This document appears to be an excerpt from a graduate school term paper written in 2004 discussing the author's growing attraction to the character Olivia Benson from the TV show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit after being introduced to the show by another woman at a coffee shop. The author details how watching reruns of the show led them to see Olivia and another character, Alexandra Cabot, as objects of desire and speculation. They indicate this interest in the characters helped form a connection when they met the other woman again later. The excerpt is presented as a "cautionary tale" about becoming too immersed in fictional characters.

1. INTERVENTION!
2012
for Rebekah
with love,
from Julie

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OLIVIA BENSON

4. ADDICTIVENESS
★ hot
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OLIVIA BENSON

5. ADDICTIVENESS
★ hot
★ comforting
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OLIVIA BENSON

6. ADDICTIVENESS
★ hot
★ comforting
★ saves children and ladies
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OLIVIA BENSON

7. ADDICTIVENESS
★ hot
★ comforting
★ saves children and ladies
★ repressed feelings
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OLIVIA BENSON

8. ADDICTIVENESS
★ hot
★ comforting
★ saves children and ladies
★ repressed feelings
★ acts gay Text
OLIVIA BENSON

9. DESTRUCTIVE
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OLIVIA BENSON

10. DESTRUCTIVE
★ unavailable
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OLIVIA BENSON

11. DESTRUCTIVE
★ unavailable
★ hot mess
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OLIVIA BENSON

12. DESTRUCTIVE
★ unavailable
★ hot mess
★ internalized homophobia
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OLIVIA BENSON

13. DESTRUCTIVE
★ unavailable
★ hot mess
★ internalized homophobia
★ internalized kink-phobia
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OLIVIA BENSON

14. DESTRUCTIVE
★ unavailable
★ hot mess
★ internalized homophobia
★ internalized kink-phobia
★ Mariska Hargitay Text
OLIVIA BENSON

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SERIOUSLY!

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22. a cautionary tale
[at the neighborhood coffee shop] I happened to catch the eye of a fellow student and fellow
dyke over the lid of my powerbook. We struck up a conversation — precisely, in my
interpretation, because we recognized each other as the latter — that touched on television (an
easily accessible topic, perhaps, for small talk with a stranger). She mentioned her ongoing
love affair with one Olivia Benson, a detective on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), a
program I’d never paid particular attention to. After this chance encounter with a personal
recommendation, however, my interest was piqued, and I wondered if I would see what my
intriguing new acquaintance saw in Olivia. The institutional apparatus of cable TV obligingly
facilitated my curiosity with daily reruns of SVU on USA, and I was indulging one evening in a
desultory study of the show’s potential erotics when I noticed not only Olivia, but Alexandra
Cabot, the sex crime unit’s foxy assistant DA... The availability of this dyad transformed the
experience of SVU, for me, into a compellingly cathected site of speculation, imagination, and
eros. Olivia ripened into a powerful object of desire located in the resonant interface between
nightly dates with her televisual image and the alternative canon of fan productions and
discussions. And this was a communicable excitement that could then ground a friendship
with the mysterious stranger when I happened to run into her again a month later... How else to
introduce my analysis than with an account of how Olivia came to be my girlfriend, a tale that
evinces a coy disregard for distinctions between the intellectual and the erotic, the academic
and the fan, the real and the televisual.
- grad school term paper (2004)

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please come back from the dark side!

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please come back from the dark side!

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