Can consent exist in ‘Severance’?

Severance’s second season delivers a pair of complementary intercourse scenes that add additional depth to the present’s dialog round bodily autonomy and consent.

Episode 4, titled “Woe’s Hollow,” sees Innie Mark (Adam Scott) have intercourse with Helly (Britt Decrease) for the primary time in the course of the Out of doors Retreat and Crew-Constructing Incidence (ORTBO). Besides he is not with Helly in any respect — he is along with her Outie Helena Eagan, who’s pretending to be Helly in an effort to control the Macrodata Refinement Innies. Severance contrasts their intimacy with a horrifying dream Irving (John Turturro) has, highlighting that one thing is off even earlier than we get the Helly/Helena reveal.

Two episodes later, as soon as Helly has returned to Lumon, she and Mark resolve to reclaim the reminiscence Helena has taken from them. They’ve intercourse in an unused workplace, utilizing a tarp to recreate the tent the place Helena and Mark slept collectively. The result’s far sweeter than episode 4’s — no Irving nightmares right here!

But every intercourse scene raises questions concerning the function of consent in a present the place you may sever a part of your self and primarily create a brand new individual inside your physique. There are such a lot of ranges right here, from deceit surrounding Innie/Outie identities to the expertise of a dormant consciousness throughout and after intercourse.

“One of the common mistakes about consent is that it can be understood as a black and white, yes or no decision,” Michele Meek, affiliate professor of communications at Bridgewater State College and writer of Consent Tradition and Teen Movies, instructed Mashable. “So what this show is really raising are some of the complexities of consent that make us really uncomfortable, but actually get right to the heart of some of the questionable and concerning yellow ‘proceed with caution’ areas are.”

So what are the ethics of intercourse in a severed world? And is consent even potential in Severance?

Helena and Mark’s intercourse scene raises questions on mistaken identification and knowledgeable consent.

The Helena and Mark intercourse scene might really feel unusual within the second as a consequence of its juxtaposition with Irving’s nightmare, but it surely develops an additional layer of discomfort as soon as we be taught that Mark wasn’t having intercourse with Helly in any respect. Their intimacy was beneath false pretenses, making it a violation of belief and lessening his company. In line with Deliberate Parenthood, sexual consent is outlined as “freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific,” so Helena’s deceit makes knowledgeable consent an impossibility for Mark on this state of affairs.

Whereas the severance process is totally fictional, Meek likens the scene to the real-world risk of somebody pondering they have been having intercourse with one individual, just for them to unknowingly be having intercourse with their twin as an alternative. “Under that circumstance, I could imagine that we would feel really uncomfortable with the fact that this person was consenting at the time, but that wasn’t the person who they thought they were,” Meek mentioned. “So most of us would read that as non-consent.”

The Mark and Helena incident falls beneath the authorized and philosophical time period of conditional consent, which specifies that if somebody consents to an act beneath sure circumstances. When these should not met — like Mark consenting to have intercourse with Helly, just for her to truly be Helena — the act is non-consensual. If a spot consists of conditional consent of their laws, deceit like Helena’s might legally be thought-about rape, making this scene a authorized difficulty in addition to an moral one.

One other worrying angle to the Severance intercourse scene is the truth that Helena is utilizing Mark for her personal ends. She’s surveilling the Innies from inside, however she’s additionally making the most of Mark’s emotions for Helly in an effort to expertise the sort of romantic relationship she is probably not afforded in her outdoors life as a high-level Eagan. There’s additionally a vengeful high quality to her actions: In having intercourse with Mark earlier than Helly, Helena can one-up her Innie, with whom she already has a tumultuous relationship.

“The fact that she’s using him makes us really uncomfortable when we think about consent, because it feels unethical to have sex with someone for some other end that they don’t know about,” Meek mentioned.

The Severance writing group didn’t take these questions of consent frivolously. In an interview with TVLine concerning the Mark and Helena intercourse scene, Severance creator and showrunner Dan Erickson mentioned they “talked about it quite extensively.”

“In a way, both [Mark and Helly] have been used,” he continued. “Mark thought he was with one person when he was actually sort of with a different person. And then for Helly, it’s a very troubling thing to know that something like that happened without you being there.”

Mashable High Tales

Helly’s realization of that reality performs out in devastating trend in episode 6, “Attila,” as she reckons with the truth that whereas her physique might have that reminiscence, she by no means will. “What sucks is she got to have that, and I didn’t,” she tells Mark. “That she used me to trick my friends, used my body to get close to you.”

This speak spurs the 2 to have intercourse and create a reminiscence for Helly. Severance frames the scene as tender, and understandably so: These are the romantic leads of the present! But the scene additionally raises a difficult new dilemma. What does intercourse between severed people imply for his or her dormant consciousnesses, who’re unable to consent?

Helly and Mark’s intercourse scene provides a wrinkle to consent and consciousness.

Mark, Helly, and Helena aren’t the one Severance characters affected by the “Woe’s Hollow” intercourse scene. Outie Mark can be concerned, even when he wasn’t awake on the time. The identical goes for him and Helena throughout Mark and Helly’s intercourse scene. They is probably not acutely aware, however they’re in these our bodies as nicely. Does this lack of consciousness from one inhabitant of a severed physique then render each sexual encounter a severed individual has non-consensual? Mark and Helly’s encounter is definitely introduced as consensual in “Attila,” with the 2 even pausing to verbally affirm that they wish to preserve going — a key addition, as consent is ongoing and could be withdrawn at any level. However the query of their Outies lingers.

Does this lack of consciousness from one inhabitant of a severed physique then render each sexual encounter a severed individual has non-consensual?

“One of the major questions of consent has always been, ‘Is consent what we say and do? Or is it what we think and feel?”” Meek mentioned. “That’s a very complex dichotomy. When we talk about things like affirmative consent, what we’re really prioritizing is verbal action-oriented consent. And while that’s really important, I think that most of us understand consent as an internal yes or no, so we can imagine a situation where someone says, ‘yes’ and means ‘no,’ or vice versa. I think that what Severance is highlighting is this real clear distinction between mind-body consent.”

An Innie or Outie having no recollection of their alter ego’s sexual previous is one factor, however Severance has proven repeatedly that bodily circumstances transfer throughout the severance barrier. In Season 1, a information report reveals {that a} Lumon worker turned pregnant throughout her time on the Severed Ground. Sudden being pregnant with no reminiscence of the way it occurred is a horror story irrespective of the way you spin it.

Equally, in “Attila,” Outie Burt’s (Christopher Walken) husband Fields (John Noble) broaches the topic of intercourse throughout a dinner with Outie Irving (John Turturro). He is conscious that Burt and Irving’s Innies had a relationship, however not the extent of it. “Do you think you two ever made love at work?” Fields asks, including: “There is a non-zero chance that the two of you had unprotected sex, and so I felt the right to ask.”

The unstated fear about STIs lingers, including to the mind-body dilemma of intercourse in Severance. Think about an Innie or Outie waking up within the Lumon elevator with an STI that they could not clarify, or, just like the unnamed Season 1 worker, discovering out that they have been all of the sudden pregnant despite the fact that they themselves hadn’t been sexually energetic. Would these not represent a violation of bodily autonomy, irrespective of how consensual the inciting intercourse had been?

Maybe the closest analogy we’ve got in actual life to the state of affairs of Severance‘s sexually energetic severed characters is intercourse beneath the affect to the purpose of blacking out, the place somebody could also be unable to recollect the intercourse act itself however can nonetheless really feel its bodily influence. However even that is not an ideal comparability, as a result of in Severance there’ll all the time be one other consciousness inside the physique that will have consented to intercourse.

“If you are not of sound mind or body, then you cannot consent,” Meek mentioned. “You can’t say yes with a gun to your head. Same thing if you’re completely intoxicated or passed out or not conscious in some way, you can’t consent. That’s where we get the sense that this is an obvious case in the show, because they’re not fully conscious, so how could they consent? But of course, there’s more complexity here, too. I think that the whole point of it is that Severance is raising the question of, ‘where do you draw the line here?'”

Severance has all the time been about consent, however Season 2’s intercourse scenes deliver that dialog to the forefront.

Whereas Severance‘s Season 2 intercourse scenes have highlighted points about sexual consent inside the sequence, they’re removed from the primary time that the present has addressed issues of consent in different conditions.

In Severance‘s very first episode, Helly watches a pre-taped video of Helena earlier than present process the severance process. In it, she reads a press release that claims, “I give consent for my perceptual chronologies to be surgically split, separating my memories between my work life and my personal life.”

Presumably, Mark, Irving, and Dylan’s (Zach Cherry) Outies all needed to learn the identical assertion by which they consent to the results of the severance process. However studying one assertion and signing one Lumon contract doesn’t make for complete consent.

“Consent is a constant and has to be constantly renegotiated and updated. There’s no presuming consent,” Meek instructed Mashable.

But presuming consent is precisely what Lumon is doing on daily basis. They take the Outies’ choice to bear severance as a minimize and dry “yes” to do no matter they need with their our bodies and Innies on the Severed Ground.

Lumon breaches that consent in a number of methods all through Seasons 1 and a couple of. Within the sequence premiere, Helly throws a speaker at Mark’s brow. When Mark leaves work that day with a minor head damage, Lumon tells him that he was harm in a fall. The lie is a violation of Mark’s belief and consent to work in an workplace the place he will not come to bodily hurt. It is also one other reminder of the mind-body divide at play: Outie Mark cannot bear in mind how he sustained the top damage, however his physique bears the mark.

The Time beyond regulation Contingency is an additional instance of Lumon overstepping its bounds, a option to hijack employees’ our bodies at will. In Season 2, episode 2, Outie Mark claims he by no means knew concerning the OTC. Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) informs him that particulars of the OTC have been in his hiring paperwork, however a onetime acknowledgment of the OTC doesn’t suggest Mark or the opposite Outies would consent to its use down the road since, once more, consent is ongoing, even in non-sexual contexts.

These moments show that Severance has all the time questioned the ethics of consent because it pertains to the severance process. However the addition of those difficult intercourse scenes in Season 2 — one thing the present already toed the road with in Season 1’s Waffle Social gathering — permits for a pure heightening of those dilemmas, as we so typically place consent in a sexual context.

The intimacy of Severance‘s intercourse scenes can also push us to attract arduous moral traces about who’s within the flawed and who’s a sufferer, regardless of the purposeful complexities Severance has constructed into these scenes. (For her deceit and her function at Lumon, Helena definitely looks as if essentially the most clear-cut wrongdoer of the bunch.) However extra importantly, these scenes’ moral intricacies drive us to suppose tougher concerning the troubling implications of severance. The idea is already unnerving to begin with, but it surely grows increasingly so from episode to episode. With that elevated scrutiny, and with Severance‘s ever-intensifying research of bodily autonomy, the present invitations us to additional study Lumon’s true motives, and the way its management winds itself into even essentially the most private of conditions.

Severance Season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV+, with a brand new episode each Friday.