By the time I turned 10, prime-time TV had rendered me terrified of many things. I was terrified I was going to get locked in a closet with my two siblings tied up outside, screaming, by a man who'd stalked me for years. I was afraid I was going to get locked in the bathroom of a lonely bus station by a pervert with my best friend left screaming outside, unable to help. I was terrified I'd be felt up by a trusted teacher; felt up by a trusted family friend; raped twice by a perp I'd successfully prosecuted; cornered in a parking garage and raped. I was terrified I'd be raped by my boyfriend, or by my boyfriend's best friend, and that neither would ever be made to pay.

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But in those pre-HBO days, I wasn't privy to this sacking-of-Troy-worthy battery of ravishings because I stayed up late watching adult-only offerings. (We didn't even have cable.) It was because, like most kids my age, I was a fan of "Diff'rent Strokes," "The Facts of Life," "Family Ties," "Blossom," "Fame," "Hunter," and "Knight Rider" -- and in the 1980s, that heretofore vanilla line-up of family-friendly shows got caught up in a very ill-advised rash of Very Special Episodes.

I thought of this when I came across the article in the Guardian newspaper about book critic Jessica Mann, who's taken crime writers, both male and female, to task for a monstrous increase in "sadistic misogyny" when it comes to their female characters. In a September blog post in The Standpoint, Mann writes:

". . . an increasing proportion of the crime fiction I am sent to review features male perpetrators and almost invariably female victims -- series of them. Each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims' sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit, as young women are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up or tied down, raped, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, eaten, starved, suffocated, stabbed, boiled or buried alive."

As I've written elsewhere, the problem with the line-up wasn't that pre-teens are too young to know about rape. It was that the networks were exploiting said problem for sensational, even titillating, purposes. Fans of "Broadcast News," that Cassandra-like classic about the end of journalism, will remember the scene in which Albert Brooks stands aghast, watching the monitor where William Hurt weeps along with his subject as they discuss her date rape. "Can I turn on the news for a second?. . . Oh, wait a minute. Sex -- Tears --This must be the news," says Brooks' character, Aaron.

Aaron is incredulous to see serious journalism devolving into a lurid telenovela. I, at 10, saw something similarly callous at how easily the show's writers had exposed my beloved characters to harm. The week after "The Facts of Life's" Tootie is molested in the bus station, she's bouncing around, worrying about her math homework. "Family Ties'" Mallory neatly segues from being felt up by her father's best friend to grousing about annoying Alex -- who incidentally, in his Very Special Episode about a friend's suicide, is given an entire hour to work through his emotions under a bare spotlight.

As Mann writes, something similar is happening in the world of crime fiction, where, even in that corpse-friendly arena, the pile of dead bodies tilts suspiciously toward the female side. Why? Because dead women sell better than dead men:

"When a female corpse appeared on the jacket of a crime-writing colleague's new book, she pointed out to her publisher that the victim in the story was actually a man. Never mind that, came the reply, dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don't. Nor do dead children or geriatrics."

Mann's mention of the cover is apropos, because if the last decade of publishing has taught us anything, it's that some of the worst crimes against women start with cover designers, who slice their victims in half before the reader even has a chance to crack the spine (no pun intended). A modest proposal: Can we stop reducing women to pairs of legs and half-faces? Because whether in TV, art, or on the page, a woman should be more than the sum of her parts.


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