perverted justice
Last night I had the frosty, air-conditioned joy of watching MSNBC Dateline's hard-hitting-yet-inherently-perverse "To Catch a Predator" program.
The premise goes something like this: Men my age (I was happy to realize I look a good decade or two younger than men my age) are lured into online chat discussions with perv-hunters posing as underaged children. The luring is done by police detectives working in tandem with the closet perverts at pervertedjustice.com. In most cases, they use a 19-year-old girl who looks and sounds around 14. Ultimately, a date is arranged at the girl's purported house.
As the hidden cameras roll, one flabby, ugly, gone-to-seed man after the next enters the house, only to be confronted by shellac-haired Aryan Ken Doll reporter Chris Hansen, who instructs them to sit at a table and eat cookies while he interrogates them.
All of the men ate the cookies. All of them. Even knowing they'd been busted for arranging to have kiddie sex online and were being FILMED answering questions about their crimes, they couldn't resist eating the cookies.
Almost all of them had sent the presumed 14-year-old girls pictures of their cocks. Some of the evening's loudest yuks were wrought from viewing onscreen shots of blacked-out genitals surrounded by wheelbarrow tummies and pendulous man-teats.
In each case, the men were repellent both physically and personally. One would prefer to go about one's daily business blithely free of the idea that any of these people have sex drives—much less compulsively overpowering sex drives—but along comes a show such as this to burst my bubble.
Their alibis were likewise cringeworthy: "This is something that everyone does." ... "We were roleplaying the idea that she was only 14." ... "My computer has a glitch, a virus..."
...Right, and your computer magically constructed a picture of your cock and sent it to a girl who'd told you she was 14 during a documented online chat session.
Sexual aggressiveness is an almost entirely alien concept to me. Anyone who's had the pleasure/misfortune of physical intimacy with me knows that they were the ones who had to make the first move. I'm too much of a narcissist to risk pushing myself on someone and getting rejected.
But not these blokes. Perhaps the evening's most nauseating specimen was a guy who showed up with his shirt unbuttoned and his beer belly drooping down almost to his kneecaps, griping that it was really hard to find the place. These men are all blessed with a near-total obliviousness to their aesthetic unsavoriness.
But that doesn't exonerate the other side, nor the idea that the network is STILL using the notion of pedophilia to sate the unarticulated desires of a restless, sexually dysfunctional public. It doesn't cover up the fact that the TRUE predators, at least within this scenario, are the weirdlings who pretend to be 14-year-old girls, hoping to catch and fry a big smelly fish.
At the end of one interrogation, as a paunchy 49-year-old realized he was trapped and in trouble, he tossed his half-eaten cookie to the table and said, "You know what? I don't even WANT your cookie."
Neither do I. You're all perverts. I'm the only normal one in the bunch.
