These condemnations are made explicit during the Eternal City night walk, which portrays sexual violence as a horrifying embodiment of an unjust power balance where abusers of women escape punishment through their status as respectable members of society. The scene’s flippant treatment of sexual assault not only conflicts with contemporary readers’ notions of consent and rape, more perplexingly, for twenty-first-century readers it conflicts with Heller’s own unambiguously condemning portrayals of violence against women elsewhere in the novel. Perhaps most alarming, however, is a troubling instance of violence against women when Yossarian and Dunbar assault Nurse Duckett in the hospital, a scene played for laughs that completely ignores the severity of the crime committed.

Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife is initially described in terms of her undressing “for every cadet in her husband’s squadron who wanted to creep into her” (71), and only later do readers learn that she “read good books” (72), leaving her intellectual abilities as an afterthought. Yossarian’s squadron-mate Hungry Joe, for instance, responds to women as “sexual beings” with a reaction of “frenzied worship and idolatry” (53) and is obsessed with capturing nude women on film under the pretense of being a magazine photographer. Heller himself even acknowledged his own sexism in a 1996 interview, calling his 1994 novel Closing Time the first time in his work that “women are consistently treated with respect” (Reilly 511).ĢIndeed, Heller’s portrayals of women in Catch-22 feel insulting and demeaning in the #MeToo era, especially compared to his more revealing satires of bureaucracy and power abuses. While little has been written by scholars regarding Heller’s treatment of sexual assault or women in Catch-22, media reviews of the miniseries unequivocally condemned the negative portrayals of women in the original novel, calling them “terrible” (Holloway), “misogynistic” (Moore), a “threadbare portrayal of women as two dimensional, objectified non-characters” (Miller), and noting that “some of what the book treats lightly would be rightly recognized as sexual assault today” (Lloyd). The decision to give at least one of Catch-22’s female characters more depth and agency was necessary in a novel where at best women are relegated to background characters and at worst they serve as objects of sexual fulfillment for the male characters. Her character, played by Tessa Ferrer, eventually submits to Yossarian’s charade and goes on to serve as his knowledgeable confidant and foil, in contrast to the novel where her role is limited to intimate liaisons on the beach. Whereas in Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel the death-averse Yossarian can check into the hospital with a fake liver ailment whenever he wants, the miniseries shows him being questioned by a well-informed Nurse Duckett about his alleged pain and unable to pinpoint it to his liver. The Problem of Catch-22 in the #MeToo Eraġ“That’s not your liver,” Nurse Duckett tells Yossarian in the 2019 Catch-22 miniseries during their first scene together.

Sexual sounds