Other People’s Rapings
“I FIND IT so soothing to watch other people get raped before I go to bed,” I told Seth. We were on the phone, cross-continental; his day was just starting; mine, ending. That meant it was time for me to watch Law & Order: SVU.
People getting raped is exactly why I avoided the show for its first 26 seasons. But then for some reason, sometime earlier this year, I felt the call to turn it on. And then, I couldn’t turn if off.
Listen: It involved way fewer trans slurs than I expected. That said, I did quit one episode the second it became clear the victim was trans. I don’t remember the precise language Detective Olivia Benson used to describe them, but it was something along the “born a girl” line that people often use well-meaningly but that many trans people, myself included, hate. I was a born a boy; I was just labeled female. I stopped watching it before I could hear what anyone said next.
But all the victims weren’t trans! Having been told that my childhood rape was caused by my transness, this might be the most soothing thing about the show for me of all. Given that trans people are raped at massively higher rates than the general population, it’s a frankly inaccurate but alluring fantasy of SVU’s world: so, so, so, so, so many people get hurt. And nearly all of them are cis.
Gabriel Mac
I imagine that for non-trans survivors of sexual assault, and members of highly threatened groups—like women who’ve been forced to fear it their whole lives—other elements of the SVU fantasy are the selling point. The police are kind and empathetic to victims, overcommitted to convicting perpetrators if anything. Benson tells everyone, over and over across many episodes, that it’s not victims’ fault, that it doesn’t matter if they were drunk, that it doesn’t matter if they were already making out, that they can say no at any time. In one episode, another detective, played by a straight cis white guy, rushes to give his coat to a survivor who’s a sex worker, homeless, and Black.
The show, like the world, is inherently sexually violent. But the show, unlike the world, is just.
Mostly: In the older seasons, there is an absolutely insane amount of police brutality. It’s hard to watch, even when leveled against culprits. In newer seasons, the cops stop clotheslining people or fully punching them in the face, and the writers, perhaps as penance, occasionally sprinkle in current rhetoric about problems with policing.
“It’s still on?!!!?!!!!,” my friend Chris texted me this week, when I told him I couldn’t wait for the new season to come out. Though I’ve only been watching the show for several months, I made a ritual of watching it before bed—for hours. Sometimes I stay up way past when I could sleep because I can’t turn it off, wanting to know what will befall the next victim, and the next. It’s not general interest in the grotesque. It’s the calmest part of my day. That person got raped, too, a quiet voice in me thinks. It’s not just me. Sometimes, I start watching earlier, particularly on days when I’m paralyzed in bed by PTSD. Then I’m kept company by characters whose mental health I can tell is about to be fucked up for probably a long time. Sometimes, they get locked lengthily in a room for sex slavery, and I know they’ll be fucked up forever.
Then I fall asleep. For a nap or for the night, I feel less alone.
“When I run out of SVU episodes, that’s when you really need to worry about me,” I told Seth. It was a little self-harm humor; earlier in the conversation, I’d told him I was having a rabidly suicidal week. In SVU’s 27 seasons, there have been 594 episodes. Since I watched them out of order—I always start with the newest seasons of shows first, because they’re less likely to be blatantly transphobic—I’m not sure how many seasons I have left. But I know it’s not many.
If I finish before the new season premiers in October—and oh, I will—I feel like there’s going to be a hole in the center of my chest that SVU has been pumping rape-belonging into. It’s not for nothing that since I started confronting my abuse nearly a decade ago, my boyfriends have been survivors, too. Our trauma was a room we’d each been trapped in by ourselves for a long time. When we were together, the room wasn’t any less Terrible. But at least then, we could hold hands in it.
