Dylan McKay: Rapist
Originally published on November 8, 2009, this piece, written by Josh Duggan, appeared as the inaugural post at the original incarnation of Munch My Benson, an irreverent if slightly unhinged blog hosted elsewhere. These entries will be dropped here from time to time, with little editing, so they can be viewed.
Newcomers to this [ed: dead] blog may be thinking,
This must be blog that I have long hoped would merge my love for Mr. Munch, the animatronic leader of Munch's Make Believe Band at Chuck E. Cheese's, with the strong feelings I have for my favorite sit-com butler, Benson DuBois, making it the first and last stop that I make on the internet each and every day.
Alas, such hopes are in vain.
No, this will not be a blog dedicated to Chuck E. Cheese or Benson. Rather, this will be a blog whose* purpose is to delve into the deeper meanings of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Some of that exposition will arise from sheer fandom. Some will be laced with irony. Never will this blog come from anywhere but a fundamental fandom for SVU.
*Is it premature and presumptuous to attach 'whose' here, or does this little nook on the internet already have the qualities of a person?
That being said, it is highly likely that this will become your first and last stop during your daily travels across the vast network of internets first alluded to on television by none other than Benson.
Without further ado, let's get down to brass tacks…
Having written briefly about SVU over at my general pop culture blog earlier this week (and largely leading to the inception of this blog), I touched briefly on a topic I would like to expound upon. On this past Tuesday [ed: well, I think we all know that this probably didn’t coincidentally air this past Tuesday], USA re-aired the Season 10 premiere, "Trials", wherein Sara Gilbert and—it is later revealed—Julie Bowen both play rape victims who met in a support group. It is while they are in the group that Gilbert's character, Caitlyn Ryan*, gives her son to Gwen Sibert (Bowen) and her husband, Noah, played by Luke Perry.
*Do I smell a Degrassi shout-out here, SVU? If it was intentional, perhaps it would have been better to have Bowen's character be the Caitlyn Ryan (I realize the spelling is different in Degrassi, but we're talking about one vowel), as she much more closely resembles Stacie Mistysyn.
At the end of the episode, we discover that not only was Noah Caitlyn's attacker, but he had also raped Gwen, only to court and marry her afterwards.
As if the whole plot-twist that he had raped his wife before she knew him wasn't enough of a mindfuck, the psychosexual ramifications of Dylan McKay, Rapist amongst 26-to-36-year-old women (and gay men?) [ed: add eleven years to that] are so loaded that it is hard to imagine another episode of television producing more widespread damage.
For girls born between 1973 and 1983, Luke Perry was the bad boy teen heartthrob for a good chunk of their teens and early 20s. Brenda Walsh, the innocent Midwesterner, had to have him. Kelly Taylor, über-popular rich girl? She found him irresistible, too. Hell, he was so cool that he looked 30 years old and basically lived on his own when he was in high school.
So we take this guy who went on to be in the goddamn rodeo and had nearly every girl in America fawning over him, and then we have him rape the tomboy from Roseanne and the love interest from Happy Gilmore and Ed. You've got to cover all the bases, right?
So Dylan McKay, the guy every girl fell in love with, raped Darlene Conner and then got his wife to let them raise her child. More importantly, that very wife was herself an unknowing victim of his rapist ways only he worked the McKay Magic managed to work his way into her shattered life.
What does this then mean to young women all over this fine country? Their teen idol has broken all of their hearts and has raped them all very publicly on SVU.
Will that subset of the female population ever be able to entrust their hearts to a man again?
I dare say no.
