Lesley Kinzel wants to talk about the sex between Peter Quinn and the fat girl on Homeland, and why it makes people uncomfortable.
Content note: this piece contains spoilers for the fourth season of Homeland.
“Homeland” is a strange adrenaline jolt of a TV series. Even as I have had frequent misgivings about its troubling portrayals of and assumptions about Muslim people and actual terrorists (and how it often conflates the two), I’ve not been able to quit watching it. Even in the third season, as its shift from espionage thriller to deranged romantic melodrama was complete, I couldn’t quite break the habit.
I’m glad I hung in, however, because the fourth season — which has required some reworking after last season’s dramatic and final death of Nicholas Brody — shows signs of returning to its less overwrought beginnings, and Carrie is even more conflicted and dark than usual, her endemic unhappiness no longer simply a desperate and obsessive need to be with the man she destructively loves, but now manifesting in a chill-inducing moment in which new-mom Carrie seems to seriously consider how simple it would be to let her infant daughter drown during a bath. If I had harbored any concerns that the series writers would employ motherhood as a hackneyed device to ground and soften Carrie, I am no longer worrying about that now.
But what I really want to talk about is the fat girl.
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A subplot in the second episode takes an unexpected turn. Having returned to the US, traumatized CIA assassin Peter Quinn crawls into a bottle at his earliest opportunity. He is discovered, profoundly drunk, beside the pool at his apartment complex by the building manager, a young, pretty fat woman. They have a brief conversation, and then the scene cuts to the two of them having sex in Quinn’s living room, the fat woman (whom I am repeatedly referring to as such since her character doesn’t seem to have a name, according to IMDB) on top.
Under different circumstances, this might have been the end of things. Certainly, had the woman in question been slender, and were this a different show, this scene might have been trotted out merely to illustrate Quinn’s apparent self-destructive behavior. But what raises this circumstance from the commonplace is that we see the couple post-coitus as well, a choice that, if I’m honest, surprised me.
The contrast between her comparatively small emotional damage in the form of slightly wobbly self-esteem with Quinn’s much more significant brokenness is striking, and yet to look at them, most people would probably ascribe the biggest problems to the fat woman…
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Sober morning-after Quinn is faced with an awkward woman in her underwear in his living room. She tries to explain her own presence away, to tell him he doesn’t have to pretend to ask for her number, to allow them both the chance to forget this ever happened. Quinn, however, looks amused at this woman who is clearly unsure of what to expect from him — and he doesn’t go the moped route, but invites her to breakfast. In public.
At the diner, Unnamed Fat Lady rattles on about being “addicted” to some kind of “bad” food and it’s both sad and real, given that so many fat women feel constantly pressured to explain and apologize for their bodies, and the how and why of their existence. I would prefer that Quinn’s lay was all “WHATEVER I’M GONNA EAT SOME POTATOES LIKE I HAVE A RIGHT TO DO SO AND NOT NARRATE THE JOURNEY FOR YOU” but I get why she does. She then apologizes for talking so much, and Quinn tells her he’s enjoying it.
She asks if he’s “okay” — apparently he slept restlessly after the sexin’ — and he admits he would love to tell her about it, but he can’t. The contrast between her comparatively small emotional damage in the form of slightly wobbly self-esteem with Quinn’s much more significant brokenness is striking, and yet to look at them, most people would probably ascribe the biggest problems to the fat woman, and assume Peter Quinn to be utterly normal.
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Of course, this conflict immediately comes to the fore. Two bros at a nearby table are whispering and giggling in a way that is familiar to any woman who’s ever been mocked for her weight by strangers in public. When his lady companion rises to go get a refill on her soda, Quinn notices their laughter, and walks over to the table to ask what they’re finding so humorous. After one of the bros repeats his joke — and seriously, it is possibly THE OLDEST FAT JOKE IN THE WORLD — Quinn proceeds to smash his bro-head into the table, bloodying his face, and to break the hand of bro #2, who rises to defend his buddy.
As Quinn raises a napkin dispenser, ostensibly to turn bro #1’s skull into pulp, his lady friend stands in the background, looking horrified. If there is a romantic way to violently defend a woman’s honor, this is very much not it, but even I have to admit feeling a surge of terrible gratification at the rage Quinn inflicts on these dudes, and when he lowers the napkin dispenser it’s a bit of a bummer.
Because I consider it a matter of professional interest, immediately following the episode in which this character makes her debut, I went hunting for information about her. The unnamed woman is played capably by Emily Walker, who brings a believable blend of toughness and vulnerability to the part, and near as I can figure she has spent several years as part of Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe. I do have it on good authority that we haven’t seen the last of her, so let’s hope she gets a name at some point, since not only does she have a substantial speaking role but a damn sex scene, however brief and mostly-covered-up it may be.
I also looked for other people’s responses to her scenes. Among them I found Judith Warner’s very curious recap in the New York Times, which reads in part:
…Quinn’s first stateside sexual encounter — a drunken tryst seemingly fueled more by despair than desire — is profoundly weird, and more than a little disturbing. One minute, our black-ops tough guy is on a lounge chair, so drunk he can do nothing but slither helplessly, and the next, he’s underneath a lady twice his size, with a really creepy smile on his face that could, frankly, be a rictus of pure fear. Beyond the politics of using a fat woman as a virtue-enhancer (or a sight gag), what was the scene supposed to convey?
It should be noted that Warner’s perspective seems to happen in a universe in which Quinn is forever pining away for a clueless Carrie, instead of one in which Quinn is struggling to see Carrie as the often toxic person she is. I had read their shared scenes, independently of Quinn’s late-night intoxicated dalliance, as Quinn marveling at Carrie’s seemingly boundless ability to keep her emotions so rigid and compartmentalized, while Quinn’s own boundaries are rapidly crumbling. This is not to suggest that Carrie doesn’t feel, we know that she does, but that her option to close that part of herself off in the interest of serving the “bigger picture” — the “mission,” as she tells the pilot back in Kabul — is what enables her to survive. Nevertheless, it is survival, and not actually living.
Still, even going with this more romantic motivation, there’s a lot to unpack in Warner’s assessment, not least the assumption that sex with a fat woman is literally terrifying (“rictus of fear,” really?), and that it’s inconceivable that Quinn could be enjoying the sex. Because she’s fat! She’s a fat lady! No men enjoy sex with a fat lady, because they’re too worried about being crushed to death! That’s only something men do to illustrate their “virtue”!
I’m also not sure that I agree that the episode itself reduces the character to a “sight gag,” especially considering the scenes that follow. However, it’s certainly possible that viewers who have never been able to consider that fat women have sex — and that said sex is often pleasurable for all involved parties — might have trouble reading the sex scene, as well as the woman in it, as anything more than a perplexing cartoon. WHAT CAN IT MEAN? wonders Warner, because it certainly can’t be a portrait of a man seeking the pleasure of sexual contact from a woman he finds attractive.
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Contrary to popular assumption, the world actually isn’t neatly divided into people who only fuck fat women and those who never under any circumstances would do so. Even narrowing things down to hetero pairings, men are not all uniformly Team Fat Women, or Team No Fat Women Ever.
Contrary to popular assumption, the world actually isn’t neatly divided into people who only f*** fat women and those who never under any circumstances would do so. Even narrowing things down to hetero pairings, men are not all uniformly Team Fat Women, or Team No Fat Women Ever.
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Some fat women have relationships with men who have specific attractions to fat women, and some fat women also enjoy relationships with men who aren’t sturdily committed to either a pro- or anti-fat stance. Sometimes, people are just attracted to other people and the process doesn’t adhere to some rigid ruleset of sexable body types (and, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m inclined to think any dude who can only conceive of screwing a singular and precise size and shape of body is probably going to be shit in the sack anyway — that’s a sure sign of both a lack of imagination and a habit of putting his own needs first).
Nor is fat sex is always administered out of pity; it is not always a magnanimous favor to sex on a fat lady; and not every dude who does wakes up the next morning being all EWWW WHAT DID I DOOO TIME TO SHOWER IN BLEACH about it. More than that, Quinn’s having sex with a fat woman does not necessarily make him a fetishist or a chubby chaser; it may simply mean he met a woman he found attractive, and she happened to be fat.
By describing this dalliance as “weird,” “disturbing” and “creepy,” the implication is that “manly,” “tough” and conventionally attractive dudes like Quinn don’t have sex with women who look like our nameless property manager (or that dudes that look like Patrick Wilson don’t have sex with women who look like Lena Dunham, for that matter). If they do, it’s only because they’re drunk. Or extremely emotionally damaged. And it is a tragic waste of their looks and personal appeal to condescend to such abysmal levels.
From this perspective, the only possible reason for Quinn to do any of this is to demonstrate to the audience that he is a “nice guy.” On a different show, this might be the case, but this read doesn’t fit with either “Homeland” as a series — which has never demonstrated an investment in making ANY of its characters “nice” before now — or Quinn himself, who already has a dark, uncertain and wildly complex background that precludes him being recast in such a way.
In a broader sense, this perspective relegates fat women to a place of only being sexual beings at the behest of the men who fetishize them — they cannot have sex lives founded on healthy mutual attraction, but are forced to wait for some kind-hearted (or emotionally broken) soul to deign to fuck them. It removes any sexual agency from the women themselves.
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I think there is a reason “Homeland” put the fat woman on top, and it might even have been to “disturb” the viewer, but not because a fat woman on top during sex is intrinsically inappropriate and distressing. Putting her there without apology, and then giving Quinn the unexpected decision not to chuck her out in disgust the following day, but to pursue some kind of tenuous relationship with her — this is instead deeply disturbing to many of our most unshakeable cultural convictions of what fat women are, and how men treat them.
And even if this wasn’t the writers’ candid intention, it is still a thing that happened.
At the end of the episode, Quinn is released from jail and returns home to find a note from the woman he tried to defend stuck to his door. Once inside — and after first pouring himself a drink — he opens it, and it reads, “No one ever fought for me before.”
Although the author of the note cannot know it, it sure seems like this simple phrase is really speaking to Quinn’s inner turmoil over whether he is doing good in the world; who is he fighting for, after all? It’s possible (and even likely) that Quinn’s efforts to befriend his property manager will end in tears — this is “Homeland,” after all — but given the subplot’s reluctance to follow established expectations so far, I am hopeful that there is room for this sideline to continue to “disturb” viewers, albeit in the best possible way.
By LESLEY
Originally appeared on xoJane
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All of this seems like overanalysis to me. I think this stuck viewers as odd, simply because we don’t see fat women having sex on television, unless she’s the butt of a joke. So to see this woman being used in a fairly significant role and being treated like a decent human being — well, we’re just not used to that. We’re used to seeing ugly fat guys bag hot women, and we’re used to seeing impossibly gorgeous people on pretty much every single show. So maybe it’s time for more shows to follow Homeland’s lead?
I don’t watch this show and I didn’t see this scene, but it seems like two things are happening in the discussion here. One, no one seems to really want to engage with the actual thesis of the article–that is, how entirely normal and not-gross plenty of attractive men find having sex with fat women to be. Except this comment, which just falls back on the tired stereotypes that are everywhere in our culture and are the opposite of what the author’s talking about: “It looked more like a playful guilty face, sort of like, he knew she was big,… Read more »
Well spotted. Raping someone isn’t the same as not having the level of validation for a body type you think it deserves. The former is far more serious than the latter, but I can’t say I’m surprised the usual excuses are being trotted out – SOP when it’s men who are the victims of women.
The issue isn’t her weight, it’s that she had sex with him while he was very drunk. It’s a bit worrying that you need this clarification.
“it is disingenuous to discount thousands of years of human history that have overwhelmingly been characterized by men’s control over women’s bodies. It is not a one-to-one correlation, a woman having sex with a drunk man vs a man having sex with a drunk woman. Someday, in the name of equality, I could wish that were the case (or you know, that we could all have enthusiastic yeses all the time), but as it stands now there just isn’t the same power dynamics at play.” And here we have it. A woman has one drink and then has sex, the… Read more »
“A woman has one drink and then has sex, the dude’s a rapist.”
Who said THAT, 8ball? That is a pretend thing you made up.
It is true that the amount of intoxication that makes the difference between able/unable to consent is nowhere specified. As opposed to, say, the amount that prohibits you from driving a car, which is an exact number. The whole point is strangely absent from the whole debate. The author of the XoJane piece stated using a very high level of intoxication as her line of division, but only when hard-pressed by reader comments. Usually it just says „intoxicated“, period, which can very well be taken to mean any alcohol level above zero. That assumption may well be polemic, but it… Read more »
This. So much this. It is akin to the “don’t make people uncomfortable” standard, which is subjective and incredibly ill-defined.
Discussions around this topic tend to take the form of:
A: “Don’t have sex with drunk people, that’s raping them!”
B: “Ok, but how drunk does one have to be unable to consent?”
A: “Oh, you know, drunk!”
* B: “Ok, but how drunk does one have to be in order to be unable to consent?”
(derp)
Christ almighty, Joanna. It’s called hyperbole.
Way to ignore the larger point of my fucking post though, kudos. Can’t say I’m terribly surprised.
LOL, so gender classifications for rape and consent is your argument? Based on privilege? Well. if that is the case, there should be racial classifications, class classifications, ableist, weight, height. Your response is nonsense. Heavily intoxicated consent = no consent, yes that even applies to men. Privileged princes that we are, we still can be raped.
This site is supposed to cater to men? At least peruse the article before posting. I am quite disappointed.
I watch “Homeland” religiously and do not consider this to be rape — unless you consider any drunk coupling whatsoever to be rape. It’s clear Quinn — in whatever state he was in — consented, just as it’s clear that, had he not, they never would have had sex. For the record, we never see what started the sex or who initiated it — we cut to it already in action, with both parties fully and purposely engaged. So case closed on the rape part, to me. And you should see it before you comment on it. As to the… Read more »
I stopped watching the show after this because i saw it as obvious rape. He was so F***ing drunk there is no way he could have consented. She was dead a sober stranger that recognized that he was drunk. To me there is no way that it can be argued that he was not raped. I don’t care what either of the people look like, that is so f***ing far from relevant. I don’t understand how anyone can justify a sober person having sex with a blackout drunk stranger.
Regarding the “rictus of fear” that seems like an exaggeration. It looked more like a playful guilty face, sort of like, he knew she was big, but I’m gonna do it anyway b/c who’s watching sort of a face. Btw I’ve known guys who had reps for getting the “hot chicks” but who have also definitely gone over to the chubby side. I can tell you it’s not so much about preference as what’s available in the moment. I thought it was funny. We already know from previous episodes that he has a child with another woman. So it brings… Read more »
I watched the scene, the drank a lot. When she encounters him he is at a certain level of intoxication, when they had sex later, his level of intoxication would have gone UP , not DOWN.
He could barely stand, he was imho, intoxicated beyond consent. The woman even acknowledges in the dialogue that he is VERY drunk.
Actually, you know, I don’t feel like being coy about this. I haven’t seen Homeland, or witnessed this particular. But the fact is, this is apparently a rape scene. He was blackout drunk- by the author’s own description- to the point where he couldn’t stand. According to every feminist and legal definition I’ve ever seen, he was too drunk to consent. Except, he’s a man, and she’s an apparently fat woman. So her RAPING him is okay? I guess? Look, this is the problem. You want men to take consent issues seriously? How can you possibly expect people to when… Read more »
“Xojane” obviously doesn’t care about gender equality. They call their few male writers “token males.”
To be fair, this was called out by several commenters of the original XoJane article (not all that many, though). The author of the piece replied in the comments and explained that she makes a distinction between “very drunk but consenting” and “very drunk unable to consent” (basically blacked-out, I guess). And she swore that she would judge a gender-reversed situation in exactly the same way. That pins her against the current feminist mainstream for sure, who usually do not specify at which level of intoxication one becomes unable to consent, but imply it is at a very early one.… Read more »
Good to see you back, Theorema 🙂
Thank you! Although I must admit I will try not to become a regular again. I found that online commenting will invariably pull you into a feedback loop of making yourself crazy, until at some point it’s a matter of self-preservation to stop. See it as a sign of weakness that I am back. 😉
This article is pretty messed up GMP and I think you should really reconsider this… alliance… you have with XOJane.
and the crosslinking to that site causes the clueless young women in the childhood of adulthood to come over here and attempt to share the ‘wisdom of their youthful craziness’, with us mature men and women.
So, wait, the woman is sober but the man is drunk…?
…huh…
Yep, that’s rape without consent but don’t hold your breath for any discussion about that. Although most state anti-rape laws use gender-neutral language, they are anything but impartial. Anti-rape activists only care about whether the woman in question was the one that was drunk or blacked out. I wonder who will be the villain in female homosexual encounters involving intoxication. Perhaps the one that looks more masculine??? Look at the explicit affirmative consent law that they just passed in California. Even without that law, this would be a rape scene!!! But of course, this writer is only concerned about gauging… Read more »
“…Having returned to the US, traumatized CIA assassin Peter Quinn crawls into a bottle at his earliest opportunity. He is discovered, profoundly drunk, beside the pool at his apartment complex by the building manager, a young, pretty fat woman. They have a brief conversation, and then the scene cuts to the two of them having sex in Quinn’s living room, the fat woman (whom I am repeatedly referring to as such since her character doesn’t seem to have a name, according to IMDB) on top…” Haven’t I/we heard over and over that a man having sex with an intoxicated woman… Read more »
One cannot legally consent to sex when drunk/intoxicated or under the influence of drugs. See Myth #7: http://www.stsm.org/myths-and-facts-about-sexual-assault-and-consent