Lost Girl I am disappoint
So I've been watching Lost Girl, right? And it's still cheesy and ridiculous but mostly, apart from the absurd fat-hate in the second episode, it does a pretty good job of avoiding fail (at least it tries *so hard* that I want to offer it a Milkbone and a scratch behind the ears). In particular, the series' dedication to sex positivity and female sexual agency--manifested in the premise of a female protagonist whose supernatural abilities and, often, survival depend on feeding off others' libidinal energy but who is not reduced to a victim or an addict but who actively enjoys sex and whose choice between a prospective male love interest and a female one was, for as long as the angst-hungry machine of genre TV narrative conventions allowed, "both"--is pretty exceptional. This is why the appalling, and appallingly cliched, kink negativity in last week's episode was not just disappointing but actually surprising.
[I'm focusing more here on the details I read as kink-negative and on the details that (fail to adequately) undercut them than on the episode's "plot"]
The episode begins with succubus!protagonist Bo's lover/food supply, the "Light"-affiliated wolf-shifter cop-dude Dyson, getting in some guy's face in a goth club owned and operated by an obnoxious "Dark" Fae named Vex. Vex is annoying, Dyson leaves, the scary henchman guy he was snarling at follows him out. Blah blah title sequence; Dyson wakes up in an alley with his shirt off and blood in his mouth, next to mauled dead henchman (whose name was Baal). He seeks sanctuary in neutral ground Fae hangout pub, pleading amnesia, and spends most of the rest of the episode hiding out there while Bo, her adorkable human petfriend Kenzi, Dyson's Black Friendcop buddy Hale, and the mysterious and sarcastic publican Trick all work to figure out who framed Dyson and how they erased his memory. Bo and Kenzi go to the goth club to question the witnesses to Dyson's argument with Baal, including a human girl named Portia. Kenzi makes fun of the goths while acknowledging that she dresses like one (in fact I know at least two people who own that top and I know where she probably bought it) and casually smacks Bo on the ass when she leaves her there to go back to Dyson. Bo offers to "drain [Dyson] into submission" to keep him from leaving the safety of the pub. Kenzi gets hit on by an awkward boy at the goth club, an opportunity to poke more fun at the funny-looking but harmless ( = vanilla) goth geeks. Kenzi finds and befriends Portia and brings her back to her and Bo's place. Kenzi watches Portia change and notices her back is covered in marks that she cannot remember receiving (look like clean, shallow cuts, randomly applied, and I honestly don't know what the showmakers were trying to suggest had been done to inflict them, and they must not hurt much or she should have noticed them sooner). Meanwhile, Dyson has regained a couple of minutes of memory, including getting a phone call at work. Bo goes to harass the smarmy bathrobe-wearing caller and puts her succubus mojo on him to find out why he called Dyson. He confesses that he worried that "the games" had "gone too far": turns out there's a secret VIP room in the basement of the club where customers play "pain games" with girls provided by Vex, girls who don't remember the pain when they're done. Smarmy bathrobe called Dyson because Baal "took it too far" ("I never knew a person could take that much pain") and killed a Light Fae girl. Bo then feeds on Smarmy Bathrobe to punish him for being a worthless sadist, or for not stopping the murder, or for some other weak excuse, and leaves him with a warning: "watch where you take your pleasure next time, or it might take you." Bo meets up with Kenzi, who frantically reports of Portia: "they hurt her, like some kind of pervy torture hurt!" and Bo confirms that Vex and/or Baal had been running a "club for people who had a taste for that" (she previously described it over the phone to Hale with a sneer as a "funfair for guys who like pain"). Kenzi, by the way, has been wearing a padlock around her neck the entire time. They return to the club (which Dyson has meanwhile attempted to storm, resulting in his capture), expressing concern that Portia is "an easy loose end to tie up: none of these people give a damn about her", then prepare to get their fight on. They rescue Portia from the (totally half-assed) dungeon, then find Dyson shirtless and chained to the ceiling by his wrists, being tortured by branding with hot irons for information on Bo. They Sherlock-splain the frame-job and walk out of there with Dyson and Portia, who leaves behind her (traumatic? unremembered and completely impactless?) experience as the target of unspecified "pain" for a life of honest poverty, la di da, everybody happy.
Thing is, it would have been so easy not to tar all kinky people with the same brush. All they had to do was throw in a line about how there were places people could go to "play pain games" with others who actually wanted to play, or something about how what Vex and co. were giving BDSM a bad name, if not actually calling out the fact that what they were doing was rape and whether or not there was "pain" involved ought not have any bearing on its rightness or wrongness. Not that hard, and given the record of character interaction on this show, not all that out of place, either. But it didn't happen--the closest thing we got to a contrasting perspective to balance Bo and Kenzi's noble scorn for Vex and Baal's brash knavery was an aside ("but that's not what it's about, I didn't want that") regarding the murdering bit in the middle of Smarmy Bathrobe's simpering, while Bo is torturing him (cuz torturing sadists is like a moral mitzvah! :/ ).
This bothers me enough for what it is in itself (a baldly pathologizing sentiment); it bothers me more for what it is in the context of a media meta-narrative (bad guys = perverts & vice versa, lazy storytelling); and it saddens and confuses me because of its program-specific context (Bo is supposed to be such an ambassador for broad sexual appetites, and she suggested a safeword prior to enjoying a raucous one-night-threesome in a previous episode; why is she so down on this? why doesn't she distinguish between what the baddies are doing in the club and consensual SM?). The part that actually rather hurts me, though, is that this time they're not just maligning abstract concepts to which I have an intellectual affiliation. They're doing it to actual, local, human communities that I and many of my friends belong to.
I know Lost Girl doesn't claim to be set in Toronto. The characters have mostly accepted that they're in Canada, I think, after the whole "across the border" execution issue, though the series is still faking up details & aiming for Generic North American City, Unspecified Region, Fictionworld. But come on, who do they think they're fooling? They may not be as explicit as Flashpoint (which, for all that they may have dodged actually using the word "Toronto" until--I think?--the second season finale inside not!Maple Leaf Gardens, never really pretended to be anywhere else: within the first sixteen minutes of the series, we're shown the inside of the Spadina-University subway line, with stop announcements; Timmie's cups; Canada flags, "Metropolitan Police" badges and red trouser stripes; Ontario license plates on familiar EMS vehicles; and, oh yeah, throbbing luminescent cock of our nation, the CN Tower), but the locations are easy for anyone to recognize who knows what they're looking for (like that walk'n'talk down Queen West at the end of the pilot, hello!). Which means that goth club is supposed to be a Toronto goth club (it isn't, not a real one; the interiors are mostly The Opera House with some overstated set decoration and I dunno about the alley), and the shit they're saying about kinky people they're saying about Toronto kinky people.
Now, I'm not saying that all the goths or all the kinksters or all the dwellers of the overlap in this or any city are good and loving people. There are far too many folks who fit those bills for me to vouch for them all personally, and there are certainly some dense and unpleasant specimens in the sub-clusters of people I have actually met. But it does smart more than usual when TPTB aren't thumbing their noses just at people who like the same stuff you like but at you and your friends, more specifically (and maybe I'm spoiled not to have encountered this before, it's never occurred to me to ask people who live in big American cities where ALL THE TV happens). I'm sure it wasn't personal, just another symptom of how much many people think they know about kink and how little they care that there are actually millions of people in the world who do choose to do it and deliciate in it.
I'm not even sure where I'm going with all this tealdeer anymore, except perhaps to put it out there: Hey TV-making people? We're here, we're queer (well, some of us), and we'd be happy to look over your scripts and tell you whether they're bullshit before you hurt us by putting them on all those screens.
Cross-posted from Dreamwidth, where there are currently
comments. Please comment there using OpenID.
[I'm focusing more here on the details I read as kink-negative and on the details that (fail to adequately) undercut them than on the episode's "plot"]
The episode begins with succubus!protagonist Bo's lover/food supply, the "Light"-affiliated wolf-shifter cop-dude Dyson, getting in some guy's face in a goth club owned and operated by an obnoxious "Dark" Fae named Vex. Vex is annoying, Dyson leaves, the scary henchman guy he was snarling at follows him out. Blah blah title sequence; Dyson wakes up in an alley with his shirt off and blood in his mouth, next to mauled dead henchman (whose name was Baal). He seeks sanctuary in neutral ground Fae hangout pub, pleading amnesia, and spends most of the rest of the episode hiding out there while Bo, her adorkable human petfriend Kenzi, Dyson's Black Friendcop buddy Hale, and the mysterious and sarcastic publican Trick all work to figure out who framed Dyson and how they erased his memory. Bo and Kenzi go to the goth club to question the witnesses to Dyson's argument with Baal, including a human girl named Portia. Kenzi makes fun of the goths while acknowledging that she dresses like one (in fact I know at least two people who own that top and I know where she probably bought it) and casually smacks Bo on the ass when she leaves her there to go back to Dyson. Bo offers to "drain [Dyson] into submission" to keep him from leaving the safety of the pub. Kenzi gets hit on by an awkward boy at the goth club, an opportunity to poke more fun at the funny-looking but harmless ( = vanilla) goth geeks. Kenzi finds and befriends Portia and brings her back to her and Bo's place. Kenzi watches Portia change and notices her back is covered in marks that she cannot remember receiving (look like clean, shallow cuts, randomly applied, and I honestly don't know what the showmakers were trying to suggest had been done to inflict them, and they must not hurt much or she should have noticed them sooner). Meanwhile, Dyson has regained a couple of minutes of memory, including getting a phone call at work. Bo goes to harass the smarmy bathrobe-wearing caller and puts her succubus mojo on him to find out why he called Dyson. He confesses that he worried that "the games" had "gone too far": turns out there's a secret VIP room in the basement of the club where customers play "pain games" with girls provided by Vex, girls who don't remember the pain when they're done. Smarmy bathrobe called Dyson because Baal "took it too far" ("I never knew a person could take that much pain") and killed a Light Fae girl. Bo then feeds on Smarmy Bathrobe to punish him for being a worthless sadist, or for not stopping the murder, or for some other weak excuse, and leaves him with a warning: "watch where you take your pleasure next time, or it might take you." Bo meets up with Kenzi, who frantically reports of Portia: "they hurt her, like some kind of pervy torture hurt!" and Bo confirms that Vex and/or Baal had been running a "club for people who had a taste for that" (she previously described it over the phone to Hale with a sneer as a "funfair for guys who like pain"). Kenzi, by the way, has been wearing a padlock around her neck the entire time. They return to the club (which Dyson has meanwhile attempted to storm, resulting in his capture), expressing concern that Portia is "an easy loose end to tie up: none of these people give a damn about her", then prepare to get their fight on. They rescue Portia from the (totally half-assed) dungeon, then find Dyson shirtless and chained to the ceiling by his wrists, being tortured by branding with hot irons for information on Bo. They Sherlock-splain the frame-job and walk out of there with Dyson and Portia, who leaves behind her (traumatic? unremembered and completely impactless?) experience as the target of unspecified "pain" for a life of honest poverty, la di da, everybody happy.
Thing is, it would have been so easy not to tar all kinky people with the same brush. All they had to do was throw in a line about how there were places people could go to "play pain games" with others who actually wanted to play, or something about how what Vex and co. were giving BDSM a bad name, if not actually calling out the fact that what they were doing was rape and whether or not there was "pain" involved ought not have any bearing on its rightness or wrongness. Not that hard, and given the record of character interaction on this show, not all that out of place, either. But it didn't happen--the closest thing we got to a contrasting perspective to balance Bo and Kenzi's noble scorn for Vex and Baal's brash knavery was an aside ("but that's not what it's about, I didn't want that") regarding the murdering bit in the middle of Smarmy Bathrobe's simpering, while Bo is torturing him (cuz torturing sadists is like a moral mitzvah! :/ ).
This bothers me enough for what it is in itself (a baldly pathologizing sentiment); it bothers me more for what it is in the context of a media meta-narrative (bad guys = perverts & vice versa, lazy storytelling); and it saddens and confuses me because of its program-specific context (Bo is supposed to be such an ambassador for broad sexual appetites, and she suggested a safeword prior to enjoying a raucous one-night-threesome in a previous episode; why is she so down on this? why doesn't she distinguish between what the baddies are doing in the club and consensual SM?). The part that actually rather hurts me, though, is that this time they're not just maligning abstract concepts to which I have an intellectual affiliation. They're doing it to actual, local, human communities that I and many of my friends belong to.
I know Lost Girl doesn't claim to be set in Toronto. The characters have mostly accepted that they're in Canada, I think, after the whole "across the border" execution issue, though the series is still faking up details & aiming for Generic North American City, Unspecified Region, Fictionworld. But come on, who do they think they're fooling? They may not be as explicit as Flashpoint (which, for all that they may have dodged actually using the word "Toronto" until--I think?--the second season finale inside not!Maple Leaf Gardens, never really pretended to be anywhere else: within the first sixteen minutes of the series, we're shown the inside of the Spadina-University subway line, with stop announcements; Timmie's cups; Canada flags, "Metropolitan Police" badges and red trouser stripes; Ontario license plates on familiar EMS vehicles; and, oh yeah, throbbing luminescent cock of our nation, the CN Tower), but the locations are easy for anyone to recognize who knows what they're looking for (like that walk'n'talk down Queen West at the end of the pilot, hello!). Which means that goth club is supposed to be a Toronto goth club (it isn't, not a real one; the interiors are mostly The Opera House with some overstated set decoration and I dunno about the alley), and the shit they're saying about kinky people they're saying about Toronto kinky people.
Now, I'm not saying that all the goths or all the kinksters or all the dwellers of the overlap in this or any city are good and loving people. There are far too many folks who fit those bills for me to vouch for them all personally, and there are certainly some dense and unpleasant specimens in the sub-clusters of people I have actually met. But it does smart more than usual when TPTB aren't thumbing their noses just at people who like the same stuff you like but at you and your friends, more specifically (and maybe I'm spoiled not to have encountered this before, it's never occurred to me to ask people who live in big American cities where ALL THE TV happens). I'm sure it wasn't personal, just another symptom of how much many people think they know about kink and how little they care that there are actually millions of people in the world who do choose to do it and deliciate in it.
I'm not even sure where I'm going with all this tealdeer anymore, except perhaps to put it out there: Hey TV-making people? We're here, we're queer (well, some of us), and we'd be happy to look over your scripts and tell you whether they're bullshit before you hurt us by putting them on all those screens.
Cross-posted from Dreamwidth, where there are currently
comments. Please comment there using OpenID.