Thursday, February 11, 2016

HOW SOAPS HANDLE MALE RAPE


Earlier this week on The Bold & the Beautiful, Quinn and Liam kissed. That’s not usually a particularly big deal. It’s a soap. People kiss (and more) all the time. It’s kind of what folks watch for. What made this kiss abnormally squicky (that’s a technical term, go with it), was that Liam has amnesia. He doesn’t remember that he hates Quinn for a variety of reasons. Little things like trying to kill him with a sword.

Right now, Liam thinks that his name is Adam. And that he’s married to Quinn. Who’s name is Eve. She told him this, and is hiding Liam at her house. So that her son, Wyatt (who is also Liam’s half-brother), can have a clear shot at Liam’s ex-wife, Steffy, who thinks that Liam just abandoned her without a second thought.

See how the kissing becomes a bit problematic at this point?

Meanwhile, last week on Days of Our Lives, Steve slept with Ava. Again, not a particularly big deal on soaps. Except that Ava who, after having strung along Steve’s teen-age son, Joe, romantically, forced Steve to have sex with her in exchange for Ava revealing where she’d kidnapped and hidden away Steve’s true love, ex-wife, Kayla. Now, Ava is threatening to tell Kayla “what Steve did,” if he doesn’t do whatever Ava says.

There is a word for what Ava did, and for what it sure does look like Quinn is about to do. It’s not a nice word. In fact, when I wrote a post about soap-opera’s treatment of women who are raped, it prompted ex-Another World star Alicia Coppola to rebut my interpretation of events.

Actor Scott Clifton, who plays Liam on B&B, also disputes interpreting what Quinn is doing as rape, claiming on Twitter that it is, at most, fraud. Some fans agree with him, some don’t.

Chime in with your opinion on my latest Entertainment Weekly post at: http://community.ew.com/2016/02/09/soap-opera-male-rape/

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