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Rape Myths Lite: ABC’s “The Middle”

-by Dr. Alesha Durfee.

I recently watched a taped version of “The Middle” (an ABC sitcom) that originally aired on 1/9/14. “The Middle” is a fairly funny sitcom that both my teen kids and I watch. I was shocked when halfway through the episode I saw what I can only describe as “rape myths lite”.

In the “Sleepless in Orson” episode, a “bad boy” kisses Sue (the main teen girl character) without her permission – they are not dating, and she is upset, shocked, and angry. She yells at him….. .but of course each time he does it (it happens five times throughout the episode) she begins to think more fondly of him and to talk to her friend more and more about him. She transitions over the episode from being appalled and angry to anxiously looking for him out the window – not in fear, but because she wants him to force her to kiss him again. At the end she is actually pursing her lips and leaning in for a kiss.

A boy kisses a girl against her will on "The Middle"
The storyline is clearly drawn from stereotypes about schoolboys chasing girls around the schoolyard trying to kiss them – it’s done in a very comedic fashion. “The Middle” is a “family” comedy so the situation is presented as “just a kiss” where “no one got hurt” and “everyone laughed”. But that’s what makes this episode all the more troubling to me. It’s far easier to spot and dispel rape myths in stark contrast – when you have a documentary or a news story or anything that shows how harmful the actions were, where you can see the consequences of actions. If you ask a teenager if someone has the right to pressure someone else into sex, the majority of teens that I’ve met say “no”. They know the rhetoric, even if they don’t necessarily believe it or act on it.

But it’s the more insidious representations of rape myths – how Sue suddenly now likes a boy because he kissed her despite her protests – that is troubling to me. My teens laugh at Sue’s changing expression post-kiss (from appalled to intrigued/excited) and I worry about what they are taking from the episode. I can explain rape myths to them, but that only conjures up images of the documentary or the news story. Does that mean that they don’t see the messages conveyed about gender, sexuality, and bodily rights in this episode? And since (thankfully, hopefully) so far their world looks a lot more like “the Middle” than a documentary or news story, does that mean they don’t see the rape myths that are in their everyday world? Because ultimately what we find “funny” says a lot more about what we believe and our perspectives on the world than when we are asked for our (measured) responses. And I’m disappointed that this is what we as a society still finds funny.

Dr. Alesha Durfee is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University’s School of Social Transformation. She can be reached at Alesha.Durfee@asu.edu.