Heads Up: This is a long post with lots of triggery stuff about representations of sexual assault in movies, particularly in comedies.  There's a clip of from the movie at the bottom of the post.

Summary: This one's about a particularly graphic one played for laughs in last year's Judd Apatow vehicle, Get Him to the Greek.  Looks like dozens or hundreds feminists from minor Tumblr blogs to the L.A. Times stood up for the male victim.  For all the "but men get raped too" derailment you see when feminists mention women victims the man-o-sphere remains remarkably silent.

Asexual activist Ily digs into the (top grossing!) 1947 Bing Crosby and Bob Hope misogyny and date-rape fest Road to Rio and then lobs the ball back into the 21st Century's court with a dissection of Judd Apatow's extremely popular Get Him to the Greek.

[F]ast forward to recent years. "Road to Rio" would probably not be written. Of course, the 40's were just more sexist times...right? However, today, we're expected to laugh at a man being raped (not to mention having his bodily integrity violated in countless other ways). Stuff like this has led some people to believe that feminism has gone too far, and now women are holding privilege over men. But I don't think these folks are aware of why we are supposed to find male rape funny. I think it's for the same reason that we're supposed to find men in dresses funny--being raped is feminizing, and therefore embarrassing. At the same time, men are so sex-crazed that being raped (at least, by a woman) is not a big deal to them emotionally. There are a few assumptions here:

...

So yes, I believe that bell hooks was very much correct. Patriarchy does hurt everyone. In a truly post-feminist world, Jonah Hill's friends in Get Him to the Greek wouldn't have laughed off his rape experience. He could have admitted that yeah, there were times when he didn't want sex*, and the other men wouldn't have mocked him for that. And we, the audience, wouldn't be expected to laugh, either.

Source: Asexy Beast

And who, you might be asking, would be making fun of men being raped? In, um, certain quarters the knee-jerk reaction is that it could only be feminists. In this case? Not so much. But they'd be so far wrong radar couldn't find them: the movie was made by Judd Apatow's all-men, no-women-at-all creative team of directors, writers, and producers.  Director? Nicholas Stoller. Writers?Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel. Producers? Judd Apatow, David L. Bushell, and Rodney Rothman. Co-Producer? Jason Segel. Executive Producer? Richard Vane. Associate Producer?Phil Eisen.  Not a feminist in the bunch.  Not a woman in the bunch.  Not even a "feminist man" in the bunch.  It's dicks and balls all the way down till you get to the casting coordinator.

And oh well, one might be inclined to say, it was a comedy for goodness sake, maybe it was portrayed as daffy slapstick. If one did one would be disappointed. While the event is supposed to be just one more bit of physical comedy that befalls a sad-sack character from a police-procedural standpoint it wouldn't be a minor incident at all!

Instead, when the Arron character is physically incapacitated by alcohol but still able to clearly express his absolute lack of consent the woman pins him down, exposes herself to him when he manifestly does not want her to, aggressively and repeatedly forces his attention up her skirt, yanks off his pants, straddles his groin, pulls a large phthalate-laden dildo out of her purse, aggressively rubs it in his face, slaps him with it, forces it into his mouth, and then reaches back and jams it between his legs in a manner that strongly (if anatomically-improbably) implies she's inserted it in his anus.

The most disturbing part to me about the scene is the breezy familiarity with which it's set and directed, as if the producers were... a little too familiar with the way rape committed by drunk people on drunk people actually goes.  (And no, this isn't accusing Apatow, Stoller, or Segal of committing gross sexual assault on drunken victims.  They may have or they might not.  If you asked me I'd guess one or more of the creative team has been on the receiving end either from another man or from a woman.  And, sort of like the victim in the film, they're not resolved to it because of a couple of really fundamental misconceptions of who can be perpetrators and, even more particularly, who can be victims.)

One thing that doesn't seem realistic? Right after the anal penetration the camera cuts away to what appears to be the Arron character's love interest, wearing hospital scrubs at a desk in what appears to be a hospital nursing station, is listening to the entire event on her cell-phone. Her reaction? To shake her head angrily, hang up, and move to put away the phone.  Ha ha, just one more way that poor schlub Aaron I'm pretty sure

And who do we find writing critical reviews of this movie? Ily, an asexual woman,

Alicia Sowisdral of Feminist Review.

Sarah M at the feminist anti-rape site SaferCampus said

I’m pretty used to rape being used as a punchline, especially when men are the victims. This usually comes in the form of jokes about prison rape, but I’ve also seen more than enough films in which a guy is basically forced into having sex with a woman or is really uncomfortable with it (like, he’s in a relationship and she’s seducing him!) and it’s supposed to be funny because ya know, women can’t rape men LOL! And prisoners deserve it! That’s bad enough to me. But this was just so beyond explicit—the guy is sodomized with an object while saying no and then uses the word rape to describe it—that I was genuinely shocked. I actually can’t even imagine an explanation of how this is funny outside of the fact that a man being raped is SO IMPLAUSIBLE to folks that it’s just laughable. You’re not watching a “rape scene” because call it rape all you want, it couldn’t be real rape, so it’s funny.

Lauren Brachman at Equal Writes put the consequences in black and white

[I]f that is the way we view rape and sexual assault, aren’t we doing a disservice to men? The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) reports that 1 in every 33 men have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. Do we emasculate the men who survive sexual assault because our culture constantly reminds us that real men do not get raped? Are these assaults as funny as the rape of Aaron Hill in Get Him to the Greek?

You might argue that women are not the only assailants of the sexual assault committed against 3% of all American men. Often, men assault other men. But don’t worry – Get Him to the Greek is an equal opportunity exploiter! Aldous Snow, one of Green’s “best friends”, also assaults him. This time Aaron Green is coerced into inserting a balloon of heroine into his anus. Later Aldous Snow digitally penetrates Aaron Green, violently ripping out the balloon. Was there an outcry in the theater when we all witnessed this assault? Not that I could over hear over the laughs and guffaws of my classmates.

I found a Tumbler post that's nested three deep with women harshly attacking the idea that rape of a man could ever be funny, with the angriest denunciation of playing male rape for laughs coming from a (now deactivated) Tumblr blog called thehumorlessfeminist.

Sigh.

For all the men that show up saying "but men get raped too" anytime someone starts complaining about rape culture in movies you'd think there's be a few more men chiming about, you know, men actually getting raped in movies.

Note: Scroll down to the next post for this week’s HNT video special.

Echidne of the Snakes says

There’s a double standard about that, don’t you think? Scott Brown can have naked pictures from his past and it doesn’t cause much of a stir at all but a woman politician? Probably the end of her career.

Read the quote in context here.

I know this is less true than it used to be. I wonder if it’s still true at all?

For instance it’s hard to imagine photos any more… frank that the “Dr” Laura Schlessinger photos that were released by a “vengeful” (a.k.a. slut-shaming, gender-power-leveraging) former partner. She received little criticism from her right-wing fans. The criticism she got from the left wasn’t as much about the photos themselves as about how they contrasted with her conservative pronouncements and accusations on her show. A dozen years later Schlessinger is no less (if also no more) popular than she was before the photos were released.

I also have a hard time imagining that conceivable sex-related revelations, photographic or otherwise, about Sarah Palin would make any difference at all with her core constituents (or of course her critics.)

You could make a plausible case that right-wing extremists get a pass on everything, and it’s almost certainly true that the right and their toadies would make a nine-day shriekfest out of similar revelations about any Democrat or progressive. But big deal. They’re setup to make shriekfests out of anything, everything, and (often as not) absolutely nothing. So no news there.

But here’s my point: I feel pretty strongly that rather than focus on the double standards of Brown’s male privilege, or his it’s-ok-if-you’re-a-Republican privilege a better strategy would be to immunize everyone else who might be at risk for being outed!

By saying “after Scott Brown naked photos no longer have an impact even in major elections: the best you can say about anyone who still thinks otherwise is that they’re either a desperate partisan hack or a knee-squeezing twit.”

Erotica author Mathilde Madden of Erotica Cover Watch reflects on why one of the covers (below, right) is not like the other one (below, left.)

Because – of course – this [the cover on the left —fl] fits into a whole I can see no menz tradition of erotica covers.

Because of that, because of the culture that surrounds it, this is just another insult. Another case where the need to never ever show a man on the cover of an erotica book seems to just be going to desperate measures.

I mean, really, there is a guy there, but he’s hiding!

Now, look at this. This is another cover [on the right —fl] where we see some sex through a half open door. The difference here is that this is an erotic romance book. And as we have discussed before erotic romance is different. In fact, erotic romance does some really lovely covers with men on them. But only because straight men are not the consumers of erotic romance.

Read the quote in context here.

And yet publishers claim they never put men on the covers of porn and erotica by and for heterosexual women because women would rather look at other women.

Because hey, why admit you’re just catering to your homophobic male customers when you can just reinforce empty stereotypes about women, narcissm and their squeamishness about men’s bodies instead?

Ezra Klein on Bill Kristol’s concern trolling of Senator Obama’s non-selection of Sen. Clinton for VP.

People standing on glass ceilings shouldn’t throw stones. Read it in context here.