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!)