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.

And speaking of consuming women...how about a Grade-A prime "slab of flesh"?

You must forgive me for the gratuitous pun I'm about to drop. Here's my [paper thin] rationale; as Bill explained about Fangtasia's silly name in Escape From Dragon House, “You have to remember that most vampires are very old. Puns used to be the highest form of humor.”

So here goes...during my first go 'round with the Sofia Sanchez-Grant piece I referenced in Wednesday's You Smell Like Dinner post, a certain phrase really got its meat hooks into me: slab of flesh.

What comes up for you when you hear this?

Maybe something along the lines of one of the first things that pops up on Google image search using this rough idiom as a search term?

Try to imagine my surprise when, about halfway through the article "The Female Body in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle" it hit me. Those words, staring up at me, right there on page 85 as part of a beauty parlor episode!

OK, OK, maybe they weren't actually staring up at me, glowering at me from the page. But this being such an incongruous stringing together of words for the context in which they were used, it sorta felt like they were.

Sanchez-Grant chose to excerpt this illustration of the character Marian's visit to what she calls "a female space dedicated to the presentation of the female body" (2008, p. 84) quite deliberately. Also on page 84, she wondered if "culturally-ordained female spaces" are less hostile to women than is "masculine terrain" (i.e. sports arenas, etc.) and interpreted the following passage from Atwood's Lady Oracle as a response:

Marian had closed her eyes, leaning back against the operating-table, while her scalp was soaped and scraped and rinsed. She thought it would be a good idea if they would give anaesthetics to the patients, just put them to sleep while all these necessary physical details were taken care of; she didn't enjoy feeling like a slab of flesh, an object. (Sanchez-Grant, 2008, p. 85)

After reading what Sanchez-Grant calls a "surgical, somewhat violent description" of a trip to the salon, I scrawled a dark, etching line below the words I bolded in the excerpt above that almost tore through the paper. I wanted to make sure I'd remember to come back to this passage, because although for Sanchez-Grant this scene's meaning lay in its mirroring of the "incompatibility between patriarchal femininity and women's own feelings" (2008, p. 85) - my mental wheels started spinning in the direction of True Blood.  

Meanwhile…in the Twitterverse…

Just today, I came across this tweet from a female fan: "dear #TrueBlood: Would it kill you to show us a little full frontal nudity? MALE full frontal nudity".

Her emphasis on the male offers the perfect segue for what the phrase slab of flesh brought to my mind. We HAVE already had full frontal nudity on True Blood - FEMALE full frontal nudity.

Let's look at how the nude, frontal female body was presented in Season 3.

In these scenes (both curiously involving Eric), the nude, frontal female body was presented violently.

The naked, unnamed WWII-era female werewolf was pinioned to the wall by nails jabbed through her body as Eric interrogated her. True, she was clearly depicted as the "bad guy" and Eric was painted as the righteous one in disguise. But still, this scene - at least for me - sickeningly called to mind the sexualized torture Jewish, gypsy, and other women were subjected to at the hands of the Nazis as well as the rape and all other manner of indecencies women around the globe have faced in war zones.

If it was a love scene, at last year's Dragon * Con Sam Trammel dubiously characterized Yvetta's dungeon dalliance with Eric as a rough one. A highly aroused and stimulated, nude Yvetta was shackled to the floor and ceiling by her arms and legs in the dank bowels of Fangtasia while Eric thrust into her. Apparently for hours. Vampire stamina. Wow. OK...I'm getting distracted...

Sure, it was consensual, and yes, she certainly seemed to have enjoyed it. Women can - and do - enjoy unconventional sex and I have no quarrel with this whatsoever, as long as it's safe, sane, and its parameters are mutually agreed upon.

But might this scene (and the one above it) be a a comment on the sicker, darker, more twisted views of sexuality and the aesthetics of torture porn?

Are we slabs of meat on a hook? For whose gaze are these images intended? Who might find them titillating and why?

In his piece "How Internet Pornographers Market to Men vs. Women" on the sentinel site NetNanny Mark Kastleman reviews the typical attributes of the potential male online porn consumer in the cold, hard terminology the pornographers use:

Vision is the key perceptual sense in males-they "like to look"...They yearn to see body parts and things being done to those body parts...Males have up to 20 times more testosterone than females coursing through their mindbody. Testosterone fuels sexual drive and aggression. As a result, it's a turn-on for most viewers to see males dominate, be aggressive or even violent in sex with females... powerful imprinting of the images in the cells of the male mindbody.

Interesting.

I think it's also telling that we have not seen the male body depicted in such a way on the show. Even the [absolutely horrifying] story arc centered on Jason's use as a breeding stud in which he's bound to a filthy bed presents him as shirtless - his pants pulled down, but not fully exposed. One of the Hot Shot women even conscientiously drapes his groin with a rag after dismounting, ensuring that we, the audience, see nothing below the belt that we're not supposed to.

There are other connotations for slab of flesh, too...

 ...extending Raquel Rivera's concept of gastronomic sexuality further in a way that certainly isn't appetizing to me as a vegetarian.

   Women's bodies as consumable foodstuffs; commodities.

I struggled in a back-and-forth with myself about whether or not to post the infamous June 1978 Hustler cover with a women's legs sticking out of a meat grinder, captioned with publisher Larry Flynt's quote, "We will no longer hang women up like pieces of meat". My sense of propriety won out; I couldn't bear to muddy our tavern with such a distasteful, offensive image. But you can click on the link above to see it on Sociological Images; I think it drives my point home.

It's also interesting to contrast the way the nude female body has been represented thus far in season 4; we've seen much more artful, demure depictions. Think Luna's voluptuous form reclining in the grass as Sam approaches, one knee bent just so to obscure her lower half from our view.

And good on you Sam, you unwaveringly looked her in the eye!

~ Rachel  

References

Rivera, R. Z. (2003). New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone. New York: Palgrave.

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.