Criminal Minds, BDSM, and Us

I have this thing for the show Criminal Minds. It isn’t the blood and the gore that kind of thing has never interested me; it is the fact that those that do harm have a psychology. As a survivor myself, one of the reasons that I am so addicted is that the  show takes the blame off of the victims, it talks openly and strongly about the actions of the perpetrator having nothing to do with the victim and everything to do with the perpetrators need to fulfill their own  fantasy. How perpetrators are extremely skilled at what they do, they study people, and every time they fail at gaining a victim they learn and get smarter at attaining their next victim. The show is ahead of its time when it comes to talking about being victimized  not being a person’s fault , and how sex workers are just as important as the rest of us, and their victimization matters. It has also addresses quite blatantly and openly the gay conversion camps, both male and female sexual assault and the fact that crimes cross the class barrier.

That being said Aaron Hotchner is hot. He is hot because he leads, because he is brilliant, because he loves his team and understands that they need his support to do their jobs well. He is hot because he provides the ultimate safety, the safety to the team so that they can focus on the job and the people while he provides an emotional safety that all leaders that know how to lead instinctively do. 

Criminal Minds has multiple times addressed BDSM in their shows. In the 7^th season there was an episode called the Company. It was about a man that had non consensually kidnapped and beaten a woman,  gotten her to sign a slave contract , and  ultimately  kept her under control by  using the idea of “The Company” as well as keeping her child from her. 

Despite the severity of the actions of the perpetrator, BDSM was by the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) represented openly and fairly. The team talked about how BSDM involved role-playing that uses the concept of the Company, and how this is usually understood by both parties to be part of the role playing.  They talked about how this case was about abuse, control, and kidnapping, and took the focus off of BDSM and put it onto the actual crime.

 That is important because people that have been kidnapped in real time and have had the concept of the company used in real time as part of their mental manipulation have existed. The company is supposedly a large underground group of people that watch over, control,  that provide slaves to willing Masters; they will also hunt down a runaway slave, trade slaves to other Masters, register slaves and so on.  This type of psychological terror assists in keeping the kidnapped victim complicit and creates an air of being watched, with dire consequences for misbehaving.  

Who knows maybe such a thing does exist somewhere. Slave auctions are still alive and well, both consensual and not, as are the trading of slaves, with all of the old time non consensual training methods still being used. If someone has enough money, anything is possible.  Mail order brides, bringing over children of all genders from foreign countries for domestic and sexual servitude, and human trafficking are all still happening, and huge money makers. 

At one point in the show the Master and the slave are separated and he is put in jail. She turns up a little while later with a lawyer, who is also supposedly in the Company, and gets him free stating that she loves him, and that she needs to make his dinner. Instead of representing her as a stupid woman, they take that time to show the bruises on her neck. Illustrating that she is operating on a different emotional level, one based in survival.  After all, if he would do that to her when she was behaving, what would he do to her when she was not behaving?

In the end, she is freed with her child, and everyone is reunited.

I love this show because for me, it really points out how far we have come in some parts of the media in portraying BDSM. What Criminal Minds did was separate BDSM from abuse and kidnapping. They took this very complicated case and broke it down into a series of crimes; they weren’t interested in that fact that she signed a slave contract, they were interested in what he did to force her to do it. They never once referred to BDSM as those sickos, or those perverts, and they were not interested in the other couples that engaged in Master and slave relationships.

This was all about consent versus non consent, consent versus coercion, and consent versus abuse. Those borderline issues that we deal with everyday, not just from the outside world looking in, but from ourselves. At what point is it what we do no longer consensual and starts being a trained response, with some coercion thrown in? In many Master and slave relationships consent happens once in the beginning of the relationship and then   is assumed from that point forward. But considering that the beginning of a relationship involves hormones, and a considerable amount of NRE, is that really a time to consent?  Can it be argued that NRE in and of itself be considered an altered state, and therefore making consent invalid and questionable?

Something to consider.

And nice to consider them while watching a little Hotchner……..