In one episode of Law & Order (the original "mothership" series in its original run) Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy and Assistant D.A. Serena Southerlyn, confer with their go-to psychiatrist Emil Skoda about a case. In the course of analyzing the facts Skoda remarks as relevant his view that "Male opinions can't be expressed. Their visceral behavior is no longer tolerated"--that "Society is telling men that they're in desperate need of remedy." Serena's response is contemptuous dismissal, while Skoda takes the (to him and the viewer) predictable contempt itself as evidence of the validity of what he just said.
The episode in which this exchange appeared first aired over twenty years ago (Season 14's fourth episode "Shrunk," way back in the fall of 2003)--but the opinions could have been expressed in exactly the same way in a show airing yesterday without any alteration, and not seemed to need any. Indeed, the exchange can seem to reflect the concerns of today even more than it did two decades ago, to go by what passes for political analysis in the mainstream media today.
Considering the matter it can seem that this is one of the things that makes the culture wars to which media hacks and politicians and those who do their thinking for them are so addicted and so intent on addicting the population so loathsome--that it is the same unsatisfying exchange, the same arguments and same contemptuous dismissals over and over and over again across the range of variations, a feature rather than a bug of the game they are playing less against each other than against the public.
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