Nom Internets

You know, when they were in the lab, testing the patient’s blood-samples, I was still sort of okay with how the episode was handling it. Yes, all the suggestions that she must have been abused as a child, must have a hormone disorder, etc., were pretty hurtful to listen to (I’ve encountered every single one of those arguments from people who try to explain away my queerness), but House is one of those shows where you are not supposed to find any of the characters wholesomely sympathetic. They’re used as tools to express views that may be flawed, and when people are first exposed to a sexual (or in this case, asexual) lifestyle that scares or confuses them, they pretty much go straight down the list that they check-marked in the lab.

First Wilson’s confusion in the clinic, then the “explaining away” in the lab. I thought that perhaps the show was trying to hand-hold the audience through their knee-jerk reactions. Perhaps the meta message would show the audience the error of their thinking, or at least give them some serious food for thought.

No. Seriously. That fucking ending. What the actual fuck.

I get that House, as a show, makes fun of pretty much every demographic on the market in some pretty unforgivable ways. There’s no group that they consider too taboo or off-limits for a little burn. They’ve even made fun of the Roma people, for crying out loud. And heck, they devoted an episode to insulting kinksters: all the same bullshit about how we must all be sick in the head, not breastfed long enough, etc.

But to seriously take a demographic that already struggles with invisibility issues, and to make your big fucking punchline, “Oh, just kidding, they’re not real!” Not even, “Hey, we’re going to insult you”, but “Hey, you don’t exist.”

I’m sorry that I’m not being eloquent right now… I know people generally expect all this- frilly, super intellectual analysis from my blog, but… I just don’t even have words right now for how mind-blowingly Not Okay this episode was.

You know what’s really funny? (And I mean funny here in the tragic sense.) Gays and lesbians have apparently become the new “black” in minority relations.

You know what I mean. There are plenty of bigots in this world, but (in most of the “Western” world), modern people are terrified of being pegged as racists. The civil rights movement did its work, and most people have some basic, intuitive sense of what constitutes racial bigotry.

So we use it, all the time, when trying to get through to people.

“Gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry.”
“Remember when black people weren’t allowed to marry white people?”
“Oh, that was terrible! Oh, I see what you’re saying.”

Not that the conversation is always so easy, but you know what I mean. Most people are better able to see their bigotry if they imagine some other group that has already achieved relative liberation, rather than the one that society is still actively sending them overtly oppressive messages about.

So when Wilson said (paraphrasing), “You can’t tell him he’s not really asexual; that’s like a gay person finding out they’re really straight”, I almost fell out of my chair.

Fine.

Do we really have to do it that way?

Imagine that this episode was released decades ago, when there was not a single gay character on television (at least not in any positive or neutral way), when “lesbian” was a vulgar word, many people genuinely had no idea what being gay even was, and most people considered it a sickness, or a passing phase, and certainly not a genuine way of life. You know. The level of societal acceptance that asexual people currently enjoy.

Imagine that the episode is about two lesbians, and follows this exact format, with this same conclusion. (“What? A woman who wants to have sex with another woman? Can’t be! Must be sick! Or abused! Hey, check it out: we were right! She just wants cock like the rest of us! And oh look, we even made it funny when she found out and told her partner, with some comical trumpets in the background! And then we smoked cigars because we saved her from a life without cock!”)

For many people, this episode may have been their first introduction the concept of asexuality, period.

Do I really have to put people through this mind-exercise to show how ABSURDLY NOT OKAY this was?

IS IT ACTUALLY 2012 RIGHT NOW?