Cinema and television, even in the children's genre, have perpetuated the idea that a sexually abused man can be, contrary to the female case, something enormously comical.
Here's an excerpt from something Bertín Osborne said in the play Mellizos, which he performed with Arévalo between 2013 and 2017 in Spain: "Two or three years ago I was invited to go to Sálvame. They opened the set door for me and told me: "Come on in. I looked and said: 'Bullshit, I'm not going in there'. Now, as I had no choice, what did I do? I put my ass against the wall and went around the set. I left the baseboard clean, clean, clean. When I was a few centimetres from the chair, I threw myself in the iron. It was a good thing that my chair had wheels, because when the interview was over I sat in the chair until I got home. There, as you get up, at any moment they put you looking at Torrejón.
Osborne's example is, to a certain extent, harmless: it is a type of moth-eaten humour, with a thick stroke and an expiration date thought for an audience that doesn't ask too much and is willing to laugh at such a poor text. A perfectly delimited evil: there it is born, there it dies. But let's analyze, even so, the narrative of the gag: Bertín believes that in Telecinco's program Sálvame, he is in danger of being penetrated. In other words, of being raped. And to be raped, very probably, by another man.
In the logic of this story, the irresistible desire that the men who work at Telecinco might have for penetrating Bertín is simply appeased by the fact that he hides his ass, either by sticking it to the wall or to the chair. These potential homosexual rapists are not only basic in their sexual impulses, but also in their ocular capacity. In that joke, the formal white man who is Bertín is exposed to the sexual predators that are homosexuals.
What Bertín did was a joke about male rape. And his remained there, but the movies and series are full of similar jokes. We all know them: the showers and the soap that falls off. The mannered man who winks at you and kisses you from the other corner of the bar.
"From where will you see how the world consumes me? Oh, right, from jail. I'll send you a bar of soap," says Robert Downey Jr. to Mickey Rourke in Iron Man 2 (recommended for children 12 and up and the seventh highest grossing movie of 2010). "Why does a prisoner drop his bar of soap? Because no one wants to do it alone," sang Neil Patrick Harris in that year's Oscar musical number (for all audiences, seen by more than 40 million people in the United States). "Here's some soap, don't drop it," SpongeBob says to snail Gary in an episode of Nickelodeon's children's series while winking at him. This scene makes no reference to rape, but the phrase and its gesture are a very unambiguous allusion.
There's a film, Dale duro 2015, in which the joke stretches for an hour and a half because its protagonist, who is going to go to prison, receives advice from a man who washes his car... and almost all of them have to do with the fact that he's going to be raped in prison.
What's the problem?
"A man's vulnerability is an inexhaustible source of humor in popular comedies," McCintosh explains. "And the vulnerability that results from sexual abuse is no exception. The idea behind this joke is as obvious as it is toxic: that men who are not hard enough or masculine enough to avoid becoming victims are pathetic, and therefore deserve ridicule. Likewise, McIntosh points out that the idea of being sexually abused "revolves around the idea of a man acting according to the wishes of another man, and thus forced into a role that is stereotypically feminine. In other words, the worst punishment for a man is to be treated like a woman.
There is more. In an overwhelming majority of films, those men who threaten to rape another man in prison showers are black. Black actors and giants who perpetuate the idea of a more primitive and basic race in their desires and way of acting. And these rapists are often depicted as men with an elegant pen, or they are men in makeup. Another perpetuated cliché: that the homosexual is incapable of controlling his sexual instincts, that he is a tireless predator for whom any male is an object of desire.
The joke, therefore, is not only very bad: it is macho, racist and homophobic. Does anyone give more? No one would think of making a joke today about raping a woman. Very few people would laugh. Why would they laugh when the man is the victim? First of all, because we still consider it something unlikely, an almost impossible tragedy, to some extent exotic. And precisely because of this, when a man steps forward and claims to have suffered some kind of sexual abuse, it short-circuits us.
Actor Terry Crews did it and even talked about it at a hearing in the U.S. Congress. "I was sexually abused by a powerful Hollywood producer," Crews said. Crews is a tall, strong, black actor. Many men, some famous, laughed at his confession. Why? Because, according to them, what a real man, a strong, black, adult man, should have done is bust that guy's head, sew him up with fists. The epic narrative of masculinity doesn't even contemplate the possibility of Terry Crews becoming paralyzed and afraid. In the epic narrative of masculinity, always so given to associating power with physical strength, no one stopped to think that there are other kinds of power at play in a sexual assault that go far beyond the physical. Terry Crews' case left public opinion speechless because it challenged all the myths and false beliefs we had about what it's like to be a man.
In Spain we also had a confession of rape by a man. Roberto Enríquez, aka Bob Pop, writer, journalist and television collaborator, did it on Andreu Buenafuente's Late Motiv in such a natural and relaxed way that it left the audience baffled. "One night someone raped me and robbed me in Retiro Park. And it left me stranded. I had to seek help. Some garbage men helped me and some boys took me to the police station. I had a really bad time, it was shit, I threw up, I cried... but the following days I laughed, I went out with friends, I did things... there was a rush, besides the pain, because when you think you're going to be killed and you're still alive, it's fucking great.
His story became viral, not only because of the courageous and direct way he told it, but also because it coincided with the trial of the Manada and the scrutiny of the victim's life. And it calls the attention that told it with humor, provoking applause and even some laughter of the public. The difference between the humour in Bob Pop's story and the humour in those films and series we have named is that Bob Pop's was used to give voice, light and hope to the victims. The rest only sought, in an empty and cruel way, to laugh at them.