Category Archives: Sexual assault

‘Your Friend and Neighbors’ another series where sympathetic male falsely accused of sexual misconduct, life ruined

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In the Apple TV series ‘Your Friends and Neighbors,’ the protaginist, Coop, played by Jon Hamm is falsely accused of sexual misconduct, he’s fired from his job, chaos ensues.

Here on Reel Girl, we’ve been tracking movies, series, and books where sympathetic male protagonists are falsely accused of sexual misconduct. Here are the series I’ve watched in THE LAST MONTH that depict charges of rape, sexual assault, violence against women, and sexual misconduct manipulated, fabricated, simply made up to manipulate victims. That’s right, the sympathy is with the victims of manipulation. Poor Coop did nothing wrong. He’s a good guy. And as a viewer, our empathy, once again, is directed to the promising man.

When we as a audience, as the public, watch this story of victimhood on repeat, we get trained in real life to look for motives, to distrust stories of sexual misconduct, violence against women, sexual assault, and rape. These stories influence our ability and capacity to believe women, and when we hear stories like Jane Doe saying she was raped by 7 men at Cornell, we have a biased filter that has created our cultural mythology, from the Bible to Greek Mythology to HBO to not believe women.

‘Your Friend and Neighbors’ makes a mockery of all the work women have done for equal rights and protection in the work force. Even the woman who Coop had sex with isn’t the villain in this story, their mutual boss wanted to fire Coop and manipulated the relationship for that end. See how vulnerable women’s rights make us all?

‘Furious’ and ‘Lucky’ feature female characters who lie about being victims

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I loved ‘Furious’ and ‘Lucky’ for so many reasons, but both series depict female characters who make up stories about being attacked in order to get sympathy. Even though I’m a fan of these new series, here on ReelGirl, we’re tracking times when we see women tell fake stories of victimhood. As consumers of fictional media—books, movies, series etc— we’re so used to witnessing women lie in the imaginary world, we’re trained to reflexively distrust women’s stories. This bias is a liability that leaks into the real world when we hear women speak out about rape and assault. The characters in Furious and Lucy ARE victims of violence and they also create imaginary instances where they were attacked, the message being we can’t trust them to tell the truth.

In ‘Furious,’ serial killer, Catherine, lies about an abusive boyfriend in order to be admitted to a women’s shelter. In the series, Catherine has a long history of multiple rapes, it’s lazy writing to see her lie for sympathy.

Lucky, played by Anna Taylor Joy, applies make-up so it looks like she has. a black eye, then tells a truck driver that she’s got an abusive boyfriend to convince him to give her a ride.