I’ve often wondered if Supernatural, especially the more bro-y early years, doesn’t constitute kind of a masculine equivalent to those old-school bodice-ripper novels, where the author obviously wasn’t able to and/or interested in deconstructing the virgin/whore stuff, but also wanted there to be lots of sexy bits. So you’d have these elaborate rape-adjacent fantasy set-pieces that were like, okay, Our Heroine and obviously You, Dear Reader are very good girls, but just like…IF you had no choice but to have rough sex with a pirate king…well, hypothetically, that would be…what? How would that go? Kind of exciting, maybe? Kind of like being given access to a part of you that you can’t fully admit you’d like to access?
Supernatural was very obviously always (at least in part) about the traumas of masculinity, its violence, its ruptured relationships, fathers who couldn’t take good care of their sons, sons who couldn’t live up to their fathers, brothers who would die for each other but would die before they’d say that out loud, the thrill of power and freedom and also the horror of having no one to turn to for help. And there was so much of that bodily vulnerability – having your body invaded and violated, being driven to your knees, being forced to the point of blood and tears, it always seemed to me like there was a little edge of that same kind of fascination – not literally about sex, but erotic in how tangled up it was with the idea of submission.
Our Heroes and obviously You, Dear Viewer are very strong men, but just like…IF you had no choice but to be exposed and dominated by powers stronger than you…hypothetically, that would be…what? How would that go? Kind of cathartic, maybe? Kind of like being free of something you can’t fully admit is a burden?
