TV: Humans: Revisited.

Warning: Spoilers.

Since the last blog post, here, on the Channel 4 show Humans it has been renewed for a second season after doing quite well. I have been begrudgingly watching along, to see if it gets better as I loved the Swedish original and also to see if it has gotten any worse with its misogyny. I am starting this post before I have watched the last 3 or four episodes of the show, that conclude tonight, as I wanted to discuss one of the things that had happened in a previous episode that I feel was utterly indefensible. I have yet to see what consequences, if any, this act has resulted in but I will find out later and include it in this post.

Amongst all of the shows more science fiction side, not necessarily relevant to this post, and amongst the chances it’s made to the original which I find each are bad decisions is this overwhelming need the writers, mostly male, seems to have had to increase the sexism depicted in the series. As I mentioned before I understand its attempt at realism and its need to create a new show that isn’t just a shot for shot remake to the original. I just find it baffling, each episode that the strongest differences that are included are moments of sheer misogyny. What an odd thing to want to contribute to a show that has so much potential, especially for a show that is exploring what it means to be human, how we treat other people, and what influence technology and AI might one day have in our lives.

The biggest, most staggering, moment for me was one that took what was an implied naughty suggestion in the original and made it what amounted to a rape scene. In the original it is a sexist joke that the father has a chip that can make their robot, Anita, into a robot that can have sex - and simulate the touches and noises that are associated with it; the father doesn’t use it but keeps it instead of throwing it away, and it is later used consensually, or as consensually as you can get with AI, between the son and Anita. However, in the remake they decided to have the father cheat on his wife, that annoying nagging robot hating wife, and the whole act was disgusting. First we have the scene where Anita teaches him how to install the sex chip, making her a complicit factor in her sexualisation and literal objectification. There is flirting on his end, him asking her about her experience of sex & sexuality but ultimately it is his decision and he is the one who takes the lead and has the power. After getting her into the right settings he then immediately has sex with her but it definitely did not seem like consensual sex, between two people in love or who want to just have fun.

No, it was a blank faced, submissive Anita who simply lies still as an object while the father has sex with her. She isn’t active, she isn’t playing a role other than thing and the whole scene is awful to watch. Afterwards, realising what he has done, the father tells her to clean herself up and Anita, emotionless, leaves to do so. But before she goes he orders her, for she is his owner and she has to do what he says, to delete what he just did from her memory. The whole scene is very abusive and that alone feels like the equivalent of drugging a woman so you can rape her, and then if she remembers telling her to just forget about it. For the rest of the episode it goes unmentioned and only comes up again when they are checking her memory for unrelated reasons and the father has a worried moment that they might find out what he did.

In the next episode the daughter discovers that someone had used her sexual settings and is disgusted; she tells her mother and her son, realising that it was his Dad, covers for him and says it was him. Rightly the mother is disgusted by the fact that he had sex with their robotic nanny, someone who is a member of their family, and that has issues with understanding and consenting to sex in the form she is in; though it goes unquestioned when the son points out that he couldn’t possibly because he needs to be 18 to do it which he isn’t. Instead of sitting him down and trying to deal with it straight away the Mum sends him away, tells him to go to his room rather than being quick to let her son know that what he supposedly did was wrong. I can’t imagine being a mother & being confronted with something like that but sitting them down to talk to them about a revelation like that would surely one better done sooner rather than later?

Then when the father comes home his character continues to be one I find utterly revolting. Initially he allows his son to remain as his cover, yes he lets his wife think that his teenage son is a pervert rather than admitting his mistake – his son understandably isn’t too happy about that. Later the father finally reveals what he does to his wife and the whole scene was a car crash that made me gasp again and again at the ridiculous justifications he came up with. In the end the scene devolved into him thinking that because Anita is a Synth that it’s not cheating and then turns around and blames his wife for working too much. The fact that she works a lot -though it is only shown once in the entire first season, in the first episode and you never see her at work again - is constantly used against her, along with other little things to point to her being a Bad Mother.

The most baffling and ridiculous thing about this whole scenario however is the father’s assertion, one he makes repeatedly, that Anita is not human so therefore it doesn’t matter what he did. He agrees that it was perhaps disgusting but that really because she’s only a human he should be able to have consequence free sex with her, as though it doesn’t matter to his wife. Why then if she is such a nothing-ness robot did he want so much to have sex with her then? We could see his sexual frustration before he did it and he had plenty of time to stop and leave her alone but he didn’t. He decided he wanted to sleep with her & he turned around and did it. So why now this insistence that she is a pointless inanimate object? As though that makes it better somehow?

Moreover, the show spends an episode or two shunning him, showing him for the disgusting man he is but then very quickly forgets it as he is needed to help the family in the more science fiction aspect of the show. Even Anita rushes to his aide to justify his behaviour by, when she is back to her old self, saying that she could tell that he hated himself before he had ‘finished’; clearly he didn’t hate himself enough to leave her alone in the first place, or own up to his act. Plus he certainly doesn’t seem to think of her as just a robot, not a sexual being, as when he finds out that she has had previous owners he makes comments complaining about how many owners has she had and how many have gone tinkering around in her, perhaps being jealous at the fact that she might have had sex before him; which apart from being just so creepy is so possessive of what he tries to defend as a literal object.

My main problem with Humans is that, along with it just being a worse show in terms of writing, dialogue and direction in comparison to its original, it doesn’t live up to it’s potential. As a concept, though one I find a bit done to death, I think AI and the question of what makes us human is one that could be utterly and thoroughly explored. Though the problem is that because TV and films are just so heavily written and directed by men we never truly get the full spectrum of what we could get with these films. We get a very limited one that focuses on the male perspective and frames the women’s stories as almost primarily ‘gets hurt by men’. My life as a woman and as a person is so utterly not defined by the things men may have said or done to me and I really think all writers need to see and understand this. Especially those writing worlds that could be so different from ours because even for a near future Humans ignores so many social issues that it could have explored that it’s just so disappointing.

Take for example something that a We Are People protestor says at a rally, he complains about the fact that humans wouldn’t need to look after their kids or make meals for them because they can just get Synths to do it. But that ignores the fact that we already have a lot of women who get left with the majority of domestic care, or that nannies exist already or that people hire maids and butlers and all the rest. I would like to hope that the show is using the Synths to make a point about how we dehumanise certain aspects of our population to do labour that the majority of men don’t want to do but it doesn’t mention it. It doesn’t highlight how it’s women who now don’t have to do so many domestic chores – though I highly doubt that poor women’s lives have gotten any different. It doesn’t look at racism and how those in poorer countries might get replaced by robots.

The show acts as though it exists in a microcosm, though one that clings to its misogyny, and that everyone leads similar lives. It doesn’t really deal with the fact that the dehumanised Synths are replacing dehumanised people in dehumanising jobs, bar making a jab at human women as I mentioned in the previous post on Humans. It just seems like such a shame episode to episode that it aims to be a show about how family life might be affected by robots, as mentioned in an article in Digital Spy, but actually goes about doing everything but. The issues the family has mostly seem to revolve around an unruly daughter, a working Mum, an unfaithful Dad, and an angry and sexually inappropriate son; all of those issues can exist without Anita being a Synth. However the focus on science fiction is one of the few things that saves the show as, perhaps despite its best efforts, it heavily focuses on a conspiracy style plot to give consciousness to Synths and the effect that might have on the world as a whole.

Which again treats humanity as though they are all violent men who are not capable of empathy; they act as though if robots all got the ability to be sentient that they would take over the world but that even if they didn’t humanity would destroy them anyway because ‘we’ can’t handle anything being bigger than us. This conveniently forgets that people who aren’t straight white men already live in a world where we are treated like we are lesser, that we don’t hold as much power as others, and that we already know what this feels like and haven’t turned around and murdered everyone (remember all those violent genocides committed by female feminists? Yeah me neither). It is this constant insistence that men are all that humanity is made of and that no one would be kind to these robots and that we would all, women and children alike, turn and murder sentient beings.

The entire series, despite it being only two episodes shorter than the original, has a surprisingly lack of storyline; by this I mean if you watch the original first season there are so many more characters, plot lines, and issues explored that it baffles me that the remake ignored so many opportunities to really explore certain aspects of the world that has been created. For instance as we see many characters blended together we get weird mismatches that those who have only seen the remake perhaps don’t realise are so short and underdeveloped. So for those who haven’t read my Real Humans post, that is here, I will explain one of those storylines that I was waiting for and that was but a fleeting moment. One of the subplots that carried over was a male character who has a wife whose wife leaves him for her Synth, or hubot as they are in the original; though the circumstances are very different in the remake – in the original the character is abusive and that’s why she leaves him – the general gist of the storyline is still there. We still see her dating the Synth, we see her acknowledging the fact he is attentive which is something that her ex was lacking, and we see her change his programming to make him better in bed. It is the latter that perhaps seems like it was finally acknowledging the idea that male Synths might be used for sex.

However what we don’t see, and that is explored a lot more in season one though perhaps more in season two, is a lot more of that side of the story. For instance when the woman in the original takes her robot boyfriend to be modified we see her do it, in a brothel, and we are exposed to how her request for him being better in the bedroom is compared to a man asking for his robot to be given the ability to feel pain for his BDSM abuse. Then we get a full, developed storyline of her feelings about what she’s done, how it affects their relationship, and how it changes his personality. Yet in the remake all of that is discarded with as she is a much more minor character; instead we are given one scene and one scene only in all of season one about the danger of this whole affair.

We see her ex-husband get a call and go to her aid because her Synth is banging on the door that she has put a chair under and she is scared. Her ex arrives and immediately begins a threatening affair with the Synth, prepared with a crowbar in case he doesn’t listen to him. Then the Synth says that he needs access to his wife so he can ‘penetrate’ her, robots that aren’t sentient don’t really have a sense of humour or an ego so the show instead did it for him – allowing him to grandstand about having sex with this man’s wife. After beating the robot the wife immediately runs to his aid, gently touching his face and tells her ex to leave. Then that’s it. That whole storyline gets shortened to one, barely examined scene that in fact makes the fact that a robot is trying to rape his wife all about the ex-husband who is offended by this fact.

For me it felt like a long trend of ignoring nuance, weird dialogue, messy plot and characterisation that made watching the first season not enjoyable at all. I did watch it because I loved the original, I’d hoped it would get better but when you’ve seen it done before and done much better it can make it a chore to sit through. I hope that if the show, which has already done well enough to get a second season, finds its feet that it explores more of what it was lacking. I hope that the writers realise that women exist outside of the men in their lives, that they have ordinary bad things happen to them that aren’t inflicted on them by men, and that even as robots we are interesting people to be explored too. I don’t know if I’ll tune in next season but if I do I hope I won’t be disappointed.

Final Girl (2015): They Don't Seem to Like Women Much.

Warning: Spoilers.

Final Girl is an independent film made by a male photographer; it stars Abigail Breslin and Seneca Crane I mean Wes Bentley. The story explains little and takes place in a time that looks simultaneously modern and as though it’s set in the 50s – this isn’t a strength. The whole film attempts to be somewhat of an artistic statement, with the directors use of lights – spotlights on each actor, often highlighting their shadow – is more a distraction than an artistic flair. Mainly this film feels very much like it was made by a student in film school, and that isn’t really a compliment. However the worst place this lack of experience or skill is clear is the writing, and directing.

The plot of the film is that when Breslin’s character Veronica was recruited aged 5 by William, Bentley’s character, to be an assassin who avenges wrongs, we assume. We are given little information about this decision and it is the first of many that give the film a creepy and infuriating theme rather than an air of mystery that I assume was the intention. We learn her parents died, but they must have just died before the film starts as he asks her if she knows what happened. How did they die? What was her life like before this? What did her parents do that lead her to being immediately recruited after their deaths? It is a film where I would be much more interested in the backstory of its female lead but it instead decides that it’s not that interesting. So instead it establishes Bentley as a father figure of this young girl who assumedly raises her day in day out as a young child whilst also teaching her survival and fighting skills. This becomes disturbing later in the film.

So once we have been told to ignore all of this and simply pretend that taking away a young girl’s childhood, children can’t give consent, and to brush away the ethics of this we see her training with Bentley. Despite her 13 years of training previously she doesn’t actually seem to display much of any skill. She is 18 when the film begins to follow her and yet the brunt of her fighting skills do not appear to have been taught yet. He teaches her how to strangle him, whilst he strangles her too; this mutual abuse is ignored on any real emotional level until she is given a drug to confront her worst fear, a drug that she will later use on her enemies in this film.

But her main fear doesn’t seem to be simply that she is frightened of him, or that she isn’t strong enough to defend herself; but more that him turning on her will mean that he is rejecting her. Yes, him romantically rejecting her is her worst fear. It is unclear really as to why she has feelings for him as again it is not explained, though it is deemed important enough to be a consistent subplot in the film. There isn’t really that much chemistry between Breslin and Bentley, mainly so both of their characters are seen to be cold. The only scene between them of her confronting her feelings to him out loud is a scene where she gets out of the shower and, in a towel, cuddles him on the bed and he rejects her.

All we really know about his character is that he is so much older than her that he once had a wife and child who are now deceased. If we are to assume that this was all before he met her, as she doesn’t seem to know much about them, then he must be considerably older than her. Never mind that if she died whilst he was training her what that meant about how much his wife either didn’t know, or was fine with. Once again the deliberate plot holes in this film lead to a very disturbing and ‘not okay’ world. So the main love story in the film is a very inappropriate one due to the age gap, his father figure status, her dependency on him in every way, and what could potentially be Stockholm syndrome slipping in.

But as I said that is merely a subplot that happens over a few scenes as the real focus of the film is Veronica’s first solo mission, it’s a real misogynist lovefest. There are four, presumably well off considering they are never seen out of tuxes, white young men who regularly find young women, tell them that they are going to a dance so they get all dressed up and then they take them into out into the woods and chase and murder them. Again watching the film I had no idea how there was so little interest in what seemed to be pretty, young white women going missing; it is unclear how long it has been going on but between them they murdered at least twenty women. What’s more is I have no idea why Veronica needs to go on her own to stop these boys.

The film tries to frame it as revenge, as though these murdered girls’ only justice would be their murderer’s deaths, an attempt at an eye for an eye. But the film doesn’t care about the murdered women any more than it cares about any of its characters. They are treated as beautiful, destroyed objects who exist as mostly nameless and only to be shown at their worst possible time; we only see women in their last moments before death or as hallucinations in the film’s climax. Neither attempt to show the pain and horror they felt does it them any justice, they are merely a plot point though yes one of the main ones. So instead the film’s focus is on the four boys and who they are.

Each boy, they are not men, is each given a unique character. The film explores each of them in turn before they go to attempt to murder Breslin’s character. We see Shane, who is defined by the fact he has a girlfriend, Danny who is defined by his quirky, loud personality, Chris, the leader, and Nelson who is defined by the fact that he wants to sleep with his own mother. The film decides each murderer needs a backstory, that each one deserves to be a fully realised personality, and that a lot of screen time should be given to them as individuals and as a group. They reminded me of a group of boys on Gilmore Girls who Rory meets at the private college she goes to who are reckless, privileged to all heck, and there is even an overly posh and quirky one of them too.

When we first meet the boys as a group Veronica asks how one of them can have a girlfriend seems as he murders women she also says that they don’t seem to like women much; now rather than examine the blatant misogyny behind a group of boys deciding to chase, hunt and kill women for sport the film decides the fact that their women are unimportant – even though it is the only real reason that Veronica appears to be doing this on her own seems as she fits their profile. No instead Bentley just replies that they don’t seem to like anyone much. This appears to imply that they are simply psychopathic killers who merely chose women by chance.

Before the film’s climatic hunt we are given two scenes in a diner where she interacts individually with Shane’s girlfriend and the leader of the group Chris. The scene with the girlfriend is one that feels dreadfully like it was written by a man, which it was. It tries to be a bit witty – “I’m a vanilla girl” “You should give yourself more credit” - to have Veronica explore why this girl can be with a murderer and not know it but just ends up feeling awkward and simply blames this girl for not realising who she’s with and leaving him. Then we get the scene that starts the main plot, Veronica is dressed up and sat in the diner and when Chris – who’s penchant for blonde women has already been establish because we all know women’s personalities, bodies, wants, needs desires and all the rest are neatly defined by what hair colour we have – sees her.

The irritating use of light is used to quite literally highlight Veronica, as though a psychopathic murderer has just fallen in love when really he’s just found the perfect object to kill. But oh did he pick the wrong object, for this women is an actual woman with skills and hands to punch with. She won’t simply run and scream and get shot like her predecessor, the also blonde, Jennifer. He flirts, as it were, with her and she establishes herself as Not Like Other Girls™. So he asks her out to what he thinks she thinks is a dance but what we all know is his and his friends attempt to end her life. I assume we’re meant to watch, with juicy dramatic irony, as we sit there knowing that him and his friends will instead die at her hands. But with such bad everything it feels utterly hollow.

Veronica’s character is not necessarily unique either, in an age where most films are written by men we have this singular version of a strong woman where her skills in murder and violence are what makes her As Good As Men. But Veronica isn’t a feminist figurehead, she’s barely a character at all; Breslin is a great actress and she gives it her all but there’s just no saving her from bad writing and directing. Moreover however it follows a recent trend in films to subvert a horror trope, the film’s namesake, the Final Girl. Seems as horror films are a chance for men to depict graphic violence against women with a somewhat free pass it has also meant that there will be plenty of women who need to survive at least near the end of the film so the narrative has someone to follow. Often these characters are murdered but ultimately they became a cliché, and one that isn’t even specific to women as many horror films have Final Boys too, as it were.

It is this subversion that I feel is actually no real subversion at all. For example if we look at the film You’re Next, which I enjoyed but also has its problems, we see what is meant to be an extreme flipping of this trope on its head. The main female character not only survives but she fights back, and she does so hard. What was meant to be a simple murder your whole family for their life insurance scheme becomes those who schemed, including her own boyfriend, end up getting murdered by her. It’s bad enough that women in films are forced to be violent just to be heard and treated like a real character and not an object. As a feminist I don’t say anymore that feminism is about equality because for me it’s not; it’s about liberating women out from under men’s dirty shoe. Equality with men would mean having the equal power to rape, to destroy lives, to take lives and none of that is what I want for women. It is not strong or brave to take a life, misogynistic men do it every day and they are cowards.

But it gets worse as we find out that in You’re Next the only reason she knows how to fight back is because her father was a survivalist and raised her in a camp designed to teach people how to stay alive. So now we have two films who are both trying to show a woman who knows how to fight back and both only can because they have skills, that took years to master, taught to them by men. Not even women who learnt skills themselves because they grew up in a world that has men who want to kill them, not women who learnt skills because their mothers taught them to survive in a world that wants to kill them, and not even women who bloody well taught themselves how to survive because those are skills that can come in handy one day. It’s a joke, one often shrugs off women’s fighting skills by saying that she grew up with brothers. It’s utter nonsense.

The film’s climax is one that tries hard to be somewhat deep, to examine humans and their deepest darkest fears as we finally see the boys drink the mixture of truth serum and what amounts to a fear toxin during a sigh worthy scene of truth or dare. Each boys’ reaction to their fears is what allows Veronica to fight back and kill them, this in and of itself is also insulting. She struggles with each fight, it doesn’t really appear that she was taught how to use her smaller size to her advantage – get in close – or how to use the fact that she is not as strong as each boy to help rather than hinder her. Even in Divergent we are given a scene where the female lead Tris is taught to use her elbows to accommodate her small and weaker size. As we see in the final fight against Chris who hadn’t drank the mixture when it’s not in play she has a very, very difficult time holding her own.

The quirky boy’s fear is as weird as he is and is a fear of Pandas and it’s not that hard for Veronica to kill him. The boy with the girlfriend’s fear felt somewhat gratuitous as his fear is his girlfriend both cheating on him with Chris, we see them making out against a tree, and also her finding out about his murderous past time. It ended with Veronica strangling him but as a scene it ended up being severely dull. Then we are shown the boy who has an Oedipus complex, who is getting circled by masked thugs and we see him kissing his mother who earlier somewhat flirtingly gave him an ice cream before he left – as with everything else being disturbing in this film it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that his romantic relationship with his mother wasn’t simply a fear or hope. Each murder did not feel like justice it just felt like a boring end to boring characters in a boring film.

Finally, with the others dead and Veronica bloody, dirty and exhausted we see her try and fight Chris. She struggles and it isn’t until she luckily gets him in a stranglehold, with flashbacks to her strangling William, that she wins and can prepare what’s coming next. She feeds him the drink and whilst he is unconscious she hangs him from a tree, his feet on a tree stump and stands in front of him while he wakes up. We watch as she scolds him for being a big bad murderer and we find out that his greatest fear is the ‘Ghost Girls’, as they are credited, coming back to haunt him and avenge their deaths. This is the main moment, one of many however, that I realised that the man writing this had no real understanding of misogyny, or even psychopaths.

Yes this man murdered women with reckless abandon, yes he was probably a psychopath and they do have empathy but they can happily switch it off, but no his greatest fear would in no way have been the women he’d murdered coming back to get him. He does not care about women, he has no remorse for what he did else he would stop, he doesn’t care about killing them else he wouldn’t have started in the first place. No he hates women with every inch of himself, that’s why he treats them like objects whose death is amusing. So there is no way in hell that his fear, even in the moments before his death, would be the women he has killed. He certainly wouldn’t have felt so bad that he’d beg for it to stop, as though seeing them were any form of agony. Any shred of guilt he felt would be one warped by narcissism, one that is less about what he did to those women and more about how it landed him in a situation in which he will very probably die.

I would say it was a disappointing end but by then I had no expectations that could be dashed. It was the first of what I’m sure is many films from the writers and I don’t think that’s really a good thing. It would be better to actually try and direct the lights less and the people more, to research narrative and characters, and to do a lot more looking up misogyny. It was another film that wasn’t for women or even men as it didn’t seem to think much of either of them. I hope that any future attempt to subvert this genre will at least see women for the strong and interesting people they are and perhaps, I know it’s crazy but bear with me, give them their own voice in the film industry with which to prove it.

Teeth: No Man Was Harmed In the Making of This Film

Warning: Spoilers.

Teeth is a film that didn’t seem like something I would rush to see; it didn’t seem like it would be particularly flattering for women considering the film’s premise was that a woman had a scary vagina filled with teeth. But as I put it on to review this week I soon found myself laughing, loving the character, and I quickly realised that the film’s writer, Mitchell Lichtenstein, was very much on the side of our female lead Dawn. It is surprisingly a film you could call feminist in that it understands sexual assault, the mind-set of those who commit it but also those of whom suffer from it all whilst being unapologetic in its condemnation of those who commit sexual violence, admittedly in a unique way.

I also didn’t realise it was going to be so funny, not realising until I was on imdb that it is listed as a black comedy. The film was hilarious in many ways, Dawn could be a bit melodramatic in her innocence and it definitely didn’t treat the male genitals like some god given gift like pretty much everything else does. It was nice to watch a film that played on the horror trope of the ‘monstrous feminine’ body, the apparently petrifying vagina, and actually give the power back to women to show how ridiculous that all is – even when in this case it was well founded. I defy you, even as a man who perhaps squirmed their way through this film, to not laugh at the man who shouted “Vagina dentata!” over and over.

Before I get to the awful male characters depicted in this film, awful in their actions, I would like to just write about how brilliant Dawn is. She is very much a cliché, a playing on many tropes of how women are portrayed in films overall but horror films in particular; she is very chaste as we see her begin the film wearing a red promise ring and talking at a club telling the joys of celibacy and saving yourself until marriage. She often wears t-shirts she seems to have bought in this club, warning about the dangers of sex; her room is full of pictures of fairies and flowers, her bathroom is pink, and fitting with the films very much on the nose metaphors there is a cherry sticker on the wall to match the cherry patterned cup by the sink. We slowly see her innocence and naivety taken away as the film progresses yet she remains a good person, not falling into another cliché of going completely to the other side.

Dawn seems like a simple person, talking about a girl’s natural modesty in response to a flustered sex ed teacher who is trying to explain why in their textbook the picture of the vulva is covered by a sticker but that the diagram of the penis is not. She loves her parents, and is there for her Mum as she is very sick – which leads to a confused Dawn not having anyone to ask about her very confusing anatomy; in the same way that boys may be confused asking their mothers about their body there is only so much her father might be able to help her with her body – though even he would be able to explain that having teeth down there is not natural. Dawn’s body is used by the men in this film as an object yet the film never joins in, it very much keeps her a fully realised character with great acting keeping her interesting and sympathetic.

The film explores the way we view the female body, in the past and in the present; its whole premise is based off an old myth that many cultures wrote about, that there was a woman who has teeth in her vagina, vagina dentata, and that this woman must be conquered by a hero to defeat her – more on that later. As with the sex ed lesson trying hard to avoid displaying the vulva, something a student actually accurately describes as such which shows that even if you try not to teach it in schools students will learn about it. It also shows the cognitive dissonance that exists in a culture that is obsessed with women’s bodies as sexual objects whilst trying their best to be ignorant about the realities of female anatomy; as is shown by the brother’s arguable fear of the vagina, again more on that later, despite the many posters of naked and half naked women all over his walls. This insistence on making the female body a mystery, of giving it a sexual power that many women don’t want or ask for – Dawn’s vow of celibacy means she is even averse to watch kissing etc. in films.

By denying teenager’s sexuality we create a curiosity that could easily be sated with knowledge, with teaching boys and girls about their own bodies and urges. If we pretend that by teaching all teenagers about sex will mean they all go straight out and do it we can’t properly protect those who already are. Teenagers, and older, need to be properly educated about the very real risks of sex such as STDs and pregnancy. Many studies have shown time and again that education along with access to affordable protection and birth control can prevent the spread of STIs and teen pregnancy but still it is something many ignorant people insist is something that shouldn’t be available. Children will find it a lot easier to remain children if they’re not having to raise their own.

Following this avenue of thought we meet Tobey, a man who meets Dawn at the celibacy club The Promise, and straight away I knew he would be the one to first assault her. He told her he agreed that they should wait until marriage to have sex, he would accompany her to the cinema and on a trip to the lake with friends and repeated The Promise’s beliefs back to her. Yet later when they are alone he explains to her that he is only ‘pure’ in ‘his eyes’ and explains that he has already had sex once, a year ago. Back at the lake they go swimming, with a little bit of shock from Dawn at seeing Tobey only in his swimming trunks and they both laugh at how they had both already imagined each other’s naked bodies. Whilst in the water they kiss, Dawn laughing, and Tobey feels her breasts but she immediately stops him. She swims away, not wanting Tobey to follow, and goes into a cave that was earlier mentioned as being a place people come to “you know”.

Dawn’s face was one of wonder, happy to be intrigued by the mini-waterfall and the cave as a whole. She seems confused by the blanket and pillows in the cave but uses one to keep her warm; Tobey begins to swim towards her and ignores her protests after he explains that he’s freezing. He sits with her and they begin kissing, they lay down together and he turns her over and goes on top of her. As he’s kissing her neck she makes it very clear she wants him to stop, she shouts no and yet he ignores her; he fights her, covering her mouth to shut her up and in doing so smacks her head off the cave floor and knocks her slightly unconscious. He immediately takes advantage of her dazed state by removing his trunks and he starts to rape her. It is clear it’s unwanted, she fights and screams and he carries on, shouting that he hadn’t even jerked off since Easter – as though his celibacy is something to be rewarded by Dawn, regardless of whether she wants it or not.

It is during the rape that Tobey begins screaming, the audience hearing a crunch sound that is heard throughout the film and no doubt in men’s nightmares, and then we see the place where his penis used to be. The film is very open about showing the blood and devastation that is a consequence of each men’s sexual assault and abuse and with its 18 rating it is also happy to show the removed penis, often applying humour in many, often disturbing ways. After Tobey flees Dawn does too and we see her being extremely confused, horrified and worried that she hasn’t heard anything from him since; we later find out that Tobey died, either from the shock, blood loss or simply falling and drowning in trying to get away. It is a very unique consequence to rape but the fact that a rape in a film has an immediate, negative consequence for the rapist is something that is important to show (many rapes in real life often have no consequences and a majority often go un-convicted). As you’d expect with the premise of the film we unfortunately follow Dawn get taken advantage of throughout.

The next time her vagina uses its teeth is on a male gynaecologist who was causing her pain by forcing four fingers into her, it is a gruesome scene as his hand gets trapped inside her as she tries to push him away; it is another example of a male character ignoring her requests to stop, her obvious pain and discomfort in the pursuit of forcing something into her vagina and its end result is similar. This is the scene that leads to him shouting “Vagina dentata! It’s true”; it is unclear whether he knows of this myth due to his job or whether his research on the female vagina in pursuit of his career lead him to come across it. Either way we later see him in surgery getting his fingers reattached. I won’t even go into his comment about how tight she was but let’s just say it’s more of a comment on the man and his sexual skills than it ever really is about the female body.

The next time her downstairs teeth are used it is with a new Dawn, pun not intended. She is more aware of her body, learning to explore it sexually after thinking she is no longer pure after her rape. This idea of women being uniquely modest is one simply designed to ensure that women are not as sexually attractive as men are; moreover men used to use rape as a way to steal women away from being the property of their father or another man and to make them their property instead and so putting the blame for this act purely on the immodest, promiscuous woman. People, women especially, are neither pure nor impure and the idea of virginity is simply yet another way to treat men and women as being something that is irrevocably changed by sex; this ignores many things such as the fact that a man’s penis is not a magic sword that can change anything it touches but also that things that are used to signify female virginity such as the hymen can be broken in many other ways and even not broken through sex.

Dawn finally has sex of her own choice, after going to him when she has no one else to turn to. She even tells him about her downstairs teeth, though he brushes her off and jokes that he is the hero who will conquer her. However there are many problems with this sexual encounter such as the fact that he may very well have drugged her, he hands her a pill whilst she is in the bath that his mother apparently uses to relax, and when we see her later open her eyes her towel is undone and he is using a sex toy on her. This already starts the sexual encounter with an extreme lack of consent, very much being sexual assault, and Dawn, inexperienced but happy to have someone touch her intimately despite knowing about her teeth, consents to further sex. The next day they have sex again and whilst she is on top of him he gets a call and answers it, he laughs and promises that he did it and tells her to say something into the phone. As the audience may have already figured out he only slept with her for a bet.

He saw Dawn as a challenge, something to conquer not due to her teeth but due to her vow of celibacy; he tells her that he had a feeling it wasn’t something she was too serious about. Not only does this once again reduce Dawn to an object, ignoring any choice she may have, it treats her as forbidden fruit – there are a lot of serpent metaphors in this film, and a mention of Eve. Women, despite popular belief, are in fact people, with full lives and interests and autonomy and we exist in and of ourselves. We don’t need a man to see us to exist, we don’t need him to touch us to be solid, and we don’t need to be fucked to be whole. This is something that the film tries to teach as this disrespect of Dawn results in yet another severed penis, leaving him literally crying for his mother and clambering around trying to collect his penis.

By now Dawn has very much learnt how to control her teeth, a weaponised vagina if you will. She has learnt, the hard way, that there are men in her life who are happy to treat her as an object for sex rather than a human being and she now has a tool to deal with it. The film also argues, briefly, that humans and animals evolve over time to change their anatomy to protect themselves. The implication is that Dawn – “it’s about you Dawn” – has adapted to protect herself from the men who would inevitably sexually abuse and assault her. Whilst this argument implies that men are destined to sexually assault the film itself tries to show men that that route is not without its very real consequences; this is something you think would be obvious yet the threat of prison does nothing to deter men from rape and instead we’ve happily created a world where the social, emotional, and physical consequences are much, much worse for the victims of rape than for the rapists themselves.

As the final act of the film begins Dawn’s mother has sadly passed away, her step brother Brad ignored her screams to have sex with his girlfriend, and Dawn is setting out to get revenge on him for letting her die, as well as for setting his dog on his Dad after he tells him to move out. Throughout the film her step brother is heard arguing with his girlfriend, he refuses to do anything other than anal intercourse with her and there is even a weird and uncomfortable scene where he uses a dog biscuit to simulate raping her mouth. She is there when he makes his dog attack his father and as she learns what the audience might have guessed – that Brad is ‘in love’ with Dawn. The film opened on Brad and Dawn sitting in an inflatable pool in their front garden, him complaining about her and saying he doesn’t like her; after Dawn’s Mum stops Brad’s Dad from having a go at him for saying he hates her we are, almost casually, introduced to the premise of the film in the context of him sexually assaulting her. Young Brad holds up his bloodied bitten finger and we know that it’s because he had assaulted her and she bit back.

It’s this bitten finger that is used to show his feelings for her as we see him pretend perhaps to not remember what happened to it, and we even later see him sucking it. He explains to his father that he wishes he hadn’t made Dawn his sister and that he always wanted her. Dawn, after realising his feelings and what she can do with them, dresses in a thin white dress and comes onto him. He protests ever so slightly, only to ask why now, and immediately flips her over as he knows exactly what is down there. Yet she turns back around and lifts her dress up, and after he spends time trying to get a look he decides it is worth the risk to finally sleep with her and he does. However he quickly realises what a mistake that was as again we hear the crunch, see his face of realisation and pain and he gets what has always been coming to him as his penis is very much bitten right off. What follows is a rather disturbing and gross, but surprisingly funny, scene of his dog then eating his penis and Dawn leaving him to bleed and realise exactly what he did.

Teeth draws to a close and we see Dawn having to hitch-hike a ride out of town after her bike tire gets punctured. As soon as she stuck her thumb into the air it was obvious what was coming; the old man driving the car later pulls up, locks the doors, and simply smiles at her and sticks out his tongue. Dawn starts off pissed off, annoyed that yet another man is deciding to sexually assault her, and the film ends with her looking provocatively at him and at the camera as we are left knowing that now every single man who hurts her will get utterly and exactly what he deserves.

Mini-Reviews: Jurassic World & Others

Warning: Spoilers.

Mini Review 1: Jurassic World

As someone who loves the Jurassic Park films (or should I say first film) I was very excited to watch Jurassic World; from the pictures I’d seen I was excited to see Bryce Dallas Howard kicking ass, and oh does she. Yet a curious thing seemed to happen where the film spent it’s time nit picking at her, making jokes about her being useless, having her trying to stand up to a patronising Pratt. It was a bit disappointing when I came to enjoy a film with dinosaurs (!!) that got distracted by trying to force chemistry and a love story that for me felt like it was more of a distraction. Moreover, I was rather annoyed that they reinforced the tired ‘All Women Want Children’ cliché; Howard’s character is clearly a very accomplished women – running a ridiculously profitable and spectacular park – but the film felt that was still not enough: surely she wants kids? Right?

I think we need to accept that women can be successful without hearing their biological clock screaming at them. For a film that was clearly written for men and boys it felt like little girls and women had nothing really to look up to besides an amazing moment with Howard near the end of the film. I don’t think every film needs to be everything for everyone but considering the original Jurassic Park film had a clear role model for young girls as well as women it’s a shame that 20 odd years later we’ve lost that. It joins the silly sexism that surrounds this film, such as Hasbro describing the clearly female raptors – something that is described constantly throughout – as ‘he’ in their toy descriptions.

Finally, it was very disappointing to see a female character get very brutally murdered. I was a bit dismayed when I saw it, as it was uncharacteristically drawn out and sustained. It was a multi-faceted murder and it made me more anxious than excited to show this film to my future children. Especially as when I went on the trivia for this film I found out that this death was the franchise’s first credited female death, which is a shame that it had to be so harsh. Disappointing as all that was however it was a very good nostalgia trip and I did enjoy the film as a whole.

Mini Review 2: Pitch Perfect 2

Pitch Perfect, the first one, is a great film that combines sisterhood, the fun of musicals with modern music and yet I feel that the second one completely forgot all of that. It was an eagerly anticipated sequel and yet I think that the pressure perhaps got to the writer & it tried to be everything modern films are in the worst way. It had many racist moments that felt really out of place and unnecessary, it reduced its lesbian character to a punchline and stereotype, and for a film that is about women and is arguably for women it really seemed to have a problem with women. There were many jokes about women’s bodies made in a derogatory fashion, a slew of gendered insults, and made me feel more insulted than wanting to join in the fun like the first film did. It seemed like a weird direction to go after the triumph of the first film and it makes me not that excited for the third.

As a film it was a bit of a mess, rather muddled as it tried to juggle far too many plot lines and subplots at once. The jokes from Fat Amy that were already quite insulting in the first film, rather than make women feel better about their bodies instead made me feel like women would perhaps be insulted. The songs for the film were also pretty subpar, seems as they were there to show that the Bella’s were having a crisis as a group; a few good songs and one great, touching moment aside the soundtrack is rather forgettable and actually I’ve found myself listening to Mary Lambert’s album Heart on My Sleeve over and over instead (highly recommend it, who knew Jessie’s Girl could be a sweet, heart-breaking song?).

Mini Review 3: Inside Out

Pixar win out this week with having the film that didn’t make me, as a woman, feel uncomfortable or bad about being myself. If anything Inside Out made me want to embrace exactly who I was, taking joy in the different aspects of my personality, and being grateful for the family and friends that made me. Inside Out is a very touching (I did cry, yes) film about what the inside of our heads are like – from our emotions, to our memories and even our imagination. It is a surprisingly scientifically accurate depiction of how we experience the world around us. It respects its female lead as a person, it doesn’t try to force gender stereotypes on her and explores her girlhood – though it does make jokes later about her being a stereotypical teenage girl. Even the stereotypes around the mother and father’s emotions and thought processes were not done in a way that was insulting or restrictive but rather embraced any differences and highlighted similarities.

The film overall had a beautiful message about letting sadness in because it can help; how friends and family can be there for you, and how being true to who you are is important. It is a great tool to show depression too, for all ages. It is definitely a film necessary to show young children for its great characters and important message – especially one that is important to tell little boys who perhaps are taught that being sad and crying is not an acceptable thing to do. Moreover it showed a marriage of mutual respect, of working together to sort out the difficult problems adults face, and the importance of being open about feelings and worries. It has been my favourite of the three films by far.

Irreversible: This Won’t Help Alex

Warning: Spoilers

Irreversible is a film known for its controversial scenes depicting brutal violence and rape. The film is done in reverse chronological order, showing the revenge before the reason for it. It opens with the two male leads Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre leaving a gay club, unsubtly named Rectum; Marcus has a broken arm and both are being arrested as men around them shout homophobic insults, telling them they will be raped in prison – a place that men incorrectly assume is the only place they might be raped and also perhaps the only time they fear it. We are then shown the reason for their arrest, they were trying to find a man named Le Tenia and they find a man they assume might be him and after he prepares to rape Marcus – an apparently go to response – his friend Pierre takes a fire extinguisher and brutally beats his head to a pulp. The film very clearly shows this violence, which is in contrast to previous scenes where the camera refused to really focus on anything in particular.

Then the film keeps going backwards, showing them being racist to a taxi driver and abusive to prostitutes in their effort to find the club and the subject of their revenge. As the film goes further backwards we see the two men stood, just having been questioned by the police, looking shocked and horrified; they are approached by two men who tell them they can find the man who hurt their friend and that they will help them find and hurt him. The revenge is framed as something they would not get if the man is simply arrested, which implies that revenge is needed full stop. One of the men says that prison is not enough because he will be fed and clothed yet actually it is unlikely the man who did it would actually go to prison. Rape is a crime that very often does not result in conviction, most times it isn’t even reported due to the pervasive, very much not mythical, rape culture that exists in patriarchal societies.

Next we meet Monica Bellucci’s character Alex and we see her choose to go through an underpass rather than cross France’s roads – which can be hard to cross due to many parallel roads and little traffic lights or places to cross. As she is walking through the tunnel she sees a man beat a transwoman, who we have met earlier as a prostitute. The man then turns on Alex, stopping her from leaving and he quickly takes out a knife. He forces her to the ground and then anally rapes her for a scene that lasts for nine notorious minutes. During this scene the camera is sat on the floor, never moving from looking at Alex’s face during what is a brutal, disgusting scene. I agree with a reviewer on the BBC who described it as being indefensible. In researching this film I did find many men saying that they watched the film for this scene, and that yes it was to masturbate to.

Moreover, many reviews of this film have described the violence of this scene as making it akin to pornography; that alone is a very, unfortunately apt, description of the sexual violence that a vast majority of pornography is – though many will attempt to tell you that that’s not true (they’re lying). It is very worrying that these male reviewers first response to seeing a brutal rape depicted, however, is for them to compare it to what I assume is the pornography they have watched. It is a long scene, it is harrowing to watch, and there is no way in the world that a rape victim/survivor should ever watch this scene; it is the definition of why the phrase trigger warning exists. I definitely think there are misogynistic men out there who will happily watch and masturbate to that scene and I also think that they will not stop having an erection when he kicks her repeatedly in the face or when her face is smashed into the concrete floor but that those men would keep on masturbating.

It is this equation with violence and porn, entwined with what is more perversion than sex, is what causes many problems for women. After the rape we see Alex dancing, moments before she leaves and is attacked, with some friends at a party. She is dancing sensuously against her female friends and it would not surprise me that those same misogynistic men would sit and glare at the way that she is dancing; that every move of her hips would be used against her – used as evidence that she caused her own rape. Even Roger Ebert, along with other reviewers, described her clothing when she was raped; he made sure to explain he understands that women should be able to wear whatever they want but that her dress was ‘unwise’.

Yet the man who raped Alex was gay. This is not I feel, as some has said, homophobic but accurate; not that all gay men rape women but some do – in the same way that straight men rape men. This is because rape is nothing at all to do with sexual attraction but instead with entitlement, with power and with violence. After he has raped her the man goes on, whilst kicking her, about how she is entitled, how she thinks she is beautiful and therefore above him; yet he knows nothing about her, has never met her before and she barely said more than ‘let me go’. This is because he does not care about her, he does not care about women but instead he hates them, and has an idea in his head of how they are. He thinks she is there to be used and abused and it is important to note that misogyny, whilst entangled with sexual objectification and violence, is not only for those men who find women sexually attractive.

The irony that a man who felt entitled to her body thinks that she is entitled herself is not lost on the film; neither is the irony that violence just begets more violence and that it doesn’t solve a damn thing. However, many reviewers, and I feel the director himself, are simply happy to quote the film – Time destroys everything- and think that that is that. That the rape itself is predestined, that it is an inevitable aspect of life and particularly of women’s lives and I think that is simply not true; I like to think that men are capable of a bit more than that. But at the moment men don’t seem to think they are and I think Vincent Cassel was right in an interview where he said that the reason for this film is to show that men are animals, that they are the ones who destroy women, and that they need to stop.

The film gives us a spectrum of male entitlement and male violence and I feel that it is exactly that spectrum that ends in rape, and props up a world where rape is seen as an inevitable potential event in women’s lives. Marcus is Alex’s current boyfriend whilst Pierre is her ex and both throughout the film treat her like an object that they own; their revenge is done because her rape hurt them – one man who promises to help them find them even says ‘you think it will never happen to you’ even though it didn’t happen to them but to her.

They touch her body constantly and this is especially creepy when it is Pierre doing the touching; his hands are on her face repeatedly, stroking her, and he even says that he simply wants to watch her dance. It is said by Marcus that Pierre hasn’t been sexual in a while and then is perhaps implied that is because he is still in love with Alex – further reinforced by the fact that despite trying to be a calming influence on Marcus’ drug fuelled revenge he is the one who actually murders who he thinks had raped her. We also see a scene where they are all boarding a train and are discussing sex, and largely sex with her. Pierre repeatedly tries to coax the couple into talking about their sex life and even continues to do so when they are all in front of other passengers on the train. At one point during the conversation Alex seems to stop wanting to talk and closes her eyes, Cassel’s arm round her neck in what is meant to be an affectionate gesture; this is then followed by Pierre talking over her when she tries to tell him that he needs to focus more on his own pleasure in bed. Pierre seems to take this as an affront, perhaps trying to say that this is what men are told they are meant to do – put women first, and focus on giving them pleasure; yet this simply results in a stressed out partner who is too in their own head. A commenter on this film described her as ‘coldly’ saying this to Pierre and said that this made her an unsympathetic character and that it made them hard to care about the fact she was raped. The film uses her talking about sex, her being naked in an intimate setting, and even her showering to show that she is a sexual being and misogynistic men, as I have said, will use this all as things that caused her to be raped; which is of course illogical and ridiculous because her rape was caused when the man decided to rape her and that is it.

The film shows the horror first and then gives you an hour to think about it and how it impacts her life. We see her discovering that she is pregnant, a baby we assume she has lost after the rape due to its violence, and it is tainted by the fact we know that her life is now changed by her rape. It implies that her happy life, her partying with her friends, and her intimate moments in the shower are now gone because of the horror that we have seen her experience. I feel that this is true for many rape victims – that their lives are changed in a long lasting way due to their experiences, and I think it is something that many depictions of rape gloss over. I very much disagree that rape should be shown on film and TV, that it is often gratuitous and, as it is partly in this film, that often the focus of the rape is on the men in the women’s life and not her; but to a degree this film does show the impact that rape has on people’s lives – past and present.

However due to the spectrum of male violence this film displays we know that the racist, homophobic, quite sexist, drug taking boyfriend who, as Alex says, can be good (aren’t all racist, homophobic, sexists *sigh*) will not be able to even remotely be there for her after her traumatic event. Marcus and Pierre will be in prison for murder and that is that. They will presumably be there for a long time, it was an event with lots of witnesses and in a world that cares so little about women the fact it was done in the name of protecting a rape victim will not matter at all and nor should it.

So now Alex will, hopefully, wake up out of her coma to find her body brutally broken and her support network in prison. She will have to heal, physically and mentally and emotionally, as much as possible with no boyfriend or best friend; I hope that this fictional character has other friends, meets better men, and has a loving family who will not blame her for her own rape like many sadly and ignorantly do. She even has to recover from losing a child she had barely known existed without the father due to his own violent actions. For violence is pointless, revenge is pointless, and it is all as unsatisfying as the fact that in the end they murdered the wrong man.

TV: Real Humans: What It Means To Be a Woman

Real Humans (Äkta människor) is a cult Swedish science fiction show that has had two seasons and hangs in TV purgatory with a third season written with no indication as to whether that season will get made. I watched it after watching the first episode of its UK/US remake Humans, which I have reviewed here. However, I feel that this show has used hubots, the shows AI robots, to discuss many different avenues of female oppression and male entitlement that I had to take a break from reviewing films to review the TV show. It has so many characters and facets that deal with many feminist issues, though perhaps not always perfectly, I will be discussing different themes and characters to truly do the show justice.

Objectification, Sexual Exploitation, and Hubots

Real Humans is set in Sweden, a place known for its gender equality, oxymoron though that is, and yet it is still a place that is full of misogynistic people; those who are happy to use others for their personal gain, as Inger said “We clone them, we dehumanise them so we can exploit them”. It is written by mostly men, and directed mostly by them too, and whilst it is full to the brim with misogyny it does at least, I feel, do so in a way that makes it clear that that behaviour is not okay, that it’s gross, and that it has consequences.

The Hubots are used to show the ways in which we dehumanise people, they are treated in a way which Inger points out is very similar to racism. One of the most common interactions however between hubots and people, or should I say men, is that of objectification in all of its forms. Many men are very happy to openly molest hubots, comparing their body parts to human women’s, they are very ready to use gendered insult against them, and a range of men seem very quick to rape and sexually assault them. Though as I point out in my review of Humans it is framed as being an issue that primarily affects the Hubots yet would indeed still be an issue that women face as objectification is about power and control over those deemed lesser rather than about sex or sexual pleasure.

There are a number of female hubots that experience sexual assault and it is painted as a very common occurrence. Anita, our hubot protagonist, is sexually assaulted by a group of teenage boys when walking through an underpass; the boys film them touching her body inappropriately, joking about touching her and her not caring or objecting before pushing her on the ground and opening her top to reveal her breasts. It is only stopped when one of the boys, Kevin, is spotted by his neighbour Tobbe, one of the members of the show’s main family. Tobias in response beats Kevin with a bat due to his feelings for Anita which results in no real consequences for either boy’s actions so both teenagers don’t suffer. Anita is clearly embarrassed and hurt, trying to hide the fact it happened so as not to cause problems for anyone; when the family finally find out they are shocked and want to go to the police.

This situation leads me on to another aspect of the show that deals with sexuality and the hubots. As a world that loves labelling everything would there are names for those who sympathise with hubots – hubbies – there are names for those who like to hang out with, or even dress as, hubots – transhumans, and also there are those who are sexually attracted to hubots – transhuman sexuals or THS. After inappropriately groping a silent Anita, after shyly interacting with her and struggling to comes to terms with how he feels about her we find out that Tobias is a THS. He breaks down to his father, ashamed and disgusted with his sexual desire as teenage boys often can be; despite his mother wanting his father to discuss sex and sex with hubots – as that is not what Anita is for – with Tobbe his Dad, Hans, struggled and fumbled through doing so. After discovering there was a name for what Tobbe is feeling they take him to see a therapist, hoping to help him feel comfortable with how he is. It is unclear whether he feels this way about all hubots or just about Anita; it is also unclear if is more of a matter of having trouble socialising and interacting romantically and sexually with human women as one character suggests which would fit with a sexual encounter he had where he insulted the girl after.

Though on the darker side of THS is that it is arguably no different from how men treat other forms of sexual attraction – they can’t all be as arguably innocent as fumbling, curious Tobias. We are shown a brothel which is full of female hubots and it is gawdy, neon, and looks rather seedy; the man behind the counter is wearing a disgustingly misogynistic top of a female hubot giving oral to a male human, as is evidenced by the cogs in her head. On top of that the man wearing the top is very open and proud to show off his top to the character Leo – as it is not necessarily like men to be shy in their objectification. Leo needs a place to stay to heal, and – spoilers – charge and so he makes a deal to modify hubots.

The first hubot he modifies is one I mentioned in the review for Humans; she is a half-naked large breasted hubot who is clearly used for sex, and her ‘owner’ asks Leo to make her feel pain. He asks that she gets hurt when he gets rough with her and that she acts scared too – in their world no hubot feels pain unless they are programmed to. It is not necessarily presented as being an all too shocking request though it is unique enough for them to show. Leo’s disgust and horror at being asked to hurt hubots, nay women, in this way is evident later as we see her standing over the body of her dead ‘owner’s body. This is also where we meet the first objectified male hubot in this show, Rick.

Two female characters in this show have male hubots as boyfriends, though they didn’t necessarily start out as that. Theresa, who is with Rick – her personal fitness model – has brought him to Leo to make him better in the bedroom. Leo does this but Theresa does not realise that it has unforeseen consequences, which I will discuss later. I will however mention that immediately after this storyline there is also one about how Theresa and her friend are at a club and their hubots are denied access; this then leads to them attempting to sue the club for discrimination which would have potentially given their partners legal human rights. So even the male hubots that are objectified are simultaneously humanised.

Finally, there are a number of attempted rapes and sexual assaults. One of those sexual assaults happens to Beatrice, a man finds her lying and broken and after charging her, discussing her breasts jokingly to her friend he immediately tells her to open her mouth and pushes her head towards his penis. However there is an immediate consequence for this action as Bea bites the end of his penis off. His action is clearly framed as a wrong one and that she is not there to for men to force themselves upon.

Anita

Anita deals with many issues that come with being a female hubot, as I have previously discussed; I also feel there might be room to discuss the fetishisation of Asian women with Anita though I feel that as a white feminist I am perhaps not the best person to address this. However, with Anita I feel it is her relationships with men that are worth discussing. As we learn she initially had a romantic relationship with Leo, despite once being his nanny, and she says to him “You were the child and I was the adult, and then you were the adult and I was the child”; this line perhaps reflects her role shifting from nurturing to learning about a more romantic intimacy. This relationship is then reflected with Tobias as she learns to recognise and embrace her growing and complicated feelings for him; perhaps put off by his young age but also being aware the problem with assuming that someone is not mature enough to understand something.

Anita is a very complicated character, who has a long journey to learn about both her present self and her past history. Even her name for instance, as we find out, is not really Anita but Mimi (last episode of season two aside). She is calm, kind and whilst she perhaps doesn’t fit in with the family straight away when she does she is there to stay. Even the father who later struggles to accept hubots is someone she can turn to in a time of need. It is great to have more shows with female protagonists and brilliant to have women of colour in lead roles too. Moreover Lisette Pagler, a stage actress, does an incredible job of playing a robotic character with a complexity that is to be admired.

Inger, and Mathilda

Inger is the mother of the main family, she is very different from her Humans counterpart Laura played by Katherine Parkinson. It takes only an episode or two for her to warm to Anita and when she does she takes her shopping for a new headband after realising, despite being a hubot, likes to change it. She is a lawyer who eventually, after demanding it, gets bigger and more high profile cases. She is competent, kind, and brilliant but also has her flaws and struggles being a mother, daughter and wife. She is a complicated and full character and she was a joy to watch.

Mathilda is very different too from the daughter in the remake; she is not rebellious, she barely has much of a disagreement about Anita or hubots in general, and she is actually a good friend to Anita. She admittedly does not have many storylines to herself as the show handles many characters both human and hubot alike. One of her storylines in season two is a relationship with a woman called Betty who introduces us to those transhumans who like to dress up as hubots, with colourful hair and eyelashes.

Vera

I can’t do Vera justice without first pointing out that in the Swedish version Vera looks like this:

She is a model designed to look after the elderly, she comes equipped with a knowledge of first aid which is essential later. She is there to look after Lennart, Inger’s father – in fact she is the reason that their family have Anita as she came free with Vera who was bought to replace the adorable but malfunctioning Odi. Lennart sees her as fussy and annoying, always trying to get him to be healthy. Though whilst Lennart, and the remake, might not accept the show generally accepts that Vera is there to look out for Lennart’s best interests. As the show goes on she arguably has more of a character than she is given credit for; despite being a standard hubot her responses generally have an air of ‘well I’m not happy about it but if I must’. She also becomes, due to later circumstances, a reprogrammed robot that is designed to protect children in combat and the actress gives a stellar performance shouting “Where is my child?” which I promise you is quite funny coming from Vera who is looking simply for a plastic doll.

Rick and Theresa

The place where Vera ends up & is reprogrammed is a human versus hubot paintball place called Hubot Battle Land; it is manned by criminal Silas, Roger, and innocent hubot Odi who I dare you not to fall in love with. It is also where we meet the inevitable conclusion of Rick’s modification. As I have mentioned earlier Rick was Theresa’s boyfriend who changed after he was modified. He started off as innocent and kind but as he was changed to be more sexual his masculinity was increased. Now feminists understand where toxic masculinity ends up. I can’t say I was surprised to see Rick become more controlling, more aggressive, and more willing to hit on other women. In fact Rick’s masculinity overdrive lead him to attempt to sexually assault and perhaps rape a woman he meets in the mall, though luckily his batteries die before he gets very far. It is this behaviour that leads Theresa to get rid of him and replace him with a more docile model.

After he is sold we later meet him when he is resold again due to his problematic behaviour. He very quickly becomes a problem in Hubot land as he turns against Roger. Roger is Theresa’s abusive ex who the show perhaps was too kind to; when he became involved with a very violent man he in turn became the sane one when in fact violent men who befriend other violent men usually end up both confirming each other’s toxic beliefs about violence – that it is in fact the answer to their problems. Though I think ultimately Roger is a character who is more pathetic than anything else, struggling to be an employee, a father, and a partner. It is Roger’s behaviour that makes Rick nickname all humans Roger (pronounced Roh-gger in a gravelly voice from Rick). Rick’s downward spiral is one of the most interesting parts of the show – though he remains a morally complicated character, one second defending a female hubot from rape, questioning if the man has heard of the Geneva Convention whilst the next second threatening to hang a woman – though I think it is one the remake won’t touch as fully because it does not quite perhaps fit the tone they are going for.

Beatrice, Niska and Marylyn

Beatrice & Niska are both female hubots and they are also both violent; I find it a shame that one of the key distinctions that makes hubots more human like is murder. Both have a mission and they are ruthless in their pursuit of it. I have spoken before in other pieces about women and violence; it is a difficult subject though I do think that if we are truly to move forward in this world and to separate ourselves from men women should strive to stay away from violence and murder and other such cruelties. Men commit the vast majority of all violence crime and sexual crimes against women, and yes men and children too, and the propensity to commit such crimes is not a way in which women would like to be equal to men.

Marylyn is a curious character. For the entire first season, unless I am mistaken, I am sure she did not talk the entire time. I was not sure as to why, whether it was something about her design or her role but I think perhaps, I could be mistaken, that it was more a part on the writers that they forgot to give her a storyline, or emotions, or dialogue. It’s worth mentioning, unfortunately that Marylyn is a black hubot. Her only time to speak and her only storyline is at the start of season two where she realises her eyes are too green and so changes them at a machine that infects her with a virus which quickly leads to her demise. It was a sadly short end for a character we never really got to explore and I hope there was a reason that she never got lines or a storyline beyond the fact that she was a black, female hubot.

Eva and Åsa

In season one as the liberated hubots – Niska and co – are hiding out in a church they meet the female priest Åsa. She is very understanding about the hubots meaning no harm, she is quick to defend them, and to try and accommodate them in her church attic; she even helps Gordon, a hubot, find God through the bible and discussion. She is met however with distaste from the next character I will discuss, Flash (yes Flash and Gordon are related hubots). Åsa is married to Eva, someone who is not quite as understanding and trustful of Hubots; this distrust is confirmed after Flash calls her a ‘homo freak’ – it is a sad statement, quickly pointed out as wrong, from a hubot who simply sees women as made to be mothers. Åsa tries to help her see how she should not judge, just as she does not judge her. There may even be more to Åsa if a later statement in season two was meant to mean that she is a hubot too – which would explain her ease with other hubots. It is always great to see lesbians on television, and I feel they were represented in a real, non-sexualised manner as complex women; though unfortunately they do not stay together due to differences in their beliefs about hubots. I fervently hope that these two characters arrive in the remake, and it will be unacceptable if they are completely erased as this happens to lesbians in all sorts of media on an ashamedly regularly basis.

Flash

Flash (ah-ah), later Florentine, is a female hubot played by a former Miss Sweden. We later learn that her model is an imported one not available in Sweden, and that she is designed to be a nanny; whilst she was liberated – set free from her programming by code – I feel that need to look after children still remains. Her first storyline is that she wants to be a mother and a wife, she wants to marry a human and live happily ever after. She is not happy being told what to do by Niska and though it means leaving her brother Gordon she leaves on her own. She hides that she is a hubot and finds a way to attend parties for well to do men to find her a husband. There she meets a man who after struggling initially with eventually learning she is a hubot marries her. This marriage is fraught with issues over should a human be able to marry a hubot, can a hubot really love, and in the end Åsa the lesbian priest is the one who marries them. She is very disproving of a woman she met before she got married, questioning why she poisons herself with drugs whilst she has a baby to look after, and she later gets involved in a custody battle to be the mother of that child (it’s a whole thing). But what is most important about Flash as time goes on is that she gets what the liberate hubots truly wanted: to be free. She, along with Anita, is granted the rights of citizenship that being human entails – though it ultimately leads to her losing custody of a child she loved but tried to buy. Flash was a character who never saw herself as a hubot and whilst many of her actions where questionable her love was real and her desire to be seen as human is one that even many humans to this day feel.

The Difference Between Man and Woman

It is a point I won’t stop making that, under patriarchy, men and women are conditioned and socialised to be different. We are taught to be different things, to want different things, and to be certain things despite what we actually feel and are. It is not surprising in a world that has a strict gender hierarchy that we wouldn’t enforce that same gender onto ultimately gender and sexless robots. It is also not surprising that in a world with this gender hierarchy still existing that these female hubots would be subject to the same sexual violence, other violence, objectification, denigration, and general exploitation that women currently face. Whilst I disagree that it is one that belongs in science fiction – where we can create any future we please, and that it is limiting to female characters to always give them storylines that focus on their status as woman I am least glad that the writers understand the things women suffer through. Though it was not done perfectly I hope it at least helped some women and men who are watching understand issues they were perhaps naïve on; television can be a great teaching tool that is not always used to the extent that it should be but Real Humans is a very good start. It can be used to help teenage boys understand sexuality and how not to treat women, as well as teaching grown men not to abuse women and that violence has very real and unwelcome consequences. It is a great show and one I hope that the remake does not continue to ruin, it has many subtleties and issues that television would be smart to handle well.

Real Humans is a show I have thoroughly enjoyed watching, and whilst it can be exhausting to watch, even well intentioned, depictions of a wide range of misogyny and toxic masculinity and male entitlement, I definitely recommend that people watch this show and enjoy the wide range of diverse characters and some truly great, and surprisingly original, science fiction.