Comments | shangy_feminism: Law & Order wank

meleth in shangy_feminism

Law & Order wank

Feb 23, 2009 23:38

I posted this to my journal, and popelizbet asked me to post it here. It's a wanky "letter" to L&O: Special Victims' Unit, and I may or may not actually be turning it into a letter fit for public consumption and sending it to them.

( Eeek! Transpeople are scary! )

murder victims, transphobia, media, do something about this please, action item get to it, hateful mess, generally meaningless gestures, that made me puke a little in my mouth y, what the fuck is this shit right here, violence against women, transfolk are people dammit

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lazerbug February 24 2009, 05:03:14 UTC

This isn't surprising. I've had to stop watching L&O (especially SVU) because of these downright sickening attitudes that never, ever get called into question. I wrote a series of blog posts about misogyny in Law & Order: Original Flavor reruns last summer (#1, #2, and #3), and that was the last time I watched the show or any of its offshoots. It's just too depressing to see where so many of our society's fucked up stereotypes about women and the female-bodied are created and reinforced. If there weren't 17 dozen versions of L&O all in their 80 billionth season, I wonder whether patriarchy would be a little worse for the wear. There'd probably be something else just as bad or worse to pop up in its place -- we love us some misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia in our entertainment, mmhmm! -- but dreaming makes me happy.

meleth February 24 2009, 05:04:38 UTC

I'm going to give it up for Lent, in hopes that that will be easier than quitting cold turkey.

lazerbug February 24 2009, 05:04:40 UTC

Aw, poor HTML skillz attack again. If I could, I would fix the tags there, but it works inelegantly, so I'll leave it.

eatenbykraken February 24 2009, 05:40:49 UTC

I don't watch original L&O anywhere near regularly, so I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the misogyny's gotten better as the show's gone on. I can't watch anything from the Chris Noth era or before without wanting to break shit, but I've found Serena-Sutherland-era episodes remarkably forceful in their condemnation of violence against women. It's still not great by any stretch of the imagination, but newer episodes don't usually offend me.

meleth February 24 2009, 05:42:03 UTC

Yeah, it's gotten better.

lazerbug February 24 2009, 05:58:08 UTC

Yeah, when I was watching it, I was just watching whatever aired on TNT during the day. It was in no sort of order, so I wound up being unable to figure out what episodes came when. If they got better later, those episodes were mixed in among older, bad episodes and I forgot the glimmers of hope among the destitution. I definitely haven't watched enough episodes from the last couple years to say whether it's okay now -- I just know that the '90s through early '00s were pretty bad every time I caught one. *shrug*

meleth February 24 2009, 05:59:13 UTC

They have more sensitive detectives, and Jack McCoy is now DA instead of ADA, so we have younger people dealing with most of the stuff.

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