"The Boys" Has a Sexual Assault Problem.
Warning: Contains spoilers for season 4, episode 6 of "The Boys."
Content warning: this article contains discussions of sexual assault.
As a preface, The Boys is not a bad show by any stretch of the word. Now on its fourth season, the show is a biting social satire of superhero media and its intrinsic connection to capitalism and consumerism, the alt-right, and American politics. While it deals with these themes with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, it is, in many respects, an effective social commentary, albeit raunchy and at times, needlessly gratuitous. Based off of Garth Ennis’s “The Boys” graphic novel series, the show arguably improves upon its source material, and other than the characters and several plot points, shares little in common with Ennis’s work, which, for lack of a better term, is written with all of the sensitivity and astuteness of a fourteen year-old commenting on 4chan for the first time.
With all of that said, I take enormous issue with the manner in which The Boys’ sixth episode of season 4 depicts sexual assault — specifically, male sexual assault. I understand that this a hot-button topic, often populated with bad-faith arguments made by raging Andrew Tate fanboys on TikTok and in Reddit comment sections, and most typically on posts discussing women’s experiences with sexual assault. I say “bad faith” because it is often men saying “but what about us?” on posts about women being brutally raped and murdered. While they do have a point, it loses all of its efficacy because it is utilized as “gotcha” and often followed up with “men have it worse than women!” Which, as a survivor of sexual assault who had to navigate the legal system as a minor, as well as finish the remainder of my junior year of high-school at home due to the intense bullying and harassment I received over coming forward about said assault, I disagree, with the caveat that we do need to have more serious conversations about male sexual assault, and that popular media containing discussions and depictions of male sexual assault often treat it as the punchline to a painfully unfunny joke.
The Boys has navigated the murky waters of surviving sexual assault before; in the pilot episode, in which Starlight (Erin Moriarty) is assaulted offscreen by the Deep (Chace Crawford), and in season 2, which deals with Becca Butcher’s (Shantel VanSanten), struggle to parent her child, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), when her rapist, Homelander (Antony Starr) discovers his existence. The show takes careful, uncharacteristically restrained measures to never show these aforementioned assaults; in both cases, we only ever witness the aftermath—-Starlight making herself throw up in the bathroom, and Becca Butcher emerging, disheveled, from a locked room through the lens of a security tape. In my opinion, the decision to only show the aftermath of said assaults rather than the event itself further compounds the horror of these events, as, from personal experience, surviving sexual assault has little to do with the assault itself, and more to do with contending with your new reality in the aftermath and weathering the proverbial shitstorm that often accompanies it.
So, what went wrong in season 4? Coming off, in my opinion, the strongest episode of the season—-episode 5—-which dealt with the passing of Hughie’s (Jack Quaid) father, Hugh Sr. (Simon Pegg), whose dementia was exacerbated, with deadly results, by the Compound V in his bloodstream, episode 6 feels like a cruel joke made at the expense of male sexual assault survivors that belongs more in an early-2000s American Pie-esque sex comedy than a 2020s-era, high-budget Amazon Prime show. The show’s depiction of said assault is not just needlessly cruel, but irresponsible as well; The Boys is a hugely popular show, often borrowing its plot points and dialogue from real-life political events, and its decision to depict male sexual assault in such a blasé manner sends the message that not only is male sexual assault a nonissue, it’s also comedic fodder.
A basic rundown: Tek Knight (Derek Wilson) (a thinly-veiled parody of Batman) is throwing a political fundraiser at his mansion. Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) decides to send Hughie to the party in disguise as Webweaver (Dan Mousseau), a drug-addled parody of Spiderman, in order to uncover Homelander and Sister Sage’s (Susan Heyward) sinister political machinations. While at the party, Tek Knight brings Hughie to the Tek Cave, an underground BDSM dungeon, where he brutally assaults him along with Ashley (Colby Minifie) the encounter ending with Hughie strapped to a table as Tek Knight attempts to cut a hole in his abdomen so he can have sex with it.
On paper, this sounds absolutely horrifying. The execution differs wildly. The encounter in the Tek Cave initially starts as a case of mistaken identity, in which Ashley (and ostensibly Tek Knight) thinks that Hughie is Webweaver. However, it is made abundantly clear that Tek Knight knows that Hughie is not, in fact, the real Webweaver, via using his heightened senses. The encounter opens with Hughie being forced to fart into a chocolate cake while Tek Knight autoerotically asphyxiates himself, the scene devolving into an exercise in needless depravity from there. While this scene is depicted as comical, it has an element of horror to it, in that Hughie is forced to humiliate himself in order to uphold the Webweaver ruse. Hughie is then strapped to a table, in which Ashley tickles his feet with a feather, masturbates herself, and then wipes her cum across his mask. Throughout the entirety of these scenes, Hughie is visibly uncomfortable and attempting to ascertain Webweaver’s safeword, reacting in clear distress to the unfolding events while Toto’s “Rosanna” plays in the background. At one point, he yells “stop!” and Ashley, confused, ceases tickling his feet, to which Webweaver tells her to continue, as he hasn’t said the safeword—-connoting that he knows Webweaver isn’t who he says he is, and that he is deriving enjoyment from Hughie’s discomfort. The episode culminates in Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) and Starlight confronting Tek Knight before he can mutilate Hughie, with Tek Knight ultimately being strangled by his butler, the encounter punctuated with the joke that Webweaver’s safeword was “Zendaya.”1
With all of the context included, the encounter between Hughie and Tek Knight is treated not as a sexual assault, but rather as the buildup to a (in my opinion, lazy) punchline—-that Webweaver’s safeword was Zendaya, because haha, he’s a Spider-Man parody, so of course his safeword would be Zendaya! The decision to depict Hughie’s sexual assault in graphic detail, as well as the choices made throughout said assault—-setting it to Toto’s “Rosanna”, Hughie’s bare ass shown covered in chocolate cake, which he is then forced to wipe with a square of sandpaper, and the ultimate punchline, buoyed with a pithy joke about David Carradine’s death via autoerotic asphyxiation, treats it less with the narrative weight that it deserves (sexual assault, but not only that, sexual assault occurring to a character who lost his father mere days earlier) and more as an edgy exercise in humiliating a character who, in all honesty, the show-runners and writers have no idea what to do with. Throughout the entirety of the series, Hughie is depicted as being a hapless, mostly-useless sidekick to Butcher’s (Karl Urban) antics, rendered insecure by his girlfriend, Starlight’s, powers and his inability to protect her against Homelander. While the impetus behind the events of The Boys is the death of Hughie’s girlfriend to A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), he is largely relegated to a backseat role in the latter seasons, and routinely humiliated by the show’s other characters.
When I first watched Hughie’s assault scene(s), I was instantly reminded of this 2015 Saturday Night Live2 sketch starring Pete Davidson, Taraji P. Henson, and Cecily Strong, which centers around a teacher-student relationship. The joke of the sketch is that Pete Davidson’s character enjoyed the relationship and that his social status was elevated by the fact that he was statutorily raped by his teacher. While the context behind the Saturday Night Live sketch and Hughie’s assault in The Boys differs greatly, the underlying subtext is the same: that male sexual assault (and in the case of SNL, the rape of a minor) is a joke. However, as in the case of Hughie’s situation as well as the SNL sketch, if it were a woman in Pete Davidson or Jack Quaid’s shoes, the situation would not be comical, but rather something out of a fucking horror movie.
While some might say that I am simply misinterpreting Hughie’s scenes in The Boys, as he does have a mental breakdown in the final five minutes of episode six3, this is simply not the case. In an interview with Variety, the series creator, Eric Kripke, states to the below question that he finds Hughie’s sexual assault to be “hilarious.”
In short, Hughie’s assault is not meant to be viewed as what it is—-sexual assault—-and rather a “hilarious” escapade. This is problematic; if it were Starlight placed into an identical situation, it would’ve played out much differently, as exemplified by her offscreen assault in the pilot episode. There is no difference between male and female sexual assault; both are equally horrifying, and need to be treated with the same narrative weight. There are few depictions of male sexual assault in popular media, and the pieces of media that do depict it tend to treat it as comedic fodder with an undercurrent of homophobia; one needs to look no further than Get Hard (2015), Deadpool (2016), and Wedding Crashers (2005) as proof4.
With all of that said, episode 7 of season 4 is being released tonight at 12am, and depending on the direction the episode takes, I might very well be eating crow. However, episode 7 better show Hughie as a traumatized fucking shell of a human—-as people who experience sexual assault often are, at least in the immediate aftermath—-or else, I’m afraid, we can just add The Boys to the ever-growing list of popular media that treats male sexual assault as, at best and worst, a punchline to an aggressively unfunny, dated joke that should’ve been dead and buried long ago.
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Get it? Because Spider-Man!
I will always maintain the perspective that Saturday Night Live is just low-effort comedy for disaffected centrists.
Which is arguably, less triggered by the fact that he was just sexually assaulted, and more so over the death of Hugh Sr.
The commonality that all of these movies share is that they are relentlessly humorless and insipid.