13 Reasons is shocking – that’s why it works
Has anyone else noticed that the anger around 13 Reasons Why is largely from middleaged parents? My friends and I are all in our early 20s. Many of us still feel more like 18-year-olds than adults. All our conversations about the show are laced with heavy relief. Since its release, adults are actually asking us about our experiences with sexual assault as teens and young people.
The sense of catharsis of being able to talk about it so publicly has been overwhelming.
But there are a lot of angry, older parents out there arguing to ban the show. The argument is that it’s needlessly graphic, it’ll traumatise teenagers, and the show should be axed because it uses shock tactics to gain attention.
I think the fact that adults are shocked is the very reason we should celebrate it. It’s made middle-class society finally pay attention to the scale of the problems with teen sexual assault, suicide and mental health in New Zealand.
Let’s just start by saying I wouldn’t worry too much for the children. I’m not long out of my teens, and was firmly raised in the internet era. At school we passed around videos of 2 Girls 1 Cup and The Human Centipede. (Google it. Well, read the Wikipedia plot summary if you can’t stomach watching people who . . . oh, just Wikipedia it.)
And that doesn’t even scrape the surface of the violent, humiliation porn we’ve grown up watching. So yes, while the rape scene in the series finale of 13 Reasons might make us retch, it’s ultimately not that shocking.
It does shock parents, though, which is absolutely essential because it seems to be one of the only ways we can get them to discuss matters of sexual assault and consent with us.
It’s very, very hard to get middle- class New Zealand to discuss these issues. Look at the recent acquittal of Luke Lazarus, the son of a Sydney businessman who was initially convicted then acquitted of raping a 18-year-old virgin in an alley behind his father’s Sydney nightclub. Reading about that case was truly harrowing in a way that a TV show never can be for me. But no-one really talked about it, not unless you were a fellow liberal Clementine Ford-reading feminist with an interest in the story.
That’s not the case with 13 Reasons. Everyone is talking about it. It’s not just the internet but our friends, our parents, random strangers . . . I eavesdropped on two separate, simultaneous conversations about it while in a bar last Saturday. Both the two bargirls in their 20s and the welldressed women in their 30s were passionately discussing the series’ grisly finale. The bargirls were agreeing that rape needed to be talked about more, while the older women were worried about the lack of support from schools around sexual assault. Soon the sentences started beginning with, ‘‘Look, I’ve never told you this but . . .’’
The show’s ability to provoke discussion comes from the fact that it is in the rare position of being a mainstream programme, which is about teens but watched by adults, that also delivers extremely raw truths to its audience.
It has graphic rape scenes that are designed to appal you, because you are supposed to be appalled at rape. You are supposed to be angry, disgusted, and incensed when you think about it. Yet we aren’t – we just often avoid thinking about it in too much detail because the trauma is overwhelming. Our brains can’t cope with that much heartbreak, so we choose not to think or talk about it.
Then a mainstream programme such as 13 Reasons comes along and absolutely forces you to examine these issues in painful, bloody, shocking detail.
Of course the initial reaction is outrage.
But the overwhelming response has then been to actually, seriously, think about whether it’s affected your children. You can’t not ask yourself that with the images so severely punched into your memory.
And yes, there are a lot of teens out there who have been sexually assaulted. One in three women and one in seven men are sexually assaulted before adulthood, and the age group of 16-24 is four times more at risk than other groups in New Zealand.
So it’s of great relief that finally adults are turning to us young people and asking us if we’re OK. We’re hearing stories about mums watching it with their daughters as a way of explaining to them that their sexual assaults aren’t their fault. We’re turning to our friends and saying: People are actually talking about this.
So we need 13 Reasons Why and shows like it. They aren’t pretty, but they work.