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moonvoiceI just watched the latest House episode.
In it, two jokes were made on two separate occasions by the titular character, concerning pedophilia. I am going to list both, the first:
House to his team in response to the question - 'where are you?';
1. 'Playground! Great place to meet chicks... their Moms too!'
The reaction from the team: Nothing. They continue on like it's fine for House to imply that he is a pedophile. The explicit meaning of the joke? The playground is a great place to meetchicks kids! Oh, their Moms can be okay too. Awesome.
House to Taub in reaction to the question - 'what are you doing?';
2. 'Maybe you don't care if children chew on your caterpillar, but I think it's wrong...'
The reaction: Nothing. They continue on (four characters) like it's fine for House to imply that Taub is a pedophile who likes 'children to chew on his caterpillar.' Not a single outraged, affronted or negative response.
*
So not only is it now okay for one of the most popular shows on mainstream television to start joking about people being pedophiles without showing any sign of outrage on behalf of the characters; it's okay to do it more than once.
This show would have been seen - in its varying stages - by editors, sound-mixers, producers, exective producers, actors, cameramen, DPs, and so on. And at each stage, each one of those people let this happen. They said; 'okay, we're going to allow this, and this is going to be okay. It's now okay for us to joke about these things, despite the fact that child sexual abuse victims are among the most silenced members of our society.'
And we are going to have white, educated, middle/upper class, able-bodied men make these jokes. Hahaha. That's hilarious. Please note if you can't tell from the subtext, I am being tremendously cynical and sarcastic when I say that.
Not only is this an episode that has jokes about pedophilia, but it is an episode that does focus on the themes of child grooming (House literally clicker trains Cuddy's child to get into a place for more intelligent children, he also implies that he's going to use aversion therapy and discourage the child from eating toys by putting tabasco sauce on them - something which has been indicated as a form of child abuse). It is also an episode that shows a drill sargeant at a boot camp who has been known to put his charges - juvenile offenders - into places like solitary confinement. The one he torments the most - a black child - is his son. The reason he abuses his son at bootcamp? Because he doesn't know how to 'show his love.'
Awesome. More child abuse.
I don't know how to feel about all of this (outside of outrage, of course), because it's not so much that people write jokes like this, or themes like this; it's that the censors didn't pick up on it and say 'STOP IT.' It's that the executive producers, normally so ban-happy on taboo subjects, didn't go 'HEY, NO.' It's that the scriptwriters and the script-editors didn't go 'hmm...' It's that the actors, all of them that were involved in these scenes, didn't go; 'hey, okay, look, this is excessive and we don't agree with it.'
I know that House frequently pushes people's buttons with House's bad behaviour; racism, sexism, everything-ism, and maybe I'm just feeling very outraged because I am a child sexual abuse survivor and I know how jokes are used to belittle, silence and invisibilise the victims, who are ultimately not given any voice. And maybe I'm even more outraged because at least for a while, people of colour, women, disabled people, have all been given a chance to express their outrage at House (whether effectively or not); but children have not. In fact, in this episode they show a child crawling into House's lap at the very end and snuggling into him.
No. It's safe to say children aren't given a voice of outrage against this sort of thing. It's safe to say that even the adults aren't given that voice.
Do I keep watching the show? The answer seems obvious, but the problem is greater than the show. Do I boycott the entire network? I will certainly be drafting letters to the studio, and to the producers.
I am not by a longshot the most eloquent person to be expressing my outrage about this, and I hope others do too. This is not some niche program (though that would still be problematic!), this is a show that reaches millions of people every week that it is airs, and it's a show that indicates acceptable standards of behaviour based on whether people approve or disprove of House's behaviour (whether or not he still gets away with it, you generally know that certain 'jokes' are wrong when characters shoot him down for them, express disgust or anger at him for them); in this, the show has basically implied that pedophilia jokes are not only okay to air, they are completely and utterly fine. Say them! People won't even protest! Intelligent people with medical degrees won't even protest! Why should they? It's fine!
I can't even convey how I feel about this expression of a symptom that's growing in our culture. I do know that it's much easier to create a world of child sexual assault victims in a culture that is happy to joke and make light of pedophilia, while silencing those who experience such child sexual assault. I do know that if the rest of similar media follows suit, we're going to see a culture that becomes more accepting of these heinous and tragic crimes overall.
We already live in a rape culture, an abuse culture; sadly, there are signs that it is getting worse all the time. Never did I expect to see such explicit signs in mainstream media that it is now a 'child sexual abuse culture' as well.
In it, two jokes were made on two separate occasions by the titular character, concerning pedophilia. I am going to list both, the first:
House to his team in response to the question - 'where are you?';
1. 'Playground! Great place to meet chicks... their Moms too!'
The reaction from the team: Nothing. They continue on like it's fine for House to imply that he is a pedophile. The explicit meaning of the joke? The playground is a great place to meet
House to Taub in reaction to the question - 'what are you doing?';
2. 'Maybe you don't care if children chew on your caterpillar, but I think it's wrong...'
The reaction: Nothing. They continue on (four characters) like it's fine for House to imply that Taub is a pedophile who likes 'children to chew on his caterpillar.' Not a single outraged, affronted or negative response.
*
So not only is it now okay for one of the most popular shows on mainstream television to start joking about people being pedophiles without showing any sign of outrage on behalf of the characters; it's okay to do it more than once.
This show would have been seen - in its varying stages - by editors, sound-mixers, producers, exective producers, actors, cameramen, DPs, and so on. And at each stage, each one of those people let this happen. They said; 'okay, we're going to allow this, and this is going to be okay. It's now okay for us to joke about these things, despite the fact that child sexual abuse victims are among the most silenced members of our society.'
And we are going to have white, educated, middle/upper class, able-bodied men make these jokes. Hahaha. That's hilarious. Please note if you can't tell from the subtext, I am being tremendously cynical and sarcastic when I say that.
Not only is this an episode that has jokes about pedophilia, but it is an episode that does focus on the themes of child grooming (House literally clicker trains Cuddy's child to get into a place for more intelligent children, he also implies that he's going to use aversion therapy and discourage the child from eating toys by putting tabasco sauce on them - something which has been indicated as a form of child abuse). It is also an episode that shows a drill sargeant at a boot camp who has been known to put his charges - juvenile offenders - into places like solitary confinement. The one he torments the most - a black child - is his son. The reason he abuses his son at bootcamp? Because he doesn't know how to 'show his love.'
Awesome. More child abuse.
I don't know how to feel about all of this (outside of outrage, of course), because it's not so much that people write jokes like this, or themes like this; it's that the censors didn't pick up on it and say 'STOP IT.' It's that the executive producers, normally so ban-happy on taboo subjects, didn't go 'HEY, NO.' It's that the scriptwriters and the script-editors didn't go 'hmm...' It's that the actors, all of them that were involved in these scenes, didn't go; 'hey, okay, look, this is excessive and we don't agree with it.'
I know that House frequently pushes people's buttons with House's bad behaviour; racism, sexism, everything-ism, and maybe I'm just feeling very outraged because I am a child sexual abuse survivor and I know how jokes are used to belittle, silence and invisibilise the victims, who are ultimately not given any voice. And maybe I'm even more outraged because at least for a while, people of colour, women, disabled people, have all been given a chance to express their outrage at House (whether effectively or not); but children have not. In fact, in this episode they show a child crawling into House's lap at the very end and snuggling into him.
No. It's safe to say children aren't given a voice of outrage against this sort of thing. It's safe to say that even the adults aren't given that voice.
Do I keep watching the show? The answer seems obvious, but the problem is greater than the show. Do I boycott the entire network? I will certainly be drafting letters to the studio, and to the producers.
I am not by a longshot the most eloquent person to be expressing my outrage about this, and I hope others do too. This is not some niche program (though that would still be problematic!), this is a show that reaches millions of people every week that it is airs, and it's a show that indicates acceptable standards of behaviour based on whether people approve or disprove of House's behaviour (whether or not he still gets away with it, you generally know that certain 'jokes' are wrong when characters shoot him down for them, express disgust or anger at him for them); in this, the show has basically implied that pedophilia jokes are not only okay to air, they are completely and utterly fine. Say them! People won't even protest! Intelligent people with medical degrees won't even protest! Why should they? It's fine!
I can't even convey how I feel about this expression of a symptom that's growing in our culture. I do know that it's much easier to create a world of child sexual assault victims in a culture that is happy to joke and make light of pedophilia, while silencing those who experience such child sexual assault. I do know that if the rest of similar media follows suit, we're going to see a culture that becomes more accepting of these heinous and tragic crimes overall.
We already live in a rape culture, an abuse culture; sadly, there are signs that it is getting worse all the time. Never did I expect to see such explicit signs in mainstream media that it is now a 'child sexual abuse culture' as well.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-25 04:23 pm (UTC)Pedophile jokes are pretty common in the culture, though - any relationship with a significant age gap gets them, and so people are normalized to it already.