Federal Breasts of Investigation

I'm missing Dana Scully. She knew how to dress. And, for all its faults, the female lawyers on the original Law and Order mostly look like lawyers. I won't even bring up a fantasy like Boston Legal, brought to you by the same folks who put Allie McBeal in her micro-minis. But the FBI, if one is to believe television, is filled with women who sport serious cleavage. Numb3rs, Without a Trace, Criminal Minds, NCIS (okay, not FBI, but it wants to be) all have female agents stalking the workplace in blazers over low cut blouses. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who is an older woman, wears her shirts buttoned up and looks like business. Poppy Montgomery wears her blouse cut low enough that I can practically see her xiphoid process. What, semiotics-wise, are we to gather from this? That these women are all young and tough and comfortable with their sexuality? That they're all young and insecure and attempting to use their secondary sex characteristics to either secure advancement within the Bureau or, perhaps, dazzle Evil Doers into submission?

Both Criminal Minds and NCIS has a resident "colorful" female: on Minds it's Kirsten Vangsness's Penelope Garcia and on NCIS it's Pauley Perrette's Abby Sciuto. They don't rely on cleavage, but they're also back at the office doing the brain work so that the cleavage girls can go out and captcha the bad guys.

And don't get me started with the clothes that the women on CSI: Miami and CSI: NY wear. Next: vice cops who catch crooks while wearing wonderbras, see-through blouses, and spike heels with marabou trim.