For the past three weeks, I’ve been using bittorrent to watch Grey’s Anatomy, a new medical drama based here in Seattle. So far, it’s struck me as fairly average-but-watchable television — nothing groundbreaking or award winning, but not horrid.
Much of the fun for me (and many others, see Seattlest’s week one, two, and three wrapups; Metroblogging Seattle’s week one, two and three wrapups, for example) has been laughing at the bizarrely twisted geography of this alternate universe Seattle, where the main character can live on Queen Anne, drive north to work along the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and work in a hospital practically underneath the Space Needle that has a picturesque bay window view of the Pike Place Market sign, and yet has South Seattle’s distinct lack of high-rises in any exterior shots.
One thing about this week’s episode really bothered me, though. There were two subplots in the episode that both dealt with essentially the same situation, but they were played in very different ways. On the one hand, we had Meredith dealing with the overly aggressive attentions of a fellow intern, a bike messenger, and a doctor (the last being her primary love interest on the show); on the other, we had George’s discomfort at being under the very appreciative eye of an obviously gay patient.
What got to me was that each situation was dealing with unwanted sexual advances, yet where Meredith’s were played more seriously (complete with Dr. Yum coming to her rescue), George’s scenes with the gay patient were played very much for laughs. I’ve seen this type of double standard a lot, too — if a man harasses a woman it’s a Serious Matter that Must be Dealt With; if a man hits on a man, it’s Comic Relief.
It’s an attitude that has always bugged me. Sure, we’ve come a long way over the years, in that the humor of the situation these days is more often expressed through the straight man’s discomfort, rather than the gay man’s homosexuality, but it still strikes me as just another side of the same coin. It’s still homosexuality being used as a comic foil.
In this particular instance, toward the end of the show the gay character brushed his advances aside as “just flirting”, but he was still doing the same thing that the straight male characters were doing with Meredith — pressing their advances onto an obviously unwilling and discomforted victim. If his lines had been coming from a straight man talking to a straight woman, they would be seen as rude, aggressive, and creepy.
It’s rather sad — though not entirely unexpected — that we still can’t seem to seem to treat homosexuality as anything other than weird, threatening, freakish behavior, something to be laughed at. Maybe the laughter is a little kinder, a little less malicious than it used to be — but it’s still laughter.
“To the Mountain Top” by Edelweiss from the album Wonderful World of Edelweiss (1992, 4:43).
