One of Britain’s favourite soap operas, Coronation Street, is tackling the subject of male rape.
(It actually aired last night.)
I didn’t see it, but I hope it will raise awareness that men too can be victims. It’s been addressed before in lesser soaps, but Corrie is one of the big ones.
The season finale of Outlander season 1 showed it from beginning to end. Very hard to watch. They also dealt with the aftermath, which you rarely see. Hopefully this will raise awareness.
Done on American TV over 40 years ago.
The guy in that movie came uncomfortably close to being convicted of raping his assailant.
Doug, the story in Coronation is male-on-male. How much male-on-male action, consensual or otherwise, was there on American TV 40 years ago?
I can think of only one…not quite 40 years ago. "The Rape of Richard Beck (1985), an American TV movie, starring Richard Crenna. A cop with little sympathy for rape victims is sodomized.
That Corrie has tackled this could actually make a difference in public opinion. As one of the longest running daily shows in history many people are immersed in it. Likewise, the viewers can see themselves as the characters b/c for the most part it’s lower-middle class. Their empathy goes beyond fashions or productsand it’s no stretch to say the show has probably saved lives.
This topic is delicate, upsetting, fraught w/ cultural issues and incredibly necessary if the idea that men cannot be raped (by men or women) is to be defeated. Every person deserves their natural agency and using a stereotype against men strips them of that.
When I lived in Michigan and could receive Canadian channels I watched Corrie for years; still kinda miss it.
It’s been done on Hollyoaks twice (Luke raped by Mark, John Paul raped by Finn).
Crenna deservedly won an Emmy for this courageous part. It’s available on DVD with the title “Deadly Justice”. It’s very good, and very difficult to watch.
The OP didn’t specify male on male - just male rape. It wasn’t the idea that a man could rape a man that was pooh-poohed, it was commonly thought to be impossible for a woman to rape a man.
The names David and Josh didn’t clue you in?
Well, there was that story arc on “Soap” in the late seventies that had mob daughter Elaine forcing Danny Dallas to bang her at gunpoint. Played for laughs though.
p.s. Surprisingly, it’s not dated either. Oh, sure, the cars, clothing styles, etc. are from the mid 1980s but the concepts haven’t changed.
Law & Order: SVU had an episode in its third season (2001) about a male stripper who gets tied down and raped after a performance at a birthday party. It’s not played for laughs, of course, but the prosecutors do talk about how difficult it will be to get the jurors and press to take the case seriously. In an odd L&O tradition, the actress who played one of the perpetrators joined the main cast a couple years later, playing an ADA.
Considering the subject matter of the the show, they may have had story lines about other male victims, but that’s the only one that comes to mind.
The trial in that show wasn’t even about the rape. One of the rapists had offered to testify on the stripper’s behalf in a civil suit and the other two killed her. I think the DA/police had declined to pursue the rape case.