Category: queer

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the reference to lesbian bed death in Glee’s Whitney episode last night was that it didn’t fill me with rage.  In fact, it was actually pretty funny, served an interesting function regarding gender in the narrative, hinted at a number of off-screen details, and was something of another shout-out to fan concerns about how much time Kurt and Blaine don’t spend sucking face on our screens compared to the ongoing car crash of PDA in Finn and Rachel’s relationship.

In case anyone reading this first heard of lesbian bed death from Kurt Hummel (an idea so hilarious to me, that I beg you to confess in comments if this is the case), let’s talk about that dreaded phrase, which does get used both within and outside of the lesbian community, even though Kurt does get the definition more or less right. 

The idea is that sex leaves relationships between women and that the blame there sits with presence only of women in those relationships.  More specifically, lesbian bed death as a phrase is a symptom of people not necessarily believing that what women do in bed with each other is sex. How, many people wonder, can desire be maintained with out male sexual assertiveness, or, to be really direct, the presence of a penis?

This is absurd, mostly (and we’ll get to that mostly in a minute — it’s important regarding Kurt and Blaine). For one thing, the presence of sex ebbs and flows in all relationships for all sorts of reasons; anyone who’s been in a long term relationship knows this. 

And it’s hardly surprising that Kurt and Blaine haven’t had a lot of time for making out or anything else when Blaine’s been injured; the situation with Dave Karofsky happened; Kurt’s preoccupied with NYADA; the Finchel marriage drama has exhausted everyone; Quinn was seriously injured; and Blaine’s been super emo about a ton of things, including the stress of having his brother around. So really, Kurt and Blaine are experiencing a normal adult couple thing like the teenagers they still are. 

That Kurt is worried enough about the situation to apparently Google around to find the phrase lesbian bed death is hilarious though, and really shows one of the ways he’s been growing up about sex and relationships.  And yes, I firmly believe Kurt found this one on the Internet. 

Because Kurt explaining it to Rachel means she wasn’t the source; and if Santana were the source (the only other source that makes sense), that would have been all over the school long before Kurt and Rachel have their little chat. Who else at WMHS would have likely shared that phrase with Kurt?

But as absurd and offensive as the lesbian bed death idea is, one thing that can actually be hard about relationships between women, at least in my own experience, is that a lot of us receive significant training to never, ever be sexually assertive.  Certainly many of my female friends who are attracted to women lament situations in which no one is willing to make the first move before the relationship starts, and no one feels fully confident initiating sexuality once it does.  Obviously, this isn’t just a lesbian problem, but it is a real thing we do talk about.

Which brings us to Kurt and Blaine, gender, and that fandom favorite of “who’s the top?”  While that who’s the top conversation has always been a mess — confusing terminology about sexual positions and terminology about BDSM activities with ideas about sexual assertiveness (the whole thing is just a morass) — that conversation happens for a reason: among other things, people want to know who takes the sexual lead between these two boys who are both private and shy about their sex life, even, it seems, with each other.

Because Kurt is associated by others with the feminine so often, people have generally, stereotypically, expected him to want his partner to take the lead.  When Blaine showed up in season 2, that suspicion seemed confirmed, until Blaine started talking about never being anyone’s boyfriend and Sadie Hawkins and then demonstrated his desire not just for approval, but to be courted.  And once that happened, things got murky.

The murkiness, frankly, has been good, because relationships are complex and as a random Tumblr meme says, asking who’s the boy (or girl) in a gay relationship is like asking which chopstick is the fork. It’s not really a question that makes sense, unless a particular couple wants it to because of dynamics they enjoy.

But the murkiness has also suggested the possibility that neither Kurt and Blaine seem to feel particularly comfortable initiating sexuality between them.  Other than the first time Kurt and Blaine kiss, most of Blaine’s attempts at being sexually assertive end in disaster (Jeremiah) or involve alcohol (Rachel, Kurt at Scandals).  When Kurt tries to discuss whether Blaine wants him in “The First Time,” he’s utterly uncomfortable once that hilarious discussion of masturbation begins.

But none of this is really surprising. 

Just as women are often trained not to express their sexual desires or make the first move, gay teens (and especially gay boys who don’t have the advantages of the level of platonic touch that is socially acceptable between women) are also trained not to show desire.  It’s not safe, polite, or well-received. It is an insult to want.

How many times has Kurt been scolded for having a crush or pursuing so much as a conversation with another boy because of how it will reflect on that boy?  And Blaine arguably had the actual desire to make the first move beaten out of him with what happened at the Sadie Hawkins dance.

That Kurt and Blaine are experiencing anxieties around sexual activity as generally discussed in the context of women makes perfect sense, and shouldn’t actually be feminizing at all.  Yet, because of the way gender comes into play around both characters so often (especially considering the evolution in Blaine’s choices regarding female empowerment songs — first he’s having kept woman fantasies (“Bills, Bills, Bills”) and now he’s telling Kurt he can pay his own way (“It’s Not Right, but It’s Okay”)) a perfectly reasonable problem they’re encountering for a number of not unexpected reasons becomes once again about Glee‘s ongoing examination of how queer men are, and sometimes are not, perceived as men by both themselves and the world around them.

Ultimately, what’s hard about this for me as a queer viewer with a female body and a female partner, isn’t actually that dread reference to lesbian bed death.  What’s hard is that lesbian sexuality is used so often not as a subject unto itself, but a side note to explicate the sexualities of others. 

I joke a lot about how I connect so much with the Kurt and Blaine storyline in part because Patty is so the Kurt to my Blaine (go on, ask me about the time she went to eight stores looking for a limited edition McQueen-inspired nail polish that was sold out everywhere). But I also connect to their storyline because of their chemistry (which I’m only really starting to see between Brittany and Santana) and because their anxieties are often mine.

The lesbian bed death comment underscored that, because it underscored the doubts Kurt and Blaine have both been trained to have on how acceptable their desire is.  Those doubts are what made Sebastian interesting to Blaine earlier in the season, and Chandler interesting to Kurt now.  Open expression of want is hard to look away from when you’ve been told you’ll never hear it and that you shouldn’t engage in it yourself.

Homophobia has a lot of costs — many of them big, public, frightening and violent.  But “Whitney” also shows us one of the small costs of bullying, violence, homophobia, and misogyny in its treatment of Kurt and Blaine by showing us just how hard it is to carry on a relationship when you’re still learning that it’s okay to love and it’s okay to want and it’s okay to have.

It’s remarkably deft.  Now if Glee would just acknowledge that lots of girls of every stripe — cis, trans, and metaphorical — like and have sex too, we’d be golden.  But that can probably really only happen once characters graduate and start escaping Lima; at WMHS femininity (which is generally defined as performativity) is always punished, early and often. 

Just ask Quinn Fabray who has to put her gender on every day. Or Rachel “man hands” Berry who is punished for not being enough of a girl precisely because she is a girl. And how about Mercedes Jones who gets called lazy for being the size and shape typical of far more American women than not? Or Blaine who so often seems almost guilty over how he constructs and is rewarded for a masculinity he doesn’t seem to feel? And what about Kurt Hummel, who never asked for grace and sorrow and a kingdom of dead things he didn’t choose to pull him from the world of men.

Looking at it that way, lesbian bed death, even as it sort of explains it all, is really the least of the reasons no one at WMHS really enjoys being a girl.

No matter how low the expectations or interest level many of us had for the promise of Glee doing disco, the fact is what seem like the biggest throwaways on Glee are often the episodes that matter the most. Some of this is because these episode are often the knitting — closing up plots and setting others in motion — but a lot of it is actually because Glee is a better show when it’s sneaky, and this ridiculous episode is mostly very, very sneaky.

Because at its heart, “Saturday Night Gleever” is about authenticity and arguing about authenticity.  It has to be, because it’s about disco, and that’s what disco makes us do. Because while Will Schuester can talk, relatively correctly, about Saturday Night Fever being the story of a working class guy finding himself, that argument ignores the degree to which disco was, and continues to be, criticized for being more contrived and less inherently meaningful and authentic than the musical and social periods its sandwiched between. 

By encouraging the kids to explore disco, Schuester is providing another not-getting-it teaching moment even if the kids don’t really have the conscious reference points to even know why they’re saying, “disco sucks.”

But no one on Glee has ever had to actually know what’s going on for the show to tell its story (remember, Blaine has no idea what he’s doing… and neither does anyone else), and so it’s absolutely a story about authenticity we get. Most obviously, that shows up in the Wade/Unique plotline which gives America some vague introduction to trans or genderqueer issues without actually using those words and just hinting, somehow, that this is something other than drag.  (I am, as an aside, desperately curious as to how that read to an America that knows about drag but otherwise hasn’t gone beyond binary at all.  Can anyone help me? because I have no idea).

Kurt’s mystified and uncomfortable, but that’s honest too — he didn’t handle bisexuality well either and queer identities outside of his own have always been difficult for him, which makes all the lovely, playful cuts to him and Blaine dancing together during key lines of “More than a Woman” immediately following the discussion about Wade’s/Unique’s identification particularly interesting.

In fact, Kurt’s reaction to Wade and Unique’s performance is also fantastic in how it recalls us to Kurt’s initial reaction to Rory’s falsetto (he was annoyed, because Rory was playing at what Kurt can’t avoid). It also helps explicate some of Kurt’s probably likely feelings behind his own part in the “disco sucks” moment.  After all, it’s a genre which Unique finds a way to own without it being play but something more fundamental, while Kurt is probably stuck feeling irritated, at least if New Directions is as clueless on the difference between falsetto and a countertenor as much of fandom seems to be.

But as Kurt grapples with authenticity around identity and voice (which is a bit shocking since he’s always been our beacon of authenticity), let’s remember that authenticity is also on display for Santana, who wants what she wants at any price; Finn, who wants to stop being told what he wants because he doesn’t want to pay the price of adulthood; Brittany, who isn’t actually playing a game at all (she’s really the way she is, and she can show us the MRI if we don’t believe her); Rachel, who really only wants Finn to find his dream so it can confirm hers; Mercedes, who just wants to be done with WMHS; Schue who who really is a bit like a grown up Jesse St. James because he can’t hear anyone talking over the sound of his own issues (as he demonstrates himself to be an authentically bad ally to Santana and all the WMHS queer kids); and, of course, Blaine who just really, really wants to be liked as much as he likes everything around him.

But while the glee club is on a quest to find itself, most of what we’re witnessing is play, with numbers segueing in and out of heightened realities, dream sequences, and random fantasy moments. Very little of it is real, but that’s hardly surprising, because the kids are mostly still kids, and aren’t out in the wider world yet. 

But the things the kids are playing at with all sincerity — Santana’s devotion to Brittany; Blaine’s ridiculous heart-eyed trust for Kurt in particular — are there not just to make us coo with delight (it was an often adorable episode), but to set us up for all the grown-up stuff that’s about to come crashing in on them in a way that shares at least some similarities with the Finchel storyline.

Grownup relationships in the grownup world are hard. And while the Finchel problem comes from wanting to be too grownup too soon without doing the grownup work of communication and knowing the self (which is to say the Finchel relationship may be showing us a real thing that happens but remains internally inauthentic), the Klaine and Brittania problems are going to come from that “no one can touch us” thing both couples think they’ve got going on. 

Freedom, distance from Ohio, and other people like them — pretty much everything that the gay kids pin their It Gets Better dreams on — are all also about come with their own headaches, betrayals and questions about the self. I suspect those issues, which will also help set up some of the season four themes, will be on full display in the next two episodes. 

From here on out, odds are nothing is funny, and the characters who know themselves will continue to school those who don’t, much as Wade/Unique does to Kurt. Authenticity will win the day (we’re looking at you, NYADA auditions), but some people will graduate still not realizing just how much they’re lying to themselves (hey there, Finn) while others will increasingly be shown to have it even less figured out than already revealed (oh Blaine, if only Cooper was your biggest demon).

Mostly though, for an episode with lots of delicious detail and micro-continuity glory that will probably matter more to the arc in retrospect once the season ends than we realize now, this episode was just painfully, painfully fun and has fandom asking all the best questions — like just what (or who) was Kurt thinking of when he eyed those sparkly platforms Sue wanted sent to Wade/Unique?

But all long-legged fantasies aside, fandom’s right, of course, that those platforms matter. Look at the composition of the shot, with the cheerleading trophy showing a female figure with wings (evoking faerie, again) in front of the glittery shoes.

Because let’s remember, the ruby slippers only became such for the film, and that Kurt’s always enraptured with his possible idendities in Oz. If home isn’t a place (and there’s no place like it), as Rachel tells Finn, but a person, isn’t the most fundamental home oneself? There’s that authenticity question again, this time sparked by Kurt’s sense of play even about serious things, that reminds the audience in a small, graceful and almost kind way that the people we pretend to be matter too.

(p.s., I use Wade/Unique throughout this piece because the character presents us with two identities and is dealt with throughout the script as such. It may be that we should be using Unique and female pronouns at all times; it may be that Wade/Unique is bi- or other gendered in a way where that might not be the best answer either, and I don’t feel comfortable making that decision when it’s intentionally unclear in the script, and I suspect the character and the related identity questions will be back soon, possibly with more clarification.  And yes, as usual, I have a theory).

If you follow me on Tumblr, you know I’ve had a not so secret desire to write a post here entitled “Kurt Hummel is Totally Having a Baby” ever since we were treated first to his crack about he and the girls not getting their periods until the end of the month. It was something which was only moderately funny until it was followed up in the Valentine’s Day episode with his shout of “tin roof rusted” during “Love Shack.” If you don’t hang out on Urban Dictionary, or aren’t of a certain age, I am here to inform you that, that particular non-sequitor has come to mean unexpectedly pregnant.

But what in the world could this particular bit of hilarity (which arguably started with Sue’s rejection of Kurt’s sperm during the opening salvos of her baby quest) possibly mean other than another excuse for me to argue that Glee, which is often criticized for continuity problems, has some of the best, if most peculiarly detail-oriented, continuity on television?

Odds are, probably nothing, but it did get me thinking about the ways in which ideas of obstruction and control are structured around gender on the show. Because in the world of William McKinley High School and Lima, Ohio, women — or more accurately, femininity — is punished early and often, usually by events that, rightly or wrongly, come as abrupt surprises to the affected parties. For the women, and the femininely associated of Glee, it’s tin roof rusted time all the time.

Quinn is probably the woman on the show most severely and obviously punished this way. While the possibility of pregnancy and the risks of texting while driving are arguably obvious to those of us sitting at home watching TV, they’re not necessarily obvious to a 17-year-old girl living in an environment where she’s sure the greatest thing she will ever accomplish is captaining the Cheerios while she dates, among others, a guy who thinks he got her pregnant via a hot tub.

Quinn’s pain may not really have external sources, but it seems so to her, and it certainly takes her by surprise over and over again.

Santana is another woman who gets hit hard by surprise. In her case, it’s in the form of outing, not just because Finn fights back when she starts in on him, but because what Finn says gets overheard and amplified in a way no one could predict. It’s not that it’s all over school, or all over town; it’s that it’s all over the congressional district.

Kurt, too, who is identified with and identifies with (but not, seemingly, as) the girls he socializes with, also experiences misery from unexpected sources: even when he seems used to the dumpster-related bullying of the pilot, he’s still startled when Dave slams him into lockers, knocks that cake topper from his hand, and, of course, kisses him. There’s little there, in his father’s heart attack (which positions him as an even more obvious care-taker), or in his election to the post of Junior Prom Queen, Kurt could possibly see coming (unless Kurt’s an Ugly Betty fan, in which case he should have totally had a clue).

Blaine, despite the passing narrative that surrounded him early in the season, and which I suspect we’re not done with yet, also has this femininely associated experience. Not only is there the Sadie Hawkins backstory, but the turn Sebastian’s predatory actions take is one he literally doesn’t see coming, and both sets of events clearly position Blaine as someone terrible things no one can prepare for happen to. That’s what it means on Glee to be a girl.

These sorts of events, and others (Brittany experiences “alien invasion;” Sunshine gets sent to a crack house; Beiste has her boyfriend stolen by Sue; and Rachel, even when nothing is wrong, is often convinced she is being actively obstructed by external forces she cannot effectively respond to) along with the agency feminine and femininely-associated characters are often denied on the show through circumstance, tells us something incredibly grim. But it is something that, I think, is in keeping with the idea of despair that the show has painted around the concept of Lima as a place to escape from, even as it claws at your ankles in every moment you’re busy trying to get out: to be a woman is to have things done to you and the only choices you have aren’t about changing those things, but merely about how you respond to the consequences.

And so we see Quinn beg, borrow, and engage criminally around access to her daughter. We watch Santana blackmail Dave into creating a quasi-safe closeted space for them both. And we watch Kurt bend not bow to circumstance, over and over again; often by keeping secrets and accepting, no matter how angrily, that pain is something he’s going to have to necessarily live with.

Really, it’s one more way in which Glee talks about consent issues without really talking about them, and it contrasts pretty markedly with how the pain the men on Glee experience is shown.

Because, while it certainly doesn’t make the pain less, the level of surprise when it comes to masculine pain on Glee, tends to be low (although this is not nearly as constant as the degree to which the female characters get hit with surprise!).

Puck gets sent to juvie because of his own choices; Will Schuester faces career dilemmas; Finn Hudson is in agony about a football scholarship he had to know he was never a shoo-in to get; Mike is in pain about parental disapproval that is anything but news to him.

But pain, and a lack of hope, for the guys of Lima is expected, and things only ever go really pear-shaped and get really scary when the unexpected befalls them, because its horror compounded: pain plus the suspicion and taint of stereotypical femininity — helplessness — implied by the mode of its arrival.

Certainly, we can look at what happens with Dave in “On My Way” and his response to it as particularly emblematic, not only of this dichotomy, but of the transitional and liminal spaces the show’s gay male characters often occupy in regard to these gendered modes of punishment, while the queer female characters remain firmly placed amongst the feminine, which is both an interesting comment on where women are in the privilege hierarchy and also frustrating for me as a gay woman who is not consistently femininely-identified.

As a guy who is both closeted and could pass as straight even if he weren’t, when Dave gets hit with the public, wide-spectrum discovery of his homosexuality, he loses the privileges not just of heterosexuality in the world, but masculinity in the structure of Glee. Things happen which he does not anticipate, he is beset by external forces, and his situation goes explicitly from that of someone who formerly executed his pain upon others, to someone things happen to.

The scenario is arguably as feminizing to him as the word scrawled on his locker in pink spray paint. After all, the public response to his homosexuality arguably convinces him of the thing his internalized homophobia and closely linked misogyny had probably been suggesting to him for a long time — that to be a gay man, isn’t to be a man at all (something not true, but seemingly true even to some of the most enlightened in Lima).

Dave responds to this by attempting to reclaim masculinity and control in the only way he can imagine at that moment — he dresses in a suit (reversing the change from monster to individual complex human in his revelation to Kurt, by explicitly recostuming himself, this time with masculinity) and trying to kill himself.

It’s a grim narrative, not just for Dave, but for everyone trapped in the stories Glee is telling. Those with feminine associations have come to expect that terrible things will happen to them to the point that they almost shrug many of these occurrences off; while those with masculine associations have become convinced that the worst thing in the world is to be a girl. And it’s a belief which isn’t just about misogyny in the world of Glee‘s Lima, OH, but also, seemingly, about common sense, which is what makes the cycle of belief illustrated so insidiously difficult to break.

As the senior class of 2012 at WMHS gets ready to graduate, I feel like I need a score card for who says in despair, “I knew this would happen” and who says in shock, “I don’t understand how this could have happened.”

In the second column? I’m expecting a check mark for Rachel Berry when she doesn’t get into NYADA.

One of the things I try not to do here is write too many posts about what I’m going to write about, as opposed to just writing the posts. And wow, what a terrible sentence that is to untangle.

But so much of what I want to write about regarding tonight’s episode of Glee is material that was in the smallest of details.

I want to talk about how the broadness of the show’s borrowed musical form means that much of the writing is done not by the writers but by the costumers and set dressers.

I want to talk about Blaine’s gender identity, again.

And I want to talk about, as I suspected I would have the opportunity to a few weeks ago when tonight’s narrative seemed to be coming down the pike, Kurt’s relationship with Death.

But it’s really hard to do any of those things without first acknowledging that tonight’s episode contained some very powerful and surprisingly visceral content regarding teen suicide. If you haven’t watched it yet, be aware that what is shown is more intense, and arguably graphic, than what I think we’re generally inclined to expect out of Glee.

I’m glad the show made the choices it made around the topic, even when the results of those choices sent messages (if stories send messages at all) that can be considered murky. I happen to like murky stories and while this was what we call “A Very Special Episode,” it still wasn’t an after-school special, so it worked for me. But quite understandably, everyone’s mileage may vary extremely widely on this one.

Because I want this to be a conversation somewhere other than Tumblr, it’s worth noting that the episode in which the show’s two main couples — Rachel and Finn, and Kurt and Blaine — lose their virginities received a warning card about its content that was displayed before the episode began.

The losing of said virginities in that episode, for the record, included a few conversations about the obvious topic, one instance of the word masturbation, some fully-clothed reclining on a bed, a bit of hand-holding, and Darren Criss’s eyelashes.

It was the least graphic thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It was barely a metaphor for sex, no matter how well executed; and it certainly didn’t portray sex, even soft-focus TV-style fake sex.

But tonight’s episode, which contained one of the most shocking representations of suicide I’ve ever seen on screen? No warning card for strong content or suggestion that this might be an episode that parents want to watch with their kids.

I don’t love a lot of the restrictions that exist around television content. I also don’t love a lot of the discussions around the topic, although they are necessary ones; they’re just ones that I find hard to do while also trying to deal with stories largely from their internals, and this is a moment to admit that weakness.

But this lack of a warning card tonight, especially when compared with “The First Time”? Is jarring. What happens in the first ten minutes of the episode is the type of material I am used to seeing warning cards for before episodes of other programs. So why wasn’t it there? And why was it there in the least sexy episode faintly about sex ever? Because I’m used to sex-related warning cards too, but not for content like that presented in “The First Time.”

Obviously, those questions are rhetorical, and we can all guess the answers (or discuss them in comments). But for now, I wanted to acknowledge this before taking some time to sit with the episode, because it brought home the thing that haunts me the most about the struggle for any sort of equality — not everyone gets to see the battle won, and that’s so agonizingly unfair.

In the next couple of days, I’ll write a few posts about some of the gorgeous detail work in “On My Way” that speaks to the themes I’ve been writing about here all season. But tonight, I need to pause, and I kind of need to say that I’m doing so aloud.

Two quick Thursday afternoon followups to some of our recent Glee discussions:

First, the detectives over at CSI Tumblr have been having some fun figuring out what’s on Blaine’s bookshelf. Aside from toy robots and old film-based cameras, they’ve also identified some SAT study guides, a book on the American theatre, and what someone is pretty sure is a history textbook. That isn’t the awesome part though.

The awesome part is not only does he have Mockingjay, he has What If… You Broke All the Rules, a-choose-your-own-adventure book in which the reader is a teenage girl neglected by her parents who must decide which boy or fabulous group of friends to spend her spring break with.

Next to that? Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J.Edgar Hoover. I don’t need to give you Hoover history here, do I?

The job of set dressers isn’t, really, to be ready for CSI Tumblr, but to make things look good at the level of detail the TV audience is supposed to see things at. That said, HD TV and digital fandom really changes the game, and I love that the folks working on Glee are not only hilarious, but seem to agree with me that maybe Kurt’s not the character we should be asking gender identity questions about. Blaine passes as a lot of things, and maybe that’s not just straight if he wants to; remember the Sadie Hawkins dance?

On a completely separate note, that does however touch on this season’s themes around passing, biyuti has written about Sebastian’s bad behavior and subsequent reactions in the context of race. Because, of course, it’s not just that he says unbelievably offensive stuff to Santana; Blaine’s not white (at least as of this writing, more on that in a moment) either, and while Dalton looks a lot more diverse than the private school I went to growing up, that still doesn’t mean that what’s happening with the power structures in this episode isn’t all about race too.

Meanwhile, for those who haven’t heard (and remember, this is not a spoiler-free blog), the very white Matt Bomer has been cast as Blaine’s brother for an episode airing in April. Considering that Glee‘s canon has glancingly acknowledged Blaine has having a non-white background (Rachel wanting to have his “vaguely Eurasian babies”), a lot of folks are head-tilting at this choice, especially when Glee has often used details of the actors’ personal lives in crafting character backgrounds (i.e., both Jenna Ushkowitz and Tina, the character she plays, are adopted). Stay tuned….

While most of what I had to say about last night’s episode of Glee remains firmly centered around “Smooth Criminal,” which was just as creepy in context as out of it, I did want to briefly mention how intensely focused the whole episode really was on gendered types of violence and gendered responses to that violence, with most of it being in the realm of the feminine, despite most of the players being men.

The slushie meant for Kurt that Blaine steps in front of contains rock salt, which heats when it comes into contact with water and ice. This implies strongly that Sebastian’s initial goal was for Kurt to experience chemical burns, and it certainly evokes a type of violence generally directed at women by men and that the media tells us transpires because those women do not obey the wishes of those men.

This is violence about damaging the one asset these women are believed to have (appeal to men) and publicly shaming them through the lasting mark of that violence, and in Glee, it hardly represents the first time that Sebastian objects to Kurt both on the basis of the charms he holds for Blaine and for the degree to which he is not straight-acting.

That Blaine’s eyesight is then damaged when he engages in a traditionally masculine act (I’m sorry, Glee is broad, and I have to use a lot of normative gender expectations to take it apart) of protecting a lover, then serves to recode Blaine as the feminine, thanks to the long history of, as an anonymous user pointed out to me on Tumblr, blindness and blinding being used as a metaphor for impotence.

From there, we witness the strongly implied violence of “Smooth Criminal” in which both Santana and Sebastian are using sexuality in their duel, but in which only one of them, Sebastian, is able to successfully imply the perpetration of acts of sexual violence through that performance.

When Sebastian slushies Santana at the end of that number, the same form of violence against women by men seen in “Bad” is again evoked, but he doesn’t even bother with the rock salt this time; Santana isn’t worth the trouble, perhaps because her lesbianism in Sebastian’s eyes already renders her of little use to men, even, or perhaps particularly, to a predatory gay one.

Responses to this violence from the New Directions team is also highly gendered. Multiple people on multiple occasions talk about how the police won’t be interested in, or believe, what was done to Blaine. This includes, most notably, Schue’s attempt to minimize it in a kids-will-be-kids way and move on, and Kurt’s privately furious catharsis which later gives way to a brave-faced comment on rising above, largely because that seems to be the only weapon he has.

Meanwhile, Santana, we later find out, wasn’t actually trying to fight Sebastian on his own terms of overt sexual aggression, so much as she was both literally and metaphorically taking one for the team in order to get him to confess on tape. A woman fights a man by appearing to yield; it gets her close enough to do real damage.

This constant metaphor of rape and response to it in the episode is even underscored by small, seemingly throwaway lines, like Brittany saying, “I don’t know how,” when told to lock the door to the choir room. This is further highlighted by the contrast of Artie, who has been constantly used to explicitly define what masculinity is and isn’t this season, blowing up at Schue for his lip-service sympathy.

But outside of the near explicit implications of Sebastian’s actions, most of the episode’s masculine violence is metaphorical and unrealized from the dancing-fighting of “Bad” to Artie’s fantasy sequence.

Lima, OH is a world where people only dream about conventional forms of power and nearly everyone must accept violation. By bringing back the slushies, Glee‘s original iconic bullying instrument, in this form, Glee tells us that all of this bullying has been serious (and sexual) business all along, and that the worst thing anyone can be in this place is feminine and feminized; the problem, however, is that nearly everyone is. There are almost no men, and remarkably few honorable ones, here; the brutality of WMHS and of Lima don’t allow there to be.

Which is really why the ridiculousness of Quinn getting into Yale feels so good. She’s the character most explicitly punished for the feminine on Glee, and so she’s the first one victoriously out. Kurt, the character next most explicitly punished for the feminine, also has his huge NYADA finalist victory moment in this episode, in a way that, unlike Rachel’s victory letter, is untainted.

Glee has always been a story about a terrible place in which to be a girl, or gay, or disabled, or different in any way. That makes people angry often, largely because the show doesn’t tell us bullying is bad, but merely shows us it is awful and exists largely without correction. But as the adult world encroaches as the stakes get bigger, at least 3.11 reminds us that the powers that be know the only way up is out.

Finally, on an almost, but not entirely, tangential note, I just want to point you to the faerie trinkets that are currently adorning Kurt’s locker. Rae Votta, who also writes stuff about Glee and other pop-culture interests, pointed them out to me last night, and I haven’t stopped thinking about them since. They seem to be references queer, magical, and feminine, as if they are the small tokens by which Kurt, who seems to always be in exile from something (a dead mother, his straight friends, his horrible high school, his gay fantasy land, a still faintly out of reach New York City), always remembers who, and what, he is.