Yes, it’s an ouroboros of confirmation bias: the popular media ad nauseum repeats the trope that what they need to fear in prison is ”gay” sexual violence, when what they really need to fear is the violence of the state and its economic interests that threatens to put them there in the first place.
> Second, sexual violence in American prisons is a very real concern
Even if we assume the worst case scenario and double it, sexual violence in prisons is an experience of the minority of prisoners… does that make it less of a concern for those who experience it? Of course not… does it mean that it’s a reason to fear prison, especially when incarcerated for actions that go against entrenched governmental interests? Not really. Again the state violence is the real fear… especially when you note that any percentage of those sexual assaults are perpetrated by “guards”. Isolation, economic exploitation, and the mental health concerns implicit in being deprived of your agency are all much more important fears than the (again trope) that something ”gay” might happen to you.
> Finally, I fail to see how it is a homophobic trope? Nobody wants to be sexually assaulted. It's about the violation, not the act itself.
Not seeing a trope as a trope is kind of the point of a trope. “Ass-pounding” implies a specific kind of sexual activity, associating it with prison implies that all such sexual activity in prison is non-consensual violence — that’s the trope part identified — and also that the act itself is violence and/or something to be feared… something to be -phobic, about, in other words. Given that prisons are still customarily same-sex segregated, then, there’s also the implication that same-sex sexual violence in the form of ass-pounding is a reasonable thing to fear when in prison. Or, in other words, the trope is communicating a homo-phobia on behalf of a culture that presumes one should be afraid of prison because one is afraid of getting one’s ass pounded.
The violation isn’t implicit in the act being mentioned. The fact that you’ve got to explain to a “foreigner” that the violation is implicit because they didn’t know the trope doesn’t make it less of a trope.
