Firefly Lane addresses the evolution of date rape by process of omission

In Firefly Lane, the rape of a young character in the late ’70s is gutting and horrifying. But how the characters process it illustrates how far we’ve come in the wake of #MeToo.

Focusing on the life-long bond between two women, Firefly Lane is a time-hopping, friendship-focused series that dropped on Netflix just when we all needed a good, cathartic binge. Sarah Chalke (Scrubs, Rick and Morty) and Katherine Heigl (Grey’s Anatomy, your fave rom coms from the 2000s), are Kate and Tully, two besties who have been through it all. The show chronicles the highs and lows of their close friendship, bopping through at least three time periods that span over four decades.

When they meet in the late 1970s, Kate and Tully (played by lovely and expressive youngsters Roan Curtis and Ali Skovbye) are neighbors. Tully, having moved back in with her flighty, crunchy granola mom, is seeking connection. However, at first, she finds it in all the wrong places. She flirts with an older boy named Pat and he takes her to a keg party. He gets her very drunk, leads her away from the party, and then rapes her.

It’s devastating. It’s awful. It’s something that happened far too often in the ’70s, and far too often now.

In the aftermath of the assault, Tully wanders home, shocked and alone. Eventually, she begins to befriend Kate, and she reveals what happened to her on that terrible night. The ensuing discussion, and how Kate supports Tully through her trauma becomes the glue that solidifies their bond for life.

But to modern viewers, there might be something that feels a bit off. When Tully confides in Kate about her experience, she never uses the word “rape”. In fact, the word is never used once.

In discussing rape, Firefly Lane steers clear of using the word at all. Why?

At first, the absence of the term might seem odd, especially since we’re (thankfully) seeing rape addressed in a more direct and candid way in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Yet, the Firefly Lane writers clearly made a distinct choice to not include the word simply because its inclusion would be anachronistic.

In the late ’70s, women still thought of themselves as responsible when they were the victims of sexual assault. Shockingly, the concept of date rape didn’t really even enter the public consciousness until the 1980s, and, horrifyingly, marital rape wasn’t even a crime in any state at all (!) until 1973.

Later in the narrative, there’s a scene in which Tully gets harassed by some other teen girls at their school. They call her names, implying that she was a slut and a tease and that she was the one who led her rapist on. This is the type of internalized misogyny that ran rampant before feminists dug into the difficult and necessary work of defining sexual assault for what it was.

In the not-too-distant past, women and girls were often taught that being the victim of sexual assault and rape was their fault. When focus was placed on the victim—a too-short skirt here, a flirty smile there—self-blame and shame took the place of white-hot rage and the pursuit of justice.

Once people had a shared language to discuss these horrific traumas, (some) people began to realize that sexual assault and rape had nothing to do with the individuals that were being victimized. This transition has been a slow and often painful one, but the shift to understanding these insidious types of attacks began when a vocabulary emerged to effectively call out attackers for what they were instead of letting them hide in plain sight.

Date rape is still the most prevalent form of rape, and it still goes unreported far too often, but women (and men) who have been attacked are now able to access narratives that place the blame squarely where it belongs. This is a small step, but it is a crucial one.

As a society, we’re obviously still making progress on the concept of blaming the victim and creating a just system that allows people to come forward with their stories of sexual assault without fear of repercussions, but the simple omission of the word “rape” in the Firefly Lane narrative gives us a tiny but hopeful glimpse into the strides we’ve made so far.

Firefly Lane Season 1 is currently available for streaming on Netflix.