Dollhouse

I am done with Dollhouse. I have given it more chances than it deserves, and even though I hate to give up watching a show with Eliza Dushku and Amy Acker (and now I love Dichen Lachman), it is just pissing me of more than it's entertaining me. Maia has some good points about how sexual assault is treated on the show at Alas, a Blog. (Can't say I agree with her on the rest of her post, though. She's enjoying the show more than I am.)

I was relieved that we seemed to be free of the icky rape issues in Epsidode 5. Then we get, as Maia pointed out, rape as character development/plot point without actually dealing with rape as an issue. BOO!

And then we get the male active who gets hard in the showers when he is with Sierra. Of course it has to be about how a woman is ultimately responsible. Are we supposed to find it romantic that his attraction to one woman is so damn powerful that it overrides his programing and despite his childlike state he really really wants to fuck her. Barf.

A few big problems here.

1. The actives shower together because they are supposed to be in a completely innocent, blank state. There is no risk to them of assault or violence because none of them is capable. Now we have a man who is sexually aroused and women who may or may not be (so inscrutable, those wimmins without obvious arousal), but are definitely not supposed to be sexual. This is not interesting or cute or amusing to me. It is damn creepy. The women may not have the bodies of children, but they have no autonomy, no sexual desire, no way to understand or deal with sexuality. And we are shown a scene in which one of those women is in the shower with a man who is looking at her sexually.

2. This development perpetuates the framing of sexuality as actively sexual man and passively sexual woman.

3. The trope of the Asian woman who is beautiful and alluring and innocent, arousing men's sexuality without being sexual herself.