A Dark Way To Look At It: Interrogating Male Abuse and The Boys

c/w - discussion of male sexual assault

Hi EDGELORDS! Are you guys ready to fucking be irreverent and swear a lot? That’s right, The Boys is back. The critically acclaimed superhero satire is back and bigger than ever. How will they top last season's shenanigans???? 

And herein lies the issue. 

The Boys first premiered in 2019, while society was still reeling from Marvel Mania. Endgame had recently come out, superhero discourse was everywhere, and The Boys seemed like a refreshing swerve on an oversaturated genre. What if superheroes were actually real? They’d probably suck! They’d all have god complexes and lack basic human empathy and be weird sex kink freaks! Adapted from comics by Garth Ennis (which I refuse to read :) ) by Erik Kripke, The Boys was a genuinely funny and interesting take on the superhero genre. 

While it was always heavy on gore and nudity, The Boys tackled some topics with genuine reverence - in season 1, one of the main plotlines revolves around Annie January aka Starlight. Played by Erin Moriarty, fresh-faced naive Annie just joined The Seven (their equivalent of The Justice League). Having worked the pageant circuit all her life, this is a dream come true; she gets to work with her idols, and help save the world at the same time! The dream swiftly comes tumbling down where on her very first night she is sexually assaulted by her lifelong hero The Deep (dumb Aquaman played by Chace Crawford). 

I’ve seen pages from the comics - the way this is shown in the graphic novels is disgusting. Annie is gang raped by every male member of The Seven. The portrayal in the comics is unnecessarily gratuitous and dehumanising. Her sexual assault is played for jokes and is largely used as a plot device for the development of Hughie (Annie’s non-superhero romantic interest). “Annie started out as a joke,” said Garth Ennis in a 2012 interview, saying that her initial purpose as a character was to get more and more degraded.

Thankfully, the show took a much more sensitive approach to Annie’s assault. The act is never actually seen on screen, and at no point is the plot about anyone but Annie. The audience sees her deal with shame and trauma, whilst overcoming this to become a stronger version of herself. “[we were] creating a story of sexual abuse that shines a light on women and exactly what they go through, and how they don’t always have to just purely play the victim,” said Erin Moriarty in a 2019 interview With the Huffington Post. “They can become stronger people as a result, while also condemning the men who have been perpetuating sexual abuse.”

Five years later, The Boys has run out of sympathy for sexual assault victims and has made them the butt of the joke. 

In the latest episode, Hughie (Jack Quaid), has to go undercover as WebWeaver (a Spiderman riff), a superhero with an extra anal orifice that can shoot webs. In case you missed it, The Boys is edgy, you guys. Whilst undercover, he meets Tek Knight (an Iron Man / Batman hybrid), who has a secret evil plan that he needs to crack. So naturally, he goes along with the undercover plan and follows Tek Knight to his underground lair. Because The Boys is dark and edgy, the underground lair is, of course, a freaky sex lair. 

Hughie is then subjected to various acts of sexual assault and submission, including cake sitting, spanking, groping and bodily fluids being smeared where they shouldn’t be smeared. There is the threat that things will get much worse imminently, but Hughie is swiftly saved by his superhero friends. 

These scenes take up over twenty minutes of the episode's run time. In a limited 8-episode season, the show chooses to dedicate its precious screentime to a prolonged sexual assault. What’s worse is the whole thing is played for laughs. 

“We view it as hilarious,” said Erik Kripke in a recent interview to Variety. “I love that it’s just such a perfect setup that he doesn’t know his own safe word. It’s just like a beautiful comedy setup that he’s trying to find it the whole time.”

The joke here is that a man is getting sexually assaulted and it’s funny. 

Sexual assault in men is hughely stigmatised. RAINN estimates that 3% of American men will have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime, and 1 out of 10 rape victims identify as male. Sexual assault in all genders can lead to mental health conditions such as PTSD and anxiety. This is further worsened by the stigma around male sexual assault. Under the patriarchy and hemogonic masculinity, the male is the powerful, dominant sex. They are the penetrator. To deviate from these patriarchal norms is inherently shameful - it makes you weak, less of a man. It’s a laughing matter - that’s why over twenty minutes of screentime should be dedicated to it. It’s funny you guys. 

Pop Culture has always had a male sexual assault problem - Pop Culture Detective does a few (admittedly hard to watch) deep dives on the matter, but throughout the history of Hollywood, a woman assaulting a man is almost always played for laughs. The men are ridiculed and not taken seriously, the women aren’t viewed as genuine perpetrators, and the whole experience is portrayed as something not real. These portrayals only make it harder for real victims to come forward and share their stories. When Terry Crews came forward about his own sexual assault in the wake of the #MeToo movement, he said he wasn’t taken seriously at the time:

“As I shared my story, I was told over and over that this was not abuse. This was just a joke. This was just horseplay. But I can say one man’s horseplay is another man’s humiliation. And I chose to tell my story and share my experience to stand in solidarity with millions of other survivors around the world.”

Things are improving somewhat - Baby Reindeer was a wonderful yet painful exploration of being a male victim of sexual assault, and May December touched on the ramifications of being groomed and assaulted as a boy. Why then would The Boys, a show that was previously sensitive about sexual assault, veer so far into the comedy angle? Media portrayal of real events matter - Kripke was aware of this when writing Annie’s assault, and he should have known this when writing Hughie’s. There was a ten-second scene at the end where Hughie says that he’s “not okay,” but given Kripke’s latest interview, I doubt there’ll be any payoff. 

The Boys has made a reputation as a shocking, no-holds-barred kind of show that’s not afraid to “go there.” Last season had Herogasm, a superhero orgy complete with CGI prehensile penises. This season, it has a Batman analogue assaulting a Spiderman stand-in. In a bid to out-shock itself, the show has forgotten why people were drawn to it in the first place. It’s not the sex and the gore, it’s the humanity; without that, the audience is just left uncomfortable and upset.