Watching a CM marathon, and I just noticed:

[krait]

Criminal Minds is supposed to be appropriate for ages fourteen and up!?

Maybe I'm overreacting -- and I definitely feel like a curmudgeon -- but given what I've been looking at in the last few episodes -- a murdered and sexually abused six-year-old, photos of a woman who's been tortured to death, a man's arm that was dissected down to the bone, children being held hostage -- I really would not want fourteen-year-olds watching this. o.O

This sort of disturbingly emphasises my prior suspicions that most of the FF.Net authors writing CM fic are between the ages of 12 and 14. It's somewhat alarming that the show says it's okay for fourteen-year-olds; it's a much more disconcerting feeling I get when I realise that they appear to be a significant segment of the audience.

Comments

[spaceoperadiva]

When I worked in the video store, I was required to get a parent's permission to rent mature movies or video games to people under 17. And I had parents with kids as young as 8 or 9 really mad at me about it, because as one woman said, "I don't care how much blood and guts there are, as long as there's no sex in it!"

Yeah, right. Because we all want our kids to know just exactly how to murder and dismember someone and be totally desensitized to all kinds of wanton violence, but we don't want them to grow up thinking that sex is okay. :/

[krait]

Meh. Alas, that is not the first time I've heard people with your job say that. *makes face*

People like that make me want to, uh, well. Sit them down and make them watch CM?

Because CM has a lot of sex, at least by implication. One of the team members is explicitly an expert in sexual crimes; they regularly discuss how sexual sadists perceive victims and how stabbing is a replacement for sexual penetration; prostitutes are a frequent victim identity; sexual molestation is common and ranges from "raped the prostitutes before killing them" to "locks girls in the basement and deliberately impregnates them, repeatedly, for years". One member of the team has a backstory involving molestation as a child. Even the lighthearted moments sometimes involve sexual innuendo (Reid giving two grand to a hooker comes to mind, along with Morgan's "broke, happy man" comment).

Even if you're confident your kid can handle straight-up violence, CM is really not straight-up violence. Nor does it involve straight-up sex! Huge segments of the show are based on the synthesis of sex and violence that patriarchy breeds... and the show's creators say that they "tone down" the show compared to the real-life cases they're often based on. So any kid who goes out looking for 'more stuff like this' and ends up in the "true crime"/serial killer genre...? *horrified face*

[krait]

Erm. Ha ha.

Looking at that? This does not sound like my kind of show! But really, I like it quite a bit, so long as I don't watch more than five episodes at a time (hello, nightmares about serial killers). I don't quite know why, when I generally shy from L&O: SVU for the obvious reasons...

(Oh, Garcia and Morgan and Reid, the things you drag me into!)

[blnchflr]

Considering how often CM isn't appropriate for me, at age 36 D:

So true!

[krait]

Hahaha, you sound like my reply just above! :D Sometimes I wonder why I like this show so much. When I start writing about it... *makes face*

[pinesandmaples]

Maybe I'm overreacting -- and I definitely feel like a curmudgeon

If you are a curmudgeon, then I am right there with you! Because NO! Those things are not what I want a child to see. To know about, maybe. To know that the world is full of a diversity of experiences...some of them VERY BAD, yes. But to watch in detail on television? Not so much.

I am embracing curmudgeonism.

[krait]

To know that the world is full of a diversity of experiences, some of them VERY BAD, yes. But to watch in detail on television? Not so much

This is pretty much exactly how I feel. *grimace* When I was 14, or probably even younger, I was at least somewhat aware of the reality of rape, spouse abuse, etc., and hopefully it kept me from doing things that were wildly unsafe, and maybe laid the foundations for social justice/feminism that I grew into...

Fantasy novels are probably not appropriate for twelve-year-olds, at least not the ones I was reading. :D But as you say -- at least it wasn't being shown in graphic colour detail, with (one the things that occasionally makes me twitchy, with CM) lingering camera scenes of the usually-female victims' agony and emotional responses. The novels were pretty much all about how This Stuff Is Not Good, which... is occasionally not the vibe I get from CM, precisely. (Good thing about fantasy novels: often ahead of their time in terms of social justice and tolerance!)