Why I Won’t Watch True Blood Tonight: Violence Against Women

There's a difference between "pushing the envelope" and an excuse for exhibiting gratuitous violence against women. In the last few weeks, HBO's True Blood crossed that line.

True Blood has always had its fair share of violence, but lately that violence has become increasingly sexual. Then two weeks ago, an episode crossed the line by portraying a violent rape scene — although they refuse to call it by that name. The most recent episode continued this trend with almost every scene containing some sort of violence against women, whether it was punching a female vampire into a wall, Tara being kidnapped (with implied rape), and a woman being undressed and branded by a crowd of men in a bar.

A lot of people write this stuff off as True Blood challenging sexual mores or being edgy. Slate's Jason Zinoman applauds the writers and suggests their rape scene deserves an Emmy: "The sick genius of Episode 3 ... is that it finds other creatively perverse ways to mingle sex and violence." Zinoman finds intriguing what should be disturbing: that the women being raped and assaulted do not condemn this behavior. Zinoman calls it "hate sex" (rape by another name) that the female character enjoys; as he twists her head around her shoulders with blood coming out of her mouth, she repeats "I love you."

It’s not violence per se that is unacceptable, but rather the context in which it is portrayed: showing violence against women without simultaneously condemning that violence. The writers believe that they can justify this by using a theme: vampires are inherently violent, like blood, like violent sex. In doing so, True Blood buys into the same myths about violence and rape that do real harm to women today: that men have more sexual drive, that rape is an act of passion rather than domination, that women mean yes when they say no, that violence against women is part of the natural order.

Our disregard of violence against women is the reason it is tolerated on True Blood, even by HBO's liberal, open-minded audience.

Here’s a parallel: the myth that black men want to rape white women. It seems silly when spelled out this way, but from the days of lynchings to convictions of innocent men today, this pernicious stereotype continues to cause black men to be vilified in the media and mistreated by the criminal justice system. Given this fact, a show that portrayed all the black men on it as predators of white women would not only be extremely insensitive, it would be an active player in promoting a lie that endangers and undermines black men today.

The same thing goes for True Blood’s casual and gratuitous violence against women. Gender violence is a problem because of all the women who are killed, abused, and terrorized by it; a problem that persists at astonishing rates precisely because we refuse to see it as the vast problem that it is (see stats here and a good example here). Purportedly liberal for the way its themes of acceptance mirrors the struggle for gay rights, True Blood has become a place where the epidemic of violence against women is not questioned or condemned but naturalized, even glorified as sexy and artistic.

In the same way that we look back at classic films and condemn them for their racial insensitivity, if society ever takes violence against women seriously, True Blood won’t be excused as art or pop culture; the creators will be cowards or ignorant at best and misogynists at worst. HBO and their writers have a social responsibility to condemn violence against women the same way they would condemn racial stereotypes or any other historical yet persisting harmful narrative.  The fact that they refuse to see violence against women as important or serious is both a symptom of our culture’s larger despondency in this area and a reason it persists. Being on TV, being artsy, being HBO does not excuse you or separate you from the larger problems that persist in our culture.

Photo credit: darkchacal