This guest post by Caitlin Keefe Moran appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.
Oh Scully. You beautiful, badass, rosebud-mouthed, flame-haired Valkyrie wearing a blazer two sizes too big for you: what do you desire? We know what Mulder desires. He wants to look at porn in his office. He wants to flirt and call the shots. He wants ALIENS. He does not want to give you a desk.
But what about you? Why do we get such a cursory glimpse into your passions? How is it possible that in nine years we only see you go on two dates, Scully? (Three if we’re counting that one weird dinner with the Smoking Man… Lord help us if that was a date.) And when we finally do see you express interest in someone…oh, Lord. Remember him? The guy with the hallucinogenic tattoo? You were pretty into him; plus you felt stagnant in your personal life, and Mulder wouldn’t give you the damn desk. And it was nice to see you let loose a little bit, honestly. You even got a terrible lower-back tattoo of a snake biting its own tail, which… OK it’s not what I would have picked for you, but hey! You were living. All this fun goes sour when this dude’s tattoo tells him to murder you after you slept together. That you slept with him at all is conjecture—the camera pans away before we even see you kiss him, which is much more prudery than the show’s directors ever exercised with Mulder. Tattoo guy tries to put you in his building’s incinerator. It wasn’t pretty.
Did it seem to you that the message you were supposed to get was, “Whoa, rein it in there, girlie! Don’t go flaunting those goods all over town!”? Because that’s what it seems like to me. Expressing your sexuality makes you vulnerable, the message goes, and, if the snake tattoo is any indication, faintly ridiculous. Expressing your sexuality makes you shameful. Expressing your sexuality makes you deserving of punishment.
Or how about Padgett, the writer who stalked you? Remember him? John Hawkes at his most moon-eyed and creepy? He might be the king of the all the men lining up to mansplain your feelings to you (though he’s only slightly ahead of the Smoking Man and his “wall around your heart” speech. STFU, Smoking Man). He has a lot to say (and write) about the way you present or hide yourself as a woman, and it hurts because it’s pretty much all true (and because he’s straight-up bonkers). Padgett watched you for long enough to read your insecurities as if they were typed out in one of his manuscripts—and sometimes they are. He knows that you downplay your femininity as much as possible so your (almost exclusively male) coworkers will take you seriously, because, as Padgett puts it, “to be thought of as simply beautiful was bridling, unthinkable.”
In fact, most of the women on The X-Files only show their sexuality when they are outside of themselves. Sometimes they’re controlled by an unusual alignment of the planets, like Detective White in “Syzygy.” Other times they’re products of a male fantasy (or an artificial intelligence’s approximation of a male fantasy), like the nurses in Kill Switch, or a lingerie-clad Diana Fowley in The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati. It would make sense, then, that you would want to keep your sexuality on lockdown beneath the frumpy blazers (also: it was the 90s). But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating to see you squash any hint of womanhood (let alone sexuality) because any hint would be unwelcome in the testosterone cloud of the FBI.
I wish you had a female friend, Scully. We hardly ever see you talk to another woman, much less confide in one. It’s not like she has to be your bosom buddy or anything. Just a pal you can get drinks with after work, blow off some steam, swap stories about your frustrating coworkers. Maybe you two could talk about what you want, at work, in bed, in life. As people. If only Monica Reyes could have shown up a couple of seasons earlier. I like to imagine the two of you at a drunk brunch, bonding over pumpkin spice pancakes with maple bacon glaze and a gallon-sized bucket of Bloody Marys. There’s strength in numbers, after all. Maybe with the two of you together, everything wouldn’t have seemed so….buttoned-up. Maybe with someone to talk through your anxieties with, you and Mulder wouldn’t have waited seven years to…but never mind, that’s a whole other article.
Let’s talk about Baby William for a second. Your miracle baby. Your super soldier. Your half-alien messiah. The Christ allegory in the Season 8 finale was slathered on so thick we could have spooned it off and eaten it. The lowly birthplace, the star of Bethlehem (which was, what, a spaceship? Do we ever figure that out?), the Lone Gunmen showing up after the fact with gifts like the Three Wise Men. But what does this say about you, Scully? The virgin mother of the miracle child. Immaculate and without sin. Clean. It takes us a season and a half to learn that you weren’t, in fact, visited by the Holy Spirit, or the aliens, or the government; your baby was born of sexual intercourse with another human being, like most other babies. But we don’t get to see this moment, with Mulder, no less, the love of your life—instead we hear it described callously by an NSA agent, who had the whole place bugged. Why is this, Scully? Is it because once presented with the idea that you might be a sexual being, we couldn’t see you any other way? That we wouldn’t be able to take you seriously as a person if we understood that you could, just possibly, desire sex?
It certainly seemed that way in “Three of a Kind,” when the Lone Gunmen snooker you into helping them spy on a Defense Department contractor’s convention in Las Vegas. Of course you remember this, Scully—when a government operative injected you with an anoetic histamine that inhibited your intellect so you would forget the damning results of the autopsy you just finished? You certainly were silly then, trying to push a table bolted to the floor as if it was a rolling cart, tickling strangers at whim. Everyone attributed it to jetlag until you found your way to the hotel lobby and began flirting with the assembled contractors. The sight of you seductively taking a cigarette out of Morris Fletcher’s (admittedly skeezy) fingers so disturbed Lone Gunmen member Frohike that he grabbed you and immediately brought you in for evaluation. Message: a flirting Scully isn’t Scully at all. Sexual desire is something you’re above. You roll your eyes at Mulder’s innuendo and come-ons, because you are a Serious Woman, doing Serious Work. The roles you can play are proscribed by your gender, even as you have greater freedom than many of television’s women, what with the gun-touting and the badge-flashing. But there is a limit to this freedom: sexual desire is dangerous, dangerous, dangerous. And in the face of this danger, sometimes it’s just easier to clam up and clamp down. To go quiet. But Scully, I wanted so much more for you.
Caitlin Keefe Moran is an editor in New York City. Her work has appeared on The Toast, in The Iowa Review, and other outlets. She lives in Queens and feels passionately about donuts and splitting infinitives as a form of protest.
I was enjoying this article so much, but had to stop; I’ve only just began season 8!
But, I totally agree. Mulder doesn’t have that many “sexcapades” either, but when he does, they are way more obvious (and he does have I think two more than she does – yes, I counted).
That episode with tattoo-guy, they don’t seem to have slept together at all, given that he’s on the couch and she’s on the bed.
Anyway, will return when I finish my binge!
I disagree wholeheartedly with this article. I think Scully talked to her sister and mother meaningfully as women (and most similar conversations with random other individuals would have been irrelevant to the show’s playing so they were omitted just like Mulder’s, but I digress…) but things such as the damage she and Mulder felt they brought upon their loved ones caused her to join Mulder in being almost exclusively about the work. They’re two workaholics which is why the levity of certain situations or episodes was welcome in some cases (including the one you claim as being about dismissing her sexual nature as “something she’s above” – more like below – the joke is that her and Mulder are so uptight, even including their dry humor, because they’re all about the work…hence the joke when Mulder lets out a loud yelp in another scene as, beyond the bare necessity, they aren’t emotionally expressive). I think Scully had tons of sexual desire and that was the whole point of her staying “buttoned up” – and Mulder’s aimless porn obsession was, ironically, his sexual desire being repressed as well. Both characters had no “genuine” sexual nor social outlet and that was basically the point. The point which tied into the whole show.
Repression is going to be a heavy subtextual element in a show about global conspiracy. So when you don’t have all of the information about Scully’s sexuality or Mulder’s sexuality – save for that there doesn’t seem to be much (expressed), it becomes an element of honesty and humanity which sets them apart from those they oppose on the show – those who seek to hide the truth. That is, those who seek to enslave or wipe out the human race via alien rule. Given their occupations and experiences, this state of being for them is what kept them “pure” (not sexually itself but as in honest, “real” as human characters) – fitting then that “Purity Control” was what the show was essentially about – in the face of the show’s main mythology of deception. They were both solitary sexual beings clearly in romantic love – and thinly-veiled denial – for so long that the sexual tension became the driving force of the show following the first half or so of its run.
To me, the whole show is about “what’s going on behind the scenes” and, by virtue of their evident repression, these two characters were honest representations of workaholics. That is to say that it’s better to be honestly chaste than falsely promiscuous (in this context, “Giving them notable sexual relationships with people outside of each other would be forcing a situation untrue to the characters and, thus, deceptive – placing them in the same realm of the many lies they seek to expose the truth of and undercutting their value as ‘human’ characters.”). “The truth is out there.” They sought the truth. And the truth is that life can be lonely and people can, while being completely honest as themselves, still repress their feelings, sexual or otherwise. In the case of the two characters, they found the truth, they found love, they found each other because of their lack of sexual expression (as those who are honest ultimately have nothing to hide – “the truth” is found). Which is a very interesting “case” to be made indeed in a world which, in many regards, stresses that sexuality must be worn on one’s sleeve…even if one doesn’t have much of anything to wear (or express openly, by virtue of either asexuality or self-imposed repression, denial, whatever). As in, a world which might easily lead to assertions toward women who aren’t sexually expressive “in the right way” such as, “You’re conforming to a role proscribed by your gender…” simply because someone wishes to be their own person and doesn’t conform to anyone else’s standards. Ironic. And fairly opposed to allowing the character to be who she is…while acting under the false pretense of wishing to allow her to be who she is (or “should be,” to the commenter’s mind).
This fittingly makes the show similar to many horror works which explore the repressed who ultimately find their relative “freedom” through rallying against deceptive or oppressive forces. Scully struggles with her loneliness (and resulting bad tattoo) as she struggles with her faith…while Mulder struggles with his loneliness (and resulting porn addiction) as he struggles with his narrow mission. The whole point is that they overcome this, the repression, the burying of the truth…by banding together. They are both sexual by virtue of not being expressly nor openly sexual (for the most part) because it is not what something appears as on the surface which is what the X-Files was ever about. It was always about what was behind the curtain, waiting to be exposed and never the exposure. It was the chase, the tension, the work. And to make that about the endpoint, the release, the answers…is reductive and misses what I feel the point of the show was across the board. The truth isn’t just there, it’s out there. You have to find it!
I think their individual isolations – sexually and socially – are what made them beautiful, human and meaningful together in the long run within the context of the show. And, of particular note, made Scully a fully human character in contrast to a media realm which so often assigns women an immediate and oft-referenced sexual identity in service of the male protagonist/s (or, in some cases, audience – whatever the gender).
Dana Scully: “The truths are out there. And if one day you should behold a miracle, as I have in you, you will learn the truth is not found in science, or on some unseen plane, but by looking into your own heart. And in that moment you will be blessed – and stricken. For the truest truths are what hold us together, or keep us painfully, desperately apart.”
In short (very short compared to the rest of this), they were basically, without immediate awareness, dating each other the whole time…and, regardless, this is not the show nor character to examine in this manner as doing so misses what makes the show what it is.