Criminal Minds

[sqbr]

EDIT: Heh, I was in kind of a funny mood when I wrote this. Also: SPOILERS. Sorry!

I swear to god, the next time I see a "Women/children who suffer abuse are doomed to become irredeemably screwed up and a force for ill (with their only sliver of hope the chance they may briefly redeem themselves before dying tragically)" plot I will hunt the writer down and hit them in the head.

Guh.

In short: I came in halfway through an episode of "Criminal Minds" about a rapist. A female team-member kept having flashbacks to being almost killed by a serial killer and being irrational, culminating in her ruining the investigation. I was there saying "Well, at least she'll be back next episode right as rain, which has the message that you can overcome this sort of thing in time" and then she shot him. (And got away with it which is just..an odd message really. I wonder if there'll be repercussions later)

This post has been brought to you by the coalition to encourage Sophie to express her anger rather than bottling it all up and feeding it into hatesinks. The subcomittee to make sure Sophie doesn't spout too much unjustified crap would like to admit that I haven't watched enough of the show to be able to make anything approaching a informed judgement, but I have seen an awful lot of plots of this type. Also, in case anyone starts making assumptions, I haven't experienced anything more than the bare minumum of sexual harrassment one is doomed to as a woman, but I've known people who have. I'm also just starting to get narky about the way disabled people are treated in fiction. Stupid brain, it's not like I didn't have enough stuff to be pissed off about.

EDIT 2: So, in the second episode the boss figures out it was her but has no proof. She decides to leave, they are all sorry to see her go. Not too bad given the corner they'd painted themselves into I guess.

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

Oh yes, I can't stand any show whose plots revolve around sadistic things being done to women or children (I advise you to never watch Law and Order: SVU) I used to think it was all thinly veiled misogyny or whatever but have decided that often it's just lazy writing, an easy way to get a strong emotional response. Also apparently the current theory about the popularity of the "slasher" genre is that the men watching identify with the woman, not the slasher, but women work better for the victim role.

Not to say that isn't still all wierd and disturbing, it's just a more complex kind of disturbing :)

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

I agree it's slightly off beam to say it's "veiled misogyny" ... it might be misogynistic but it's not misogynistic because the show's creators hate women, but because they want to rate well. It's just some sick thing that aims to tap into all kinds of bad parts of the human psyche.

I always get this feeling from those police procedurals that they bring out people's native detestation of the Other. Every person other than the detectives is always unsanitary, deranged, filthy -- guilty of something, untrustworthy, to be handled only with latex gloves. The world itself is a claustrophobic space of dungeons and dingy apartments, in which the police station and its forensic labs are the only bastion of hygiene and good lighting.

Don't watch 'em, I say. They're sick.

[alias_sqbr]

As with racist tropes on tv, "We didn't do this because we hate you, we did this because the entire viewing audience hates you" isn't very comforting :)

I'm with you on the "Other" thing, there's also the desire to reassure people that this stuff only happens to bad people. That said, I like mysteries, and on tv that means nasty violent murders with unpleasant subtexts. I need to find some more decent mystery authors :/

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

As Sophie says, it's not very comforting if the options are:

1, the writers hate women and want to show them suffering
2, the audience sees women as the other and likes to see them suffering
3, the audience finds it plausible that women should be the victims of violence because this reflects reality.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

I agree, but I think the reality is more complex than any one, or indeed all of the above together. People like to have their buttons pushed. Some have an unspoken enjoyment of observing misogyny despite their stated (and real) opposition to it, similar to the enjoyment I sometimes derive from reading The Australian's editorial page and venting my feelings at their latest Howard-boosting nonsense.

Fictional characters do bad stuff. Sometimes we enjoy it because we identify with their actions, and sometimes because we revile their actions and rejoice in their eventual just desserts. Sometimes we enjoy knowing that an fictional environment we're *not in* is unsafe or unpleasant relative to our own, and sometimes we enjoy being immersed in a foreign fictional environment offering different possibilities for us-as-we-inhabit-the-protagonists.

In calculating the motives or prejudices of viewers (e.g., natch, how misogynistic they are) by the content of a programme designed to attract their interest, we need to consider both points of view based on the devices employed (first-person camera work, whether the perp gets away, how the victims are portrayed, to what values the characters appeal via dialogue, etc.)

(As mentioned, I don't watch these shows. But that's not really because of the content - on the superficial level of graphic, repeated violence against women, I've read things like American Psycho which are far worse - but because of the formulaic structure in which these devices of entertainment are deployed, though. But in these shows the blatancy of the emotional manipulation, episode after episode, rapidly begins to outweigh the short-term payoff. It's like being on a high-calorie diet of catharsis and moral outrage. Once your ethical stomach stretches anything except the most obscene atrocity is a bathetic let-down. Witness the consequently escalating perversions of these programmes, and the claims thereof in the associated station promos. "You'll might guess how old this 'school girl' is (16? 20? 28?) but you'll never guess what she's been up to *montage of photographs of teenage male victims*", crows the latest SVU ad, desperate to convince you that something really shocking is out there)

In pursuit of maximum audience numbers, media publishers observe no standards that aren't enforced by regulatory bodies. It's a pursuit that's blind to the associated prejudice and social costs, not to be forgiven therefore, just to be differently interpreted.