#trigger warning cocsa

Ok, I know that anyone who has seen the show is like “Fizzie, anyone with eyes can see that Jay and his brothers are deeply neglected and abused”, but because of how the abuse is usually shown in a dark humor way, I think it's played down to a way that some people don't realize that Jay and his brother might have been abused by more people than we realize….

Jay Bilzerian is a funny guy, and the abuse of his character is often the butt of a lot of jokes in Big Mouth, but how deep does that abuse really go? Over the seasons, we get small glimpses into Jay's disturbing home life through jokes and in one of the singular somewhat Jay-centric episodes we get in the early seasons, “Sleepover: A Harrowing Ordeal of Emotional Brutality” we learn two very important things: Jay is abused by his brothers and neglected by his mom. Now, I know this may seem like something small in the grand scheme of things, but this actually tells us a lot about the inner workings of the Bilzerian family. You see dear readers, in this singular episode, we learn that Jay’s mom (Jenna) isn’t abusive in the sense that she’s verbally cutting down her boys at every turn or putting her hands on them, rather she’s neglectful and absent as a parent despite her presence in the physical home. Down the line we learn that her neglect likely stems from her dependence on the substances she self medicates with. Stay with me now, I’m not excusing the neglect of her children, but I think that Jenna’s dependence on substances is a result of abuse she’s also suffering, and considering her sewing room seems to be a sort of safe haven for her, it’s likely that while locked away in her little safe space, drunk or high, she isn’t fully aware of just how bad her boys are to each other. I know there are times that she seems fully aware of it, but I think that through her haze of numbing her own hurt, Jenna doesn’t has the cognitive function to actually grasp how her boys are being brought up or why it’s an issue.

So this brings us to the 2nd thing that the sleepover episode shows us: that the abuse Jay faces at the hands of his older brothers is child on child sexual abuse (COCSA). Sexual abuse in general is sickening, but I think there’s something especially chilling about COCSA because in many accounts, it tends to be something that was a learned behavior through abuse that the abuser suffered that they either don’t realize is wrong when they begin to imitate it with other children, or in some cases, it can be something that the children are encouraged to do to others by their own abusers…. Why does this matter?  Other than being a clear indicator of why Jay is the way he is, this also points to the abuse being something that isn’t just happening with him. I believe that while actively abusing their younger brother, Val and Kurt have also been victims of abuse, and likely still are. Again, I’m not giving Val and Kurt a pass on how they treat their younger sibling, but I think it gives a lot of insight into why the pair are the way they are with him…. But that brings us to another question: 

With Jenna being more neglectful than abusive, who is hurting the Bilzerian boys?

The obvious answer here would be their father, Guy Bilzerian, since we see do see him putting his sons down verbally, and we have accounts of Jay talking about his dad’s history of cheating on his wife and Jay being present for the aftermath… Do I think that Guy is abusing his kids? Yeah, I do. Do I think that he’s enforcing the boys abusing each other and pushing really poor core values and ideas on them? Also yes… Do I think that the abuse suffered at his hands is the abuse that pushes his boys to act the way they do? Not entirely.

Hear me out: Guy Bizerian is a piece of garbage who objectifies women and neglects the dozens of children he’s fathered…. But it also seems that unlike his wife, Guy doesn’t actually spend a ton of time in the home with Jay, Curt, and Val to dish out the kind of abuse that I think would foster the acts Jay and his brothers commit in the show. I could see Guy being the type to put his hands on his kids out of anger and be very heavy handed with punishments when he’s around to “parent”, but given the little we know about him, I don’t see any of the punishments he may dish out to his boys as being even remotely sexual in nature. Guy Bilzerian, to me, seems more like Terry Milkovich in Shameless; the type of man who could possibly be homophobic enough to punish his children for being gay by making them fuck a woman (we don’t see Guy enough to know how he feels about LGBT+ people or issues in the show, I’m going solely based off the vibes I get from his character through my multiple rewatches of the show), but I don’t think Guy would ever put his hands on his boys in a way that could be portrayed as sexual in nature and I don’t see him encouraging his boys to “act gay” in any derogatory way because Guy Bilzerian is a man very focused on appearance and reputation. He doesn’t care about how his family looks, or how he looks as a husband or father, but he does care that he looks like a pimpin’ ladies man with money, which gives him that sleazy vibe that everyone gets from him, and I don’t think he would risk that reputation by having sexual abuse allegations with his sons come out. But this beg the question again: 

Who is abusing the Bilzerian boys?

The answer? Well, Jay actually says something in season 5’s episode “Thanksgiving” that actually makes me think that while Guy and Jenna haven’t been sexually abusing their boys themselves, they are both bringing people into the Bilzerian home who abuse their children, and I think that they may even bring these people into their home knowing that it’ll happen. In season 5, episode 5 of Big Mouth, Jay tells Nick, “Hey, don’t talk to Uncle Jay like that. You treat me with respect!” in response to Nick telling him that he wouldn’t be considered to be Nick’s uncle just because Leah and Val are dating, and he does it while snapping his belt and approaching Nick in a very menacing manner…. I didn’t think too much about it in my first, second, or even third rewatch of the show; laughing at the humor in it the way most do. But with the approach of the new and final season, I’ve been rewatching the show again and actually refreshing myself on the characters and plotlines in preparation for the last season, and I realized that this scene actually had a slightly darker tone to it than just the laughable “jay is dumb and doesn’t know what he’s talking about” bit. Growing up, I had uncles and aunts and cousins who my family had over constantly; I saw some of them daily and we were so close that I didn’t realize that these people had absolutely no actual biological or even marital relations to my family. It was work friends of my grandmother’s who watched my mom and her siblings grow up, highschool friends of my parents and their kids who were about my age, friends from church that I grew up with and never remembered not having around. And this isn’t super uncommon, there’s a lot of people who are introduced that way to kids by their parents when the real explanation is too long or complicated or when their parents just feel like that person is their family… This is also a trope in media that is used to convey that a parent is having an affair with someone or is seeing someone that they don’t think their child is ready to accept as their parent’s partner, they bring them over and introduce them to the kiddos as “Uncle Jake” or “Aunt Tammy” because that person is about to be inserted into the child’s life in what is usually a long term way. And after rewatching season 2 of Big Mouth, I realized that Jenna is really comfortable and confident in approaching Coach Steve for sexual companionship, meaning that he is likely not the first man she’s had over that isn’t her husband, and after seeing Jay react the way he did with Nick in season 5’s thanksgiving episode, I think that Jenna probably introduced her previous partners to her kids as “Uncle _____”,  and if Jay’s little bit as Uncle Jay to Nick says anything, I think that more than a couple of these so called uncles Mrs. Bilzerian had over through the years have treated Jay and his brothers similarly to that…. And while this places a lot of blame for letting these people around the Bilzerian brothers on Jenna, we know from Jay’s own accounts that Guy isn’t shy about having his children around to see his dirty dog behavior he participates in with his own partners, even taking Jay to drop the women he’s screwing to planned parenthood for abortions and emergency contraceptives, and that he brings clients from his business as an attorney to his personal home (which would further normalize criminal behavior in their home and likely make their home horribly unsafe since it seems that Guy will take any case regardless of innocence or the fact that he’s supposed to be DUI attorney).

Jay’s parents cheating on each other doesn’t automatically mean that they also let their other partners abuse their kids, but if we look at the state of their marriage and them as individuals, it’s clear that neither one of them are present in their kids lives most of the time, so they might not know that these people are physically/sexually/verbally abusing their kids…. But it’s also likely that they may know and just not stop it, which would normalize a lot of the behavior they see and create this ideology in their developing minds of “if it’s not being stopped, then doing abc, xyz, and lmnop, is ok”, and then the boys continuing down that path until we get the COCSA we see being portrayed in the show between Jay’s older brothers and him, and the odd and creepy behavior we see from Jay through the seasons. If that is the case, and Jay’s parents do know that their children are being abused, I genuinely think that Guy is the type to not care and pass off parenting as his wife’s job, probably saying that it wouldn’t happen if she took carer of the kids or that its her job to know what’s happening in the home with the kids (despite the fact that men tend to be the ones portrayed as protectors and we know that he’s opening his home to host clients and he’s an attorney who likely has criminal clients), I also think that if the abuse occurring is happening at the hands of men Jenna invited into the house, Guy would paint her as a monster and claim to have not known what vile people his wife let around their children. And if Jenna knows, and she knows that the abuse is being done by men she brings into the home as her sexual partners, I think she’s letting it happen because it may keep the men coming back, and while she would know deep down that they wouldn’t be the type of men that are coming back for her, I think her depression and self worth are bad enough that she would have the mentality that being with someone like that was better than being alone…. And if Jenna knows that the abuse of their children is happening at the hands of people her husband have brought into their house, I honestly think that she’d be too afraid of Guy to speak up on behalf of her kids, which would likely add to her substance use since she would attempt to numb that pain and forget that it was happening since I think that she would feel pretty powerless in that situation.

The abuse of the Bilzerian boys is honestly really heartbreaking to me because I think that all three boys could be really wonderful kids, Jay himself is actually a very sweet kid if you watch the show and set aside the emotional dysregulation and creepy freak stuff that has attached itself to his character, but if my dark theory here is correct, I’m not sure how much of a chance these kids will have at normalcy in their world until they get out of the Bilzerian house of horrors.