Every Wednesday night, I tune in to watch “American Horror Story” on FX like the good little monster I am. And without fail, just like in the four preceding seasons, I am faced with things that make me cringe, hide in my bed, and sometimes even shed a few tears.
To say that it’s easy being a fan of a show that boasts a multitude of cases involving murder, insanity, rape, and torture would undermine the basic value of the show, and it would dilute the many reasons for which viewers, myself included, love it so much.
And it’s not like these things are anything new. From season one episode one, you had to have some kind of idea of what you were getting into if you stuck with the show.
But for some reason, the fifth season rolls around, the season that creator Ryan Murphy promises to be the sickest and bloodiest season yet, and people are still surprised that something truly horrible and scarring happened.
For those who prefer that their television shows not deeply disturb them, the season five premiere of “American Horror Story” featured a male heroine addict being raped to death by an unidentified latex creature with a strap on that can only be described as a chrome unicorn horn.
Hard to read, right? Imagine watching it. I won’t tell you that it was easy to watch, or even that it was completely called for. But there are plenty of other things that have happened in “American Horror Story” that have been hard to watch.
A teenage girl getting drugged and gang-raped by a group of frat boys.
A mother suffocating her son in a hospital and then having her mind controlled and manipulated into drinking bleach.
A young girl descending into her own personal hell and never being able to ascend again.
Point being that this isn’t the first time something terrible has happened. This isn’t the first time that rape has happened. But for whatever reason, after the release of the first episode, article after article started to pop up about what an outrage it was. How dare Ryan Murphy show a homosexual rape?!
There have been examples of rape in every single season of “American Horror Story”. Why is everyone so angry about this one?
I’ve read many of these articles because I’m a huge fan of the show, and while I was upset by the scene because it was rape, I fail to see the difference between this scene and any other. But what I have found is that underneath our topical, politically correct desires to initiate a feeling of equality for homosexual couples, there lies a persistent feeling of discomfort when it comes to actually seeing homosexuality and categorizing it in the same way that we would heterosexuality.
In short, at our psychological human epicenters, we’re more comfortable with heterosexuality than we are with homosexuality, and that, in the most messed up way, translates to this: we are more comfortable with watching a heterosexual rape than a homosexual rape. We can watch a girl get raped, be upset by it, and move on. But we are so angry about homosexual rape.
Which is a weird almost backwards Freudian slip. We defend a conceived purity of homosexuality because we are not comfortable with seeing homosexuality. We want equality; but we just don’t feel comfortable seeing it happen.
It’s incredibly frustrating to realize that no one was emotional enough about any of the heterosexual rape that happened in the previous seasons to take up arms and complain about it. Yet this metaphorical scene that was supposed to signify the relationship between an addict and their addiction has caused an uproar because of a little gender switching. I can’t really blame people for getting angry about rape scenes. But I can’t see the logic in being okay with some, but deeply upset by others.
The way I see it, rape is rape. If you’re going to say that for whatever reason, homosexual rape is crossing a line that heterosexual rape does not, you’re perpetuating the idea that a homosexual relationship is different at its core (beyond the genders of the two people, of course) than a heterosexual one. And it isn't. That's the whole point.
