Torture and rape in SPN season 6
Okay, so I should probably wait for this week's episode of SPN but I pretty much got this done today and whatever, I'm gonna post! THROWING CAUTION AND MY COMPLETENESS FETISH TO THE WIND. Yeah, I dunno why this topic is my first major post on the season. Blame last week's episode.
This essay owes a bunch to dafnap, as always, especially for her points about Dean's relationship to Meg.
(trigger warnings for, obviously, torture and rape, nothing any more explicit than seen on the show)
Torture and rape in SPN season 6 (so far)
1.
The way torture has been a nearly constant undercurrent this season intrigues me, and seems to hint at potential conflicts to come.
So far we have Christian Campbell (who we now know is a demon) using Dean's stint as a torturer as a dig in 6.02, Dean objecting to but standing by while Cas tortures a kid in 6.03, Bobby torturing a demon in 6.04, Veritas basically torturing people with the supernatural equivalent of a truth serum in 6.06, Cas torturing Sam (with Dean's approval) to discover the missing soul in 6.07 and then later in the episode the Campbells as well as Dean torturing Alphas. Episode 6.10 is the motherlode so far: Crowley torturing the Alpha Shifter, Meg threatening to torture Dean as well as referring to their mutual past as Alastair's pupils, Sam making a deal that Meg will torture Crowley to get information on Sam's soul, Christian torturing Meg, and finally Meg torturing Crowley. That's, if I'm remembering them all, six episodes out of ten majorly referencing torture.
Dean started out the season standing firmly against torture but backslid in 6.07. First he gives tacit permission when Cas tortures Sam while looking for Sam’s soul. Then when confronted with the Alpha vamp, who was ultimately responsible for Dean's being turned into a monster and a huge factor in the destruction of his relationship with Lisa and Ben, who might also have held a key in the quest to get Sam's soul back from Crowley, Dean continues the torture that the Campbell clan started.
It feels to me like the frequency of outright torture or allusions to torture this season is leading somewhere. There is already a bit of a slippery slope for Dean, as we've seen. Would Dean be willing to go back to being a torturer if it gets him Sam out of hell (spoilers for 6.11: this doesn't seem to be what's going to happen, but I'll be interested to see how his deal with Death plays out in this regard, as it feels tentatively related)? Would he be willing to torture, or to condone torture, to help Castiel's cause? Especially given his mindset right now that all he's good for is killing? Or will he take a stand again and pull himself back from that brink?
Or will the theme manifest in a different way that I'm not anticipating?
2.
References to rape have also frequent in the last several episodes, and it's my hope that I can address this pattern without falling into some kind of rape apology. I know there has been controversy over these references, but given the context of the season and the canon as a whole the majority don't play to me as if they are intended as merely laughs.
The references to rape have been made mostly by or about Dean. In 6.09 they are played primarily for laughs (the lines about alien probing and “servicing” Oberon), but in my opinion the jokes are muddied by the fact that Dean's reactions, his anxiety and revulsion, are played fairly realistically and straightforward and without the over the top slapstick humor of some of the other episodes which poke fun at his averse reactions to an event, such as the first half or so of “Yellow Fever.” In 6.10, with the exception of Dean's remarks to Cas at the end (which I didn’t take as written intentionally as a rape joke but instead refers to the mutual attraction between Meg and Cas; but can see why it could be taken that way given rape culture and the presence of Meg’s host and possibly Jimmy, neither of whom can consent), none of the references struck me as meant to be read as strictly humorous.
Instead, Dean comes off extremely defensive when he makes them, especially to Meg's lackey (“Are you gonna kiss me?”) and to the two ghouls sent to eat him (the Shawshank line, which is the second reference to rape and showers in the episode and the third between 6.09-6.10). The episode also implied heavily that Crowley has been raping the captured daughter of the Alpha djinn (Why else is there a bed in her cell? Which she appears to be chained to, in a scene that heavily recalled the movie "Kalifornia" to me.) and it is this djinn that begs for Dean's help. Dean has a moment of near compassion for her, or at the least a pause -- the monster who tried to kill him with visions of one of his worst fears, asking him for help -- before Sam moves them along. I think that short scene is echoed later in the moment between Dean and Meg, when he frees her from Christian’s torture table despite everything she’s done to him and his family in the past, though Meg would never ask for his help the way the djinn did. Dean needs her help still, yes, but at the same time, as I'll get into a bit more below, it solidifies the already strong connections between them.
The rape references aren't limited to these two most recent episodes.
In 6.02, we discover at least one shapeshifter has disguised himself as a woman’s husband in order to impregnate her. While it’s not explicitly coded by the show as rape, and whether the show realizes the implications is unclear, in my view this is the first of the season’s rape references.
I think we can easily throw in "Live Free or Twihard," 6.05. Not only is the entire opening sequence played like a seduction followed by a rape, but we have Dean making references to how "rapey" the twilight-knockoff books are; Dean being violently assaulted, held down, and turned into a vampire against his will after being called "pretty;" the later subtext of sexual coercion between Dean and the vamp who turned him in the "private tour" line; the allusions to trafficking in the way the vamp in charge of the nest treats the women he's "recruited;" and Dean's remarks that his own behavior in the scene with Lisa resembles what he'd only a day before labeled "rapey."
Then we have the subtext of 6.08, "All Dogs Go to Heaven," where the skinwalker disguised as pet dog Lucky creepily stalks the woman of the house, Mandy. Lucky gets rid of Mandy's boyfriend and lies in bed and licks her in his dog form. And when he's found out, she reacts appropriately, rejecting him with horror and disgust. eta: in comments, sidura points out another line I'd forgotten: Dean's reference to wanting to prevent an innocent person from suffering "an eternity of demon rape" when Sam is pushing him to hand over Mandy to Crowley before they know whether she's the skinwalker they're looking for.
I am probably oversimplifying by stating that some of the rape references are not being played as jokes, and I realize many people will disagree with me as to the writers' intentions. For the most part they do occur when Dean is making a joke; but it seems an odd coincidence that suddenly most of Dean's defensive jokes are rape-related. And most of these jokes barely come across as jokes, per se, instead they seem to be the result of Dean covering discomfort or anxiety.
Dean doesn’t refer to anyone else in this manner - the butt of his jokes is himself. Possibly it started with 6.09, though like I said, 6.05 was full of rape and coercion connotations. There's just *so many* of these references, made in the context of Dean being assaulted over and over by monsters and demons this season, that it's hard for me to take them as anything but deliberate on the part of the writers. To me, one joke can be dismissed as bad taste, but this many, almost always solely aimed at or spoken by Dean? I'm not so sure.
Dean's black, self-referential rape humor typically occurs in or after moments where he's threatened physically. The one that doesn’t occur in such a moment of danger, which references his working for Crowley (the "daily rape shower" line), makes sense to me in the context of the episode, which refers back to Dean's relationship with the last demon he worked for: Alastair. So I don't think that line was random, and I don't think it was meant to be a joke. That one in particular isn't played humorously in the least. It's a line coming from a character who, it has been very heavily implied, was in the past raped by a demon ("daddy's little girl," "all those pokes and prods" in 4.16) and now finds himself coerced into working with one in the slim chance that it will lead to his brother's soul.
I'm not positive this theme is actually headed anywhere in particular; I've just been noticing the pattern and finding it hard to dismiss. The fact that it's occurring after the running of the show has been taken over by a woman, Sera Gamble, who has in the past brought up issues of rape and consent in the writing of the show, makes me wonder if she's just more willing to acknowledge rape overtly, including the usually taboo possibility of male rape, and primarily doing so through Dean's defensive jokes. It's difficult for me not to see this as part and parcel of the show's ongoing interest in explicitly deconstructing Dean's performance of masculinity.
3.
The way rape and torture come together in the sexually violent scene between Meg and Christian in 6.10 has also been widely discussed. I found the use of nudity to be a double standard and the move from showing less skin in a similar scene in 4.10 with Ruby to more in 6.10 with Meg to be a predictable move I could have done without; but the rape connotations, in the context of the rest of the episode, felt purposeful to me, and not, as a few reviewers have put it, intended to punish Meg for her sexuality.
Instead it felt honest. Let's face it: torturers, whether their victims are male or female, very frequently use rape as a weapon. Meg herself has a pattern of sexually assaulting her enemies: suggestively straddling Sam in the first season and Dean in 6.10, a scene in which she also threatens him with torture to get Crowley’s location; kissing Dean against his will in 5.01; making sexually charged remarks to Sam and Dean in 6.10 and "Born Under a Bad Sign" in season 2, in which she also nearly rapes Jo while possessing Sam - a double assault, since possession has been coded repeatedly as rape by the series; and mocking Castiel's "impotency" in 5.10. Not to mention her treatment of Meg Masters (who describes her possession as being "ridden for months by pure evil," and her current nameless brunette host. I'm not saying that she deserves the torture in 6.10 for these reasons; I'm trying to point out that Meg's pattern of using sex as a weapon is entirely consistent with the new canon revelation that she studied torture under Alastair. And as we'll see, Christian finds it nearly impossible to use that weapon against her.
In 6.10 it looks at first as if Christian has turned the tables on Meg -- he has her strapped down and is slicing into her with a knife. Meg lets out sounds of pain, yes, but despite Christian's mocking of her "fear" -- which appears to exist only in his mind, since compared to the scene with the hellhounds she shows none -- she spends most of the session laughing at him. Because she studied under Alastair, and it is implied that she's had worse -- after all, she's only wearing a host body here. As we know from 4.16, torture on earth is so very limited; later in the episode, when it's Meg's turn to torture Crowley, she makes a comment about the best torturers not getting their hands dirty - and uses some kind of power to inflict pain on Crowley without touching him. Christian's an amateur: Meg is the one who makes comments on his manhood and tauntingly suggests he try poking the knife somewhere else. And when he obliges, the camera work and blocking suggesting that he is raping her with the knife, she again vocally expresses her physical pain, but follows it up with laughter.
For these reasons, the scene does not come across to me as punishment of Meg for her sexuality. Meg is goading an inferior torturer. She's suffering physical pain, yes, but Christian hasn't begun to touch the rest of her -- hasn’t begun to actually punish her for anything. She was trained by "Picasso with a razor," after all. This show has a history of multiple female characters with agency and motivations that have nothing to do with men. Female sexuality is portrayed as a healthy, no-strings expression where women more often than not initiate sex, and are no more shamed for their sexuality than men, let alone killed for it. Given that history, I don't buy that the writers on a meta level are suddenly (even unconsciously) using this episode to punish a sexual woman character. Maybe it would be true on another show, but on this one and in this episode in particular, that reading strikes me as shallowly applied.
4.
“Caged Heat” further solidifies the long-running connections between Dean and Meg and torture. The first time Dean is shown torturing someone it's Meg, in season one's "Devil's Trap." He has her tied to a chair under a devil’s trap, and orders Sam to recite an exorcism, intending to use the pain and threat of the exorcism to torture her for information on their father's location. In the end they finish the exorcism, sending her back to Hell, where, as Ruby puts in it in season three, Hell is Hell, even for demons.
In “Born Under a Bad Sign,” Meg, wearing Sam, starts to torture Dean in revenge, telling him: "All that I had to hold onto was that I would climb out one day, and that I was going to torture you, nice and slow. Like pulling the wings off an insect." She's thwarted by Bobby and sent back to hell again, only to return allied with Lucifer in season 5. In 5.10, Meg gleefully sets hellhounds after Dean in particular, calling them his "favorite" -- a jab pointed at his manner of death in season 3.
However, Dean's the one who stops Christian's torture of Meg in 6.10. He frees Meg from the table without much hesitation, and he's willing to trust Meg with the demon-killing knife and condone her torture of Crowley to get Sam's soul back. Dean and Meg are tied together now more than ever before, both mentored by Alastair, both presumably tortured by him, both initially motivated by loyalty to their fathers, now both on their own. At this point they've each tortured the other at least once. In hell, Dean managed to retain his humanity, most likely due only to the divine intervention provided by Castiel's rescue. Meg wasn't so lucky.
I realize many people might disagree with some of my points. I totally respect that and welcome all comments.
This essay owes a bunch to dafnap, as always, especially for her points about Dean's relationship to Meg.
(trigger warnings for, obviously, torture and rape, nothing any more explicit than seen on the show)
Torture and rape in SPN season 6 (so far)
1.
The way torture has been a nearly constant undercurrent this season intrigues me, and seems to hint at potential conflicts to come.
So far we have Christian Campbell (who we now know is a demon) using Dean's stint as a torturer as a dig in 6.02, Dean objecting to but standing by while Cas tortures a kid in 6.03, Bobby torturing a demon in 6.04, Veritas basically torturing people with the supernatural equivalent of a truth serum in 6.06, Cas torturing Sam (with Dean's approval) to discover the missing soul in 6.07 and then later in the episode the Campbells as well as Dean torturing Alphas. Episode 6.10 is the motherlode so far: Crowley torturing the Alpha Shifter, Meg threatening to torture Dean as well as referring to their mutual past as Alastair's pupils, Sam making a deal that Meg will torture Crowley to get information on Sam's soul, Christian torturing Meg, and finally Meg torturing Crowley. That's, if I'm remembering them all, six episodes out of ten majorly referencing torture.
Dean started out the season standing firmly against torture but backslid in 6.07. First he gives tacit permission when Cas tortures Sam while looking for Sam’s soul. Then when confronted with the Alpha vamp, who was ultimately responsible for Dean's being turned into a monster and a huge factor in the destruction of his relationship with Lisa and Ben, who might also have held a key in the quest to get Sam's soul back from Crowley, Dean continues the torture that the Campbell clan started.
It feels to me like the frequency of outright torture or allusions to torture this season is leading somewhere. There is already a bit of a slippery slope for Dean, as we've seen. Would Dean be willing to go back to being a torturer if it gets him Sam out of hell (spoilers for 6.11: this doesn't seem to be what's going to happen, but I'll be interested to see how his deal with Death plays out in this regard, as it feels tentatively related)? Would he be willing to torture, or to condone torture, to help Castiel's cause? Especially given his mindset right now that all he's good for is killing? Or will he take a stand again and pull himself back from that brink?
Or will the theme manifest in a different way that I'm not anticipating?
2.
References to rape have also frequent in the last several episodes, and it's my hope that I can address this pattern without falling into some kind of rape apology. I know there has been controversy over these references, but given the context of the season and the canon as a whole the majority don't play to me as if they are intended as merely laughs.
The references to rape have been made mostly by or about Dean. In 6.09 they are played primarily for laughs (the lines about alien probing and “servicing” Oberon), but in my opinion the jokes are muddied by the fact that Dean's reactions, his anxiety and revulsion, are played fairly realistically and straightforward and without the over the top slapstick humor of some of the other episodes which poke fun at his averse reactions to an event, such as the first half or so of “Yellow Fever.” In 6.10, with the exception of Dean's remarks to Cas at the end (which I didn’t take as written intentionally as a rape joke but instead refers to the mutual attraction between Meg and Cas; but can see why it could be taken that way given rape culture and the presence of Meg’s host and possibly Jimmy, neither of whom can consent), none of the references struck me as meant to be read as strictly humorous.
Instead, Dean comes off extremely defensive when he makes them, especially to Meg's lackey (“Are you gonna kiss me?”) and to the two ghouls sent to eat him (the Shawshank line, which is the second reference to rape and showers in the episode and the third between 6.09-6.10). The episode also implied heavily that Crowley has been raping the captured daughter of the Alpha djinn (Why else is there a bed in her cell? Which she appears to be chained to, in a scene that heavily recalled the movie "Kalifornia" to me.) and it is this djinn that begs for Dean's help. Dean has a moment of near compassion for her, or at the least a pause -- the monster who tried to kill him with visions of one of his worst fears, asking him for help -- before Sam moves them along. I think that short scene is echoed later in the moment between Dean and Meg, when he frees her from Christian’s torture table despite everything she’s done to him and his family in the past, though Meg would never ask for his help the way the djinn did. Dean needs her help still, yes, but at the same time, as I'll get into a bit more below, it solidifies the already strong connections between them.
The rape references aren't limited to these two most recent episodes.
In 6.02, we discover at least one shapeshifter has disguised himself as a woman’s husband in order to impregnate her. While it’s not explicitly coded by the show as rape, and whether the show realizes the implications is unclear, in my view this is the first of the season’s rape references.
I think we can easily throw in "Live Free or Twihard," 6.05. Not only is the entire opening sequence played like a seduction followed by a rape, but we have Dean making references to how "rapey" the twilight-knockoff books are; Dean being violently assaulted, held down, and turned into a vampire against his will after being called "pretty;" the later subtext of sexual coercion between Dean and the vamp who turned him in the "private tour" line; the allusions to trafficking in the way the vamp in charge of the nest treats the women he's "recruited;" and Dean's remarks that his own behavior in the scene with Lisa resembles what he'd only a day before labeled "rapey."
Then we have the subtext of 6.08, "All Dogs Go to Heaven," where the skinwalker disguised as pet dog Lucky creepily stalks the woman of the house, Mandy. Lucky gets rid of Mandy's boyfriend and lies in bed and licks her in his dog form. And when he's found out, she reacts appropriately, rejecting him with horror and disgust. eta: in comments, sidura points out another line I'd forgotten: Dean's reference to wanting to prevent an innocent person from suffering "an eternity of demon rape" when Sam is pushing him to hand over Mandy to Crowley before they know whether she's the skinwalker they're looking for.
I am probably oversimplifying by stating that some of the rape references are not being played as jokes, and I realize many people will disagree with me as to the writers' intentions. For the most part they do occur when Dean is making a joke; but it seems an odd coincidence that suddenly most of Dean's defensive jokes are rape-related. And most of these jokes barely come across as jokes, per se, instead they seem to be the result of Dean covering discomfort or anxiety.
Dean doesn’t refer to anyone else in this manner - the butt of his jokes is himself. Possibly it started with 6.09, though like I said, 6.05 was full of rape and coercion connotations. There's just *so many* of these references, made in the context of Dean being assaulted over and over by monsters and demons this season, that it's hard for me to take them as anything but deliberate on the part of the writers. To me, one joke can be dismissed as bad taste, but this many, almost always solely aimed at or spoken by Dean? I'm not so sure.
Dean's black, self-referential rape humor typically occurs in or after moments where he's threatened physically. The one that doesn’t occur in such a moment of danger, which references his working for Crowley (the "daily rape shower" line), makes sense to me in the context of the episode, which refers back to Dean's relationship with the last demon he worked for: Alastair. So I don't think that line was random, and I don't think it was meant to be a joke. That one in particular isn't played humorously in the least. It's a line coming from a character who, it has been very heavily implied, was in the past raped by a demon ("daddy's little girl," "all those pokes and prods" in 4.16) and now finds himself coerced into working with one in the slim chance that it will lead to his brother's soul.
I'm not positive this theme is actually headed anywhere in particular; I've just been noticing the pattern and finding it hard to dismiss. The fact that it's occurring after the running of the show has been taken over by a woman, Sera Gamble, who has in the past brought up issues of rape and consent in the writing of the show, makes me wonder if she's just more willing to acknowledge rape overtly, including the usually taboo possibility of male rape, and primarily doing so through Dean's defensive jokes. It's difficult for me not to see this as part and parcel of the show's ongoing interest in explicitly deconstructing Dean's performance of masculinity.
3.
The way rape and torture come together in the sexually violent scene between Meg and Christian in 6.10 has also been widely discussed. I found the use of nudity to be a double standard and the move from showing less skin in a similar scene in 4.10 with Ruby to more in 6.10 with Meg to be a predictable move I could have done without; but the rape connotations, in the context of the rest of the episode, felt purposeful to me, and not, as a few reviewers have put it, intended to punish Meg for her sexuality.
Instead it felt honest. Let's face it: torturers, whether their victims are male or female, very frequently use rape as a weapon. Meg herself has a pattern of sexually assaulting her enemies: suggestively straddling Sam in the first season and Dean in 6.10, a scene in which she also threatens him with torture to get Crowley’s location; kissing Dean against his will in 5.01; making sexually charged remarks to Sam and Dean in 6.10 and "Born Under a Bad Sign" in season 2, in which she also nearly rapes Jo while possessing Sam - a double assault, since possession has been coded repeatedly as rape by the series; and mocking Castiel's "impotency" in 5.10. Not to mention her treatment of Meg Masters (who describes her possession as being "ridden for months by pure evil," and her current nameless brunette host. I'm not saying that she deserves the torture in 6.10 for these reasons; I'm trying to point out that Meg's pattern of using sex as a weapon is entirely consistent with the new canon revelation that she studied torture under Alastair. And as we'll see, Christian finds it nearly impossible to use that weapon against her.
In 6.10 it looks at first as if Christian has turned the tables on Meg -- he has her strapped down and is slicing into her with a knife. Meg lets out sounds of pain, yes, but despite Christian's mocking of her "fear" -- which appears to exist only in his mind, since compared to the scene with the hellhounds she shows none -- she spends most of the session laughing at him. Because she studied under Alastair, and it is implied that she's had worse -- after all, she's only wearing a host body here. As we know from 4.16, torture on earth is so very limited; later in the episode, when it's Meg's turn to torture Crowley, she makes a comment about the best torturers not getting their hands dirty - and uses some kind of power to inflict pain on Crowley without touching him. Christian's an amateur: Meg is the one who makes comments on his manhood and tauntingly suggests he try poking the knife somewhere else. And when he obliges, the camera work and blocking suggesting that he is raping her with the knife, she again vocally expresses her physical pain, but follows it up with laughter.
For these reasons, the scene does not come across to me as punishment of Meg for her sexuality. Meg is goading an inferior torturer. She's suffering physical pain, yes, but Christian hasn't begun to touch the rest of her -- hasn’t begun to actually punish her for anything. She was trained by "Picasso with a razor," after all. This show has a history of multiple female characters with agency and motivations that have nothing to do with men. Female sexuality is portrayed as a healthy, no-strings expression where women more often than not initiate sex, and are no more shamed for their sexuality than men, let alone killed for it. Given that history, I don't buy that the writers on a meta level are suddenly (even unconsciously) using this episode to punish a sexual woman character. Maybe it would be true on another show, but on this one and in this episode in particular, that reading strikes me as shallowly applied.
4.
“Caged Heat” further solidifies the long-running connections between Dean and Meg and torture. The first time Dean is shown torturing someone it's Meg, in season one's "Devil's Trap." He has her tied to a chair under a devil’s trap, and orders Sam to recite an exorcism, intending to use the pain and threat of the exorcism to torture her for information on their father's location. In the end they finish the exorcism, sending her back to Hell, where, as Ruby puts in it in season three, Hell is Hell, even for demons.
In “Born Under a Bad Sign,” Meg, wearing Sam, starts to torture Dean in revenge, telling him: "All that I had to hold onto was that I would climb out one day, and that I was going to torture you, nice and slow. Like pulling the wings off an insect." She's thwarted by Bobby and sent back to hell again, only to return allied with Lucifer in season 5. In 5.10, Meg gleefully sets hellhounds after Dean in particular, calling them his "favorite" -- a jab pointed at his manner of death in season 3.
However, Dean's the one who stops Christian's torture of Meg in 6.10. He frees Meg from the table without much hesitation, and he's willing to trust Meg with the demon-killing knife and condone her torture of Crowley to get Sam's soul back. Dean and Meg are tied together now more than ever before, both mentored by Alastair, both presumably tortured by him, both initially motivated by loyalty to their fathers, now both on their own. At this point they've each tortured the other at least once. In hell, Dean managed to retain his humanity, most likely due only to the divine intervention provided by Castiel's rescue. Meg wasn't so lucky.
I realize many people might disagree with some of my points. I totally respect that and welcome all comments.