As much as I love it, every bad thing that has ever happened to me is because of sex

Jason Stackhouse's relationship to sex is complicated and conflicted, to say the least.

And after narrowly escaping his breeding mill ordeal at Hot Shot, he knows it.

Flashback to Season 1. Do you remember the Cold Ground scene when, after Gran's death, Jason tried to lose himself in an empty, hollow, loveless tryst with a blond woman - a virtual stranger he couldn't remember the name of - who rode him reverse cowgirl-style? His bid to mindlessly fall back on predictable Stackhouse sexcapading as a means of escape backfired terribly. The two of them never made eye contact; while she moaned, "I love you", Jason softly cried.

His rape at Hot Shot felt to me like an extreme, twisted, alternate universe redux of that scene; his facial grimaces and sounds as he was repeatedly violated in the breeding shed reminded me very much of that scene.

While it’s true that he’s had lots of fun romps (with lots of different women) in the sack, Jason’s also had his share of sexual experiences that were exploitative and devoid of real emotion; where no true human connection or bonding took place – as in the two instances above.

And it seems to be going from bad to worse.

It's a good thing Hoyt and Jessica found him lying battered and bruised on the side of a deserted rural back road; the baby vamp's blood was his salvation. Having been miraculously healed by Jessica's blood, a restored-to health-Jason told his best friend over breakfast at Merlotte's:

As much as I love it, every bad thing that has ever happened to me is because of sex, (counting on his fingers) jealous boyfriends, becoming a drug addict, being accused of murder… Maybe God’s punishing me for having too much sex. He’s like "Jason Stackhouse you have fucked too many hot women, now let’s see how you like it."

*Transcription credit to Thought Catalog.

And now, part of Jason seems to think that maybe he's been the victim of reverse objectification, his studly past having finally caught up to him and put him in God's punishing crosshairs. 

In her online piece On Rape in True Blood Kat George addresses this concern:

Firstly, this insinuates that sexual "sins" are tantamount to punishment by rape. Secondly, the delivery of these lines is both humorous and cutesy on Jason’s part. Thirdly, since when was it ever OK to deserve rape (and how would we feel listening to a woman declaring that a rape was her just desserts)?

Good points, all.

But let’s remember, as Kirsty Walker (2010) writes in her essay "True Stud: Jason Stackhouse in Search of Masculinity", Jason is often the comic relief on the show. His light, funny tone with Hoyt is perhaps in keeping with this role and persona. Moreover, his use of a comical “God voice” - Jason Stackhouse you have fucked too many hot women, now let’s see how you like it - may very well be a defense mechanism. He’s been traumatized, and he knows it, but he's got to maintain some semblance of control - humor may be Jason's way of doing that, as it is for many people.

Ms. George takes the position that True Blood has trivialized the male experience of rape. While I agree that it is often underplayed in our society (as I wrote in my last post on Jason & Hot Shot) I don't think the show has treated this topic lightly or brushed it under the table.

In fact, I think it's brought new dimension to the mainstream discourse around sexual assault, particularly in light of the FBI’s 80-year-old, outdated definition of rape: "the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will." Each year the FBI omits hundreds of thousands of rapes from its Uniform Crime Report (UCR) based on this limited definition.

The FBI’s flawed definition of rape excludes any form of sexual assault that falls outside of the narrowest understanding of heterosexual sex, including the rape of men and boys as well as transgender people.

The FBI's stance on what rape is and isn't is evidence for the idea that in our culture, it is often questioned whether a red-blooded, virile guy like Jason can even be raped. Men are supposed to be into sex under any circumstance; expected to enjoy it every which way, with as many partners as possible. Under this paradigm, most will allow that maybe boys or weaklings can be sexually abused, manipulated, or dominated, but surely not young, strong ex-jocks who are seen as being in control, and insatiable in their hunger for sex.

Jason told Hoyt his experience was horrible; some might argue that a stud like him probably wouldn't (or maybe the right word here is shouldn't) have thought being forced to have sex with dozens of women was so awful if they had been hot women, and that he only protested because the women forced into the breeding line didn’t measure up to his standards of feminine beauty or sexiness.

But this thesis falls flat when one considers that the first woman to violate Jason had been the object of his desire, Crystal Norris, whose (in his words) "cute butt" he had chased all the way to Hot Shot.

He didn't want it, not even with her. Men can be raped, after all. Even by hot women.

I found out about the FBI's definition of rape from an action alert from  Change.org. You can sign their petition to tell the FBI to update their definition to include all forms of rape, by doing so you can help ensure that the resources law enforcement receives to aid survivors and apprehend perpetrators is based on real crime figures instead of dramatically underestimated statistics.

We've been trained to see Jason Stackhouse as a Louisiana Lothario, a "horn dog" who lets his penis guide him through life. Yet as Walker (2010) points out, while in his very first Strange Love scene Jason is depicted as a sexual creature, he is also shown to be perhaps not quite as experienced as he would have folks believe – and as his reputation would suggest (he was easily shocked by unconventional sexual behavior, i.e. the bite marks on Maudette's inner thigh). 

When it comes down to it, Jason is a man in search of his own masculinity in a world that no longer feels quite so stable or knowable; a world that has been upended by the appearance of vampires on the scene. Even for a guy like Jason, having been brought up in a patriarchal, heteronormative society where those in positions of power were for the most part other white males, navigating through a culture in flux is no easy task. (Walker, 2010). 

And up until now, he’s attempted to define himself through sex and violence (his Light of Day Institute adventure); both failed ideologies by which Jason could become self-actualized, according to Walker. As she writes, by the end of Season 1 he had come to experience sex as a bonding, as opposed to purely physically gratifying, experience. And he’s still learning and growing.

About his character, Ryan Kwanten has said, “it was important for Jason to have a sense of vulnerability and for the audience to be able to sympathize with him, and not to see him as…a piece of meat or just a dumb redneck, that there is really some soul and some hurt deep inside” (Walker, 2010, p. 122). 

The hurt in him has been exacerbated by his now conflicted relationship to sex, and his victim/survivor status.

So, despite the humorous tone Jason used to make some light of his dreadful experience with Hoyt and the racy distraction of his dream-sequence encounter with his buddy's girlfriend vampire Jessica, I am certain that his Hot Shot ordeal with have a profound and lasting impact on his continuing personal development. I am looking forward to seeing how this shakes out for him.

I just hope that since Jason now sees sex as the root cause of his troubles that he doesn't take what some might view as the next logical step and assign to women the wholesale label of temptress, she who leads man (i.e. him) down the garden path to ruin; the devil's door. 

Woman, The Devil’s Door
12^th C. CE, France

Jason did say, “As much as I love it, every bad thing that has ever happened to me is because of sex”, and that worries me a little.  Could Crystal's betrayal set him on the course of viewing all women as deceivers, as Eve's daughters, as portals to the corruption of men?  

“Do you not realise, Eve that it is you?

The curse of God pronounced on your sex weighs still on the world. Guilty you must bear its hardships. You are the devil’s gateway, you desecrated the fatal tree, you first betrayed the Law of God, you softened up with your cajoling words the man against whom the devil could not prevail by force. The image of God, Adam, you broke him as if he were a plaything. You deserved death, and it was the son of God who had to die!”
                                                                                                              ~ Tertullian

I don’t think it will. Despite his puffed-up bravado when it comes to hooking up, I think Jason genuinely likes women - women in general, and the ones in his life.

And as Wayne Koestenbaum,  author of Humiliation, remarked in his 8/1/11 NPR, humiliating experiences, if you survive them, are capable of being reinterpreted. When most of your recognizable personality or sense of self worth is decimated and you wake up from that experience still alive - as Jason has - a kernel or residue of the self is left and gold can be spun from this straw.

Now, the self-depreciating Jason may never let on that he's been rocked to the core; he may well continue to bemoan the horrors of Hot Shot and joke about it in the next breath as he has with Hoyt. This is the guy who, last season, told Hoyt he never thought he was smart enough to be depressed, after all. But he is smart enough, sensitive and emotional enough - and human enough - to have been deeply impacted by his rape experience. And he has surely come through what Koestenbaum calls a "kiln of shame and suffering" which can lead to transfiguration.

Koestenbaum allows that not everyone can spin the experience in this way, but I think Jason can. And I think he can do it without vilifying all women in the process. Hopefully, although his rape was in no way his fault, he will also grow from this experience and learn to make better choices, since, as he admitted to Sookie in I Wish I Was the Moon, he's not always so good at controlling his impulses.

And I, for one, am pulling for him!

~ Rachel

Not 'cause some mean man shoves you in a shed and says you got to...

Jason's Hot Shot ordeal was absolutely horrific.

In Body Matters: Essays on the Sociology of the Body, editors David Morgan and Sue Scott write, "Historically, women have been defined by their 'biological potentiality' (1993, p. 11). Indeed, the same could be said of Jason's recent predicament - strapped down to a filthy cot and forced to be Ghost Daddy stud to the females of the compound, each one having been programmed to obediently and dutifully fulfill her "reproductive destiny" (Sanchez-Grant, 2008, p. 78).

Crystal to Jason, "I got a duty to my kinfolk to propagate the bloodline" S4E2 You Smell Like Dinner

Becky to Jason, “Uncle Felton says I'm old enough and you'd better give me a cub!” S4E4 I'm Alive and On Fire

Bound and nearly helpless himself, Jason was valiant in his determination to have the young Becky spared from such a debasing and dehumanizing fate, displaying the generosity of spirit his captor Crystal lauded him for earlier.

To recap:

Jason, horrified upon seeing Becky approach him from the rear of the breeding shed, shouts out to anyone in earshot: “Oh no, hey she's just a little girl!”. 

Old man Luthor, looking in, yells: "Never you mind, breed Ghost Daddy, breed."

Jason tries to reason with Becky, whose sense of duty to her clan and overriding fear of Felton compelled her to take her place on the breeding line: 

Jason:  “You ever do sex before?”
Becky: “Sure, lots of times...No, but I ain’t scared.”
Jason: “This ain’t the way it should be, your first time. It should be special. With a boy you really like, who brings you presents and candy.”
Becky: “Boys do that?!”
Jason: “They sure do. And, hey, you make love with him cause it’s the right time. Not ‘cause some mean man shoves you in a shed and say you gotta.”
Becky: “I don’t wanna do this with you, I don’t wanna do this at all.”
Jason: “Then cut me loose.”

And she does, exhibiting the bravery and decency that not a one of her kinfolk would, or could. But not before Jason's and many of the women of Hot Shot's bodies were bent to the will of others; their spirits trampled, their humanity utterly violated.

Jason was undoubtedly used, abused, and traumatized at Hot Shot, but so too were the women in the breeding line. The women queuing up to be recepticals for Ghost Daddy's seed have been been manipulated, bullied and exploited by their men; forced to do the bidding of a small number (perhaps only one, truly - Felton) who sit atop the werepanther social heap.

Here's an interesting angle on this.

In their article "'Katrina That Bitch!' Hegemonic Representations of Women's Sexuality on Hurricane Katrina Souvenir T-Shirts", Kris Macomber, Christine Mallison and Elizabeth Seale (2011, p. 529)point out that within the framework of androcentric cultural production, far more derogatory terms exist in English for women than for men [and] sexual slang terms that insult men often simultaneously insult women (e.g. son of a bitch). Applied to the context of the Hot Shot breeding mill, a torment that insults and injures a man also insults and injures many women.

Take for instance the woman who, grunting in frustration as she rides an unwilling Jason, works in vain to reach the orgasm she has been denied her entire married life.

Jason: “Come on now...Get off me!"
Woman: “I ain’t done yet.”
He repeats it, shouting and rocking from side to side, unbalancing her so she is forced off. She starts crying.
Jason: “I don’t know why you’re crying, I’m the one what getting raped.”
Woman: “My brother husband, he just bites the back of my neck, and he holds me down 'til it’s over. You’re the best I ever had.
She pads off, slumping as she yells, “Next!”

Heartbreaking. Jason's rape is unforgivable, but so is the tragedy of a woman's sexuality blunted; pleasurable physical intimacy and the warmth of a loving relationship denied her.

Where does healing begin? For Jason, maybe through the bonds of friendship. In Sunday's episode we witnessed Jason share his pain and suffering with Hoyt. His openness is surprising - but encouraging - given that statistics show male survivors of sexual assault or intimate partner violence are slow to report such crimes or even talk about them at all when their attacker is female. I'm guessing few men [and boys] relish the thought of being re-traumatized, as they will likely be shamed and made to feel less of a man for being victimized by a female. For the women of Hot Shot, now under the paw of Crystal "Big Mama Kitty" Norris, who knows... 

On a larger, systems level, we've got to recognize that sexual violence and exploitation is deeply entwined with the prevailing culture of violence; the ethos of domination. As feminist scholar Carol Christ (1997, p. 158) writes:

To transform the cycle of violence, we must proceed simultaneously on several levels: We must change ourselves and our intimate relationships, especially those with our children, we must transform the deepest values of our culture, and we must reconstruct our social institutions.

We need sweeping paradigmatic change, and it it really does start with us - our own ways of thinking and being, the way we move through the world. Integral thinkers agree that the point at which to leverage the greatest potential for change within a system is at the level of mindset.

When a show like True Blood presents - or perhaps the better word is confronts us - with images of that which is abhorrent, (i.e. Jason's ordeal), it can catalyze within its audience deeper reflection upon the way things are and get us to think and talk about how they might be different. And, maybe unseat some taken-for-granted assumptions and habits of mind along the way. Not a bad place to start, if you ask me!       

Transcription credits: Fangs, Wands & Fairydust

~ Rachel

References

Christ, C. (1997). Rebirth of the Goddess. New York: Routledge.


Macomber, K. Mallinson, C. & Seale, E. (2011). "'Katrina That Bitch!' Representations of Women's Sexuality on Hurricane Katrina Souvenir T-Shirts". The Journal of Popular Culture. (525-544). Vol. 44, #3.

Morgan, D. & Scott, S. (1993).  "Bodies in a Social Landscape. In Body Matters: Essays on the Sociology of the Body by Morgan, D. & Scott, S. (Eds.). pp. 1-22, London: The Falmer Press.

Sanchez-Grant, S. (2008). The Female Body in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle. Journal of International Women's Studies, Vol. 9, #2.

You aren't supposed to think, you're supposed to follow protocol!

So said King Compton to his [grudging] subject Pam in S4E4 I'm Alive and On Fire
This quote speaks well to a major theme I detected in that episode: hierarchical, authoritarian power & control

IN THE FAMILY

Joe Lee has a choke hold on Tommy and Melinda Mickens 

IN THE COMMUNITY

Crystal: "I'm big mama kitty now, finally. Everyone gonna do what I say"

AND IN THE NATION

the newly crowned vampire king of Louisiana

How is such autocratic rule achieved? How is it maintained? Is it legitimate? Effective? Do we have any alternatives? How can we throw it off?

If we are to organize ourselves and act to get out from under oppressive rule, we've got to be able to determine who's really in charge.

For example, Bill looks rather more presidential than kingly here, no?

In countries where there are both royalty and systems of representative government, the royals are generally seen more as figure heads than politicians; that label being reserved for those in elected office. Interestingly, Bill is being portrayed as the later. 

And he certainly seems to be more involved with matters of state than the two other vampire monarchs we have met thus far on True Blood,  Russell & Sophie-Ann, ever were. Yet, it seems someone else is really in charge.

Now, we all know that at least in this country, there is [supposed to be] balance of power. The executive branch of government is not omnipotent; the president must answer to the congress, etc.

On the surface, at least, this appears not be the case in the vampire nation.

So far this season, King Bill's power seems rather absolute and iron-fisted. Pam's telling him she wouldn't risk lying about Eric's whereabouts because word of Bill's ruthlessness as king has travelled far and wide is seemingly evidence of that. And then there's his condemning the vampire caught on YouTube feeding on a human to the true death without benefit of a trial (I want to take this case to the Authority!" Bill: "I am the Authority, you idiot !"). S4E3 If you Love Me, Why Am I Dyin'

But in this week's episode, we found out that things aren't so simple.

With Bill cast as somewhat of Nan's puppet - his distaste for power wielded unilaterally & unjustly made clear by his sarcasm when she inquird about the execution - could this be a critique of the U.S. system of government? Is True Blood suggesting that our elected officials from the school board to the Commander-In-Chief aren't really holding the reigns, the [fill in the blank - multinational corporations, shadowy interest groups, others in government, etc.] are?

Hhmmm...

Thoughts? Please share below.

~ Rachel