Somehow last night there was nothing on TV, even by my incredibly low, low standards. I'd maybe watched a minute or two of To Catch A Predator before, so I decided to check it out. Before I get into it I just need to take a minute to appease my inner grammar nerd. Why are we using the infinitive form? Wouldn't "catching" be more accurate? Surely it's not an instructional show on how to catch a predator. Seeing as I'm at a loss to find any deeper meaning in this mystery, I'll move on.
Before even watching the show I had a problem with its premise. Just in case anyone has been living under a rock for a while, the show is essentially a filmed sting operation. Someone working for the show (no doubt a poor intern) has the unenviable job of posing as a teenage girl and finding older men to have very explicit sexual conversations with, and then getting them to agree that they meet up to have sex. The man shows up at the house she told him to go to, at which point the host literally emerges from behind a curtain to confront the man about his intentions. Any kind of entrapment of course offends any good progressive, but I feel that in this particular case, the argument for the intent to commit a crime is especially weak. One of the men objects that what he said online and what he would actually do in real life are different. Now, do I think he actually showed up to have a wholesome time bowling with this fake girl? No. But I think he has a very valid point. Anyone who has ever talked online with a stranger in any situation knows that part of the appeal is being able to create a persona who is as different from you as you want, and being able to say things you would never say in real life. Not that I had a lot of love for our justice system to begin with, but I find it deeply disturbing that having an internet conversation and then showing up at a specific location is apparently grounds for arrest.
While I find hosts of any reality show rather annoying, I think the existence of one in this show is the core of why it's so problematic. If the host didn't exist, the show would consist of one man after another showing up at a house and being arrested. That's pretty boring TV though. So the host shows up. But what is his purpose? As I mentioned earlier, the content of the online conversations is very sexually explicit. Before we meet the man, the host reads the most lascivious parts to us, as the screen presents us with a picture of the man above the written text. Cut to the men walking in the house. The host always asks why they are there, at which point they always lie, giving him an opportunity to read the sexy bits aloud again from the conversation. Once he is done doing that, he asks leading questions such as, "you came here to have sex with her tonight, didn't you." In case the audience hadn't gotten it, some gross, naughty illegal sex was just prevented from going down.
This show is a great example of how television does a horrible job at differentiating what sexual things should be treated as excitingly sexual. The men tend to be in their 30s (from little bit I watched), and the girls are about 15. The girls initiate the conversations, the girls begin the flirting leading to the conversations about sex, and the girl suggests a meet up. The show is apparently unequivocal that the man's intentions are bad, because it is statutory rape, but it is simultaneously selling sex.
I'm always shocked at how little Americans understand and agree on what rape actually is. How old is old enough? What if she didn't say no? What if she was drunk? What if she changed her mind in the middle? What if she's just plain lying that it happened? And then, of course, what if she actually wanted it? That last question is what drives To Catch A Predator. I'm not a person who believes, as some do, that there is "grey" rape. It is or it isn’t, and the act of sex should be considered entirely different from the act of rape. The problem with statutory rape, morally, is that it is conditional on the ability of each different girl to consent. It can be so hard to tell which it was, because we cannot see inside the girl's brain. I think there are definitely 15 year olds who can consent to having sex with a 24 year old (these were the ages in on of the cases) but there are also 15 year olds who are not mature enough to give true consent. So when you're generalizing about 15 year olds and sex, there is an inherent lack of clarity on whether it is rape or not, which makes it appear to be a gray area. I absolutely believe that exactly because it is so complicated there should be laws against statutory rape, but laws and morality are not always the same thing.
So when To Catch A Predator makes this generalization, it plays on this grayness. The draw of the show isn't about the predators, it's about the titillation of sexy school girls. You (the predator, and the voyeur) know it's technically wrong to have sex with them, but is it really wrong wrong if they say they want it?
Americans love catching bad guys. Why are there so many crime dramas on TV? So they can introduce us to a despicable character who they give us just enough time with to hate before they relieve us by catching the bastard and putting him away for good. That is part of what is work here. Everyone knows pedophiles are the worst of the worst, that in prison pedophiles get ganged up on because even other criminals are disgusted by them. So, as in crime dramas, To Catch A Predator sets us up with a criminal to hate. Who wouldn't want to catch a predator? The show pretends that the explicit details presented over and over are there to show us how very bad these men are, but it’s just too gratuitous for that to be the case. What they really do is make us, probably not consciously, think about sexy teenagers having sex. It intentionally blurs the line between rape (bad!) and sex (very hot!), so that the show can capitalize on two things Americans really love at once: catching the bad guy, and sex.
The more we allow the blurring of this (solid) line, the more we encourage rape culture, by allowing the potential for rape to seem sexy. I could write a completely other post on how Law and Order SVU captures its viewers with the sexiness of rape and other sexual crimes.
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