In real life, most rapists get away their crimes and rarely go to prison. Yet, in our favorite books, movies, and series, we often see a male character who is wrongly accused by a lying woman. When we, as viewers, as readers, have repeated experiences where our empathy is directed to innocent men, how we view reality is filtered through this skewed lens.

Right now, I’m watching Youth on HBO, Sharon Hogan’s new series. She plays Alex, a literary agent, and for the most part I like the show. Like pretty much everything. Hogan does, it’s witty. Alex is the mom of Rauri, an awkward kid who’s in his freshman year at Uni. Rauri leaves school suddenly because he’s ostracized, shamed, and humiliated and called a pervert because he and a girl he likes had a sexual encounter. She regrets the event and has blamed him for it. As a viewer, our empathy is with Rauri and his mom.

Rauri even has a speech about how hard it is to be a male:

“I hate being a man. You have to be strong, but not too strong, ’cause then you’re an alpha. And if you’re an alpha, you’re toxic. And if you’re toxic, just, girls fucking hate you. But if we try and express our feelings, we’re weak and needy. If you send flowers to a girl, we’re just love-bombing her. If we can’t get it up, then we’re broken.”

To me, this sounds like a riff on the famous speech by America Ferrera in the Barbie movie, but it’s made by a white male who does not experience systemic power dynamics of misogyny and sexism! When I heard it, I felt annoyed. And it also seemed like I was supposed to continue to feel empathy for him and for Alex as his mother because her son was suffering.

This scene got me thinking about how many times, as a viewer, as a reader, my empathy is directed to the male protagonist who is so often, it seems, in the fictional world, wrongly accused of sexual assault and rape.

In real life, only 2% of males are wrongly accused. Yet, as consumers of narratives, so many of us are used to rooting for victims of evil women. I’m also watching East of Eden, another series I really like, and feeling so bad for Charles when Cathy seduces his brother. Cathy uses her sexuality to hurt men. Directed by Zoe Kazan, this version presents Cathy not so much as bad seed but a survivor of trauma, in her family and in the wider culture. Kazan has cut the scene from the book where a child Cathy fasley accuses two 14 year old boys of rape.

Please help me track books, series, and movies where sympathetic males are falsely accused of rape. I’d like to focus on white males falsely accused because the misogyny isn’t blended with the racism. In To Kill a Mockingbird, there is a false accusation and in that case, this lie illuminates how black men are treated.

The reason this is important to track is because when we see a case like what’s happening at Cornell, a woman saying she was gang raped, our experience of not trusting the woman has happened so many times to each of us; stories influence everyone, from the Bible to Greek mythology to Steinbeck to…

Just beginning the list to get this up now:

1. Movies

1. The Hunt (2012)

A teacher is falsely accused of sexually abusing a young child. The accusation spreads through his small community, destroying his relationships and reputation. One of the strongest examples of this theme.

2. Atonement (2007)

Robbie Turner is falsely accused of raping a young woman by a girl whose misunderstanding and subsequent lie help destroy his life. Based on Ian McEwan’s novel of the same name.

3. Wild Things (1998)

A high-school guidance counselor is accused of rape by two female students. The plot involves deception and an elaborate scheme, although the counselor is not simply an innocent victim, so this is a complicated example.

4. The Crush (1993)

A teenage girl becomes obsessed with an adult man who rejects her advances and tries to ruin his life, including through a false accusation of sexual misconduct.

6. Freeze Frame (2004)

A man whose life has already been shaped by a wrongful accusation becomes the subject of another accusation of rape. The film explores paranoia, public suspicion, and the struggle to establish innocence.

7. Gone Girl (also a book)

Amy Dunne meticulously constructs a false narrative in which she is the victim of her husband, Nick. Her plan includes staging evidence of violence and making it appear that he has murdered her. Earlier in the story, Amy also describes being sexually assaulted by her former boyfriend, Desi Collings. She later kills Desi and stages the scene to make it look as though he raped and imprisoned her.

2. Television series

Lucky

Lucky uses make up to make it look like she has a black eye and then makes up a story about an abusive boyfriend to get a truck driver to help her escape the FBI.

In Furious, Catherine males up a story about an abusive boyfriend to get access to a women’s shelter

In ‘Your Friend and Neighbors’ protagonist, Coop, played by Jon Hamm, is falsely accused of sexual misconduct and gets fired from his job, life ruined.

3. Books

Is BMO the first animated character to openly defy binary gender assignment?

The guy in the video wants to know if BMO is expressive of feminism. I like how watching BMO lets us experience how we fall for various gender stereotypes and makes us challenge not only those assumptions but our need to define the “maleness” or “femaleness” of a character whether she’s a robot, car, plane, or fish. It’s important that a character like BMO is finally represented. Gender stereotyping is all over animation and it’s great how BMO rejects those cliche classifications.

But here’s what’s not so great. I haven’t seen “Adventure Time” but from this video, it’s apparent that it’s yet another show where the two main characters, Finn and Jake, are male. That gender assignment gets an automatic eye roll from me. With females already so underrepresented in animation, I can’t get super excited about a character, stuck in a supporting role no less, who’s only female some of the time.

h/t Charles Kenny

I got this comment from Clare:

As a mother of 2 little boys I’m constantly struggling to find movies for them to watch that aren’t completely sexist. And it is frustrating because he is too young to have an opinion on what girls can or can’t achieve. I want him to grow up knowing girls an be strong leaders, smart and funny, not just pretty to look at. But hardly any kids movies give you a decent female protagonist worth bothering with. For me “Brave” was embarrassing as Pixar’s first female lead movie. Despite the film having a stereotypically “feisty” heroine (when is that word ever used to describe a boy/man?) it is still all about whether Merida will marry or not. Merida is seen as subversive, difficult because she won’t do as her mother asks and get engaged, but why not a movie where strong, independent Merida has a great adventure that’s nothing to do with romance like any number f her Pixar lead character counterparts? Also as Merida seems to be a young teen the whole idea of marriage is particularly creepy.

I’m glad Clare wrote in because, just like “women’s” issues, people tend to think sexism in animated movies is a girl issue. It’s not. What are our kids learning about gender when the males get to do all the cool, fun, brave stuff, when they get to be the center of attention, while girls are stuck on the sidelines?

Yesterday, my daughter brought a light up fairy to show and tell. She earned that fairy for reading her first chapter book, and she was proud of it and her accomplishment. A couple first grade boys yelled out, “Stupid! Boring!” The boys wanted to be clear that they wouldn’t be interested in something as uncool and girlie as fairy, Fairies, are sadly, on eof the few images we can find in our culture of magical females. Unfortunately, the boys’s reaction isn’t a rare reaction when girls show and tell “girl” stuff. How’s that for an early lesson in public speaking?

What if fairies flew out of the Pink Ghetto? What if kids saw fairies go on exciting adventures in narratives marketed to all kids? What if fairies didn’t look coy, with short skirts and shy smiles?

What happens when kids learn, from the moment they exit the womb, that there are girl toys and boy toys, and that girls are less important than boys? How does it affect who our kids grow up to be?

A new Muppet movie is coming out in 2014. On Disney’s site for the movie, the characters listed are Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Animal, Fozzy the Bear, Gonzo the Great, and Walter. So here we have a typical gender ratio in children’s media of 1:5. Females, half of the kid population, are once again, presented as a minority. Miss Piggy is a Minority Feisty.

Make that 1:6. The human star of the movie is Ricky Gervais.

In case you forgot, here’s the poster your kids got to see for the 2011 movie.

When females are marginalized and sidelined in a fantasy world created for children (not to mention creatures from a world that originated on PBS) how can we expect them to get equality in the real world? If we can’t even imagine it, how can we achieve it?

I just posted on how “everyday” actions have high stakes emotionally for the individual; that conveying this emotion to readers universally is why we “raise the stakes” in a narrative. (Otherwise known as plot or motor.)

I was on FB and saw this post from my friend Lateefah Simon, that shows what I meant perfectly. Here is her post:

This sweet lady ran like a bat out of hell to catch the Caltrain this morning. Her cute black boots were moving at crazy light speed. She didn’t have time to swipe her clipper before boarding the train. She was soaking – breathing hard but managed to find a seat. The ticket taker dude approaches her first. Lady with the cute rain boots pulls out clipper and tells story about what happened. She’s kicked off the train. Next one comes in an hour. Sad cause it’s storming.

Sadder because I hate waiting. Booooo! At least my boots are fresh. Just wanna get yo work. Sheesh.

This is about catching a local train, right? No big deal. But clearly, the runner is a hero and the ticket taker dude, a villain.

If you were writing a story about a woman catching the train, running for it “as if her life depended on it” you might create a plot situation where her life actually depend on it; that will evoke the emotion in the reader that the runner experiences. To evoke and communicate that emotion, you have to make the reader care if she catches the train, understand what it means if she misses it so that the reader misses it to. For me, coming from this place, plot doesn’t feel contrived but the opposite, fully accurate.