Many people think that too much attention and resources are given to the protection of wild animals and birds. Do you agree or disagree?

I started watching

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because Ronald Reagan died in the summer of 2004. Normally I watched the news during the sweltering afternoons between my morning and evening jobs, but I had no patience for the days-long live coverage of Reagan’s funeral festivities as his casket traveled around the country. Fortunately for me, Law and Order:

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was always playing on the USA Network. I fell in love with Olivia Benson and her authoritative blazers, her commitment to believing victim-survivors and her ferocious drive for justice, with the

show

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’s diverse range of storylines about abuse and sexual

violence

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that appealed to me as a gender studies major with a commitment to fighting gender-based

violence

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. Sixteen years later, I research sexual

violence

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in the Middle Ages for a living, and

SVU

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is the longest-running primetime drama on American television. I am aware of the

show

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’s deeply problematic elements

—

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its propensity for ever-more-outrageous narratives ripped from the headlines, the fact that it fictionalizes real-life trauma without victims’

consent

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, its troubling abortion politics, its portrayal of incarceration as the ideal form of

rape

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justice, and its valorization of the

police

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, which is its most glaring fiction, particularly given our country’s long, ugly history of

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sexual

violence

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against women of color. I feel conflicted about deriving

this

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much enjoyment from a

police

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procedural, especially right now,

although

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I tell myself that I am in good company. Roxane Gay repeatedly thanks the

show

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in her book acknowledgments: “Thank you to Law & Order:

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for always being on television so I can have something familiar in the background as I write,” she writes at the end of Hunger. What is it that makes so many women, even women who want to abolish the

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, take comfort in

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?

SVU

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’s brand of pop

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sexual

violence

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fictionalizes

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enough to enable viewers to enjoy fantasies — and they are indeed fantasies —of righteous allyship, of narrative closure after

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, of a world where victim-survivors are believed and supported, of compassionate and justice-driven

police

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officers who are

also

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survivors. These fantasies can be especially meaningful if you know that the portrait of disbelieving, dismissive

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response in shows

such

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as Netflix’s Unbelievable (2019) is the more realistic one. These consoling fictions give us a glimpse of what a

culture

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that takes sexual

violence

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seriously might look like. As

SVU

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’s

show

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-runner recently said, “I think that the audience is sophisticated enough to know that

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is not the day-to-day reality [in policing sexual assault]. I think people wish it were more like [it is on

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]. I think I wish it were more like

this

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.”

SVU

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’s use of sexual

violence

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as thought-provoking entertainment,

however

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, isn’t new at all. Medieval people had their own brand of

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-esque pop

culture

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sexual

violence

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, in the form of popular short poems called

pastourelles

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that feature fictionalized narratives about

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and

consent

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. Some

pastourelles

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survive with musical notation, showing that they were transmitted orally and sung by people regardless of whether they could read, giving them the potential for mass consumption comparable to

SVU

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’s status as a network

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accessible to anyone with a television.

Pastourelles

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have a familiar structure: A powerful

man

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encounters a

peasant

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woman

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alone in a secluded outdoor location. He propositions her. She declines. He refuses to take no for an answer. But from there, the stories they tell vary widely, from tragedy to accommodation to revenge. In one, a knight coerces sex from a

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girl by inventing a law that requires unaccompanied young women to pay a fee

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which he knows she cannot afford

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and forcing her to pay

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fee with her body. In another, a

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rapes a

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but

then

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apologizes, pledging to “heal” her “hurt” and offering to marry her as reparation. But as I hinted above, other

pastourelles

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feature satisfying endings or unexpected twists. One features a

man

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and a

woman

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about to have consensual sex when the

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abruptly withdraws his

consent

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and the

woman

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tries to pressure him until he runs away, challenging popular ideas about gender,

consent

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, and coercion. Another depicts a

woman

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who laughs at her would-be assailant, orders him to find someone more willing, and sends him on his way. So what did medieval audiences get out of

pastourelles

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? They could enjoy satisfying fantasies of seeing predators dissuaded or humiliated, which was particularly important in a society where bringing successful

rape

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charges was incredibly difficult and where many women who did press charges were later fined or imprisoned when they failed to appear in court, or when their assailants were exonerated by all-male juries. It hardly needs saying that in

this

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way, at least, the medieval world was not so different from our own. And so, like today’s

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viewers, medieval people — particularly those who had experienced assault, or been afraid of it — sought out ways they could witness a variety of narratives about sexual

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which underscore that it does not follow a single paradigm and challenge society’s pervasive silence around sexual assault, both

then

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and now. Both

pastourelles

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and

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address a topic

that is

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intimately, devastatingly familiar to far too many people, and they mix

this

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real-life trauma with comforting fictions by featuring empathetic

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officers who challenge

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culture

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or powerful predators who are dismissed and thwarted. They acknowledge the complexity of real-life narratives of sexual

violence

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—

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trans sex workers attacked by wealthy lawyers;

peasant

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girls raped by powerful men; victim-survivors who don’t follow the “good victim” script by ingesting drugs and alcohol, attempting to reconcile with their assailants, or failing to report the assault immediately

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while shying away from depicting the most graphic

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, allowing it to occur mercifully in the gaps between scenes or stanzas. Most importantly, they

show

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survivors that they are not alone, that survival and resilience are possible. In an episode from

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’s recent season, Benson tells a

woman

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who was gang raped while intoxicated, “You’re going to survive

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.” “You’ve said that before, too, haven’t you?” says the

woman

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. “I have,” says Benson, “because it’s true.” “How do you know?” the

woman

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asks. “Because I did,” Benson replies. A

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survivor in a medieval pastourelle offers similar words of consolation to her fellow survivors. “I trust to recover my heart again, / And Christ’s curse go with you,” she declares after she is assaulted, cursing her attacker and looking ahead to a future of recovery. That’s not to say these genres are uncomplicated. An insidious quality of the pastourelle genre,

for instance

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, is how its habit of portraying

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women as victims works to portray aristocratic women as safe from sexual

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, even though legal records

show

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that

this

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was definitely not the case. And it goes without saying that

SVU

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’s fantasy of protective

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is especially dubious right now. So how do we balance these consolatory moments, offering comfort and solidarity to real-life survivors, against pop

culture

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sexual

violence

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’s potential harms, its powerful fictions about allies and victims? One question of

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is whether it is possible to represent the

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ethically. But another is simpler. If we see these fantasies less as offering solutions and more as excavations of ongoing problems — excavations that illuminate sexual

violence

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’s myriad forms — we can see in these beloved fictions a glimpse of where

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justice might start, which is most basically in a radical and necessary acknowledgment.