Let’s Overthink: Law & Order: SVU

Let’s face it, friends, Eliot Stabler couldn’t be more of a stand-in for patriarchal order if he were a golden penis holding a gun. Just look at him: the receding hairline, the one-note justice-as-vengeance worldview, the willingness to bend some rules when it suits him while brutally and violently enforcing them on others, and the penetrating gaze that radiates both an asexual, paternal concern for the victims, and a barely-restrained desire to punch the next person who mouths off to him, be they bureaucrat or perv. Then there’s his relationship with Olivia Benson, which combines unrelenting sexual tension with older-brother overprotectiveness.

The L&O cops of yore usually went the route of the wry, pun-loving, world-weary NYC cop stereotype, to great effect. In contrast, Stabler is unwaveringly earnest. Where Lenny Briscoe would shake his head and shrug in a way that says, “What’s the world coming to? Let’s go have a drink,” Stabler channels John Walsh, in full-on “Let’s make this dirtbag pay” mode.

The reasons for these creative decisions lie in the types of crimes portrayed. The wealthy Upper-East Sider committing murder for the insurance money story, “Law & Order”’s stock-and-trade, is the perfect opportunity to invite the kind of cynicism and schadenfreude that would hardly go well with “SVU”’s parade of brutal sex crimes. “SVU” goes about victimizing both women and a sense of common decency, then ushers in Eliot Stabler, the perfect combination of Chuck Bronson and your dad, to reassure everyone that “order” will be restored at almost any cost.

Thus, “SVU” manages to satisfy society’s two competing misogynistic impulses: it shows graphic violence against women, while at the same time introducing a patriarch to patronize and overprotect them.