According to TV Guide, 6.7 million viewers watched the premiere of the fourth season of Jenji Kohan’s Orange is the New Black in the first 72 hours after its release, making it the second-most watched show in the United States the week it debuted. In recent years, shows like Orange is the New Black, Wentworth, Girls Incarcerated: Young and Locked Up, and Prison Wives have skyrocketed in popularity, signaling that American households have become fascinated with the issue of women in prison. While some may view this in a positive light – seeing that scholars like Angela Davis (2003) argue that “women have been left out” of the discussion of the American prison system for decades – I find myself on the other side of the spectrum. I believe that “Hollywood representation” of women’s prisons can only be negative, as this kind of representation will simply perpetuate the hypersexualization and sexual assault that female inmates already experience due to the gendered construction of prison spaces (Davis, 2003).
According to Angela Davis (2003), “prison is a space in which the threat of sexualized violence that looms in the larger society is effectively sanctioned as a routine aspect of the landscape of punishment behind prison walls.” In other words, female inmates can simply expect to be sexually assaulted while in prison, a societal evil that has become institutionalized by prison spaces in the form of cavity and strip searches (Davis, 2003). While critics have berated Orange is the New Black for misrepresenting prison life for women, it does get this aspect right: the show underscores the commonality of both strip and cavity searches as well as guard-on-inmate physical and sexual assault.
The acceptance of the patriarchal status quo has rendered women inherently sexual beings. In the eyes of society, women find themselves in a constant state of wishing and wanting of both male desire and contact – both physical and emotional – leading to widespread rape myth acceptance amongst males overall (Suarez & Gadalla, 2010). However, I believe that female inmates become even more sexualized – “hypersexualized,” in the words of Davis (2003) – simply by being in prison. According to Kimmel (2005), male sexuality is based in both “risk-taking” and “accumulating partners (scoring).” Thus, because female inmates are both perceived as dangerous and because their incarceration makes them both literally and figuratively unavailable (making it harder for men to “score”), their sexuality increases tenfold in the eyes of the average man. The existence of hybristophilia, or “Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome,” in which sexual arousal is contingent upon being with a partner known to have committed a crime, furthers this line of reasoning.
Shows like Orange is the New Black can only make this situation worse. Hollywood representation of women’s prisons does nothing more than perpetuate the “inherent sexuality” of female inmates by reinforcing the ideas that the gendered violence that real inmates experience in prison is simply “routine” (Davis, 2003). The proliferation of girl-on-girl shower-sex scenes that appear in Orange is the New Black and its kin do not help either, as they allow men to further sexualize the female inmate by imagining that women’s prisons are just some kind of big, lesbian, sleepover-orgy. In short, because both mass media and women’s prisons both already oversexualize women, society’s fascination of mass media about women’s prisons is only going to make things worse.
I don’t want to hear “those are just TV shows!” Perception is reality, and because Orange is the New Black and its kin are most likely the only exposure that society (read: heterosexual males) will have to “female inmates”, these shows become the reality of female imprisonment for the majority of viewers. Prison life is not glamorous. Women’s prisons are not inherently full of women starved for male contact. When mass media perpetuates these ideas on television vis-a-vis fictionalized prisoners, it can have a serious impact on the way that society (read: heterosexual males) views and treats real female inmates.
In short, we don’t need any more goddamn women’s prison shows. These shows are not making the issue of female incarceration visible, but instead glamorize prison life and perpetuate the idea that women’s prisons are nothing more than “warehouses” for sexual objects (Davis, 2003). Instead of renewing Orange is the New Black for its sixth season, we should be having more, substantive conversations about women in prison and the discrimination and violence they suffer at the hands of the prison industrial complex.
Works Cited
Davis, A. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? New York, NY: Seven Stories Press.
Kimmel, M. (2005). Men, Masculinity, and the Rape Culture. In E. Buchwald, P. R. Fletcher, & M. Roth (Eds.) Transforming Rape Culture (140-157). Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.
Suarez, E., & Gadalla, T. (2010). Stop Blaming the Victim: A Meta-Analysis of Rape Myths. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 25(11), 2010-2035.
Comments
Post a Comment