Saturday Night Live aired a fauxmercial last night advertising inexpensive help around the house, because Angie’s list is great, but it’s much too expensive.
If you’re looking for help around the house and want a real bargain, you might like Aron’s list. That stands for the American Registry of Non Violent Sex Offenders, you know, not the bad kind. Streaking, public urination, missed the cutoff on statutory stuff… Article
Video Clip
Violent is not exactly the most well defined word where sex offenses are concerned. Some instances of sexual assault or molestation don’t include violence or what most people might consider to be outright force/manipulation. Rape could simply be someone not remembering if they consented the previous day/night or the experience didn’t meet their expectations. Neither are ideal, but they don’t necessarily equal rape. Then there’s public urination, indecent exposure, sexual harassment, anything related to the production, distribution, receipt, possession, sale, or buying of child pornography, different sex positions, sexual role play, or sex acts could legally be viewed as more or less violent despite there being some form of consent between those involved. Merely lumping all offenses covered by a given label as automatically violent or non violent removes the complexity of the nature of “sex offenses” which may not actually involve any sexual activity.
I wish it was easy to say automatically that something was violent or not, but humanity has yet to invent the correct language to make such informed decisions upfront. Glad that SNL felt comfortable at least suggesting not all sex offenses are violent.
Except for the final upskirt selfie stick crap, the skit was dead-on accurate with the registered citizen problem of employment. This video, without the laugh track and aforementioned recidivist sex crime, would actually be an excellent employment recruiting tool.
It saddens me that we are at this stage in the first place where parody is fact.
As long as it doesn’t come off as saying that registrants are weirdo’s who reoffend. Just look at this guy in the skit, he’s smiling and looking weird. One guy at the end of the skit pulls out an upskirt selfie stick under his customers dress. The other positive stuff aside, such as calling attention to the low level of the offenses, and the non-violence, it also makes it appear acceptable to ridicule registrants who are the butt of the joke. Their misfortune of having to endure all these registry add-ons is funny and is something to be laughed at. The add-ons to the registry are so strange, cruel and unusual, that just mentioning them on a comedy show gets a laugh. Kind of like laughing at stray animals running in the street. If SNL thinks this is so funny, maybe they should do a comedy skit on the 2 writers from Law and Order:SVU ( a show on the same home network, NBC )who got busted for sex crimes. MS-NBC also gave us Dateline: to Catch a Predator. If their latest skit can support a tiered registry, then it’s a fair balance considering the past propaganda from Law and Order:SVU and other SNL skits that made registrants seem like reoffending is a given. The 2013 Halloween skit comes to mind.
Everyone that had done their time should get help to find work. Having a job is a very good anti-crime fighting tool.
I have to say this is kinda sick.
Man I know its rough for us all but wt..f lighten up!!!!!!!!!!!! That was one of the most hilarious skits I have ever seen… I’m otflmao over that shi…. Absolutey great publicity for our cause and shows just how ridiculous these laws are and how utterly harmless most of us on the reg. are. Kudos to SNL I haven’t had a good laugh like that since being put on the reg.
This is not a joke.
No its not a joke but the registry is begining to be seen as a joke by the mainstream which is one step closer to abolishing it
A REMINDER of what the term “sexually violent” means in the context of law and its use by the sexual abuse theoreticians:
“Sexual violence” includes ANY sexual contact (which, increasingly, has expanded well beyond those behaviors which one would ordinarily think of as “sex”, and now includes simple affection) which involves an adult and someone under an arbitrary age (in the U.S., that age is most often 14 or 15). All such contact is classified as an act of “sexual violence”, regardless of willingness expressed by the younger partner. The act is “violent” if the younger partner is under an arbitrarily affixed age.
We should ask ourselves why a commonly understood term with clear, historical meaning, i.e. “violence”, was found to be in need of redefinition and to what obvious uses it was then put in the effort to further marginalize decidedly NON-violent citizens.
Everyone here will understand its utility in distorting public perception.
I was surprised to see this skit on snl, but I thought it was very funny and probably did more to help us than hurt us. There isn’t much humor about our situation, but the skit was funny.
Davids absolutly correct. The word violence has actually been redefined to include completely non violent offenses. 288a is considered a violent offense no matter what circumstances surround the charge. Luckily for me an attempt was not considered violent even though it took me over a year to force CDC to aknowledge that fact.
I get the point, and I understand how it can be amusing, however SNL pretty much reinforced another stereotype. Note the only two creepy ones (the dog walker and guy with selfie stick & camera) are African Americans. It has long been part of American history that black men cannot be trusted around white women; many of them were lynched for something as simple as a whistle. So why make the creepiest ones black? This may not have been SNL’s intent but there are a lot of “‘Muricans” that still have the belief that African Americans are not ones to trust.
I don’t see that skit as funny at all. I can’t understand how some of you can minimize the insult in this skit. I found two items in particular to be troubling.
1. When the narrator joked with the woman about how ‘Arons’ list didn’t have the ‘bad’ sex offenders. Implying that felony SO Offences are bad like Child Molestation or Rape but public urination is ‘good’ SO. Belittles the main concept we try to make clear to the public, regardless of individual crime the label and public designation of ‘Sex Offender’ is BAD. Although I do feel for my fellow price club members who only had misdemeanors.
2. When the woman asked where the men had been all her life and one laughing joked under a bridge. That pissed me off. Speaking as a price club member who has been and IS homeless and who has lived under a bridge. That just angers me how they laugh that off as one who knows how price club membership comes with a ohh so off-the-grid benefit package. Try being homeless for a year then come to me about problems.
And the NVSO’s all laugh together about living under a bridge in unison with the laugh track. It makes it look they all chose to live under a bridge so they can all commit sex crimes together with their laughing about it like that. I think this makes a joke out of a false version of the situation and not the true fact that they would have been forced to live there out of being homeless due to residency/presence restrictions. Also, I dislike the way the lady looks so worried when she hears what Aron’s stands for. This is a comedy skit after all, not the Nancy Grace show. And I also dislike the way all the NVSO’s look ‘pathological’. Kind of similar to what Donald Trump said about Ben Carson by mentioned that Ben Carson is pathological like a child molestor, without actually calling him one. But, I think the SNL Fauxmercial makes the NVSO’s look pathological, whatever that means. And that’s not even considering the last punchline with the selfie stick.
I’ll keep on sharing this as long as you’ll keep on reading it. But I will have to wait until the next SNL sex offender comedy installment. They have been a regular on SNL since 2006 as far back as I recall. So the next one is coming soon. Then, I will see if its a trend to be less anti-registrant than in the past. The SNL sex offender skits always end with a re-offense or something close to it. In the Halloween skit, after the registrant knocks on the door on Halloween and tells the neighbor he’s an rso, right at the end, he asks the neighbor if he needs a babysitter. Bad, just bad.
People, please keep in mind that what you see on SNL is called “Satire” which is defined as the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. Most every skit on SNL has some satire in it. If you look at it this way then they are both making fun of people like us but also society’s stereotypes of us. It’s both funny and serious at the same time. If you look at it this way then maybe it will help you understand some of what the skit is trying to say.
Live from New York, its Saturday Night Live. Nice of New York’s SNL to focus on making low levels look bad. O look it’s New York rep. Curran’s bill to extend the registry for them in New York. Coincidence?
Im glad to see i was not the only one that found this skit funny as hel… Believe me ive been through everything and anything any of the rest of you have been through i.e. prison, parole, homelessness, destitution, vigilantism and even threatened physical harm by neighbors but that skit was funny . Im just glad to still have a sense of humor after everything i have went through. Like i said i havent laughed like that since i got arrested back in 2004. thats a long time to go without finding anything funny. so there is hope moving forward that some day I might even feel half way human agian……..
I guess it’s easy for some to overlook the racism of the skits’ using 2 black guys as NVSO’s out of a skit with 4 offender characters in it and call criticism of the skit based on this ‘PC’, but when the skit also perpetuates the PC notion of registrants being repeat offenders, who can’t even complete a thought without lying and contradicting themselves, we could also call that ‘PC crap’. One guy says he’s sorry and ready to work. Then, he says he exposed himself on a jumbotron and says ‘take that kiss-cam’, which indicates he is not sorry. Yes, I know its a parody and one guy here hasn’t laughed in 11 years because of this great comedy, but comedy at the expense of black people and registrants seems very ‘lowest common denominator’. Yet, as I said before, there are some positive things in the skit drawing attention to the harshness of treatment of NVSO’s, and I will have to wait and see if this becomes a positive trend with SNL in their regular, since 2006 I think, sex offender comedy installments. It is also possible that since Obama is calling attention to legislation to help non-violent drug offenders get reduced sentences, SNL may be trying to help other non-violent offenders such as NVSO’s by calling attention to the non-violence. ( I think the term ‘non-violent’ should also be returned to its real definition based on actual violence, and examined on a case by case basis, not based entirely on age ) I just will have to wait and see how this plays out to see what the true effects or intentions of this fauxmercial could be, if any, other than just trying to make people laugh. Perhaps SNL did this skit as a backlash to Curran’s bill and I am wrong on this. I hope that’s the case.
Yall take sh** so serious makes me feel like you are on the list, why else would you be so offended lmao
You did something bad, it doesn’t get fixed and it stays broken. Live with it, die, burn.