Observe and Reports "Shocking Sex Scene": if This Isn't Rape, What is?

While reading the blog Feministing, I came across a post about Seth Rogen’s newest movie “Observe and Report” which is about Ronnie, a bipolar mall-cop. In the post they link to the Friday Feminist Fuck You, in which Courtney (one of the bloggers of Feministing) criticizes Seth Rogen and the movie for its portrayal of date-rape. This video of Courtney’s drew some fire from the website Wired.com which basically thought that Courtney was overreacting and needed to calm down. Wired even describes the date-rape scene “a shocking sex-scene.” Now, I haven’t seen the movie, nor do I plan to, but after reading this I found a trailer for the movie which has a short clip from that scene (the clip is at the very end of the trailer), and from the little bit that I saw of the scene it is obvious that he is raping her. Although many people argue that Ronnie was not, in fact, raping Brandi because he once stopped in the middle of having sex “with” her and she briefly woke up to say “did I tell you to stop, motherfucker?” That does not mean that he was not raping her, he had started having sex “with” her before she consented to it, and, as Courtney and many other people, have pointed out, it does not count as consent if the person is drunk at the time of the act. And Brandi was definitely drunk. In fact she was covered in vomit and passing out while Ronnie was “grinding away at her” (as Courtney put it).

Many people further defended this scene by saying that Brandi wanted to have sex with Ronnie but could only do it when she was drunk (since she’s the one who showed up at his house, it is automatically assumed that she was only there for sex), so it couldn’t be rape. But that is still rape. Brandi is so out of it that she can barely walk and when Ronnie is having sex “with” her she is passed out. That does not seem like consensual sex to me.

What I found to be most interesting about Wired’s article were the comments that it incited. I don’t know exactly how many comments there are, but it took me over an hour to read through all of them. A vast majority of the comments are people defending the scene and calling those people that are against it (including Courtney) “bitches,” “cunts,” and “lesbians.” Now, not all of them resorted to name-calling (and several people that agreed with Courtney said some rude things), but a vast majority of them seemed extremely angry and were quite hostile to those people that agreed with Courtney. One commenter, Mark, even said “As for that unattractive small tittied idiot who made the video; wouldn’t screw her with my enemies dick... pity though, coz looks like that’s what the carpet muncher needs to get back on track.” So, according to Mark, what every woman needs to get her “back on track” (which here means that she just doesn’t agree with his views and feels that rape should not be laughed at) is a man to have sex with her, even if she is a lesbian (and the only reason he thinks she’s a lesbian is because she’s a feminist). This sort of logic is how we got into this argument in the first place. If people think that a woman needs to have sex with a man in order to calm her down or set her straight, then it only follows that these women should be forced to have sex; which would be rape. These men delude themselves into thinking that they are helping these women or that these women deserve to be raped, and so they rape them and then pat themselves on the back and laugh it off as a “job well done.”

This idea of women needing a man to force them to have sex is disgusting, and movies like Observe and Report are supporting this mentality. Observe and Report is showing that Ronnie had the right to rape Brandi because she was “slutty” and showed up at Ronnie’s house intoxicated. This movie is not being artistic or smart by portraying this “shocking sex-scene,” it is doing something that has been done over and over again; it is taking something absolutely horrendous and trying to make it amusing. But instead of just getting people to laugh at this scene, it is normalizing date-rape and making it seem OK for men to have sex with an obviously unconscious woman because, hey, Ronnie from Observe and Report did it, got away with it, and it was hilarious. This is what the media is teaching people, and I, personally, am disgusted by it.