lookatthesefreakinghipsters:

obsessionisaperfume:

laoih:

I usually like to be warned before I'm violated with demon tongue.

Enemies have a habit of making sexual or sexually suggestive moves on Dean, and it’s very disturbing and sad and makes me very uncomfortable. 😦

I also want to note that Dean’s responses in these situations (“I don’t usually get this friendly until the second date.” // “Are we gonna fight or make out?” // “I’m not in the mood.”) are a verbal defense mechanism, since he usually can’t defend himself in that moment any other way.

I’m sitting here looking at how many times we hear the enemies say he’s pretty, and JEEZ.  No wonder Dean makes that face every time the word’s directed at him…

I still wonder how many times he heard this before the beginning of the show, when he was still young and how much it contributed to his macho overcompensation.  I wonder if that’s why he needs to be so tough externally, because he’s always felt so vulnerable because of his looks, so the appearance of toughness is his defense mechanism.

It’s really well done, though, the way that Jensen doesn’t just look disgusted and horrified when Dean’s in this situation, but how he also plays it as a violation.  That’s something that we see a lot in media products when it’s a woman who is being sexually assaulted, but less so often when it’s a man.  When it’s a man who is sexually assaulted, then the tropes of Double Standards: Rape, Male on Male and Double Standards: Rape, Female on Male come into play for the most part.

From the former:

A man raping someone is (almost) always depicted as a horrible thing, and the source of much drama. Unless the rapist’s victim is another man, in which case it’s commonly dismissed, ignored, or even Played for Laughs. It doesn’t matter if it’s through force, deception, coercion, or drugs, male-on-male rape is almost always an object of derision — against the victim.

And from the latter:

Men are stereotyped as constantly wanting sex and of being stronger in general than women. Therefore, the idea that the man could have either not consented to sex with a woman or been incapable of fighting off a female aggressor if he did refuse sex is simply not taken seriously. Another commonly-held notion that the idea of female-on-male rape challenges is the false idea that since men have erections, they enjoy the sex, and hence is not rape or not as traumatic as any other kind of rape…

A man raped by an attractive woman is considered a lucky man, and a man being raped by an unattractive woman is comedy gold.

Dean’s our hero, right?  And he’s handsome and strong and brave and fucking kills monsters for a living, but he is constantly being put into situations where he is being assaulted by both men and women.  And it not played for laughs, not with him (sadly, there are other examples where it is, “Tall Tales,” for one). Physically, Jensen Ackles overwhelms nearly every other actor in this gifset, yet Dean is clearly powerless and overwhelmed.  It subverts those tropes (particularly the Female on Male ones) and exposes them for the disingenuous falsehoods that they are. 

Yet another component about these tropes (particularly the Male on Male trope) is that the rapes or assaults are not dealt, in-text, as the awfulness that they are and that there is lasting ramifications to characters.  They’re played for, of all things, laughs.  Dean is implied to have been raped in Hell.  But it’s not a joke and it’s not something without long-term implications.  There has been a consistent horror at sexual assault in the show with regards to Dean that is serious and is based in what the character has gone through and experienced.  It subverts the idea that rape is a joke when it’s a man who is the victim.

This show isn’t exactly perfect when it comes to discussions of sexual violence, but they do a damn good job with this one.