Film and television create ambiguous sexual expectations by not explicitly showing consent being given
In the second-season premiere of Girls, there’s a moment where one of the characters, Shoshanna, is having a dispute with her lover, Ray. It escalates. She’s walking away. He grabs her and pulls her back, forcibly kissing her. She relents. They have sex.
This is a question that was posited to me a few weeks ago, and has since been turning over in my head: how often is sexual consent given in film and television? And extending from whatever the probable answer is (hint: almost never), what does it mean?
What’s shocking is the lack of statistical documentation about this. There hasn’t been a single study done on approach and consent in film. It’s simply there, and taken for granted, which is intensely troubling.
I’ve been trying to think of films and shows in which a kiss is approached with consent, and I have trouble listing more than five. There are more than a few scenes I can think of that can easily be counted as rape, the aforementioned one in Girls being one of them.
It’s a sign of a society in which sexism has, because of the reductive processes of equality, become more subtle, an ingrained behaviour rather than an active decision, and this is one of the ways it manifests itself.
We’re often primed to reject violence, while love and intimacy are expected. The cues for sexual behaviour are taken from our own social learning and what we absorb from the media. This is only strengthened as we age and are fed the same concepts. From watching the Prince kiss Snow White,all the way to watching Booth Jonathan aggressively accosting Marnie in Girls, expectations develop around the way things occur, especially in the power-tipped patriarchal side.
It’s from these expectations that we get things like nice-guy syndrome and rape culture. For all its sophistication, mass media operates in almost storybook terms when it comes down to simple intimacy. Even worse, it normalizes the idea that not asking for consent yields positive results. It’s these small, significant ideas that are omnipresent, constantly holding back gender equality.
All of this comes down to the idea of responsibility in entertainment. Director Mike Figgis once said, “All films are science fiction films,” which is true, to an extent. They posit situations, scenarios, and people out of nothing, leading us to lives that, no matter how unremarkable they are, always operate on heightened levels of reality.
But to say that a film isn’t informed by the culture at large would be ignorant. Girls demonstrates a close-to-life aesthetic and has become something of a cultural trend-setter, both in how it speaks to the emotions of people in its target audience, and how it informs the programming that has come afterwards. It’s a show that prides itself on having realistic depictions of sex scenes. So then, why can’t it have realistic depictions of physical communication and approach?
Of course, Girls is one piece of entertainment out of countless others that do this. It’s the norm in most media portrayals of intimacy. The show demonstrates a lack of awareness and illustrates how far we still have to go to become egalitarian. It’s…something to work on.
Abdul Malik, Staff Writer
