Previous entries in the series can be found here. Most recently: Kaylee/Inara on Firefly.
This is a big one. I’m a little afraid to touch it, to be honest, she said about two fictional television characters who never kissed even once. But there it is — as you know, every woman over the age of menarche is required by law to watch Law & Order: SVU whenever reruns air on USA. SVU has been on the air for a solid decade and a half, and I’m willing to wager more than one lesbian sexual awakening has been sparked by Olivia Benson’s short hair over the years.
A brief Chris Meloni aside, before we get down to business: I love the guy, I really do. He looks like an angry, confused bald eagle. He has the tallest eyebrows in the world, he’s real full of muscles, and he was on Oz and Wet Hot American Summer. I love and accept him unconditionally. Stabler and Benson have a real thing going on. It may or may not be romantic, but they are unquestionably each other’s person. I’m not going to deny that. If I’d ever watched The X-Files, I’d probably call it a real Mulder-and-Scully type of connection, but I never watched that show. So I don’t want to explain him away or write him out.
But Eliot Stabler is a married man. (He’s also off the show, at this point, but we’re going to confine ourself primarily to the first seven seasons, so it doesn’t matter overmuch.) He’s stuffed full of ethics; that’s why his muscles always bulge out of his dress shirts. He’s her partner. He’s never going to be her boyfriend.
Assistant District Attorney Alex Cabot, though. Assistant District Attorney Alex Cabot. Do you have any ideas the goddamn feels this woman and her relationship with Olivia Benson has inspired over the years? The careful, annotated watching? The 5000-word essays about whether or not the almost-matching pair of necklaces the two began sporting in season 4 mean they’re in a committed relationship? The fan videos? One-eighth of the Internet is just Liv/Alex fan videos set to slow Spanish ballads.
Longtime fans of the show remember the delightful season-2-era Butchification of Olivia Benson. She was already delightfully dry and self-reliant (“It’s two for a dollar!” “Just the one tomato.”), but in season two she went from pinging to breaking your gaydar. The haircut played a huge part in it, as did her ridiculous level of swagger. Moments like this didn’t hurt either:
Ignore the fact that it looks like Stabler’s about to sneeze. Note Benson LICKING HER LIPS at that girl.
Everything about the two of them was electric, and people…noticed. They fought differently with each other: intensely, and in each other’s personal space, and using each other’s first names. (You know who calls Olivia ‘Liv’ on this show? Eliot, and Alex, and nobody else.) Olivia asks her out to get drinks. They linger. They stare. They make my heart hurt. It got the people going, as they say. And the producers noticed. And the actors noticed. And still they toyed with us.
I remember sitting in my dorm scrolling through AfterEllen and actually gasping out loud when I saw someone had asked Stephanie March about the Alex/Olivia relationship:
Finally, when Melissa Lee of ILoveTelevision.com asked whether Alex and Olivia are in love and just not realizing it yet, March answered, “I’m not saying we’re not…I’m not saying we’re not in love.”
I still don’t think there’s any real chance the writers are going to develop a romantic relationship between Olivia and Alex.
But even a few years ago, questions about a romantic development between two ostensibly straight characters on a popular mainstream TV show wouldn’t have even been asked in a mainstream press conference, let alone answered in a way that seeks to encourage viewers to read between the lines.
I love Olivia–particularly Butch Olivia (I pretend that the weepy, baby-crazy, silk-shirt-ensconced Olivia of later seasons doesn’t exist, as do you), but Stephanie March kills me. That episode of 30 Rock where she plays brilliant Plastics engineer and lesbian Gretchen Thomas? I can’t be the only dyke who pretended that “I am a lesbian” was somehow SVU canon.
Liz Lemon is quite possibly the straightest female character in human history, but I still ship it, even now. Stephanie March’s voice is just pure lesbian catnip. It’s husky and authoritative and it wears sensible shoes and powder-blue Oxford shirts. She looks like a lioness who has temporarily assumed human form to amuse herself. Her hair makes me want to kill myself. And watching her slowly let her guard down with Olivia over the course of several seasons is the most maddening, slow-burn tease in the world.
There’s a reason the lady cop has been a staple of lesbian wet dreams for centuries. Give me a full-jawed, wide-stanced woman with broad shoulders who doesn’t cross her legs when she sits down and looks good in a trench coat, and I’m hers forever. Put two of them together, make one of them an impossibly luscious-yet-authoritative blonde, and you’ll have to peel me up off the floor. And if they’re both good people? Both hard-working, with jobs they care about deeply, who treat their friends well, who care about honesty and justice and victims’ rights? Look, it’s a stereotype for a reason that all lesbians fall for ethical cops and veterinarians and social workers and family therapists. We get hot for fairness.
The two of them go from this:
To this:
That’s from the episode Whereof We Do Not Speak — where Alex has to join the Witness Protection Program and leave SVU (aside from a few later, disappointing guest turns). Olivia is a wreck. She’s soft. She’s vulnerable. She’s been filleted. Her voice cracks, her jaw wobbles, her eyes fill with tears. It’s the episode that launched a thousand ships, and they still won’t give us one goddamn kiss. Olivia never leans over and pulls Alex’s glasses off. The top of Alex’s desk never gets swept clean and christened. Their voices never get close and husky until they turn off from a dark, quiet kiss. Olivia never takes off her leather jacket and lets down her guard and takes a fistful of Alex’s hair in her hands.
But we still have the fanvids.
Tags: alex cabot, butchification, femslash fridays, law and order svu, making people lesbians by argument, olivia benson
SQUEE-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
“He looks like an angry, confused bald eagle.”
This is the best description I have ever read of Christopher Meloni.
I’d like to add Josh Charles as part of the confused bald eagle club.
And, in his best moments, Tony Goldwyn perhaps? As like, the slightly-less-hot-but-I’d-still-go-there little-eaglet-brother?
Yesssssssss yessssssssssss
i have watched like two episodes of SVU ever, somehow, but i have quietly worshipped Olivia Benson anyway, and so i will try to be better.
God, her short hair really WAS the best.
pertinent: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/11/mariska-…
My mother and I watched SVU a lot at home during the midpoint of terrible recessionlandia and this was allllways the most uncomfortable part, and by that I mean, see you later I need to spend the day on Ralst.com
My very first femslash!! These two will always have a special place in my heart, and as long as SVU is on the air I’ll be (not so) secretly hoping they get together.
YES. i’m home sick and a USA SVU marathon is on my teevee RIGHT NOW. it’s season 1, and just before reading this, i found myself muttering “when’s she gonna cut her hair?”
LORDY LORDY thank you
SVU works in my house because i’ve got a thing for Cabot and my ladyfriend has a thing for Olivia; when they are on the screen together, there’s significant swooning/stand-in petting (stroking each other’s arms and legs while still looking at Cabot and Benson). It’s in the Top Three Gayest Things We Do list.
Your life is perfect.
What are you wearing while you do this? I’m asking for a friend.
That friend is Mallory.
Just our tattoos.
(JK, more like sweatpants and sweatpants and awesome socks from Costco because it’s getting cold here.)
I’m just going to leave this right here, with the caveat that it is long, and it is by my friend, BUT it is worth it.
I’m only about 10% done, but this is absolutely brilliant.
“Misleader”: Father Jones has never touched a child, but when he closes his eyes at night, he still remembers his high school girlfriend: her soft thighs, her lined hands, the way she dropped off that roof like a falcon.
Oh my god Father Jones dated Paulie?!?
YOUR FRIEND NEEDS TO WRITE FOR US
“Limitations”: Stabler discovers that even New York ends.
BRB, PEEING PANTS
I watched L&O:SVU a handful of times* when it first hit the airwaves and thought “That broad [Olivia] looks amazing, like the offspring of a beauty queen and a strongman.” Then I noticed her last name and – KAPOW, mind blown. A beauty queen and a strongman indeed.
*I was unaware of the statute you cite, but I know: ignorance of the law is no excuse.
[There was an Inara/Kaylee femslash? Where was I? And, at least as important, WHERE WAS ZOE? Was she waiting for me? I’m right here, Zoe. I’m right here. Let’s be bad guys.]
I love how we do not speak of Casey.
The actress who played Casey was actually in an earlier episode as a suspect! I find that deeply weird. The things you learn by rewatching shows from the beginning! (True of X-Files, too–Nicholas Lea showed up as a random dude about a season before he showed up as Krycek.)
EVEN WEIRDER, Novak ALSO appeared on 30 Rock, as one of Liz’s former high school classmates!
The actress who played Casey was actually in an earlier episode as a suspect! I find that deeply weird. The things you learn by rewatching shows from the beginning! (True of X-Files, too–Nicholas Lea showed up as a random dude about a season before he showed up as Krycek.)
And my decade-old obsessive Alex Cabot feelings all come flooding back. Ms. Ortberg, with this piece you might as well have looked directly into my soul.
I haven’t been watching the latest season that much, but I caught an episode a few weeks ago and now they’ve got Olivia dating the guy who played Liz Lemon’s ex Dennis and there was a case where he had to go undercover and he was forced to have sex with a prostitute while wearing a wire to maintain his cover and she overheard the whole thing and it was awful and wrong and NO. Why do this to yourself, Olivia? Why?
There is a scene in the episode when Alex comes back from witness protection when she talks to Olivia about missing New York And being called “Emily.” Olivia tells her, “it’s hard being someone that you’re not.
No one will ever convince me that Olivia isn’t taking about having to keep her relationship with Alex closeted. Ugh. I am getting emotional just thinking about it.
In aggregate, I have spent approximately a year of my life reading and re-reading Cabenson fanfiction and watching the show. Thank god for Ralst and later iterations, although it did make it rather difficult to finish my senior thesis in college.
I think I’ve read pretty much every fic that people would rate 4 or 5 stars; I welcome challenges to this or requests. As I’m not talented enough to write it myself, dissemination of Cabenson goodness will just have to be my fandom contribution.
This brings back so many memories of my first fandom love. Thank you for including my essay.
I love Cabenson! There is definitely chemistry and always has been. In one of the bloopers on YouTube, there are playing around during filming and Mariska jokingly suggests that they hold hands in a scene. I have written my first fanfic of Cabenson. Check it out if you want…
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10606218/1/Love-Won-…
Dammit! Every time I bunny-trail through one of the Femslash Friday posts I get alternately sad and angry that I just found The Toast a few months ago. You’re all precious precious butterflies, and also Alex/Olivia forever and ever.
Re-reading this toast classic and it hit me. Dick Wolf tried to do a lesbian shocker once and IMO it just kind of fell flat. But he could do a totally successful one if he wanted.
Series finale of SVU, it’s revealed that Benson and Cabot really were a couple, but just for one super special, unforgettable weekend together, at the end of which they tearfully accepted that because of their careers, they just couldn’t make it as a couple.
Would be totally believable and a satisfying twist ending to the series.