Caught

I like looking down on people who are charged with minor sex offences so there was no way my open schedule and readily available network television access were going to prevent me from watching tonight’s installment of “To Catch a Predator“.

True, over the last several months, I’ve watched nearly every episode that’s aired. But personally I’d like to think it’s not because the first episode I saw featured a guest star who resembled my father. “Oh, he’s coming inside the house, doesn’t suspect a thing, ha-ha. Wait. No. I’m mean, yeah he is but, wait, is that … no … What? No, no. Oh-ho, no, of course not. I didn’t think that, it couldn’t be. I knew that.” However (and just in case), I now watch every episode, because, come on, who wants to hear that shit from a friend? I let Dad know, too. “No prep sport stars on my watch,” I tell him. He knows I’m serious, too. Yep. My internet filter blocks chat rooms containing references to Fall Out Boy lyrics.

Anyway, I’ve written about my disgust with this show before, but I realized if I tell everyone I’m a “watchdog”, I don’t have to stop watching this morally-satisfying and accessibly-packaged lasciviousness. Really, though, and seriously (seriously) this time, this is one of the most unethical pieces of popular entertainment since blackface. The whole operation is cut with alarm, fear and outrage so that you, the average viewer, (see: American mothers) don’t have to own up to what the show is: a sexually-titillating, unsettlingly-hypocritical, morally self-indulgent and wildly-sensationalized perp walk … wherein, the majority of the time, the audience and good-cop-bad-cop smug-ass host Chris Hanson are more guilty of sexual deviance than the irreconcilably demonized “predators” are.
Outrageous! There is nothing more reproachable than soliciting a minor for sex. We must witness the setting of a disproportionately high bond before we can even think about stomaching a commercial break. Anywho, let’s see who’s guilty of what:

• Dudes — Soliciting and arranging to have consensual sex with an underage person (statutory rape); showing up for the meeting
• Dateline/Chris Hansen — Reading (unnecessarily) the graphic conversation of that underage person on national television; encouragement of police brutality; encouragement of public hysteria; entrapment; illegal delay of reading Miranda Rights; perpetuation of misleading language for personal gain; perpetuation of misleading information about predators (never stressing, for instance, that a predator is much more likely to be a friend/family member than stranger)
• Audience/Me — Approving of police brutality; being incredibly proud of selves for not having committed a sex crime; secretly reveling in the sexual conversations of underage girls; not doing shit about shit

I don’t know, maybe they’ve been doing some of this especially outrageous shit beforehand, but the women who were supposed to alert me of said outrageous shit were out during the last episode buying two-piece bikinis for their five-year-old daughters.

“Huh? What outrageous shit?” you may ask. Okay, how about this: four SWAT team members charging a known unarmed suspect with guns drawn and cuffing him face-down on the cement. Oh yeah, and how about shooting one of these suspects with a taser gun who is facing these officers with his hands up in the air? Granted, he ran out of the house after the host told him he was “free to go” and stopped two seconds after the SWAT team order him “down on the ground! down on the ground!”.

What really struck me this time was how insistent Chris Hansen was about reading excerpts from the internet conversations between the suspects and decoys. He never just said, “Well, sir, you may say you just came over to watch a movie, but this sexually-explicit chat room conversation seems to indicated otherwise.” No, Chris knows that we the audience need specifics, really dirty specifics, so we hear in concrete terms how truly perverted these men are. “You ask her if she likes oral sex,” Chris says, “You say you like’d like to do it ‘doggy’ … you say, to this 14-year-old girl, you would like to hear her moan and squeal in a hot tub as you engage in unprotected anal sex.” Then he’d ask these smart-alecky questions just to mock the guy and get the home viewers to shake their heads and giggle under their collective breath. “You say you want to put your ‘thing’ in her mouth,” he read at one point, I swear. “What do you mean by that?” And, in what might have either shocked or delighted Chris Hansen, one guy actually answered. “My dick.”

Obviously what these guys are doing is illegal (and needs to be prosecuted), but is it necessary to ruin their lives because of it? For example, there was a 22-year-old who showed up to have sex with a 15-year-old. This is not good and this should not be allowed, but does this guy — who we learned is also a virgin and maintains a religiously-themed Myspace page — deserve to be known as a pervert for the rest of his devoted and Christ-centered life? And, why why why, why in the fuck does this guy need to be taken down by a SWAT team? A SWAT team. Are you even serious?