eighthsense

Welcome to MDL comment section where infidelity outranks abuse in the hierarchy of outrage. Where people are united to criticise hypocrisy of women in this drama while silently accepting the existence and actions of pedoflies. I am not here to discuss whether cheating and sexual violence belong in the same moral category. I’m pointing out the public reaction to them. It is telling that the priority of some people lie in the judgment of a "messy" cheating woman over the systemic reality of assault. Honour drama matters because it refuses to give us "perfect" victims and some people seem more disturbed by that imperfection than by the violence itself.

—-
SELECTIVE MORAL OUTRAGE VS. STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE.
My question is does a character’s moral failure invalidate a story’s thematic argument?
Reducing a drama about trauma, coercion, sexual violence against women and minors, pedophilia, and female solidarity to “she cheated, therefore the show is trash” is intellectually lazy and critically shallow. Cheating is being treated as the central moral failure of the drama and SA is being sidelined in discussion. Honour isn’t a tale about infidelity, it’s a story about how past abuse shapes lives, how women navigate power and vulnerability, and how solidarity and resilience become survival tools.

To focus solely on Hyeonjin’s affair is to ignore the narrative’s core. The hypocrisy is the point. These women are legal warriors for justice who are simultaneously messy, dishonest, and compromised. This isn’t a narrative flaw… it’s realism. Trauma doesn’t produce moral saints, it produces survivors navigating shame and survival. That does not diminish the responsibility for their actions. The cheating storyline is ethically messy. Hyeonjin is not written as triumphant or empowered in her betrayal, she is destabilised. The encounter itself is narratively uncomfortable: she says no, attempts to leave, and is kissed again before ultimately giving in. That sequence introduces ambiguity around agency, coercion, emotional vulnerability, and unresolved attachment.

They are not romanticising cheating. It reads as a moment of weakness entangled with power dynamics and unresolved past trauma. The subsequent lies, the hidden earring, the possibility of pregnancy… these are not celebratory plot devices. They are destabilisers. The drama does not present adultery as liberation. They are not offering her a "get out of jail free" card, she is clearly driving toward a cliff of social and personal consequences. Presence of moral failure among the protagonists complicates the message, it does not ERASE it. The story depicts a survivor who is a brilliant advocate for others but a fragmented, self sabotaging disaster in her private life. To demand she be a "moral saint" to be a worthy protagonist is to demand a fiction that doesn't exist in the real world of trauma. We can hold her accountable for the betrayal of her marriage while simultaneously recognising that her personal failures do not justify or diminish the systemic violence she fights against.

Criticise Hyeonjin. Dislike her. Hold her accountable for the betrayal of her marriage, the narrative certainly does. But to let her infidelity become the only takeaway from a story about the industrial scale violation of women and minors is fundamentally dishonest. In dramas like Penthouse/ Love in the Moonlight/ Shine/ Eve, the infidelity outrage is the point of the exercise. For this drama to be discredited, it would need to trivialise sexual violence, glamorise coercion, or selectively condemn certain moral failures while excusing others without consequence. The cheating arc generates tension, fallout, and instability rather than reward. It complicates the characters’ credibility but does not erase the seriousness of the issues they confront in court.

We should be capable of holding a character’s personal failure in one hand and the world’s systemic cruelty in the other without dropping the latter because the former makes us uncomfortable.

—-
PERFECT VICTIM
Focusing on SA victims in this drama, I want to make one thing clear: abuse is defined by the actions of the abuser, not the personality of the abused. Must a victim be perfect to deserve sympathy? Does a woman’s imperfection erase the harm done to her? If she isn’t universally likable, are her bruises, fear, and trauma any less real?

Societies often measure women against an “perfect victim” standard: she must be passive, gentle, sexually restrained but not prudish, emotional but not hysterical, composed but not cold; she must have no prior mistakes, no anger, no contradictions, no complex history. People subconsciously look for reasons to distance themselves from discomfort by asking, “What did she do?” rather than “What was done to her?” suggesting if the woman harmed is even worthy of belief. Sympathy is granted most easily to those who fit a narrow image of innocence. The myth of the perfect victim allows people to believe that violence only happens to the exceptionally innocent, and therefore can be avoided by behaving correctly.

People find it hard to believe victims because believing them is uncomfortable. It forces people to accept that harm can come from ordinary people and that it could happen to anyone, including themselves. Doubting the victim feels safer and easier, and blaming them gives people a sense of control, as if bad things only happen when someone “does something wrong.” Many also misunderstand how trauma works, mistaking confusion, fear, or emotional reactions for lying /exaggeration /weakness. Public cases involving women such as Tara Reade, Amber Heard, Angelina Jolie, Christine Blasey Ford, Chanel Miller, and Anita Hill reveal how credibility is filtered through race, sexuality, likability, timing, demeanor, and presumed motive. Credibility cannot be based on how likeable someone is. Imperfection becomes evidence, anger becomes instability, sexual history becomes motive, delay becomes fabrication, survival strategies become aggression. The demand for “purity” is less about truth and more about preserving social comfort.

“If the victim is flawed, the world feels orderly. If she is difficult, perhaps he isn’t so bad.”

A woman can be brash, ambitious, selfish, queer, contradictory, difficult and still be abused. Suggesting otherwise shifts responsibility from the abuser to the abused, inflicting a secondary violence by silencing survivors who fear disbelief and internalise blame because they don’t fit the archetype they were taught. A victim deserves sympathy not because she is pure, but because she is human and her flaws, whatever they are, do not retroactively justify someone abusing her.

Showing empathy to victims doesn’t mean ignoring fairness, it means remembering that real people are carrying real trauma. We should be more outraged by acts of violence than by the imperfections of those who survive them. Sexual violence is a choice made by the perpetrator, not a mistake or weakness of the survivor. Instead of questioning what the victim did or didn’t do, we need to ask why someone thought it was okay to violate another person. It’s time to assign the blame where it belongs… on the perpetrators and not the survivors. Holding perpetrators accountable, rather than scrutinising survivors, is how we show true justice and compassion.

—-
MAGNITUDE OF SA
“He was my friend/ relative/ father/ brother/ colleague.” ONE IN THREE women can say this. Violence at that scale is not an anomaly, not a “few bad men”, not a misfortune. It’s a pattern and patterns are built and tolerated by societies.

While you are reading this, 8 more crimes against women will be recorded in my country. Every 16 minutes, a man in my country makes a decision to violate a woman. 86 new victims every single day. We panic over rare dangers, redesign airports after one incident. If 86 bridges collapsed in one day, we would call it a national emergency. But 86 women being assaulted? It has become a statistic and routine news cycle. Just a number we learn to live with. For every case you hear about, there are many you don’t. Silence is not absence. People think of SA as isolated incidents, but for many women it functions like an atmosphere, shaping daily calculations about what to wear, how to walk, who to call, and when to share their location. It is not just something that happens occasionally; it quietly structures ordinary behavior, from gripping keys between fingers to texting, “I got home.”

—-
MEN’S BRIGHT FUTURE
Are women’s lives and suffering expendable when weighed against a man’s “bright future”?
As someone who listens to true crime all the time, it’s impossible not to notice how often phrases like “boys will be boys”or “but he has a bright future” are used to excuse harm. They frame cruelty as immaturity, entitlement as potential, and accountability as something unfair or excessive. By doing this, people protect the idea of who the man could be rather than what he actually did.

What’s disturbing is that these excuses almost always come at the victim’s expense. No one asks about their bright future, their lost sense of safety, or the life altered by someone else’s actions. Instead, the narrative centers on preserving male promise and comfort. Society is often quicker to mourn a perpetrator’s consequences than to acknowledge a victim’s suffering. Her losses are emotionalised and minimised and his losses are treated as tragic and unjust.
This is because systems of power have been built to protect men’s futures over women’s safety. When accountability is seen as cruelty and harm is seen as collateral damage, it decides whose life is worth defending. Until harm to women is treated as more serious than discomfort to men, the message remains the same: women are expected to pay the price so men can keep theirs intact.

Men especially those with status, authority, talent, or social connections are seen as more valuable to protect than to hold accountable. Admitting harm would mean questioning respected institutions, friendships, families, or one’s own judgment, so people minimise, excuse, or deny the behavior instead. There’s also a long standing culture that normalised male aggression and entitlement while doubting or silencing those who speak up, especially when it would “ruin a good man’s life.”

—-
GLAMORISATION AND DESENSITISATION OF SA IN FILM.
There is long tradition in television where sexual violence appears less as a lived trauma and more as narrative currency. Violation often functions as ignition and what lingers is not the wound, but the spectacle that follows it. When violation repeatedly serves as character development, as motivation, as spectacle, people expect it as part of storytelling grammar. The trope embeds itself quietly, shaping cultural assumptions about whose pain advances the plot and whose pain is secondary to it.

Experimental evidence suggests that repeated exposure to sexually violent films can dull emotional responses, reduce empathy for victims, and lessen the perceived seriousness of abuse. Sexually degrading portrayals may also shape beliefs about sexual assault, reinforce objectification, and foster harmful attitudes toward women. Research indicates that sexually aggressive media can affect not only men’s attitudes but also women’s psychological responses and self perception. Media can distort understandings of consent and responsibility y normalising gender stereotypes, blaming victims, or presenting male aggression without critique.

I also think romanticisation of SA plays a huge role in desensitisation. 365 days, Ffifty shades of grey, GOT, After and many other films aestheticise dominance, persistence, and forced intimacy as proof of desire. Threat becomes foreplay and control becomes charisma. Resistance is framed as tension and coercion as chemistry. Over time, audiences learn to read violation as romance not because the act changes, but because the framing does.

Desensitisation often looks like reduced shock, reduced empathy, treating it as “just another trope”, but reduced outward reaction doesn’t automatically mean reduced empathy. If you respond emotionally to real world harm but not to dramatised scenes, that’s often media habituation, not moral desensitisation.

—
INFIDELITY IN CINEMA.
Imagine looking into the eyes of the person you love, the one you trust without hesitation, the one you depend on, the one you’ve built your life around and not knowing they are choosing again and again, to lie to you. Just to protect the betrayal instead of protecting you. Cheating isn’t just a mistake. It is a form of moral bankruptcy. It shows a complete disregard for the very person you promised to respect and protect. In this drama, what happens cannot simply be dismissed as a “single lapse in judgment.” Even if the physical act happened only once, it did not exist in isolation. There was secrecy, emotional boundary crossing, rationalising the situation, staying despite discomfort, and then continued deception. She lies to her husband even when confronted with evidence. When pregnancy enters the picture, the consequences of those choices become even more devastating. Calling this a momentary mistake is an oversimplification of what cheating really is. It reflects not just one impulsive act, but a series of conscious decisions made when there were multiple chances to stop, to leave, or to tell the truth. It reveals a willingness to betray when the opportunity presented itself. The damage is not measured by how many times it happened. For the person who was betrayed, even once can permanently shatter trust. One breach is enough to change how love feels, how safety feels, and how the entire relationship is understood.

—-
HOW DESENSITISED ARE WE?
Romanticisation frames cheating as emotionally profound, fated, or spiritually meaningful. Glamorisation emphasises aesthetic appeal (luxury/ sensuality/ thrill/ personal liberation). Both reduce moral weight by reframing cheating as self discovery, emotional authenticity or rebellion against restrictive norms. Because viewers are repeatedly exposed to these portrayals, desensitisation occurs where infidelity begins to feel more normal, less shocking, and more understandable. This opens a possibility where repeated narrative framing can reshape moral perception and relationship expectations.

In recent dramas I have watched (Shine and Love in the moonlight) there was intense romanticisation of cheating. Storytelling is designed to make us deeply identify with the central couple framing their relationship as destined, pure, or emotionally unavoidable. When cheating is presented within that emotional framework, people tend to evaluate it through empathy rather than moral principle, seeing it as tragic or justified instead of wrong. Over time, this emotional alignment can make infidelity seem more acceptable within fictional contexts, even if audience might not support it in real life.

—-
MY THOUGHTS ON THIS DRAMA
It is not a bad drama people are claiming it to be in the sense of poor craft. It is purposefully provocative, and people mistake their own moral discomfort for a failure in storytelling. When a show refuses to provide a "perfect" protagonist and instead mirrors the messy, compromised reality of survivors, it stops being a comfortable escape and starts being a mirror that many audiences are unwilling to look into.

This drama is challenging the very hierarchy of outrage that allows real world trauma to be sidelined in favor of "safer" scandals. Low ratings suggest a "moral purity gap" where audiences conflate a character’s personal flaws with the show’s overall quality. While viewers frequently tolerate or even celebrate "anti hero" men, a messy, unfaithful female protagonist often triggers a visceral likability tax, leading audiences to "downvote" the show as a form of moral protest rather than focusing on its technical or thematic core messages. People prefer glamorous escapism over the gruelling confrontation.

We must move beyond "likability" to understand that mirroring a messy reality is not an endorsement of it. Rejecting this entire drama because the victim is flawed only upholds the "perfect victim" myth, suggesting that empathy is reserved for the stainless. Don’t fall into the narrative trap of selective empathy. Husband is undeniably a victim of a devastating personal breach. His suffering also does not negate or compete with the systemic violation of women’s bodily autonomy and these are not mutually exclusive tragedies. When we allow a husband’s heartbreak to become the loudest part of the conversation, we are choosing the "safer" anger of a private scandal over the necessary rage required to confront a culture of sexual violence.

(Explicit terms for sexual violence are omitted to prevent this review from being flagged. It is not a self censorship. I know the legal distinction between general SA and more severe violations (r word). My goal here is to address the collective trauma of survivors. I have documented all statistical references used here so feel free to message me for the source link.)