This is a more difficult post to write than the first two, both because it’s tougher to put my finger on exactly why I liked the way the third untrusting female character was portrayed, and because this character’s experience is more based on generalized male privilege than it is on the much more salient and dramatic problems that come with recovering from acts of violence.

The woman is Lt. Esme Pasquale, and her story is that she’s worried that her fiancé … READ MORE

The second woman in this episode who exhibits a learned discomfort with trusting her male partner is Rita, Dexter’s girlfriend. Rita is interesting for a number of reasons—she’s in a romantic relationship with a sociopath, but one who is adept at hiding the fact that he spends his evenings murdering people, though he still struggles to pretend that he experiences actual emotional connection to others. She’s also relatively recently gotten out of an abusive first marriage with a drug addict … READ MORE

The second episode of the second season of Dexter includes a thematic thread connecting several of the female characters. I started trying to write just one post on it, but found that, even though I’m really only looking at one episode, the themes were rich enough that they deserved to be explored in a post addressing the way they affect each of the three female characters.

Generally speaking, movies and television shows about violence or violent characters (the eponymous Dexter himself … READ MORE