Television as Feminist Sermon

The HBO television drama series, The Pitt, is brilliant entertainment. The show has won a stack of awards for its gripping portrayal of the grisly medical cases staff confront in a Pittsburgh emergency room. 

In the second series we witness this constantly overwhelmed, high-stakes environment during a chaotic July 4th shift, with staff juggling life-or-death traumas amid bed shortages, diversions from other hospitals and other crises. The heroic staff cope with these relentless dramas with gallows humour and dark banter that keeps morale afloat amid the chaos.

But suddenly the mood changes. We are told of a new patient in triage – a “sexual assault survivor”. The atmosphere snaps into hushed solemnity: jokes vanish, voices drop and the entire team shifts to gentle, almost reverent tiptoeing.

Somehow, in the overflowing ER – where beds are scarce and staff stretched thin – there’s instant allocation of a private room, specialised lighting and three dedicated professionals for hours of solemn and meticulous evidence collection.

Dana, the charge nurse, treats Ilana, the survivor, with utmost care and sensitivity. “You’re in a safe place now… We’re here to help and support you,” she whispers, oozing empathy.  

There’s a disquieting moment where Ilana sits up and blurts out, “I don’t want to do this anymore… He’s my friend… it was just dumb – he was drunk, he didn’t mean it.”

Confronted with the girl’s ambivalence, the medical staff are reassuring: “Your feelings are valid and we’re here no matter what you decide.” Having agreed to proceed with the examination, later Ilana expresses renewed concern about her friend: “He’d lose everything. It was stupid, he was so drunk. Maybe it is not worth ruining his life over something like that.”

And what happens? The woman from the local rape crisis group intervenes: “That’s a normal feeling right now – minimising to cope. Ilana, what happened to you wasn’t a mistake – it was a crime, no matter the circumstances.”  

I spent days thinking back to this plotline which struck me as both bizarre and revealing. For a start there is the tonal whiplash, the sudden shift from frenzy and gallows humour to what seems like a solemn rite, akin to a religious service. It comes across as a laborious exercise in moral posturing, reeking of performative empathy, as the ER’s unfiltered brutality is paused for a sanitised, educational interlude that virtue-signals the show’s progressive credentials.

Then, with rape elevated to ‘MOST VITAL’ status and demanding undivided attention amid the chaos, the victim’s minimisation has to be portrayed as a tragic flaw rather than an appropriate compassionate instinct. There’s no room for ambiguity, let alone forgiveness, in a script that prioritises ideology over nuanced humanity.

Naturally my concerns about these aspects of The Pitt’s storytelling proved to be totally at odds with the acclaim the episodes received from all the reviewers. Ilana’s ambiguity about the assault is uniformly framed by commentators as a realistic portrayal of self-blaming survivor psychology.

This is exactly what you’d expect from today’s feminist culture. Our media is determined to enforce a monolithic narrative of victimhood, dismissing alternative responses like empathy for the accused as misguided, internalised oppression. This strips agency from the victim by implying her instincts are wrong, while privileging a framework that views all such incidents through a lens of systemic harm – at the expense of individual context, like alcohol-fuelled mistakes.

There’s something very odd about framing sexual assault as “Ultimate Trauma”. It is surely ideological overreach to assume that all sexual assault warrants immediate, exhaustive resources – despite ER overload. It imposes a rigid, value-laden hierarchy of suffering rooted in feminist ideologies, rather than objective medical or situational priorities.

But that is what happens in this mad, sad world of modern feminism which positions sexual violence as an unparalleled symbol of patriarchal harm or systemic oppression, a compulsory narrative which overrides individual agency and real-world context.

How telling that a New York Times article on The Pitt described the show as “a civics lesson” and “an empathy exam”. 

What we mustn’t forget is that we’re usually talking about kids here – most date rapes involve very young men and women, with 15–19 the most common age group amongst accused males. And surveys show most women in this situation are, like Ilana, very unsure that these young guys deserve to be sent to prison for regret sex that so easily results from these alcohol-fuelled adventures.  

That’s the bottom line. The feminist’s prescribed punitive approach simply isn’t working. Many young women don’t want these former friends to end up behind bars and hence don’t report to police. And if they do, many juries don’t end up convicting the males caught up in these murky he-said she-said cases.

Eight years ago, Germaine Greer was promoting a small book she’d written on rape and argued society should not see it as a “spectacularly violent crime” but instead view it more as “lazy, careless and insensitive”. She mentioned “restorative justice” (RJ) as a means of tackling the issue in a more sensible way. 

Restorative justice is all about bringing together the various parties – those directly involved plus some supporters – to collectively explore what happened, sort out responsibility for different aspects and decide on ways to make amends. This approach can lead to clearer understanding, genuine accountability and steps to repair harm or prevent recurrence – outcomes the criminal courts rarely achieve in these low-conviction, contested cases.

Against feminist resistance, RJ has finally started to be used with such cases, but only when the alleged perpetrator had admitted responsibility or was already found guilty in court. But now an Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) inquiry has recommended RJ as an alternative or complementary pathway to our current revenge-seeking system, even agreeing to remove the current post conviction/admission requirements in certain circumstances. 

That’s a huge breakthrough but naturally faces resistance in our feminist-led Labor Government which has been ignoring these recommendations for over a year. Yet in our current political climate there’s a chance the feminist grip on our society might start to weaken. We can only hope. 

As one of Australia’s first sex therapists, Bettina Arndt began her career discussing sex on television and training doctors and other professionals in sexual counselling at a time when such topics were largely taboo. Her current – and even more socially unacceptable – passion is exposing Australia’s unfair treatment of men through the relentless weaponisation of laws and policies that portray women solely as victims. Her decades of advocacy for fair treatment of men in the Family Court included serving on key government inquiries. Bettina makes YouTube videos and blogs on Substack.