Look, I walk through the world with pretty low expectations of what I see on screen. Movies and television are routinely filled with stuff I find offensive, and frankly I’ve stopped blogging about it as much as I used to, partially because I know I’m still going to watch it anyway, partially because after a while I start to feel like I’m just whining and no one wants to hear it, and partially because “media justice” just isn’t the battle I’ve chosen. But every once in a while I’m shocked enough by something to actually brave the “you just don’t have a sense of humor, I can’t believe how PC you are waters” and wage my own public complaint, however ineffectual it might be.

(I guess I should add a spoiler alert here? I really don’t think I’m discussing anything that’s important to the plot, but just know I’m describing a part of the movie.)

Get Him to the Greek. Produced by Judd Apatow, starring Russell Brand and Jonah Hill…I know what I’m getting into when I walk into this movie. And I’m actually looking forward to it, because despite the obvious critiques of movies like Superbad and Brand’s comedy schtick, I really enjoy this stuff—when I’m not being offended, I’m having fun, I’m laughing. You can call it a guilty pleasure; I don’t feel particularly guilty about it, but that’s a whole other discussion. So I’m thinking: Russell Brand as a rock star parody (reprising a character I laughed at in Forgetting Sarah Marshall) being dragged from London to Los Angeles by Jonah Hill as straight-man rock nerd record co. employee in a sort of road-trip-buddy-comedy-OMG SO MANY HIJINKS WILL ENSUE-kind of thing—this is going to give me some cheap laughs. And it did! And I didn’t even care while I was watching it that the female characters might as well not be there because they didn’t really have character at all!

But then we get to the rape scene. That seems like a sentence that shouldn’t have just been written because what place is there for a rape scene in this kind of comedy, right? But it’s there, and it’s really not funny.

Hijinks have taken our characters to Las Vegas, where Aaron’s (Hill) boss is trying to out-party rockstar Aldous Snow (Brand), basically so that Snow can’t take it anymore and gets himself to the Greek Theater in LA where he has a concert. In the midst of this partying, for NO reason and having NOTHING to do with the plot as far as I remember, Aaron’s boss sends Aaron and a random woman named Destiny to head up to a hotel room and have sex. So cut to the hotel room where Destiny is perched on top of Aaron and he is protesting this whole thing. Vocally. And then basically the joke is that she pulls out a large dildo and rapes him with it.

To make this even less funny (and more weird) when Aaron returns to the party downstairs, with a dazed look on his face, he actually tells the other characters that he’s been raped. I think his exact words are, “I think I was just raped.” This is greeted with laughter, and then someone gives him a lot of drugs and the story moves on and it’s never brought up again.

I’m pretty used to rape being used as a punchline, especially when men are the victims. This usually comes in the form of jokes about prison rape, but I’ve also seen more than enough films in which a guy is basically forced into having sex with a woman or is really uncomfortable with it (like, he’s in a relationship and she’s seducing him!) and it’s supposed to be funny because ya know, women can’t rape men LOL! And prisoners deserve it! That’s bad enough to me. But this was just so beyond explicit—the guy is sodomized with an object while saying no and then uses the word rape to describe it—that I was genuinely shocked. I actually can’t even imagine an explanation of how this is funny outside of the fact that a man being raped is SO IMPLAUSIBLE to folks that it’s just laughable. You’re not watching a “rape scene” because call it rape all you want, it couldn’t be real rape, so it’s funny. I get that the way physical comedy works is that you’re laughing at someone’s physical discomfort—like when Ben Stiller zips his balls into his pants in Something About Mary. But isn’t that distinctly different from the discomfort that comes from what is by this point widely understood to be a trauma-inducing sexual violation? I don’t know, I can’t even unpack all of the layers of fucked up here.

So yeah. Nice job, Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel for writing that into your movie. It really added so much so much to film and sent a valuable message to your viewers about how funny it is when men are sexually assaulted.