Skins – S2 E4 – Michelle – video Dailymotion

In season 2 episode 4 of the television series Skins (British version) at 28:46, a female character grabs a male character’s testicles and squeezes. Jai, the female, does this because Chris, the male, lost the tent for the group’s day at the beach. The first shot in this scene is over Jai’s shoulder as she is walking towards Chris, Chris walking backwards, talking fast, trying to diffuse; the camera angle widens and you see that Jai is at the head of a group of six kids. Jai looks confident, in charge, strong, angry. Once Chris is backed up against a car, he tries to apologize again, and Jai grabs his testicles. You see her hand slap his groin hard, you see her squeeze and lift. It looks real; you see what appear to be his genitals move in her hand (he is wearing loose shorts). You hear a crunching sound and he grunts, then frozen in pain, slides down the car out of the shot. Now the camera is on the group of kids; one of them says “Oh that’s gotta hurt!” They all look some combination of surprised and entertained by what just happened, three of them covering their mouths as if to stifle a combination of wincing and laughing. The camera moves to another kid (not in the group that was with Jai) who has found a tent, and the group walks to this kid to set up the tent, ignoring and leaving Chris. Only one kid does not walk towards the new tent, Michelle; but she also ignores Chris, and walks away by herself. The camera follows her; now we are in her world of feelings (which have nothing to do with what just happened). Chris, on the ground (presumably), is simply not part of the story anymore.

The next time we see Chris is a few minutes later; we are now inside a tent. He is smiling and joking around with the other kids.

In this scene, we are directed, or misdirected, by three kinds of invisibility. One is literal; the victim disappears out of the shot, we can’t see him on the ground, in pain, alone, violated and laughed at by his friends. When the camera ignores him, it’s like we are being told that he doesn’t count anymore for this part of the story; he served his purpose by getting his testicles grabbed by the tough, confident girl. The second is a narrative shift; we ignore Chris for a second because of the new tent, and then because we follow Michelle and wonder what she is thinking and feeling. The third is when we see him in the tent, acting as if nothing has happened. We have no thought that he may have lasting damage or that he might be traumatized by what just happened to him. He’s perfectly fine, and the show goes on as if he were never violently sexually assaulted, in front of all of his friends, who stifled laughs and walked away from him.

The details of the shots are interesting…we see the attack in a lot of detail. It really looks like the actress actually grabbed the actor’s genitals. It looks very real, graphic, and detailed, and it looks violent. You see the actor’s face in the shot, which means they couldn’t have used a double, stunt person, dummy, etc. Immediately and seamlessly after the attack we cut to the faces of the kids, which tell us how to interpret what just happened; it was zany, funny and fun. Jal is a badass, her hands on her hips, looking down at him as if deciding whether or not she should hurt him more. We don’t see Chris anymore after he’s been hurt, the camera only went low enough to clearly film the attack itself, and then cut back up to waist/hip level, and then follows everyone off in their own directions. Everyone but Chris; we don’t see Chris alone, we don’t see him on the ground, we don’t see him in pain except as Jal is hurting him. To put that another way, we only see him in pain in the context of Jal’s take-no-shit badass awesomeness.

If I wanted to make a world full of the assaulters in the youtube questionnaire videos I discussed in my previous article, I would portray mga this way in stories all the time. The boy is only visible long enough to empower the girl to express herself this way, and to take power in this way. There are no consequences for the assault, and in two ways (redirecting to the group of kids with Jai and the new tent, redirecting to Michelle), we are told that Chris on the ground doesn’t matter; what DOES matter is these two girls, what they are thinking, feeling, and experiencing. Later, Chris is perfectly fine, acting normal. We only ever see him hurt in the context of her empowerment (literally…the only time we see him in pain on camera is with her hand squeezing his testicles).

This, by the way, is also what I would do if I wanted to make a world where males don’t and can’t complain about mga. All of the kids approve of what happened to Chris. They all laugh at him. Clearly he deserved this (for forgetting or losing the tent). If he didn’t, part of the narrative would show this; one of the other kids would have intervened, chastised or attacked Jai, helped Chris. Perhaps we would have seen Chris have to go to the hospital, perhaps we would have seen him go home, and leave that group of friends, or call the police, etc. Maybe Chris’ older sister beats the shit out of Jai in a later scene. But, of course, none of that happened. Also, he is perfectly fine, acting normally one scene later; so if, in real life, a boy decided to be whiny or bitchy about having been sexually assaulted, he’s not behaving the way boys are supposed to behave.

There’s a somewhat shorter and simpler version of this scene in Orange is the New Black, season 5 episode 1. During a prison riot, a man (not a guard) is trying to leave a room that the female inmates have gotten to. He is carrying a box of what appear to be files; he’s obviously not a threat, and announces that he is going to leave. One of the prisoners says “aw hell no!” and knees him in the groin. He drops out of the frame. “Stay the fuck down, Captain America, or you ain’t never making babies!” She yells at him on the ground. The other man in the room (also not a guard) says “Jesus Christ, are you insane?” And a second woman says “No, she’s angry. We’re all angry.” We cut away from the scene a little later without the camera ever going down to the floor, and for the most part the camera stays on the faces of the women. From “No, she’s angry” on, there are pauses in the lines of dialogue, as if we have now gotten to the emotionally and thematically important aspect of the scene. What matters isn’t the man on the floor, what matters is that the women are angry, and why they’re angry; and, like in the scene from Skins, we experience the assault exactly long enough to have the woman’s perspective, and then the man is out of the scene, visually and narratively. In this case, I would describe the feeling less as “Wow, what an awesome badass she is!” and more “Wow, look, she just kneed that guy in the groin. I’m really feeling her anger and frustration now.” The next time we see him, several scenes later, he’s tied up in the corner, no longer in pain, not part of the action of the scene.

An interesting thing about this scene in the context of the show…in season 6 episode 9, there is a description of this scene in a legal hearing. An attorney describes the women breaking into the room, brandishing an improvised weapon, punching the other man in the room in the face; she uses the phrase “false imprisonment,” asks the man in the hearing whether he feared for his life…but she doesn’t mention our victim getting kneed in the groin, which happened right in front of the man in the hearing (and would have contributed to his fearing for his life). This, to me, feels like a reveal…the writers could have made this hearing scene stronger by including the mga in the attorney’s case. But they chose to leave it out. I don’t know what this means, exactly, but I know what it feels like…it feels like shame. They can write this stuff if they stick with the giddiness of dehumanizing someone…but they might not want to hear a detached narrator, like a lawyer, describe it back to them.

Whether or not that feeling of mine reflects what’s going on, this exclusion also has something mechanical or technical in common with the Skins scene…if the lawyer had brought up the mga, this would be an equivalent to the character himself complaining about the attack. Just as we don’t hear Chris mention the fact that he just got sexually assaulted, we don’t hear the lawyer mention Josh’s assault.

A variation of this kind of scene is where the victim simply disappears from the story altogether; he exists long enough to get assaulted, and then we never see him again. There are lots of examples of this, probably more than the types I describe in this article. This arrangement is an option if the character isn’t a central or recurring character. (in both skins and orange, the assaulted character stays in the story). When the writers can’t simply discard the male, then we get these odd, sculpted exclusions and reinclusions of the male and the consequences of the assault…so these are (at least in some ways) more interesting and revealing.

There is at least one more important kind of invisibility that we will talk about, where the first thing we see after the assault is the boy apologizing to the girl. I will save that for a later article, as that connects to other themes we will explore. I mention it now because it is an interesting twist on the kinds of invisibility I described here, as it requires us to look at the victim. However, like the invisbilities we discussed here; what is important is the female. In the apology scenarios, we see THROUGH THE EYES OF THE VICTIM that she, the assaulter, is what is important; he experiences the sexual assault as a lesson and a wake up call to her feelings, needs, and experience. So we do look at the victim, but simply to further deemphasize the fact that he just got violated and dehumanized, and reemphasize the point that it’s all about her.