Male Rape: ‘The Boys’ treating a sensitive topic so trivially

Men can get raped too, but sadly, everyone’s ‘favourite’ television show ‘The Boys’ think it is a joke…

Ever since the series first aired, The Boys TV show has largely been a political commentary, even though it is dressed in superhero colors. The show has not only perfectly satirized American society but also reflects the reality of the era we live in.

Through its unique writing and style, the Superhero genre has been used by show creator, Eric Kripke and co to show its audience the true realities of the world we live in; ‘nothing is to be believed as it is’, and everything should be questioned as long as it is questionable. Politics, religion, social arguments and all manner of narratives meant to divide the general public, should be questioned.

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Using the saying; ‘Never meet your heroes’ as its central message, The Boys has grown popular to become an highlight for every faction of the American political divide; it satirizes the ‘right wingers’ and the ‘left-wingers’ so perfectly that its audiences no longer see the series as a joke but an allegory of how society needs to take things very seriously before situations grow dire.

But despite the series’ strengths, this season, The Boys has become the butt of the joke or simply put, allowed itself to fall into the pit of becoming the joke it tries so seriously to satirize, and that is its treatment of a very sensitive topic–male rape as a joke.

Male rape has consistently been a topic society tries desperately to ignore or pretend doesn’t hold much weight as its counterpart, even if they are practically the same thing; ‘a forceful and unlawful non-consensual sexual penetration of a person‘.

The show’s recently released episodes 6 and 7; particularly 6 showed one of its characters, Hughie Campbell getting raped and violated on, not for story narratives but for audience’s shock value and comedy.

The scene in question was very much not to satirize a given trope and force viewers to take the subject serious, but in every manner of its execution, to disgust audiences and make viewers question why at least 40-minutes would be wasted on a character being forced into chains and sexually violated without any meaning whatsoever.

Hughie Campbell in that episode infiltrated a secret lair owned by a Billionaire celebrity; Tek Knight, but dressed as another character so as to avoid detection. Of course, the tension was already sold to the audience knowing what such mission entailed. But the approach afterwards by the series’ writers was a bad execution of a topic largely ignored by society.

Ironically enough, this is a series that portrayed female sexual assault so perfectly in Season One, and using a then trope in Hollywood–the Me-too-movement to sell its narrative. The topic was largely centered on, with its resolution leading to a complete character development for said female character.

It’s no longer funny anymore…

However, the show’s treatment of male rape in its season 4 pales in comparison, with only a 5 second scene resolving a 40-minutes sequence that could have been better executed. Going further on said; male rape, the series’ writers have still gone on to subject the same character to another form of rape, by introducing a shape shifter to take advantage of Hughie’s ignorance of their identity to sexually assault him without Hughie knowing of it.

And like they did with the show’s episode 6, The Boys is left to resolve the topic in its very last episode of the season; episode 8, which judging from all the narratives started this season, shows it would not be better handled again.

The Boys started its narrative to satirize matters that society has so much trivialized, but now, the show has joined society to trivialize a rather sensitive matter of male rape, and this time, the joke isn’t funny no matter how hard they try to write comedy out of it.