Law & Order Misogyny Watch #1

I’ve been watching Law & Order for about five years now. Actually, “watching” is too strong of a word — I’ve been sitting in a room while L&O has been on the television set with the sound on for about five years. I’ve been absorbing all this bullshit for about five years. It wasn’t until last week that I noticed that Jack McCoy, Fred Thompson the DA, and Replaceable Hawt Female Attorney have been prosecuting a truly inordinate number of female defendants, and it wasn’t until a couple days ago that I decided to just sit down and actually pay attention to the way I thought a plot would work out in reality and how it worked out in L&O-land. Oddly enough, I found that women were found guilty for typically masculine/male-generated violent crimes more often than men. This piqued my interest and inspired me to see just to what extent L&O twists reality to suit its own misogynist fantasies.

For my first Law & Order Misogyny Watch, I watched a 2006 episode airing on TNT last week. “Public Service Homicide” features the investigation of the death of Carl Mullaly, a pedophile outed on national television just hours before he was murdered. Within the first five minutes, it appears that this is a case of vigilante justice, and knowing what I do about the conservative fucks who prosecute on the show (McCoy and Replaceable Hawt Female Attorney), they won’t be letting whoever did this slide — we have to let the justice system do its job. Yeah, okay. Anyway, at this point, it doesn’t appear that there will be much, if any, outright misogyny, but Law & Order is always surprising in how it chooses to couch its belief that women are always and forever evil and cruel. I will have to pay attention to see how they worm their hatred of women into this episode.

The investigators learn that Hannah Welch called Mullaly in the hours before he died — in her interview, she says she wanted to talk to him because, according to her, they had been dating. She offers an alibi to the cops, and they examine the next-door neighbor, a middle-aged white guy, single father of a nine-year-old daughter. He maintains that he didn’t murder Mullaly, though all signs point to him and his alibis are just as shaky as Hannah’s.

Oh, I stopped paying attention. So. Monotonous. What brings my eyes back to the screen is that, of course!, even though the next-door neighbor seems like the most reasonable suspect, Law & Order writers, as usual, decided to make this episode as sensational and unrealistic as all the rest. Somehow the cops figure out that Hannah Welch was responsible for the murder. Her alibi (she was out watching a movie at the time of the murder) probably fell through.

They arraign her, and she pleads not guilty because she was defending herself against an “enraged sex offender” after confronting him about his appearance on the show that outed him as a sex offender. Then, McCoy and Replaceable Hawt Female Attorney talk with Welch and her lawyer, where we learn that Carl Mullaly raped Hannah when she was young. A few weeks before Mullaly’s death, Hannah agreed to confront Mullaly on a television show about abuse victims confronting their abusers. Turns out the show’s producer, Ellie, bought Hannah the knife she stabbed Mullaly with — and, of course, the producer of this sensationalistic tripe is a woman, too. So McCoy & Co. decide to prosecute Ellie, since Hannah agreed to testify against her.

Ellie claims on the stand that she was doing the show to empower victims of abuse and restore their dignity by giving them a chance to confront their abusers. McCoy argues that Ellie was irresponsible by ignoring obvious signs that Hannah was ready to kill and giving her a knife “to protect herself with” anyway. Of course, Ellie is found guilty and sentenced to a billion years in prison.

So, in this tiny one-hour episode, we encounter eight instances of misogyny at different levels. The first two are in terms of plot line and reflect a realistic social dynamic; the rest, though, are contrived by L&O writers and represent no reality that we read about in the headlines — and these contrivances are the ones I really despise:

1. Mullaly is a pedophile — he is caught entering the house of what he thinks is a 12-year-old girl only to find that it was a trap set up by the television show outing him.
2. Mullaly has been a pedophile for a long time — he raped Hannah when she was young, as he worked with her father. Hannah was unlikely to have been his only victim.
3. The entire premise of Hannah killing her abuser is unrealistic and misogynist. How often do we hear about women killing other adults, let alone women killing pedophiles out of a sense of vigilante justice? In a search on Google for “woman kills pedophile,” only one of the first twenty hits might have been because of a man’s pedophilia, and one other is a woman killing, but not for pedophilia, as far as I can tell. The second link is from 1987. That’s all I have say about that. (I should say that not a lot of dudes apparently kill pedophiles, either — I found only two separate, recent cases where a man killed a pedophile in my brief searching. It appears that when a pedophile dies and it makes the news, the pedophile has typically killed himself. And yes, “himself” is the appropriate gendered pronoun for this discussion.)
4. In line with #4, Mullaly’s next-door neighbor fits the profile for people who seek “vigilante justice” much, much better than a female rape victim. I realize that L&O deals with the “out of the ordinary” crimes — but with a television show that has been on for, what?, 18 years, their notion of “out of the ordinary” has become, literally, stuff that just doesn’t fucking happen, often with women as the unwitting victims of L&O writers’ absurd, naturalist fantasies about how life works.
5. The show that Ellie produces where abuse victims confront their abusers is callous and unrealistic as well. A show like this would (hopefully/likely) never make it to production or interviews, let alone out of the brainstorming room, because its main function is to exploit the suffering of survivors for network profit in the name of empowerfulling women.
6. The notion that Hannah would go through with the confrontation with murder in mind is not representative of the feelings of many, if not most, abuse survivors. Mortality has some responses from rape/assault survivors, and more reference forgetting than violent revenge. This is not to say that many women who have been raped, abused, assaulted, etc., don’t envision killing or hurting their abusers, just that the vast majority never go through with these visions.
7. Additionally, the way Hannah is characterized and portrayed as a survivor is misogynist. The abuse defines her whole life in the episode, and from the first minute we see her, she appears to be either crazy or conniving or both. She premeditated the murder and she doesn’t appear to be able to control her fury at being raped. According to L&O, women are insane in general (as I hope will be made evident in future L&O Misogyny Watch posts), and if they’re not insane they’re pretending to be insane so that they can plead insanity. Survivors are no exception, apparently, if they’re not worse than the “typical” female population of New York City.
8. L&O has a tendency to put women in positions of relative power, such as casting Ellie as a television producer in a country where women producers are a minority, only to tear them down. It’s as if the writers of Law & Order want to prove that women can’t handle any responsibility (not even the responsibility of being mothers, as we’ll see in L&O Misogyny Watch #2). This is unadulterated hatred of women.

If this episode of any indication of what’s to come in this examination of a legacy of a show, we have a lot of feminist deconstruction to do. On a bad day, I’d think the revolution will start with the expulsion of Law & Order from the airwaves — not in the name of censorship, but in the name of superior taste.