Enough is enough

[chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

I haven't seen silence of the lambs, so only really know it through popular culture. I know there. Is some element of gender identity to the story but not much else.

Is the whole thing transphobic, like when they make villains queer coded, or do you mean something else?

[dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

In the film there is a villain character named Buffalo Bill who murders young women and harvests their skin to make a woman suit they can wear to feel like a woman, presented as a sexual fetish (this is a debunked pseudoscience concept of "autogynephilia"). The character does this after being rejected by gender-affirming clinics for being mentally unstable and not being a "true transexual".

There is a famous scene where Buffalo Bill has abducted a woman and keeps her in a well, and a basket with lotion is sent down and Buffalo Bill says a now famous line: "It rubs lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again." This is a threat to get her to moisturize and take care of her skin, since that's what is intended to be harvested from her.

There's another iconic scene when Buffalo Bill is putting on makeup and jewelry and in the mirror saying "Would you fuck me? ... I would fuck me. I would fuck me. I would fuck me so hard." Then Buffalo Bill dances in front of a camera wearing the skin of women while dressed in women's clothes.

This is perhaps one of the most impactful instances of transphobia in film, and served as an anchor in the 1990s for how people thought about trans women, as deranged psychopathic perverts (similar to how at the time all gay men were believed to be pedophile rapists).

There were even protests held against the film at the time.

Since OP's post is about lotion and criminality, my assumption is that some Silence of the Lambs joke is inevitable, so I thought I'd get ahead of it.

EDIT: I missed that the top comment response was a Silence of the Lambs joke. Oops.