I like that both of the other posts talked about how Olivia was portrayed as emotional in this first episode. We all agree that this is not so much the case with current episodes. I wanted to reflect a little more about this concept.
What bothered me about Olivia's character being more emotional than the other characters was the implication that since she was emotional, she would not be allowed to perform her job. I understand that as a police detective, one must adhere to policies and procedures as well as keep a strict presence of professionalism, but why is it that they cannot express their emotions? It seemed to me that this was another play into the stereotypes of women and how the way women "normally" act is not valued, especially in this noticeably male dominant unit. Is being emotional equal to being feminine? Can only men be successful on the SVU team because they do not cry or expose a personal feelings towards a case? "No crying in baseball..." (or on this team in the NYPD). These are the impications of the characters' dialog and actions on this initial episode.
Also, it is odd to me that with sex crimes committed primarily against women, the show presumed that only men could "handle" this work. Really? Shouldn't we have more women involved because the crimes pertain to women? Or maybe this was a way for the writers to expose issues of violence against women by making Olivia overcome with emotion on the first episode. I could go both ways. But if the intention was to bring light to the fact that sex crimes are predominantly committed towards women, it is interesting that the writers had to create buy in from viewers about the oppressing stereotypes of women. It just made me mad to see how much masculinity was valued in this context as it is in so many others ways in our society. I am glad that we know further down the road how awesome Olivia's character becomes and how much respect she gains and demands from her coworkers and superiors in future episodes.
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3 comments:
I agree that Olivia is quite emotional in this episode. Later it is more often Stabler who is emotional. However, he never gets criticized for his emotions, they just make him a better SVU detective. He is "handling" the job, yet Olivia is too emotional. Where is the equality there? :)
I watched an episode recently though where Stabler was emotional to the point that Olivia had to monitor him. He had testified in a case against a grandfather who had molested his grand daughter. There was a lot of evidence against him and the little girl put a lot of faith in Stabler. When soon after Olivia and Stabler go to investigate a rape/murder he says something along the lines of "and my day couldn't get any worse." It seems like with Stabler, however, his involvement isn't in relating to the crimes, its feeling like he failed. That you can't really win in this game because rapists get off, murderers get away with it, and crime is never-ending. He begins to lose faith in his ability to do his job or really make any change for the better, so I think that is one of the rare times you see other's opinions of his ability to do his job affected by his emotions, but this is definitely a rare occurence.
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