Reason #545 Dr. George O’Malley Was The Worst

• this essay contains both discussion of sexual assault and spoilers for seasons 1–5 of Grey’s Anatomy.

It is a widely accepted fact (around my apartment) that Dr. George O’Malley was the most obnoxious resident in the first few seasons of Grey’s Anatomy. There is barely an episode in which he appears that I don’t want to slap him at least once, and when he dies in season five, I did not miss his character a bit.

During my many, many times watching the show (thanks, Netflix) I found more and more reasons to despise O’Malley, from the way he treats Callie to the way he treats his brothers, but the one that sticks with me the most is the way George reacts when Meredith starts crying while having sex with him.

George’s entire infatuation with Meredith reeks of nice guy, friend-zone entitlement. And when he comes to her on the night she speaks to her estranged father for the first time and makes his declaration of love, he doesn’t even notice how visibly upset she already was. When, in the middle of sex, Meredith bursts out crying, George immediately makes it about him. Not once does he ask a simple, “what’s wrong?” His first question is “is sex with me really so awful?” before storming out of the room while Meredith begs him not to.

The first time I cried during sex, it had nothing to do with an estranged father. I am a survivor of multiple rapes, and while in bed with a partner I had a flashback. I burst out in tears, and when I pulled myself back into my body, he didn’t storm out, but he did resent me. He said he was afraid to touch me, that he hadn’t made me do anything. And it was true, he hadn’t. While he seemed to get that my being triggered wasn’t about any of his actions, he didn’t understand that it wasn’t about him at all.

George O’Malley was the extreme of this attitude when he refused to speak to Meredith after their disastrous sex. Later on he does admit that it was unfair of him to want her to want him so badly that he ignored the signs, but he never takes responsibility for seeing the woman he said he loved crying in bed, and walking away because he felt rejected.

I want to be clear, I know witnessing someone else’s trauma is scary. You are allowed to be frightened, and you are allowed to need some time to process it. But throughout, you have to respect it. A trauma survivor’s pain and their healing has to be about them. Even more so, a trauma survivor’s life and personhood shouldn’t be all about that trauma.

George refused to see the whole Meredith in the moment she was crying. He saw only how her crying made him feel. He saw only that this was not the fantasy he had of being with her. My partner stopped seeing the whole me in the moment when I started crying. He saw only that my emotion had come out at an inconvenient time and might again interrupt his orgasm.

If you’re going to have sex with someone, you need to be willing to see ALL of them, not just the hot naked bod. And you need to understand that being a George O’Malley is no different than other sexually selfish behavior, if not worse. So, George, take some of your definitely overly intimate bedside manner with patients and use it when the person you’re sleeping with needs to be human in a way that is inconvenient for you.