'Orange Is the New Black' New Season Takes Torture to Eleven

Spoilers ahead for season 4.
It seems clear now that Orange Is the New Black has always traded in vicarious torture and degradation porn for middle class, Netflix-dues paying audiences.  We knew this all along, with the very premise being a barker's call to look into a freak show. See the Smith Graduate Nice White Lady shower in a room full of toenail fungus and criminals! See her sell her pretty hair and choke on peppers while starving to acquire the basic need of food! The white-centered point-of view was more than evident, as was the definition, as was the thesis that prisons are dehumanizing. Even the opening credits tell us we'll be seeing animals in cages.
But fans fell in love with this show anyway because it was so rare to see a show about so many women that truly featured many women of color and LGBT-centered storylines that managed to be poignant and diverse and biting and sexy AND funny. We were promised by the show's creator that the focus on Piper was just an entry point, and in many ways it was. We were thirsty for Alex and Piper's connection, and for that of Taystee and Poussey.  We were starved for women like Sophia and Red and Suzanne and Dayanara.  We were willing to watch their struggles because that's reality and we were told it would be sympathetic to them, and we were hoping for the redemption that art, comedy and attention can provide. We also fell, hard, for the real life actresses who shared their delight in their show and friendships via social media. We were, I suppose, lured in with the promise that through an investment in OITNB we'd see the human stories and that the animal thesis would therefore dissolve, and that the flaws would get better over time. We were wrong. It all got worse.
Image: Netflix What is now more than clear, though, is that like buying an overpriced ramen bowl at the commissary for a week's wages in a crushing prison job, we were getting screwed. Orange is the New Black is not a show for fans who need stories about women of color, lesbians or trans women, or the nuanced realities of women grappling with poverty or systemic oppression. OITNB is for folks who like their torture porn chased with apologies for white men in power. They've dropped the comedy from the dramedy and given us unabashed exploitation slopped on a cafeteria tray.
Abuse, rape, racist degradation, denial of lesbian love...none of this is new. But each season it has been increased, while the balancing redemption has been decreased. In the past we saw the women care more for each other, and we could bear witness to the ways that humor, loyalty to found-families and emotional intelligence created survival. Less story attention is given to those themes now, though, because the show has increasingly made space to tell the back- and outside-stories of the men.  The result is a firm thesis that now defines OITNB as a universe where monolithic oppression creates a torture machine that degrades the human animal on both sides of the fist: where it's sad but inevitable that women of color and lesbians get punished, and where it's sad but inevitable that "nice guy" hapless men get turned almost accidentally into monsters of the machine. Poor nice guys.
I can't even list the torture and degradation Season 4 levied upon us. Sophia was shown as wrecked in every way, and the camera gawks at her appearance and her blood. Red is tortured with sleep deprivation and work abuse. Alex is choked. After a focus on shit, Nicky, Alex and Piper share a disgusting crack pipe in the cornfield.  Blanca is tortured on a table as a public spectacle, and is shown as having peed on herself. Maritza describes in detail the mouse she is made to swallow. It went on and on visually, and the dialogue held racist insults that were more vile and darker than ever before.
But all of that was nothing.
The two worst incidents of torture are particularly cruel if you think of OITNB's fanbase as people thirsty for stories of the under-represented. The fight club scene was sick and brutal, and when we are (much later) given a close-up of Suzanne on a gurney next to Kukudio, the torture porn of Kukudio's busted face and broken heart is at max.  The fact that these characters were pitted against each other to rage against the sparks of loving connection in an interracial friendship and tender affair that the writers teased us with was sick and beyond disturbing.

Image: Netflix We thought that was too much, and yet nothing compares to the horrors inflicted on Poussey. To see her crushed before our eyes was beyond all need to tell the story of why Black Lives Matter, and in fact was a perversion of it. The way they choose to have Suzanne, once again, an agent of dangerous chaos, and the Nice Guy guard oblivious to his lethality, told a story that was off the rails of understanding and nuance and instead centered on gawking at pain and loss while excusing the agency of the real perpetrators. That the story focused on the pain and loss of a lesbian woman of color, soon after she finally finds love and hope, was cruel beyond measure to that character. It might be understandable reality if the art redeemed it, but sadly it did not. That they showed us a reductive story in the name of Black Lives Matter wrapped in white male apology politics in that way was unforgivable.
Putting the fight together with the slaying of Poussey, we were given the sickest rendition of Lesbian Request Denied ever. OITNB showed, gratuitously and coldly, if you dare to find happiness as a queer person of color, you will pay with your life. The charming romance between Poussey and Soso provided some of the rare happy moments of the season, and a true, nuanced relationship born of attraction and nurtured with communication and emotional labor. They it was twice punished with lurid, grotesque violence. The season ended with a re-connection between white lovers Alex and Piper. It's predictably racist that they will be the Final Girls, not that that's much of a prize. At this point it looks better than what happened this season, though: as promised, Piper's story was just an entry point to be able to abuse queer women of color and call it an innovation in television storytelling.
As bad as the Poussey Washington tragedy was, I held no hope that Caputo would do the right thing. OITNB wants us to blame the system, not individuals. but the sad-sack Nice Guys of OITNB don't have my sympathies, and like Boo, I do blame them. Rapists are continually shown as befuddled, confused guys. Healy, the original "lesbian request denied" boot, is now in our hearts as a broken kid with abandonment issues from his mentally ill mom who is now broken from trying to save too many inmates. Caputo's ineffective "but I'm trying" storylines overwhelm. They even gave him a corporate bitch of a girlfriend in case the message wasn't received that we are supposed to not only forgive him his sins but to feel sorry for his predicament and blame the women in his life for his failures. Even the wretched, racist, abusive Piscatella piques our sympathies by dropping that he was sent to gay conversion camp as a kid, and they make a point to say his mom sent him. Not his dad, not his parents. His mom.
If I heard about straight white men liking a show with all of this torture porn, all of this degradation, all of this straight up immediate punishment by women who dare to find a little bit of subversive love or dare to dream of something more...I would be appalled. Is that OITNB's real audience? If so, they'll be very happy this season. As for the rest of us who stuck with it this far? We're back where we were, thirsty for a show that does us justice.