“Well, that’s a dark way of looking at it!” he said. “We find it hilarious.”
“In the comics, there’s a great story where Hughie goes undercover as a superhero,” Kripke added. “That was a story that Jack had always asked us to do. So part of it is, you always have to be careful what you ask of writers. Then we finally had this Webweaver character, and the idea of Spider-Man going down to get kinky tickled in the Batcave was just too good to pass up. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t pass it up.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Kripke said: “I love that it’s such a perfect situation that he doesn’t know his own safe word. It’s like a beautiful comedy situation that he’s trying to find the whole time.”
And in a behind-the-scenes report, Within the boysKripke is seen praising Colby Minifie, who plays Ashley, for his “world-class comedic performance” in the scene.
Needless to say, Kripke’s approach to such a sensitive topic on his show horrified viewers, but the worrying reality is that this is far from the first time male sexual assault has been trivialised on screen, which could impact how society as a whole views it.
In fact, in 1997, men’s health activist and writer Michael Scarce argued in his book: Male-on-male rape: the hidden cost of stigma and shamethat the very idea of male rape is so taboo that when it is depicted on film, it becomes a kind of spectacle used to give audiences a cheap shock without great cost to the larger narrative.
Alternatively, it is presented as an expected consequence of a male character’s bad behavior, most notably seen in the common on-screen trope of prison rape.