Tag: Mad Men

The Female Gaze: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Female Gaze Theme Week here.

The Female Gaze: Dido and Noni, Two of a Kind by Rachel Wortherley

Directors Amma Asante and Gina Prince-Bythewood illustrate that when a story is told through the eyes of the second sex, themes, such as romance, self-worth, and identity are fully fleshed out. By examining an 18th century British aristocrat and a 21st century pop superstar, it proves that in the span of three centuries, women still face adversity in establishing a firm identity, apart from the façade, amongst the white noise of societal expectations.

Thelma and Louise: Redefining the Female Gaze by Paulette Reynolds

The violence may decrease as the movie progresses, but Thelma, Louise – and we – become comfortable about their actions as the film winds down, because they were now tapped into our veins, nourishing our battered spirits with acts that said, “See? We recognize your anger, cause we’re angry – and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

How Catherine Breillat Uses Her Own Painful Story to Discuss the Female Gaze in Abuse of Weakness by Becky Kukla

The female gaze is more than simply “reversing” the male gaze; it allows for a questioning of why the male gaze is so inherently built into cinema and why women are aggressively sexualised within cinema. With Abuse of Weakness, Breillat attacks both of these concerns whilst also actively encouraging identification with Maud – our female protagonist.

The Capaldi Conundrum: How We Attack the Female Gaze by Alyssa Franke

In any fandom based on visual media, fangirls are attacked because of the way the female gaze is misunderstood and misrepresented.

Murder Spouses and Field Kabuki: The Female Gaze in NBC’s Hannibal by Lisa Anderson

The show treats the bodies of living women with the same respect that it treats those of dead ones.

The Male Gaze, LOL: How Comedies Are Changing the Way We Look by Donna K.

The body is no longer a Lacanian reflected ideal, it is a biological mess that often exists beyond anyone’s control. The effect of this convention is two-fold–a bait and switch of expectations but also the creation of a sense of biological sameness: man or woman, everybody poops. By placing the body in a biological space instead of a symbolic one, physical comedy is questioning the visual tendencies of subconscious desire.

Please Look Now: The Female Gaze in Magic Mike XXL by Sarah Smyth

The trailer offers a kind of meta-advertisement, recognising the very marketing strategies that attracted people, including women, to the previous film. Cutting between clips of the men performing various routines, the trailer includes the line, “We didn’t want to show the best parts of the movie in this trailer but it was very very hard to resist,” before inviting the audience to #comeagain this summer.

No, You Can’t Watch: The Queer Female Gaze on Screen by Rowan Ellis

The desire to show a complex version of yourself seen with male characters in the Male Gaze, alongside a desire for a complex version of your partner seen with male recipients of desire in the Female Gaze, combines in the Queer Female Gaze to produce sexual and romantic relationships often rooted in friendship.

“Everything Is Going To Be OK!” – How the Female Gaze Was Celebrated and Censored in Cardcaptor Sakura by Hannah Collins

In other words, there was a concerted effort to twist the female gaze into a male one under the belief that CLAMP’s blend of hyper-femininity and action would be unappealing for the male audience it was being aimed at.

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze by Leigh Kolb

Breillat’s complete oeuvre (which certainly demands our attention beyond these three films) delivers continually shocking treatment of female sexuality presented though the female gaze. She wants us to be uncomfortable and to be constantly questioning both representations of female desire and our responses to those representations, and how all of it is shaped by a religious, patriarchal culture.

Jo March’s Gender Identity as Seen Through Different Gazes by Jackson Adler

The male gaze either holds Jo back from the start, or else shows an “educational” transformation from an “unruly” female into a “desirable” young woman who knows her place.

Pleading for the Female Gaze Through Its Absence in Blue is the Warmest Color by Emma Houxbois

The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.

Women in a Man’s World: Mad Men and the Female Gaze by Caroline Madden

In fact, many of the clients grow to appreciate the benefit of the female gaze, making their products truly (for the most part) appealing to women. This makes more profit than the false patriarchal ideas of a woman’s wants and needs. With the character of Peggy, Weiner is able to let us see the advertising world from the female gaze to criticize the falsehood that lies in selling female products with a male gaze.

Just Not Into It: Why This Female Gazer Opts Out by Stephanie Schroeder

I choose to only support women-centered film and TV efforts as a funder, promoter and, indeed, gazer, if the intent, casting, storyline, and other elements are female-positive. There’s really just too much misogynistic and women-negating/woman-hating media in the world for me to do otherwise.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Scares Us by Ren Jender

Amirpour’s camera (the magnificent cinematography is by Lyle Vincent) lingers over Arash’s beauty–his high cheekbones and large, long-lashed eyes under a dark, curly version of James Dean’s pompadour–in a way few male filmmakers would.

When the Girl Looks: The Girl’s Gaze in Teen TV by Athena Bellas

In this moment, then, Elena is completely relieved of the conventional position of girl-as-object, and is therefore able to occupy a different position as a desiring subject. By purposefully making herself invisible, Elena momentarily evades and perhaps refuses to be defined by the adult male gaze that governs girlhood.

The Female Gaze in The Guest: What a View! by Deirdre Crimmins

Pinning down what makes the camera use a female gaze can be a little tricky, as we have all lived within the male gaze for so long. It is commonplace to see women on display disproportionately while male characters go fully clothed. The gaze’s assumption of heterosexuality also carries over to the infrequently used female gaze, making it slightly more visible. It is this consumption of the male body in The Guest which initially establishes the film’s gaze as female.

Shishihokodan: The Destructive Female Gaze of YA Supernatural Action Romantic Comedy by Brigit McCone

Recognizing the function of Ice Prince/Wolf in YA SARCom implies the continual defeat of the Whore as structural necessity in male writings also – as a pursuing character she must be resisted to generate sexual tension, regardless of whether the male author is Team Madonna or Team Whore. The destructive impact on the self-image of female viewers is pure collateral damage, just as our SARCom is poisonously emasculating for male viewers.

 

 

Women in a Man’s World: ‘Mad Men’ and the Female Gaze

In fact, many of the clients grow to appreciate the benefit of the female gaze, making their products truly (for the most part) appealing to women. This makes more profit than the false patriarchal ideas of a woman’s wants and needs. With the character of Peggy, Weiner is able to let us see the advertising world from the female gaze to criticize the falsehood that lies in selling female products with a male gaze.

This guest post by Caroline Madden appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

Mad Men is a remarkable portrayal of the 1960s that explores the office and home lives of workers in the New York City advertising industry over the course of a decade. The 60s was a particularly patriarchal and sexist period of history, as was the profession that Mad Men depicts. Advertising, even for women’s products, was driven by the male gaze. Mad Men aims to portray the decade and the world of Madison Avenue advertising as accurately as possible, but does not view it from the patriarchal standpoint of the time.

In the Establishing Mad Men documentary, creator Matthew Weiner states that Mad Men “is about conflicting desires in the American male, and the people who pay the price for that are women.” The leading women in the series who pay that price are Peggy Olson, Joan Harris, and Betty Draper. The struggles of Mad Men’s male characters have ramifications on them. Weiner uses the female gaze of these women to criticize the sexism of the era and profession they inhabit, while rendering fully realized and dynamic female characters. Peggy, Joan, and Betty are depicted as sexual, complicated, and diverse human beings.

In the first season of Mad Men especially, much of the dialogue shows the vast amount of overt sexism in the workplace. The Sterling Cooper secretaries are a smorgasbord available for men’s consumption, objects they can use for their amusement or lust. For most audience members of the 2000s, this blatant sexism is baffling, and some may find it oddly humorous just how much was acceptable or tolerated back then.

We experience this sexism through the eyes and gaze of Peggy Olson, who, much like the audience, is being introduced to the world of Sterling Cooper in the first episode. Peggy ends up being the female character most tied with the nature of advertising- making her way from Don Draper’s secretary to copywriter and then copy chief. But at first she is just another secretary, a new piece of fresh meat for the men. Peggy has never worked in an office before; she is straight out of secretarial school. Raised in a strict Catholic family, Peggy has likely never experienced male ogling at quite this level. By Episode 2, “Ladies’ Room,” Peggy is already fed up: “Honestly, why is it that every time a man takes you out to lunch around here, you’re…you’re the dessert!” she bemoans to Joan. Matthew Weiner uses the female gaze purposefully in the following scene where the camera allows the audience to identify with Peggy as the men’s prey. As Peggy sits at her desk on the typewriter, the camera cuts to many different men in slow-motion gazing at her, with reverse low angle-shots of Peggy. The multiple and unrelenting gazes of men echoes Peggy’s dialogue from minutes before: “It’s constant from every corner.” The low-angle on Peggy heightens her overwhelming feeling of their gaze.

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Peggy’s role puts her in the position of seeing not only the advertising world firsthand, but also the male point of view that it so actively employs, and from her first account, she begins to challenge that point of view. Peggy’s rise in advertising begins with a Belle Jolie lipstick campaign. The Sterling Cooper secretaries are treated to a testing session (viewed by the men behind a two-way mirror) where they can try on as many Belle Jolie lipsticks as they please. The gaggle of secretaries are thrilled, but Peggy sits there unhappily. The camera shows Peggy watching the girls try on lipsticks in slow motion, the seeds of her first copy pitch planting in her brain. Freddy Rumsen asks Peggy why she didn’t try on any lipsticks. Peggy tells him that they didn’t have her color, that she is very particular: “I don’t think anyone wants to be one of a hundred colors in a box.” The men are failing to see the individuality in women, and instead choosing to see them as a limited whole. Peggy’s observations leads her to be promoted to copywriter for that campaign.

In Season 3, Peggy continues to challenge the male gaze in advertising. In a campaign for Patio, the clients want a shot-for-shot reenactment Bye Bye Birdie’s opening: “She’s throwing herself at the camera. No one seems to care that it speaks to men. Not the people that drink diet drinks.” Peggy asks Don about the faux Ann-Margaret. “It’s not about making women feel fat. It’s ‘look how happy I am drinking Patio. I’m young and excited and desperate for a man,’” Don replies. “I don’t mind fantasies, but shouldn’t it be a female one?” Peggy asks. “Peggy, you understand how this works: men want her, women want to be her.” Don is subtly insisting to Peggy that advertising, even for women’s products, is aimed for men. Don is also hinting to Peggy that if she keeps up the criticisms about the male gaze in advertising, she will lose her job.

Another example is the Playtex ad from Season 2 Episode 6’s “Maidenform.” Kinsey comes up with an idea that every woman is either a Jackie or Marilyn. He points to various women in the office pinpointing which one they are. “I don’t know if all women are a Jackie or a Marilyn. Maybe men seem them that way,” Peggy counters. “Bras are for men. Women want to see themselves the way men see them,” Kinsey insists.

As the series progresses into the mid-60s, we see the gradual shift into (slightly) more open-minded ideals about the roles of women in the workplace. Peggy is promoted and works on many campaigns. In fact, many of the clients grow to appreciate the benefit of the female gaze, making their products truly (for the most part) appealing to women. This makes more profit than the false patriarchal ideas of a woman’s wants and needs. With the character of Peggy, Weiner is able to let us see the advertising world from the female gaze to criticize the falsehood that lies in selling female products with a male gaze.

Peggy makes the biggest change as the series goes on, from a meek, mousy girl to a headstrong woman, though her evolution is no surprise upon reflection. Outside of the office, Peggy is seen many times exerting control over her own sexuality and choice of sexual partners. Peggy’s struggles of putting career over having a family are honestly and sensitively executed by Weiner.

Another female character tied to Sterling Cooper is Joan Holloway (later Harris). No other character experiences the male gaze as much as Joan. In the beginning seasons, the camera flatters and accentuates every curve of Hendricks’s voluptuous body. We see her as the men in the office see her. But one scene turns this on its head, in Season 1’s “Babylon,” at the Belle Jolie lipstick testing. Joan oversees the secretaries wearing a gorgeous skin-tight red dress. The camera views Joan (as the men view her) as she walks across the table, slyly looking at the two-way mirror. The camera then glides over to and fixes on Joan’s bottom as she bends over. Cut to Joan smirking, turning around and looking squarely at the mirror, almost straight into the camera. Joan knows the men are gazing at her, and she takes possession of that gaze by giving them what they want to see. The men think they have the power in being able to gaze at her unknowingly, but the power lies in Joan’s hands as she presents herself to be looked at. When Joan looks into the camera, it is almost as if she is also challenging the audience as well.

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The character of Joan is frequently seen as a sexual object by all those around her. Many of her storylines revolve around the harmful ramifications you experience when you are only viewed by how you look and your body. The men around her, and even Joan herself, tend to use that sexuality as a pawn. Joan knows she exactly how she is viewed and objectified by the men in the office, and she yields that power for better or for worse. Two significant plot points happen to Joan–the rape by her fiancé and the act of prostitution to obtain the Jaguar account and a higher position in the office. As she lies on the office floor with Greg on top of her, or as awful, the awful car salesman kisses her and takes off her fur coat, the camera fixes on only Joan in a close-up. By doing that we are able to empathize with only her instead of focusing on the act. Weiner visually does not reduce these scenes to moments of exploitation. We are not centered on the event itself, but on what Joan is going through.

The show itself does not reduce Joan to just a sexual object as much as the men around her would like her to be so. Joan is a very smart, capable woman that is excellent at her job, more so than some of the men are. She often goes unappreciated until she does obtain her higher-up position. The show’s finale shows Joan running a production company in her home while raising her son.

Outside of Sterling Cooper, but connected to leading man Don Draper, is Betty Draper (later Francis). Betty’s image is one of passive, docile sexuality and complete perfection. Throughout the series, we quickly learn that there is more beneath Betty’s Barbie Doll-esque façade, for Weiner delves deeper than the false image she presents. Betty’s character seems ripped straight out the pages of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a visual personification of “the problem that has no name” that she studied in housewives. Betty’s character allows viewers of modern day to see the nature of those housewives’ lives; there are multiple scenes of the dull drudgery and loneliness Betty deals with day to day alone in the house.

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We first get a glimpse at her underlying sexuality when she tells Don, “I want you so much. I thought about it all day. No I mean it. It’s all I think about…every day. Your car coming down the driveway. I put the kids to bed early. I make a grocery list. I cook butterscotch pudding. I never let my hands idle. Brushing my hair, drinking my milk…and it’s all in kind of a fog because I can’t stop thinking about this. I want you so badly.” From this we learn that Betty is very much at the whim of Don’s actions. One episode delves further into Betty’s brimming sexuality, when we see her pleasuring herself against a washing machine while fantasizing about making love to the air conditioner salesman. In Season 3, after seeing Don sleep with so many other women, there is a scene of Betty controlling her sexuality when she sleeps with a stranger from a bar. Matthew Weiner takes great care in telling her side of the story in the marriage and relation to Don. Betty is not shown to be the demure or child-like woman that Don or others may view her as.

Mad Men is one of the few shows that depicts a successful representation of the female gaze, despite taking place in an era and profession where female’s experiences were often devalued. Weiner does not reduce the women to just mere symbols of the decade’s movements but crafts them as complicated and dynamic human beings living in an equally complicated time. And this is not limited to just Peggy, Joan, and Betty. Mad Men has many women, good qualities and bad, older women, mothers, grandmothers, young girls, teenagers, within the show that Weiner manages–even through small parts–to finely craft. Weiner uses the female gaze as one of many ways to examine the fascinating decade.

 

Caroline Madden has a BFA in Acting from Shenandoah Conservatory and is working on an MA in Cinema Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design. She writes about film at Geek Juice, Screenqueens, and her blog. You can usually find her watching movies or listening to Bruce Springsteen. 

Masculinity: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Masculinity Theme Week here.

Outlander and A Modern Man by Alize Emme

“What is her power over you?” Randall chides Jamie during his psychological torture. As manly as Jamie likens to be, he long ago surrendered himself to Claire’s power over him. In his deteriorated state, only a woman can heal this broken man. While Jamie’s brokenness is wholly justifiable, his extremist way of thinking shows his ideas of masculinity will need to continue to evolve if he wants to fully regain his soul.

Mad Max: Fury Road Allows Audiences to Both Enjoy and Problematize Hypermasculinity by Elizabeth King

As the evil dictator of the territory he occupies in a post-apocalyptic world, he demands more and more gasoline (which is in rare supply), while withholding water from his starved and sickly citizens. He also has a collection of women that he imprisons and uses for breeding purposes. In this single character we see some of the worst aspects of rampant hyper-masculinity condensed into one truly horrifying man.

Masculinity and the Queer Male: There’s Nowt So Queer as Folk by Rowan Ellis

Yet this very concept of shaming queer men for their sexuality while society is praising straight men for their sexual conquests as a key element of “successful” masculinity demonstrates the way homophobia intersects with a devaluing of the feminine.

Strong in the Real Way: Steven Universe and the Shape of Masculinity to Come by Ashley Gallagher

Steven, the title character, isn’t the troublemaking, reckless, pain-in-the-butt Boy-with-a-capital-B I feared I’d have to watch around to get to the powerful women and loving queer folk I really wanted to see. He’s unreserved, adventurous, and confident – all good traits that are fairly typical for boy leads in kids’ shows – but he is also affectionate, selfless, very prone to crying, and just plain effin’ adorable.

The Three Questions That Divide Breaking Bad Fans and What They Tell Us About Masculinity by Katherine Murray

Breaking Bad is one of those well-written, well-acted shows that somehow inspires people to scream at each other in CAPSLOCK. The debate about Walter White and his wife and their drug-trade boils down to your answers to three deceptively simple questions that act as a rorschach test on masculinity in American culture.

The Conflicting Masculinities of Frank and Claire in House of Cards by Tilly Grove

It is this point at which things significantly begin to shift in Frank and Claire’s relationship. This entire situation, which occurred in a succession of embarrassments for Frank, clearly served as a challenge to his dominance and an infringement on his masculinity, especially coming from his wife. For Claire, meanwhile, it is evident that while Frank is fighting desperately to enforce his masculinity and remain in power, she has lost all of hers.

The Blind (Drunk) Leading the Blind (Drunk): Masculinities and Friendship in Edgar Wright’s Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy by Tessa Racked

Two distinct masculinities pull the Trilogy’s heroes in different directions. Given Wright’s frequent use of pop culture references, I’ve opted to borrow Dungeons and Dragons’ terminology and describe these extremes as lawful and chaotic. Lawful masculinity is characterized by competency and order; it is the hallmark of the responsible (but rigid) adult. Chaotic masculinity is characterized by hedonism and anti-authoritarianism, usually embodied in the series by characters in a state of adolescence (whether age-appropriate or not).

A Fragile Masculinity: Genderswapping Male Characters by Alyssa Franke

Part of this belief comes from the assumption that casting women in these roles is always an attempt to tone down the masculine-coded characteristics associated with these characters. Vaguely omnipotent feminist forces are conspiring to emasculate hyper-masculine characters by recasting them as women, so the argument goes.

I Think We Need a Bigger Metaphor: Men and Masculinity in Jaws by Julia Patt

The life Brody has lived is utterly different, if not entirely sheltered. What dangers or dilemmas he’s faced in his life simply haven’t left the kind of marks Hooper and Quint bear. And their lack prevents him from engaging in any stereotypical masculine posturing. He is, by that criteria anyway, untested.

Female Masculinity and Gender Neutrality in Dexter by Cameron Airen

Knowing that his son had and would continue to kill, Harry taught him to follow a strict code that only allowed Dexter to kill “bad” people. Instead of being chaotic, spontaneous, and killing out of pure rage, Dexter developed a more methodical approach. He is a neat monster who creates a pristine kill room with everything clean, tidy and in its place. All of this could be seen as a more feminine kind of control.

The Complex Masculinity of Outlander’s Jamie Fraser by Carly Lane

It’s a surprising twist on the trope. Jamie is undoubtedly a force of man to be reckoned with, though the fact that he is a virgin and thus relatively inexperienced in terms of sex when he encounters Claire – the older, more experienced woman – attributes some unexpected “feminine” qualities to his character.

Mad Men: Masculinity and the Don Draper Image by Caroline Madden

Upon viewing the series after knowing the show’s finale, we see that the Don Draper arc reflects a small change in gender perspectives during that era. The Don of Season 1 would never act as the Don in the Season 7 finale. We see that Mad Men was all about shattering the hyper-masculine Don Draper mythos that he built and trapped himself within.

How Avatar: The Last Airbender Demonstrates a More Inclusive Masculinity by Aaron Radney

All of them, even those that have more traditional male expressions than the others, end up rejecting more toxic expressions of masculinity.

Misogyny Demons and Wesley’s Tortured Masculinity in Joss Whedon’s Angel by Stephanie Brown

Not only does the characterization of this violent misogyny as “primordial” imply that violence toward women is the natural state of men, it also implies that gender itself is an essential and natural state of being. Men are men and women are women. In a universe that generally operates in gray areas, such a distinction is uncharacteristically black and white.

Tough Guise 2:  Disrupting Violent Masculinity One Documentary at a Time by Colleen Clemens

Narrator Jackson Katz uses visuals and film clips to argue that such a view of masculinity is creating a crisis in young boys as they grow up being made to feel that violence=agency and that rape is just fine because you should get what you want—and if the answer is “no,” then you just take it.

Off the Fury Road and Without a Map: Masculine Portrayal in the New Mad Max by Zev Chevat

Wrapped in a hypermasculine Trojan Horse of violence and war custom is a heady lesson about the dangers of ceding to those expectations, and about the road away from them and toward something like redemption. Here is a film where women are shown to be men’s combative equals. Even more so, it is a film where the only way the men can escape their own oppression is to join up with, and occasionally defer to, these women.

Negotiated Identities and Gray Oppositions in Ridley’s American Crime by Sean Weaver

With that said, even the traditional gender binary is flipped on its head—the women of the show uphold the patriarchal system that controls them, while the men are often portrayed as effeminate and oppressed by the same system that is supposed to give them power. Yes. Take a second while you process that.

Masculinity in Game of Thrones: More Than Fairytale Tropes by Jess Sanders

Boys are judged on their ability to swing a sword or work a trade, criticised for showing weakness, and taught to grow up hard and cold. Doesn’t sound unfamiliar, does it? Masculinity is praised in Westerosi society, as it is in our own.

Bigelow’s Boys: Martial Masculinity in The Hurt Locker by Rachael Johnson

The movie also, however, offers ideological and anthropological readings of masculinity which are, arguably, a little more complicated. Bigelow appears to have a deep interest in, and respect for, martial masculinity.

Moving Away From the Anti-Hero: What It Means to Be a Man in Better Call Saul by Becky Kukla

Slippin’ Jimmy was to James McGill what Heisenberg was to Walter White–a hyper-masculine alter-ego. OK, Slippin’ Jimmy was only conning a few business men out of their Rolexes, but essentially both men created an alternative, more masculine version of themselves in order to survive and gain success.

The Loneliest Planet and the Fracturing of Masculinity by Cal Cleary

Alex is, in many ways, the ideal of the modern man: Handsome, athletic, intelligent, well-traveled, well-off financially but still environmentally sensitive, and with a romantic partner he treats as an equal. Because of this, he has no trouble shrugging off the gendered stereotypes expected of his relationship in the first half of the film. But as soon as he is given reason to doubt his own traditionally defined masculinity, it all falls apart.

Entourage: Masculinity and Male Privilege in Hollywood by Rachel Wortherly

Turtle reminds Vince that “the movie is called Aquaman, not Aquagirl.” This line is indicative of the “boys club” that continues to thrive in Hollywood. An actress’s livelihood in the industry is dependent on her co-star.

The Courage to Cry: Men and Boys’ Emotions in Naruto by Jackson Adler

However, when boys are told that “boys don’t cry” and that men should “man up,” their emotions are not respected, and they often internalize this stigma, sometimes with devastating consequences.  Of course, simply crying won’t cure a condition as severe as PTSD, but men being shown that they are not “weak” for experiencing emotions and needing help will undoubtedly aid in the road to recovery.

Man Up: How VEEP Emphasizes the Value of Masculinity in Politics by Shannon Miller

Because he doesn’t display the same aggressive temperament (he’s actually rather sweet and nurturing) nor does he have a similar function as the rest of the group, his value is regularly questioned and his masculinity is nearly erased. Walsh broaches this issue in the second episode of the series, “Frozen Yoghurt,” when Egan flippantly claims that the famous bag is full of lip balm: “Everything you say to me is emasculating.” And it’s true!

Mr. Robot and the Trouble with the White Knight by Shay Revolver

This is another one of the problems that I have with White Knight syndrome. The types prone to exhibiting this behavior tend to have a lower opinion of women that than their outwardly sexist counterparts. White Knights take up the causes of the women in their lives and speak out for them, but it is usually done in a manner that seems to suggest they think that these women are incapable of speaking up for themselves.

Let’s Hear It for the Boy! Masculinity and the Monomyth by Morgan Faust

As the monomyth evolves, the question is: will it evolve to include the “everywoman” hero archetype, or will the nature of myth itself change to embrace not just the messaging of individualization, but the representation of unique stories for unique people?

‘Mad Men’: Masculinity and the Don Draper Image

Upon viewing the series after knowing the show’s finale, we see that the Don Draper arc reflects a small change in gender perspectives during that era. The Don of Season 1 would never act as the Don in the Season 7 finale. We see that Mad Men was all about shattering the hyper-masculine Don Draper mythos that he built and trapped himself within.

This guest post by Caroline Madden appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

Mad Men’s leading ad man, Don Draper, started out as an enigmatic and virile figure–a creative genius on the top of his career who has a beautiful wife and family and an insatiable sexual appetite fulfilled by many other mistresses. Don Draper, for audiences and the characters that surrounded him alike, was the ultimate male figure. Characters around him constantly likened him to matinee idols such as James Garner and Gregory Peck, or an astronaut, and even Batman. Don is constantly seen by others as handsome yet inscrutable, as he swaggers around the office winning pitches and charming clients, yet remaining distant and unwilling to share anything personal. No one, whether it be the clients at work or the beautiful women he seduced, could resist the Don Draper charm. But the seemingly infallible wall and perfect image that surrounds Don slowly diminishes as the series goes on. And we learn that it is just that: an image.

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We discover early on in the show that Don Draper is really Dick Whitman- a poor farm boy from Pennsylvania. His mother was a prostitute who died in childbirth, his father a cruel drunk who died in front of him after being kicked by a horse. Dick moved with his stepmother and grew up in a whorehouse. Dick then volunteered for the Korean War to get out of his home. He accidentally killed his C.O., the real Don Draper, and switched dog tags with him in order to start a new life under his name. Ever since then, Dick has been constantly trying to escape his past by reinventing himself as a new man–a man who has, as Peggy Olson notes in the episode “The Fog,” “everything, and so much of it.” The farm boy now has more money than he knows what to do with and a beautiful home and family. Don tries to live the picturesque life that he conjures up in advertisements. But like most of advertising itself, it is false. Despite his new start, Don cannot escape his past and issues, it is constantly bubbling over and seeping into his life. Don’s seemingly perfect family life and ways of self-medication is, how Pete Campbell reflects on in his own monologue, a “temporary bandage on a permanent wound.”

Mad Men has seven seasons, and is set across an entire decade from 1960 to 1970. The show is rampant with the gender stereotypes of the era, and they are especially visible in the first seasons. The sexist attitudes of the era are shown in the dialogue and depiction of office and family life; there are far too many examples to name. We see these gender stereotypes reflected again and again in the brainstorming and final fruition of advertisements that Sterling Cooper creates. However, not only does Mad Men tell the stories of people who live in that time period, but the characters and story also end up symbolizing the turmoil and transformations of the decade itself. Upon viewing the series after knowing the show’s finale, we see that the Don Draper arc reflects a small change in gender perspectives during that era. The Don of Season 1 would never act as the Don in the Season 7 finale. We see that Mad Men was all about shattering the hyper-masculine Don Draper mythos that he built and trapped himself within.

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Throughout the series, we have seen Don reach several small epiphanies and seemingly making some progress, only to circle around and revert back in the end. Much like the Springsteen song, Don was constantly moving “one step up, and two steps back.” In Season 4, Don loses control of himself after his divorce from Betty. Most notably in the episode “Waldorf Stories,” Don gets blackout drunk and ends up sleeping with two women in one night. He also shows up at a meeting where he drunkenly and sloppily pitches to Life Cereal. He even references the notion of “nostalgia,” which pathetically evokes the most poignant pitch of his career for Kodak. This is not the cool, calm, and collected Don of Season 1. Don remarries Megan to get himself back on track, and for a while it works. In Season 5, he was able to remain faithful and cut back on drinking. He was open with her about his past as Dick Whitman, his relationship with Anna Draper, everything. But by Season 6 he is having an affair with his neighbor and drinking heavily again.

The culmination of Season 6 is a major collapse of Don’s masculine, perfected, and guarded image. The charm and swagger that used to work so well for his business is losing its power. During a pitch for Hershey, we see Don his most vulnerable in front of other men. At first, Don tells a fake story of how he would mow the lawn for his father and be rewarded with a Hershey bar. The executives are pleased; it’s the exactly what they want to hear. But it’s a lie. Then, Don decides to sell the truth for once. He confesses,

“I was an orphan. I grew up in Pennsylvania in a whorehouse. I read about Milton Hershey and his school in Coronet magazine or some other crap the girls left by the toilet. And I read that some orphans had a different life there. I could picture it. I dreamt of it. Of being wanted. Because the woman who was forced to raise me would look at me every day like she hoped I would disappear. Closest I got to feeling wanted was from a girl who made me go through her john’s pockets while they screwed. If I collected more than a dollar, she’d buy me a Hershey bar. And I would eat it alone in my room with great ceremony, feeling like a normal kid. It said ‘sweet’ on the package. It was the only sweet thing in my life.”

Don continues this reveal of his true self to the ones he owes it the most, his children. He takes his children to see the decrepit house he grew up in. He attempts to break the circle of this false identity he has built for so long.

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Upon reflection, the breakdown of Don’s persona seems a clear journey for this character, but to many audience members it is hard to see Don in weaker moments. Many prefer seeing Don as the alpha male of Season 1. In Matthew Weiner’s interview with Hanna Rosin at The Atlantic they remark that the audience has trouble when Don loses his confidence. Rosin comments that the audience “Could tolerate his wickedness if he was alpha. But if he cried, or lost his bearings-” To which Weiner replies that there have been other ‘weak’ moments for Don on the show: “He’s cried before. He lost his bearings in the Carousel scene at the end of the first season. That’s the most famous moment in the show. He was filled with regret and weeping over something very, very un-masculine. He ran to Rachel Menken and said, ‘Let’s run away,’ and could not have been weaker.” But the Hershey moment was remarkably different than these moments.

In the Season 7 finale, for Don has to finally hit rock bottom in order to truly shed his false persona. Don has ended up in California at the Esalen Institute, a therapeutic treatment center. He did not go willingly, but was brought by his acquaintance, Anna Draper’s niece Stephanie. During a class in one exercise, you are told to face another person and physically communicate with them how they feel. Don remains guarded with his arms crossed and brow furrowed, a gesture certainly fitting. Don has long felt psychology was false and a waste of time, and this is no different. Sharing your feelings was seen as weak, and Don was always telling others to stop crying or grieving.

However, eventually Don has a nervous breakdown. The culmination of Stephanie leaving him, telling him he is not her family, and news of Betty dying leaves him paralyzed with emotion. He calls Peggy on the phone, who fears that he is near suicidal. “I messed everything up. I’m not the man you think I am. I broke all my vows. I scandalized my child. I took another man’s name and made nothing of it.” He confesses. A kind woman takes him to a group therapy session, but he can only sit in a trance. Then, a nebbish man Leonard sits a chair and begins opening up: “It’s like no one cares that I’m gone. They should love me. I mean, maybe they do, but I don’t even know what it is. You spend your whole life thinking you’re not getting it, people aren’t giving it to you. Then you realize they’re trying and you don’t even know what it is.” The beginning of his speech gets Don’s attention, and by the end Don is standing up and walking over to embrace the sobbing Leonard. This scene is incredibly important for Don Draper’s character arc.

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Matthew Weiner remarked in his interview with the New York Public Library that they studied videos from Esalen: “These guys have had it. Even if they’re not veterans, they are just—the alienation that was created by success, political, racial tension, the technology, which is I think what’s happening right now, the isolation, these guys were like they’re going to crack, and it’s not like they haven’t always done that, but it was really something that I felt that was part of the story of the era of the sixties.” The era of the ’60s is ending, as well as Don’s journey. Don has had it; he has cracked and cannot take it any longer. The story of the characters end up reflecting the era they’re living in.

Don Draper is from The Silent Generation, where children were taught to be seen and not heard, especially male children. And especially Don, whose stepmother hated him. Boys were (and still are today) taught never to cry, or express their feelings. Being emotional is seen as being feminine, which men of that era would never want to be been seen as. It is a harmful stereotype for all men, leaving them stunted and suppressing their emotions. This expectation for men to remain these silent heroes, doubled by the false perfect persona that Dick Whitman puts on as Don Draper, is what leads him to make so many of his mistakes and fuels his turbulent emotional problems.

The Mad Men finale, as well as Don’s entire journey, demonstrates how destructive the rules of “being a man” can be. Especially during a time when sexism was so open, when the lines were so clearly drawn between what made a man and what made a woman. We had seen Don cry or open up emotionally a handful of times, but for the most part Don remained so closed off from everyone, folding his arms to the world. The finale shows the first time he finally opens them and embraces, both literally and figuratively, not only himself, but another man suffering the same problems as well. It is an incredibly important moment for Don. Don begins as a man unable to express himself and forced to uphold unwavering masculinity due to his upbringing, the era he lived in, and the persona he crafted for himself. He ends by rejecting those notions, which allows him to fully connect with others around him and make peace with his inner conflicts and past.

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Caroline Madden has a BFA in Acting from Shenandoah Conservatory and is working on an MA in Cinema Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design. She writes about film at Geek Juice, Screenqueens, and her blog. You can usually find her watching movies or listening to Bruce Springsteen. 

 

 

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

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Mad Men: Joan Would Like To Burn Shit Down, & Other Feminist Concerns by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd at Jezebel’s The Muse
Don’t Hate on Sansa Stark’s Powerful Femininity by s.e. smith at Bitch Media

The Sisterhood of Night by Olivia at Rookie

Ana Lily Amirpour Steals the Show by Vanessa Lawrence at W Magazine

Finally, a Summer Movie Season for Women by Kara Cutruzzula at Vulture

Why Can’t Strong Female Characters Just Be Complex? by Latonya Pennington at Black Girl Nerds

This “Raging Granny” Crashed a Wall Street Dinner to Demand Answers by Peter D’Auria at Yes Magazine

Jane Fonda And Lily Tomlin Reunite In Netflix’s ‘Grace And Frankie’ Trailer by Erin Whitney at The Huffington Post

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

Unlikable Women: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our Unlikable Women Theme Week here.

Dolores Jane Umbridge: Page, Screen, and Stage by Jackson Adler

Umbridge works as Undersecretary to Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge. Through her position in the patriarchal wizarding government, Umbridge enables job discrimination, segregation, incarceration and harsh sentencing, and physical violence and genocide against marginalized people. She not only politically supports these efforts, but personally enacts violence against marginalized people and their allies, including children.

Never Fear: Unlikable Black Women on Orange Is the New Black and Luther by Rachel Wortherly

When I searched my mental rolodex for Black female characters in film or television who are unlikable my mind continued to circle. I was lost.

“I’m Not Bad, I’m Just Drawn That Way”: The Exceptionally Beautiful Anti-Heroine by Jessica Carbone

And if you’re anything like me, every reader of this site wants the same thing: to see more portrayals of women on film, televisions, and beyond that reflect their complexities, strengths and weakness alike. We want a greater range of body types, a greater representation of lifestyle choices, a broader world of occupations and skill sets and backstories and destinies.

Evil-Lyn: Fantasy’s Underrated Icon by Robert Aldrich

A character with few rivals and even fewer scruples, Evil-Lyn was arguably one of the better developed villains in the show. And in the annals of females from sci-fi/fantasy, her name should be spoken of in the same breath as Wonder Woman and Princess Leia.

A Fine Frenzy: With an Outspoken Anti-Heroine and a Feminist Lens, Young Adult Is Excellent by Megan Kearns

In this witty, hilarious and bittersweet dramedy, Theron plays Mavis Gary, an author of young adult books living in Minneapolis. Mavis’ life is a hot mess. She’s divorced, drinks her life away and the book series she writes is coming to an end. She was the popular mean girl in high school who escaped to the big city. Mavis returns to her small hometown in Minnesota full of Taco Bells and KFCs intending to reclaim her old glory days and her ex-boyfriend, who’s happily married with a new baby. As she fucks up, she eventually questions what she wants out of life.

Political Humor and Humanity in HBO’s VEEP by Rachel Redfern

She’s a toxic political figure, a creator of monumental gaffes and inappropriate situations who doesn’t even have the excuse of good intentions. Her intentions are always self-serving and she treats her staff atrociously, often assigning them the blame for her mistakes.

Bad Girls and (Not-So)-Guilty Pleasures in The Bling Ring by Amy Woolsey

Coppola’s refusal to condemn, explain or apologize for her characters makes for a rather opaque experience. To state the obvious, these are not likable individuals. They exhibit no visible remorse for their crimes, seemingly oblivious to the concept of personal boundaries, and think about little besides fashion and D-list celebrities.

Why Maxine from Being John Malkovich Is The Best by Sara Century

Maxine is a perfect character. She stands up for herself, takes no guff off of anyone, and goes for what she wants while issuing remarkable and hilarious ultimatums to those around her. I don’t just like Maxine. I don’t just love Maxine. I am Maxine.

American Mary: In Praise of the Amoral Final Girl by Mychael Blinde

Directed by the Soska sisters, American Mary features a complicated female protagonist who starts out as a likable badass but ends up as an amoral psycho. The film celebrates the power of bodily autonomy and depicts the horror of taking it away.

Reclaiming Conch: In Defense of Ursula, Fairy Octomother by Brigit McCone

Ursula’s show-stopper, “Poor, Unfortunate Souls,” presents case studies of mermen and mermaids made miserable by culture. What this song really teaches is that internalizing cultural messages is a fatal weakness, and rejecting cultural conditioning is a source of great power. Small wonder that Ursula had to die the most gruesome onscreen death in all of Disney.

Bad Girls Go to Heaven: Hollywood’s Feminist Rebels by Emanuela Betti

Hollywood has produced some of the most memorable bad girls and wicked women on-screen—from silent era’s infamous vamps to film noir’s femme fatales—but bad women do more than just entertain, particularly if we’re talking about the sweepingly emotional and excessively dramatic world of woman’s melodrama.

Why We Love Janice and Why We Love to Hate Janice by Artemis Linhart

Is Chandler going somewhere, just minding his own business? Chances are that Janice is just around the corner. As Janice once put it, “You seek me out. Something deep in your soul calls out to me like a foghorn. Jaaa-nice. Jaaa-nice.”

Cristina Yang As Feminist by Scarlett Harris

As people, no matter what gender, it is seemingly second nature to want others to like us and to portray our best selves to them. Just look at the ritual of the date or the job interview. That Cristina defied this action (though we have seen her star-struck when meeting surgeons like Tom Evans and Preston Burke) made her not just a feminist character, but a truly human(ist) one.

Triumphing Mad Men’s Peggy Olson by Sarah Smyth

What exactly, then, makes a character “unlikeable”? How can we define this complex term? Broadly, a character is unlikeable when they behave in an amoral or unethical way (which, of course, depends upon our individual morals and ethics), particularly when their motivations are unclear. However, when it comes to female characters, this term seems to diversify and pluralize.

Hate to Love Her: The Lasting Allure of Blair Waldorf by Vanessa Willoughby

In an interview with the New York Times, Gillian Flynn says, “The likability thing, especially in Hollywood, is a constant conversation, and they’re really underrating their audience when they have that conversation. What I read and what I go to the movies for is not to find a best friend, not to find inspirations…It’s to be involved with characters that are maybe incredibly different from me, that may be incredibly bad but that feel authentic.”

Young Adult‘s Mavis Gary Is “Crazy” Unlikable by Diane Shipley

Mavis is truly transgressive. Not only is her plan against most people’s moral code, it shows no solidarity for the sisterhood and no respect for the institutions women are most conditioned to aspire to: marriage and motherhood. Mavis alienates feminists and traditionalists alike. Not that she cares–she only wants to appeal to men. And she has done so, seemingly effortlessly, for a long time.

Ruthless, Pragmatic Feminism in House of Cards by Leigh Kolb

Claire is a horrible human being for many, many reasons–but her abortions aren’t included in those reasons. The show makes that clear.

Top 10 Villainesses Who Deserve Their Own Movies by Amanda Rodriguez

While villainesses often work at cross-purposes with our heroes and heroines, we love to hate these women. They’re always morally complicated with dark pasts and often powerful and assertive women with an indomitable streak of independence.

Stephanie McMahon Helmsley: The Real Power in the Realm by Robert Aldrich

She’s proven herself to be as diabolical as she is brilliant, manipulating wrestlers against one another and circumventing any and all rules to reach the ends of her choosing. She’s pit wrestlers in matches with their jobs on the line, or the jobs of their spouses (in the case of a short-lived feud with Total Divas darling Brie Bella), added heinous stipulations to matches, or just flat-out fired anyone who disagreed with her.

Suzanne Stone: Frankenstein of Fame by Rachael Johnson

The would-be news anchor is not only an extraordinarily unlikable–though entertaining–protagonist; she also embodies certain pathological tendencies in the American cultural psyche.

King Vidor’s Stella Dallas and the Utter Gracelessness of Grace by Rebecca Willoughby

These repeated conflicts make for a number of scenes in the film that, as Basinger has also asserted, are painful to watch. Our emotions are in conflict: Stella’s aims are noble, her execution hopelessly flawed. It’s hard to like her when she’s so inept, impossible not to sympathize because her purpose is so noble.

The Complex, Unlikable Women of House of Cards by Leigh Kolb

These women are complex, if not likable, and that’s a good thing.

Summer: Portrait of a Recognizable Human by Ren Jender

When the family sits down to eat, a platter full of pork chops is placed in the center of the table just as Delphine announces she is a vegetarian. As the others interrogate her (a tedious line of questions familiar to many vegetarians) and one of the men even offers her a plate full of rose petals to feast on, she tries to walk the tightrope many women do–in all sorts of conversations–of not wanting to be seen as a “bother,” but still trying to stick up for her own beliefs.

Anne Boleyn: Queen Bee of The Tudors by Emma Kat Richardson

Anne Boleyn was considered by many contemporaries to be the very living, breathing definition of an unlikable woman. And perhaps “unlikable” is too soft a term here – at points in the 16th century, following her execution on trumped up charges of adultery and treason, Anne was so widely reviled that very few of her own words, actions, or even accurate portraits remain today, thanks to Henry’s redoubtable efforts to wipe her off the record completely.

Patterns in Poor Parenting: The Babadook and Mommy by Dierdre Crimmins

This is not to say that Amelia and Die are not sympathetic characters. Both want to do the best for their sons, but neither can handle the stress and actual responsibility of disciplining them. I do not mean for this to seem like an attack on Die and Amelia’s parenting skills, but rather a way to look at the sudden appearance of women in film who are not good at parenting.

The Real Hated Housewives of TV by Caroline Madden

Naturally, we are all on these anti-heroes’ sides, despite their bad deeds. And Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White all have an antagonist: their wives. They call their husbands out on their lies, moral failings, and oppose them. Thus, they are seen as the nagging wife that everyone hates.

 

“I’m Not Bad, I’m Just Drawn That Way”: The Exceptionally Beautiful Anti-Heroine

And if you’re anything like me, every reader of this site wants the same thing: to see more portrayals of women on film, televisions, and beyond that reflect their complexities, strengths and weakness alike. We want a greater range of body types, a greater representation of lifestyle choices, a broader world of occupations and skill sets and backstories and destinies.

This guest post by Jessica Carbone appears as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” This expression is meant to remind those who hear it not to conflate a beautiful face with a beautiful soul. However, when it comes to starring roles for women on television, the most important tool an actress can bring to the table is traditional, indisputable beauty. Why is this so valuable? Because from a storyteller’s perspective, it’s the perfect narrative loophole—if your main character is physically gorgeous, no matter what horrendous moral or criminal violations she might commit, viewers are still going to be hungry to see her on screen. Some newer anti-heroines deliberately break this mold (see Hannah Horvath on Girls), and we should be happy about that—whether she’s the hero or the villain, a female character can be much more than eye candy. But a beautiful actress unlocks some very interesting plotlines in the modern television writer’s rooms, and with the rise of the antiheroine, a woman on television can now get away with murder—literally and figuratively. But to do that, she can’t just be smart, funny, and fierce—she’s also got to be HOT.

just a few of the pretty TV heroines who escaped criminal punishment for their murderous deeds over the last decade. From left to right, Blake Lively as Serena van der Woodsen, Gossip Girl; Evangeline Lilly as Kate Austen on Lost; Tatiana Maslany as Sarah Manning from Orphan Black
Just a few of the pretty TV heroines who escaped criminal punishment for their murderous deeds over the last decade. From left to right, Blake Lively as Serena van der Woodsen, Gossip Girl; Evangeline Lilly as Kate Austen on Lost; Tatiana Maslany as Sarah Manning from Orphan Black

 

A pretty girl on television has never been an oddity—but it used to be easier to know that the attractive lead character was virtuous, just as the mustache-twirling side character was the villain. But with the first appearance of Tony Soprano, a violent gangster we could root for, writers began to craft all main characters as internally conflicted and morally compromised, crime-fighter and criminal, mama bear and femme fatale. (See Dexter, Hannibal , and Mad Men for more of this archetype). Audiences are willing to tolerate a lot from male antiheroes, partially because of historical precedent—as men have traditionally been in power, we expect our leading men to wield their power both for good and evil. But a good woman who goes bad? That prototype is sexy and revolutionary as hell—and we see that reflected in the constant shaping of the beautiful villainess, a woman who gets by being bad because she looks so good doing it. To be a woman aware of and in control of her sexuality is to be newly powerful, potentially dangerous, and thus, perfect material for the perfect anti-heroine.

Nancy Botwin
Nancy Botwin

 

The introduction of Weeds, a half-hour comedy about a pot-dealing widow, shone a whole new light on the suburban femme fatale, especially one who comes into her own by way of her criminality and who, newly single and newly living a life of crime, gets to be a fully sexualized force of nature. Nancy Botwin (played by the radiant and ballsy Mary-Louise Parker) would do anything to keep her upper-middle class lifestyle in check—be it selling dime bags to teenagers, collaborating with a Mexican drug cartel, or romantically tie herself to any number of criminals (a fraudulent DEA agent, the murderous mayor of Tijuana, a sleazy insurance magnate). Through everything, Nancy kept her family safe with her sexuality—even in the first season, Nancy has sex with a competing dealer to defend her territory. In many ways Nancy acts as though she’s invincible—something she believes because society confirms her ability to pass unnoticed through the criminal underground. When you’re an attractive prosperous white woman in a world dominated by impoverished non-white men, it’s easy to escape because you don’t look like a criminal. And yet Nancy’s good at her job because she’s selling herself as part of the product. Hell, Snoop Dogg even names her product “MILF weed,” because its delightful effects are exactly like Nancy. What makes Nancy an admirable yet deeply troubling anti-heroine is that she doesn’t mind being objectified in order to get what she wants—sometimes she even embraces it, because it’s an effective method of negotiation. In Season 3, she literally shakes her moneymaker to get a brick of product from another dealer.

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Nancy does the brick dance

What starts as a dance of awkward desperation very quickly becomes something fun for her—another moment for Nancy to hold all the cards, and get what she wants.

“Get a good look at me”
“Get a good look at me”

 

While Nancy discovers her powers of seduction on Weeds, many of our best antiheroines stride into view fully aware of their desirability. Fiona Goode, of American Horror Story: Coven, is a new version of the Wicked Queen prototype, updated and empowered for a 21st century kind of sexuality and MILF-status. As portrayed by the eternally flawless Jessica Lange, Fiona is the reigning Supreme (head witch) of the Salem coven, a inherited title passed down to a witch who shows mastery of her craft (which includes the power of concilium, mind-control, often demonstrated as flirtation and coercion) as well as blossoming health and beauty. Power and beauty are inextricably linked in Coven, and so Fiona is obsessed with her looks, to the point where she tries to sell her soul to a voodoo spirit to guarantee “life everlasting—no aging, no decrepitude, forever.” Fiona knows exactly how powerful beauty is, because she’s wielded it from a very young age—at age 17, she killed the reigning Supreme so she could claim the title, and given that the lone witness was in love with her, she had someone to cover up the crime (and future crimes as well). Fiona’s desire to eliminate all competition is strengthened by her love affair with the Axe Man, a murderous ghost who can be summoned to do Fiona’s bidding. (All the men on Coven are sidekicks or love interests, never once dominating the storyline, and that’s radical all by itself.) Whether Fiona is actually in love with the Axeman is unclear, but one thing is for certain—Fiona’s best weapon throughout her life has been her beauty and desirability. Whether or not the writers of Coven stand behind Fiona’s deeds, there is no question that she holds the screen, as well as all the other girls in the coven, in her thrall—when you hand a role like this to Lange, it comes a performance that’s part camp, part feminist tour-de-force, and you can’t help but admire it, even when she slaughters everyone in her wake.

"Who's the Baddest Witch?"
“Who’s the Baddest Witch?”

 

It’s one thing to wield beauty deliberately, to bend the universe to your will the way Nancy and Fiona can. But can a beautiful anti-heroine ever accidentally wield this power? Even with intelligence, ingenuity, and fearlessness to wield, does beauty become the most defining characteristic of an anti-heroine?

Olivia Pope
Olivia Pope

 

The last thing a real anti-heroine wants to be is a “damsel in distress,” and yet Olivia Pope, Scandal ’s most morally messed-up “gladiator,” is constantly finding herself in scenarios where being an object of lust is the only thing that will actually rescue her. Olivia Pope (played by the fiercely intelligent Kerry Washington) conceives of herself as a hero, a champion for the underdog, someone who “wears the white hat” and has an unfailingly good gut sense of right and wrong. But whatever ivory, bone-white, or champagne-colored hat she wears, Olivia is almost never championing the underdog. In fact, for the first two seasons of Scandal, the vast majority of her clients are powerful people needing a “fixer” to protect their image. And what better champion to call upon then, than a woman who is all perfect surface and no moral core? True, Olivia is constantly calling people out on their vile actions, but very often she is speaking more to the Scandal audience (or to her adoring employees) than to the actual person needing a shakedown. Yet Olivia is never punished for this hypocrisy because, as the series progresses, she is primarily valued for her beauty and the influence it wields—specifically, on the men who can’t resist her. But she never fully understands what that power means.

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Fitz and Olivia

We know that Shonda Rhimes writes brilliant, passionate women of all orientations, races, ages, and life experiences. (We’ll be thanking her for Cristina Yang for years to come.) The development of the Rhimes heroine prototype makes for better and better television, and there’s no question that Olivia is part of that tradition—but she’s also a setback. Because every time she is imperiled, every time it looks like she will finally receive some comeuppance for any of the multitude of crimes she has committed, there’s a guy who loves her ready to swoop in and protect her. What the show does by making Olivia so desirable is actually reduce her exceptional qualities, and treats her more like a cardboard damsel in distress. (Unlike Fiona and Nancy, Olivia doesn’t suffer from the same delusions of untouchability, and that’s a byproduct of knowing just how hard she’s had to work as a black woman—class and race are a huge yet currently unexplored part of the Scandal storyline.) And while we’d like to say that Olivia’s love interests are merely incidental (and make for great soapy plotting), you could practically write a drinking game around what I call the “Pope” test. (Take a drink for any scene where two men talk to each other for more than a minute about someone other than Olivia. That’s one sober hour of television.) If Olivia really is claiming to choose herself, you’d think that would also mean choosing to take back the conversation about her own beauty, and what it can do. But instead of reckoning with that power, she constantly tries to throw it off, to disregard it or dismiss it as unimportant. And that doesn’t make her look strong—it makes her look naïve.

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Start at 0:52

So when we talk about television’s anti-heroines, which would we rather have—women behaving badly who are also, conveniently, beautiful? Or women who go full anti-heroine, knowing that they can be pretty when they need to? Making a female protagonist unaware of her own power, wherever it comes from, neuters her strength as a character. If Nancy didn’t know that she could get away with being a drug dealer, she’d never discover how much she could fight her own battles. If Fiona hadn’t known she was beautiful, she never would’ve become supreme. When will Olivia sit up and realize just how much she can take control of the men in her life, and use or discard them as she needs to? Rhimes has said repeatedly that she never intended Olivia to be a role model, that she “has always been an antihero,” and maybe that’s true. But maybe Olivia needs to realize that she might not be bad at the core, but being drawn that way sure makes being bad easier. And taking ownership of her sexuality, her allure, her ability to draw people in and make them love her isn’t a sign of weakness—it would be a sign of self-knowledge, and a new coat of armor. Just ask Amazing Amy. Or Cersei Lannister. Or Six.

Cersei Lannister, Six from BSG, Rosamund Pike as Amy
Cersei Lannister, Six from BSG, Rosamund Pike as Amy

 

Of course, it does pain me to think that we need more beautiful villainesses, more femme fatales, more female bodies on screen to ogle over and objectify. Haven’t we had enough of that? And if you’re anything like me, every reader of this site wants the same thing: to see more portrayals of women on film, televisions, and beyond that reflect their complexities, strengths and weakness alike. We want a greater range of body types, a greater representation of lifestyle choices, a broader world of occupations and skill sets and backstories and destinies. But if we’re going to ask for more valid portraits of strong women, we also have to validate more sources of power—and maybe in looking at television’s most beautiful antiheroes, we have to consider the value of beauty as a legitimate weapon, used for both good and evil. When it comes to my nightly viewing schedule, I’d rather have lots of beautiful girls acting out across the moral spectrum than simple pretty ingénues any day.

 

Jessica Carbone spends her days researching food history and editing cookbooks, and her nights writing film, television, and literary think pieces for The Rumpus, The Millions, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Recommended reading:

From The Artifice, “Olivia Pope as modern antihero”

From Complex, “the women of American Horror Story: Coven rewriting male-dominated television”

From Flavorwire, “Just Because There’s No Tony Soprano doesn’t mean we can’t have female antiheroines”

 

Triumphing ‘Mad Men’s Peggy Olson

What exactly, then, makes a character “unlikable”? How can we define this complex term? Broadly, a character is unlikable when they behave in an amoral or unethical way (which, of course, depends upon our individual morals and ethics), particularly when their motivations are unclear. However, when it comes to female characters, this term seems to diversify and pluralize.

This post by staff writer Sarah Smyth appears as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women. 

In the proclaimed “golden age of television,” female characters, it seem, get a pretty raw deal. Not only is there a lack of female-driven shows (or, perhaps more accurately, a lack of critical consensus surrounding female driven shows), but there’s also a keen hatred towards any female characters deemed “unlikable.” Take, for example, Breaking Bad. Despite Walter White becoming a drug kingpin, murderer, and rapist, Skyler, his wife, elicited a vitriolic response from the audience. Most worryingly, as the actress who played Skyler, Anna Gunn, noted, this response was deeply rooted in sexism and misogyny: “I finally realized that most people’s hatred of Skyler had little to do with me and a lot to do with their own perception of women and wives. Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.” 

A charming example of the response towards Skyler...
A charming example of the response toward Skyler…

Aside from the deeply troubling attitudes toward “unlikable” female characters from the audience, another problem we encounter when attempting to examine “unlikable” female characters is the programme’s lack of detailed, nuanced and critical explorations and examinations of these characters. Returning to the problem of Skyler, Bitch Media’s Megan Cox puts it neatly: “While the show revolves around Walt’s struggles along the spectrum of morality, Skyler never gets much space to be an independent character. Her story really revolves around the choices her husband makes. It’s hard to build empathy with a character whose internal conflicts are never fully explored—instead, she often seems to just be getting in the way of the story, as another obstacle for her husband.”

What exactly, then, makes a character “unlikable”? How can we define this complex term? Broadly, a character is unlikable when they behave in an amoral or unethical way (which, of course, depends upon our individual morals and ethics), particularly when their motivations are unclear. However, when it comes to female characters, this term seems to diversify and pluralize. With a strict code of behaviour, even in the Western world, women can be more easily identified as “unlikable.” We’re supposed to dress in a certain way. We’re supposed to behave in a certain way. We’re supposed to be excellent partners, mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends. We’re supposed to have a “hot” body. We’re supposed to be sexy but never sexual ourselves. We’re supposed to be strong but not too strong, ambitious but not too ambitious, smart but not too smart. We’re supposed to be pleasing, pretty and altogether agreeable. And we’re supposed to have a sense of humour about the whole darn thing. Any departure from these set of expectations and we risk being marked as a deviant, a failure, a thoroughly unlikeable woman.

In Mad Men, Peggy Olson is often constructed- and construed, both by other characters and the audience – as “unlikable.” Introduced on the show as Don Draper’s secretary at advertising powerhouse, Sterling Cooper, she goes on to develop a hugely successful career as a copywriter, breaking several glass ceilings along the way. What is notable about her character, particularly in the early seasons, is the way in which Peggy fails – or refuses – to exploit her sexuality in the workplace. Unlike the other secretaries in the office, she fails to look sexy or even stylish. This is particularly crystallised in the pilot episode, “Smoke gets in your eyes,” when Peggy is mocked by her colleagues, Pete Campell and Joan Holloway, for her dowdy dress sense. As the show progresses, however, it is clear that Peggy will not play by the rules of the blatantly sexist workplace, rules which, as Joan demonstrates, the women clearly internalise. There is only one notable moment when Peggy attempts to “sex up” her look. In a season two’s episode, “Maidenform,” Peggy finally takes Joan’s advice to “stop dressing like a little girl,” and goes to the strip club where her (male) colleagues are enjoying a sleazy night with their account, Playtex, dressed in a revealing outfit. However, what’s clear is that Peggy refuses to do so in order to make herself appealing to men. Earlier in the episode, the boys mock her in a meeting for being neither Jackie or Marilyn but Gertrude Stein. Peggy retorts that she’s neither Jackie nor Marilyn because she refuses to be categorised by their male world. By boldly defying rigid and narrow expectations of femininity, and by displaying her sexuality only when its on her terms, Peggy not only retains a level of control and autonomy that was rare in the 1960s. More crucially, she refuses to be perceived as attractive, appealing or likable for her male colleagues.

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A rare moment of Peggy displaying her sexuality

For the audience, however, this may not make her character “unlikable” as such. In fact, this kind of badassery is exactly the kind of thing which earns Peggy a worshipping Buzzfeed article. What becomes more troubling – and, arguably, unlikable – is the development of her character, particularly in the later seasons. Peggy becomes bitter, harsh and critical, particularly towards her colleagues. Seemingly disillusioned with her career, she becomes a harsh task master, and lacks any sense of humour in the office or outside of it. Her already “outsiderness” from being a woman intensifies as her hostile attitude fractures her relationships with her colleagues further. As James Poniewozik in Time puts it: “Where have you hidden our Peggy, Mad Men? And how did you replace her with this hostile, unpleasant basket case, lashing out at everyone in sight and pining over a long-lost married man [Ted, an older married man who also happens to be her boss]?”

Poniewozik suggests that Peggy’s unlikability both from the audience and from the other characters on the show is precisely down to the show’s writing: “The problem here is that right now Angry Lovelorn Peggy is all the show is giving us. Right now, though, the balance [between her personal and professional life] seems badly off; what we see of Peggy at the office is refracted almost entirely through reminders that she’s shattered over Ted to the point of seeming like a different person… It isn’t about the show being obligated to make Peggy perfectly likeable, or empowered, or happy. It is about maintaining the complexity of a character who, over six seasons, has become the de facto female lead; or, at least, if her character radically changes, providing a reason beyond, ‘She went through a really bad breakup last season.’”

In one particular episode, “A Day’s Work,” Peggy mistakes flowers sent to her assistant, Shirley as her own. Thinking they were from Ted, she spends the day fretting over them before throwing them out and leaving an abrupt message for Ted with his assistant. When Shirley finally reveals who they were actually intended for, Peggy, angry and embarrassed, demands a new secretary. Peggy is presented as petty, selfish, and thoroughly unlikable. This is magnified later in the episode as her demands for a new secretary results in Dawn, a Black woman, being assigned as the new receptionist, something which the firm’s partner, Bert Cooper objects to purely on racist grounds. In this moment, Peggy fails to recognise both her privilege at being white within the working world. But, more crucially, she fails to recognise and empathise with someone who faces disadvantages and obstacles in the workplace, something she faced only a few years previously.

Peggy's confusion over the flowers reinforces her "unlikeability"
Peggy’s confusion over the flowers reinforces her “unlikeability”

However, we may judge, pity, and despise female characters like Peggy, but we must always triumph them. For as long as we have “unlikable” woman – well-developed, nuanced, and centralised woman, particularly on television – we not only defy highly gendered codes and expectations and triumph deviancy. We can also further gains toward producing characters as complex, multifaceted, and unlikable as male characters.

The Real Hated Housewives of TV

Naturally, we are all on these anti-heroes’ sides, despite their bad deeds. And Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White all have an antagonist: their wives. They call their husbands out on their lies, moral failings, and oppose them. Thus, they are seen as the nagging wife that everyone hates.

This guest post by Caroline Madden appears as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women.

On August 23, 2013 Anna Gunn, who starred as Skyler White on Breaking Bad, published an article in The New York Times titled “I Have A Character Issue.” Her article discussed the cruel and sexist online backlash that her character–and even Anna herself–received.

She wrote, “My character, to judge from the popularity of Web sites and Facebook pages devoted to hating her, has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, non-submissive, ill-treated women. As the hatred of Skyler blurred into loathing for me as a person, I saw glimpses of an anger that, at first, simply bewildered me.” She continues, “It’s notable that viewers have expressed similar feelings about other complex TV wives — Carmela Soprano of The Sopranos, Betty Draper of Mad Men. Male characters don’t seem to inspire this kind of public venting and vitriol.”

Gunn writes that she understands that since Walt is the shows protagonist, the audience will root for him. These male anti-hero dramas and character studies started with The Sopranos, and Mad Men, and Breaking Bad continued on with the genius success that changed television forever. Naturally, we are all on these anti-heroes’ sides, despite their bad deeds. And Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White all have an antagonist: their wives. They call their husbands out on their lies, moral failings, and oppose them. Thus, they are seen as the nagging wife that everyone hates.

Anna Gunn as Skyler White in Breaking Bad
Anna Gunn as Skyler White in Breaking Bad

 

There are many hate groups for Skyler White, including the “I Hate Skyler White” Facebook page with over 30,000 likes. On these boards you can find typical comments like Skyler is a “controlling shrew,” and a “shrieking, hypocritical harpy who doesn’t deserve the great life she has.” (Umm…what? Did you even watch the show? Their life got progressively worse each episode.) And that she “needs to die, hate her strongly.” They even remark on Gunn’s appearance, saying how Skyler “got fatter as the show progressed.” So the consensus among viewers is that Skyler was a drag, a ball-and-chain, and overall an annoying bitch. All because, in Anna Gunn’s words, “Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward genders.” And that attitude looks pretty horrible.

But Skyler’s arc of the show is just as captivating as Walter’s Mr. Chips-to-Scarface transformation. She had a loving husband and a quiet suburban life in a nice home, while still struggling to make ends meet. And then by the end she’s the shell of her former, self- trapped in a shitty apartment with two children. Her reputation is ruined, her brother-in-law killed, and her sister she loved dearly now hates her. Her life turned completely upside down. All because of Walt.

Of course Skyler is not without flaws or faults; she had an affair to deal with her shattered home life, and she was insensitive to Walt’s feelings when he did not want to receive cancer treatment. She and Walt already had underlying tensions in the marriage before he broke bad. But Walt has just a few more faults with all that murder, manipulation, and that little meth cooking habit. Think of all the lies she had to deal with, over and over again from Walt.

All she was doing was trying to protect her family from the danger, and what more of a dilemma when that danger is someone they all once knew and loved. How do you make the right choice in that situation? Why do audiences not even give her ANY shred of understanding? Why is she just vehemently hated? Viewers cannot put themselves in her shoes and think of how they would handle those life-changing events? Nope, she’s just a bitch.

January Jones as Betty Draper in Mad Men
January Jones as Betty Draper in Mad Men

 

Betty Draper is not only hated as a character, but many hate January Jones’ acting. Many feel that she is a bad actress, too wooden, bland, one-note and cold. But regardless of your opinion on her acting, I think she is good at the part, for Betty is cold and blank. Now whether this is intentional on January’s part or it just ends up fitting because January is wooden all on her own, that’s up for debate.

Betty Draper receives tons of online hate, bloggers calling her to be killed off, articles entitled “No Sympathy for Betty Draper” and montages of Betty’s worst parenting moments titled “Ugly Betty.” Online comments on Reddit and other sites include a high number of c-bombs, and comments like “Betty is a fucking, annoying, immature, bitch.” and “I want to slap that bitch every time she is on the screen”

It is very easy to dislike Betty Draper. Is Betty a bad mom? Yes, she is 90 percent of the time. But Don Draper’s a bad dad. Is Betty terrible to most people? Yes. Isn’t Don just as terrible to people? Answer: most definitely yes. With Don being the main character, we are able to see flashbacks of his childhood, letting the audience understand why Don causes so much damage to his family and friends, and why his inner psyche is so troubled. But we do hear from Betty’s as well. And if you’re really listening, you can see why she is the way she is.

Her mother focused terribly on her appearance, telling her “You’re painting a masterpiece, make sure to hide the brushstrokes.” In other words, you can be nothing but perfect. Isn’t that a lot of pressure to put on a child? Can’t you see how that would affect Betty? We do see that throughout the show. Betty must always maintain her trophy wife status, meaning be beautiful and thin. (She has extremely disordered eating habits throughout the show.)

Betty is literally a character ripped from the true-life 1950s/early 60s housewives Betty Friedan studied in her book The Feminine Mystique. Like many housewives of that time, Betty Draper went to college, (anthropology at Bryn Mawr) just to buffer the time until she found a man, and then went on to literally do nothing with that degree. Taken from Freidan’s book, “Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question– ‘Is this all?”

We see Betty’s trapped in the confines of domesticity described above in the earlier seasons. Don convinces her it’s better for her not to work at modeling, so we see Betty’s ‘busy day’ at home. Breakfast for kids, a load of laundry and housework done by 1 o’clock, then sitting alone smoking and drinking wine at the kitchen table. This is the monotony of her day, nothing to do with her life but wait until Don comes home. If he even comes home that night.

That blankness that Betty has is exactly described in The Feminine Mystique, the hundreds of housewives she interviewed who were trapped in their homes with nothing to feed their minds, just like Betty. I think why people loathe Betty the most is because she doesn’t change. She starts out as a frail oppressed housewife filled with anger and bitterness, but never combats her oppression. Even with a new husband and new life, she still gets worse. She doesn’t learn from her mistakes.

But neither has Don, really. He makes small steps throughout the show, but he still has a long way to go. Mad Men seems to be culminating in the idea that although times and decades may change, people don’t. And both Don and Betty are on that same trajectory. It may be easy to hate Betty because of the way she acts, but she has inner wounds as Don does. And they both have moments of cruelty and honesty, steps back and forward.

Edie Falco as Carmela Soprano in The Sopranos
Edie Falco as Carmela Soprano in The Sopranos

 

The online community was not as potent in the late 90s early 2000s as it is today, so viewers did not have a platform to express their negative opinions as much as they do today. But there are still comments to be found, from DVD rewatches, like, “I wanted nothing more then to see Carmela shot in the face!” or “She should have been whacked from the start!” And, “Carmela Soprano, the whiny bitch who deludes herself into thinking she can have a mafia boss husband and expect her family to lead a moral life at the same time. She wants the luxury but not the consequences. It’s hard to imagine somebody to be so dense, and it hurts the show in my opinion.”

Hard to imagine? Hurts the show? How can someone not see Carmela Soprano as a complex, intriguing character? She is a woman who deals with Catholic guilt over Tony’s sins; she knows she is just as guilty as he is for standing by him. Carmela Soprano is dense? This woman knows her husband has sex with nearly everything that walks. She knows that all those old friends aren’t in the witness protection program- they’re dead. And that is her whole inner conflict. She knows all this but chooses to stand by Tony anyway. No one’s interested in that dynamic? At all? If Carmela was whacked from the start where would the show even go?

These sexist jabs show that some fans have the inner desire for the show to be all whacking all the time. No diversion into the “soap opera” marriage and family boring stuff. And it’s hard to separate that from sexism, since relationship stories are considered “girly things” These viewers are deluded if they think the family stories were a waste of time. Some of Tony and Carmela’s arguments are incredible works of acting from Edie Falco and James Gandolfini, such as this one.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9oY7zpan18″]

Without these familial conflicts (in addition to his childhood flashbacks and explorations) why would Tony even be in therapy, the entire point of the show itself? Carmela Soprano “hurts the show”? I think not.

I’m not denying that the men, despite all their flaws are complex characters, they truly are, and are a testament to the rich and nuanced writing of these brilliant television shows, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and Mad Men. But the wives are, too. Without these women, where is Tony Soprano’s story? Don Drapers? Walter White?

Walter’s loving family is what drives him to start the meth business. At the beginning his only defense is that he did it all to “take care of his family.” Don Draper’s arc and story about the effects of his childhood on his relationships with women and family is nothing without his wife Betty. Tony Soprano’s therapy sessions, the crux of the show, deal with his conflicts between his two families- the mafia, and his wife Carmela.

Online, you can see tons of battles between these female characters of who is the bigger bitch, Skyler Vs. Carmela Vs. Betty. You certainly don’t see who is the bigger Dick? Tony Vs. Walt Vs. Don anywhere. One has to wonder if we had complex shows where female characters were the protagonists, the flawed anti-heroes…would their husbands receive such hate online?

You can hate a character, and you can hate a female character. But do you have to express that hate with such highly sexist remarks? These sexist remarks are oversimplifying these complex female characters that the brilliant writers of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men have given us. These comments show why audiences can’t handle a complex female character, which Carmela, Betty and Skyler are.

Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White will forever remain heralded as the most complex and fascinating television characters of all time. But the women? Just a bunch of bitches.

 

Caroline Madden writes about film at Geek Juice, Screenqueens, and her blog. You can usually find her watching movies or listening to Bruce Springsteen. She has a BFA in Acting from Shenandoah Conservatory. 

 

Representations of Female Sexual Desire: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for Representations of Female Sexual Desire Theme Week here.

Love Isn’t Always Soft and Gentle: Female Sexual Desire in Secretary by Jenny Lapekas

Sex and sexuality are complicated, whether we believe it or not. Most of us have experienced some type of same-sex attraction or participated in some kinky activity in the bedroom. Movies often help us to make sense of these feelings and experiences. However, too often, female sexual pleasure and arousal are still deemed unfit for viewing by mainstream film and television. America has a bipolar and hypocritical relationship with female sexuality. Our culture consumes copious amounts of porn and then doesn’t hesitate to slut-shame the women who create and act in pornographic films. Is this because pornography can be seen as objectifying women, while mainstream film humanizes them? Why does the marriage of sexuality and human intimacy feel so dangerous?

How Is The Sex, Masters and Johnson? by Rachel Redfern

The biggest question for the show will obviously be, um, what about the sex? Sex is in the title: the opening sequence bathes in it, and every episode features it. As a big proponent of women’s sexuality I’m pretty much all for it; however, I desperately hope that Masters of Sex doesn’t just become cheap exhibitionism driving up late night ratings; I want to know that Masters of Sex is trying to tell us something in all of the orgasmic moaning (fake or real).

Prom and Female Sexual Desire in Pretty in Pink and The Loved Ones by Ingrid Bettwieser and Steffen Loick

In this piece we focus on “Prom” as a densifying trope for teenage female sexual desire in many cultural representations (think of Carrie, She’s All That, My-So-Called Life or Glee to name just a few). We are doing so by complementing John Hughes’ rather classic romantic-comedy and “Brat Pack” movie Pretty in Pink with the horror/torture movie with comedy elements The Loved Ones directed by Sean Byrne – two examples of female desire as imagined by male writers.

Sexual Desire on the X-Files: An Open (Love) Letter to Dana Scully by Caitlin Keefe Moran

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.

Enjoyment Isn’t An Item on The To Do List by Scarlett Harris

The sex in The To Do List—which comes about for Plaza’s character Brandy Klark after she realizes she has no sexual experience going into college—was utterly joyless; it was as if Brandy was going through the motions. This is hardly surprising considering the premise of the film is to check off a smorgasbord of sex acts over summer vacation in order to be appropriately sexually educated as she becomes tertiary educated.

Stoker: Love, Longing, Desire and Acceptance by Shay Revolver

In addition to telling a great story, Stoker also shows an open and often eerie portrayal of female sexual desire, longing, perception of love and acceptance of one’s self as an autonomous sexual being. The film doesn’t shy away from pure desire and want as justifiable means to actions.

Bewitched by Bridget: Female Erotic Subjectivity in The Last Seduction by Rachael Johnson

Female viewers may derive psychological pleasure from watching Bridget’s erotic, self-interested shenanigans. It’s exhilarating to see a female cinematic character take sexual control and outwit her male partners. It makes a refreshing change from watching women suffer the pain of romantic love. We know that Bridget will never be a victim. She will never tolerate domestic drudgery or the compromises marriage brings. In fact, it’s pretty much a given that she will always overcome her opponents. Life is a pitiless yet entertaining Darwinian game in The Last Seduction, and Bridget plays it brilliantly.

A Streetcar Named Desire: Female Sexuality Explored Through a Bodice-Ripper Fantasy Gone Awry by Nia McRae

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a classic movie based on a Tennessee Williams play presents how society shapes, shelters, and shames female sexuality. Williams’ is well-known for writing plays that dealt with the gender-specific issues women faced, sympathizing with the way women were kept from being whole and balanced human beings.

Room for One: A Positive Representation of Female Sexuality on Bates Motel by Rachel Hock

On Bates Motel, the character of Emma Decody (Olivia Cooke) – a seventeen-year-old with cystic fibrosis. In a show where sex is conflated with violence, male desire, and death, Emma is an oasis of sex positivity, female desire, and life.

Queer Women as Sexual Beings: The L Word and More by Elizabeth Kiy

Today’s media landscape is fuller than ever with queer characters (though most of them are still white and/or male), yet the stories we see are still most commonly either angst-ridden fumbling towards a coming out or pregnancy and adoption dramas. It’s rare to see a fully realized queer character, too old for coming out and too young for children, actually dating and enjoying sexual encounters. It’s rarer still when it’s a woman.

The Sin of Sexuality: Desire in Philomena by Caitlin Keefe Moran

Sex is everywhere and nowhere in Philomena. Sex is the reason that the titular heroine is sent to Roscrea as a young woman, to have her illegitimate baby behind closed doors. Sex is also the reason that Philomena’s son, Anthony, is adopted out to an American family even though his mother is still living.

But I’m a Cheerleader: Stripping Away the Normalcy of Heteronormativity by Abeni Moreno

But I’m a Cheerleader literally queers the stereotype of the popular cheerleader going steady with a handsome football player. The film’s overt display of oppression over queer sexuality speaks to the dominant patriarchal society that strives to eliminate all non-normative ways of living.

Feminine Fire Burns Behind Mad Men by Danielle Winston

However, female desire occasionally lives in the subtext of Mad Men like fire ants fighting to dig themselves out of a mountain of sand. The show’s complex female characters are regularly lusted after, and at times brave leaps are taken into the sea of their cravings. Other times, their behaviors appear inconsistent, and it seems we’ve been cheated out of crucial discoveries that lurk just beneath their surfaces.

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze by Leigh Kolb

The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.

Of Phallic Keys and Ugly Masturbation: Let’s Talk About Mulholland Drive by Katherine Murray

That’s right, you guys. I’m gonna try to analyze Mulholland Drive for sexual desire week. I do this partly out of love for you, and partly out of hate for me. Let’s get this party started.

The To Do List: The Movie I’ve Been Waiting For by Leigh Kolb

And then I saw it–a film that extols the importance of female agency and sexuality with a healthy dose of raunch, a film that includes a sexually experienced and supportive mother, a film that celebrates female friendship and quotes Gloria Steinem, a film that features Green Apple Pucker and multiple references to Pearl Jam and Hillary Clinton. Yes. This is it.

Wish You Were Here Sex and Obscenities By the English Seaside by Ren Jender

In the words for women that have no male equivalent–like “bitchy,” “slut,” and “hag”–we can easily discern sexism, but we can also see it in words and phrases that mean something different when applied to men than when applied to women–or when applied to boys rather than girls. A boy who is “acting out” is often a euphemism for a boy who is physically threatening or harming others or (less likely) himself. A girl, especially an adolescent girl, who is said to be “acting out” is sometimes harming herself (and even more rarely harming others), but is more likely behaving in ways that, in a bygone era, would have been called “unladylike” (when no one ever used the word “ungentlemanlike”). She’s loud; she’s crude; she’s inconsiderate–all things girls and even adult women are rarely allowed to be. When she is seeking out her own pleasure she is “acting out sexually,” another phrase with no male equivalent.

Sex, Love and Coercion in The Americans by Joseph Jobes

The tension of the spy antics in The Americans really gets my heart racing in the climax of most episodes. Besides that phenomenon, though, there’s another aspect of this show that puts me on edge: I cannot tell if I think the way that The Americans portrays sexual and romantic relationships in a progressive way, or in a, for lack of a better term, creepy and abusive way.

A Feminine Fire Burns Behind ‘Mad Men’

However, female desire occasionally lives in the subtext of ‘Mad Men’ like fire ants fighting to dig themselves out of a mountain of sand. The show’s complex female characters are regularly lusted after, and at times brave leaps are taken into the sea of their cravings. Other times, their behaviors appear inconsistent, and it seems we’ve been cheated out of crucial discoveries that lurk just beneath their surfaces.

The women of 'Mad Men'
The women of Mad Men

This guest post by Danielle Winston appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

The glossy backdrop for AMC’s Mad Men is the high-stakes Manhattan advertising game, namely the office of Sterling Cooper.  Set right smack dab in the feminist revolution, when season 1 takes off, it’s 1960: the year birth control pills received approval by the FDA.

Mad Men’s stylized universe revolves around the Jagger of the ad world: the ever-enigmatic Don Draper (Jon Hamm).

Fascinating women surround Don at Sterling Cooper. And sometimes just looking at Mr. Tall Dark and Dreamy can steam up their Ray Bans, but more often, he’s so exasperating they struggle with the urge to whack some sense into him with their clutch purses.

 

The infamous Don Draper
The infamous Don Draper

 

In between writing copy for Lucky Strike, pitching the Cool Whip clients, and lunching at the automat, the men of Sterling Cooper swig scotch and flirt so unabashedly with the secretaries, their actions often cross over into sexual harassment territory, which is totally cool, since it hadn’t been invented yet. Meanwhile, the lucky ladies at the receiving end usually proffer demure smiles, and make sure to reveal just enough ankle real estate to warrant their attentions. As these women partake in the flirtation-dance, their longings are kept under wraps, not unlike the tattered copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which magically opens to the “good parts by itself,” and is tossed around amongst the giddy secretarial pool behind closed doors.

Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) arrives at Sterling Cooper fresh out of Miss Deaver’s Secretarial School with a bouncy ponytail and can-do attitude.  Given the demanding position of Donald Draper’s latest secretary, Peggy is uneasy when she finds herself flooded with salacious stares from countless male coworkers. Soon Peggy becomes so distressed by an unwanted sexual advance from a copywriter, she can’t do her work. When she confides in her supervisor, Joan, instead of being met with empathy, Joan tells her that a plain-Jane like Peggy should enjoy her “new girl” status, considering the extra attention surely won’t last. What Joan doesn’t realize is, however naïve Peggy may appear, she is far more clever than her facade suggests, and will zoom up the corporate ladder like no woman ever has at Sterling Cooper.

A young and eager Peggy Olsen
A young and eager Peggy

 

The first hint into Peggy’s sexual attitude is her visit to a gynecologist, where she hopes to procure a prescription for birth control pills. But with sexual freedom comes the price tag of humiliation. While in the stirrups, the smarmy male doctor advises Peggy that pills are “$11 a pop,” so she shouldn’t become “the town-pump just to get her money’s worth.” And if that’s not enough to scare the sexy out of Peggy, he adds with a smirk that if she dares to “abuse the privilege,” he will revoke her prescription.

Peggy doesn’t scare easily. She’s highly complex. In perhaps in the first glimpse into her private desires, while alone in the office with Don, Peggy places a warm hand atop his, and lets it linger a beat too long. Put off by the advance, Don tells her, “I’m not your boyfriend,” and sends her a strong message to never to veer into this territory again. Don’s reaction is tricky to comprehend, especially since he’s established as a philanderer. Is this sudden bout of professionalism sincere? Is Peggy simply not his type? Or is the mere fact that Peggy made the first move such a turnoff it immediately labels her as undesirable?

Peggy doesn't scare easily
Peggy doesn’t scare easily

Even more curious is Peggy’s experience with another maddening man: Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser).  When she first meets the engaged but overly flirtatious account man who is known for his poor manners with women, Pete’s overtures makes Peggy so uneasy she refuses to wait alone with him, even for a few minutes. The encounter takes an unexpected turn when later that evening, Pete shows up at Peggy’s apartment door, drunk, and confesses he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Instead of sending him away and/or slapping the sleaze out of him, Peggy takes him to bed. Was Peggy so flattered by Pete’s desire it awoke her own? Perhaps Don’s rebuff caused Peggy’s powers of sexual reasoning to be muddied. Then, when the liaison leaves her pregnant, Peggy hasn’t a clue.  She believes she’s merely gotten fat. It’s not until the startling episode where she gives birth that Peggy discovers the truth. Afterward, she gives the baby to a relative to raise and resumes her life as a single woman. 

Soon Don recognizes Peggy’s creative talents, promotes her, and she becomes a successful copywriter. As Peggy evolves, she rises through the ranks on merit, and along the way has a potpourri of unsatisfying boyfriends and love affairs. 

Fast-forward to season 6: Peggy’s new boss, the earnest (and married) Ted (Kevin Rahm), confesses romantic feelings for her.  During this time, Peggy’s desire is illustrated, as she longs for the man she can’t have. Unable to resist Ted, Peggy falls hard for him. In a love scene where she finally surrenders to her feelings, we witness Peggy’s intense burn. Sadly, instead of finding love, her hopes are dashed the next day when a guilt-ridden Ted leaves New York and decides to stay with his wife. More insight into her desire: Peggy can’t shake lingering feelings for Ted, and they carry over into season 7. So passionate is Peggy when she believes Ted has sent her long-stemmed red roses, she all but shreds them in front of her secretary, Shirley (Sola Bamis), only to discover that they were never hers in the first place, much like dear, old Ted. 

The commanding Joan Holloway
The commanding Joan Holloway

 

When we first meet the head secretary, Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), she’s the scarlet-haired bombshell showing Peggy the ropes. Joan’s girlish tips to Peggy include that she should reveal more ankle and put a paper bag with eyeholes over her head. Peggy should then stand in front of a mirror naked and assess the plusses and minuses. Joan has learned to use her womanly wiles to her advantage but it’s her keen intuitive sense and expert problem-solving skills that make her an indispensable asset in the workplace. 

Carefree about her sexual persona, Joan often dresses in red to accentuate her ample curves, and early in the show’s run, she enjoys an affair with her married boss, Roger Sterling (John Slattery), and chooses to keep a no-strings-attached vibe. This woman has lovers, flirts with ease, and when she doesn’t feel like paying for lunch, allows the men in the office the privilege of treating her. 

After playing the field with finesse, Joan falls in love with a handsome medical student, Greg Harris (Gerald Downey), and it looks as though she’ll have the American dream, something we never dreamed she ever wanted. But all goes sour when Greg discovers that Joan has been intimate with a host of other men before him, and in a fit of rage, he rapes her. Instead of leaving him, as we would expect from the strong-willed, take-no-bullshit Joan, she does the unthinkable… and marries him. And then, even though she is unfulfilled in her marriage, with the exception of a quickie with her ex-lover Roger after they’re both mugged (this is less about desire and more about comfort), Joan is faithful to her husband the whole time he is away in the army.

Later in the series, in a rare scene, Joan and Don play hooky from work, and over cocktails at a bar, Joan asks him if he was ever interested in her. With a whiskey buzz, Don confesses when he met Joan that she scared the pants off him. Not surprising. Even though Joan is a portrayed as a highly sexual being, her longings are mainly alluded to, leaving very little of Joan’s desires reflected on screen. Instead we are given a few heated sighs and eyebrow-raises in Don Draper’s direction, and left to wonder about what might have been. Perhaps Joan is just too much woman for even the writers who created her to deal with, and the notion of a scene that fully realizes her sexual persona would scare the pants off them, too.

In season 7, Joan turns down a chance to settle into a loveless marriage with her gay friend before her “expiration date” at age 40. Joan confides to him that she wants more, and intends to hold out for real love. Vixen façade aside, it would seem Joan is a romantic at heart.  

 

A tousled Betty
A tousled Betty

 

At the beginning of the series, Betty Draper (January Jones), a passive aggressive former model, is Don’s wife. Betty, devoid of self-awareness, lies in bed after making love, stares at her gorgeous sleeping husband, her entire universe… and doesn’t understand why he is not just enough. Betty’s longing goes far beyond the sexual realm; she aches to have a sense of self, submerges her feelings, and overeats to fill the void. When very pregnant, Betty meets the distinguished Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley), a local politician, at a charity event; Henry makes it clear that he’s attracted to Betty while he caresses her belly. The incident causes Betty’s desire to spike in a new way: afterward, she fantasizes about buying a decadent rose satin chaise lounge, even though it clashes with everything in her home. And romantic daydreams of Henry haunt her married life. Finally, when he doesn’t appear at a function in her home, Betty storms into Henry’s office. Flushed with white-hot rage, she throws papers at him and demands to know why he didn’t show up. Then Henry confesses that he was waiting for her to make the first move because she is married. What follows is a kiss that uncorks the bottled-up longings Betty has squelched throughout her relationship with Don. At that moment we see Betty as a sensual creature, hungering for a man other than her husband. 

 
Megan and Don
Megan and Don
 

By season 5, Don has split up with Betty and is married to Megan Draper (Jessica Pare), who seems the polar opposite of Betty. A French Canadian, willowy brunette in her early 20s, Megan represents the new generation of women. She is free-spirited enough to reject a successful career in advertising alongside Don to pursue her dream of being an actress, much to the bafflement of those around her. Unlike passive aggressive Betty, Megan knows what she wants, and possesses the drive to get it. 

Naturally, Megan’s uninhibited attitude translates to her sexuality.  In the much talked about season 5 episode, “A Little Kiss,” Megan throws Don a surprise 40th birthday party, and invites his coworkers. As a romantic gift, she sings Don the French song about love and kissing, “Zou Bisou Bisou,” and dances coquettishly in his direction, dressed in an elegant black chiffon mini-dress.  Megan’s performance is far more sweet than salacious, and yet the gesture serves as such an aphrodisiac, consequently men’s throats go dry, and overheated couples flee the party. And Don?  He becomes so embarrassed he can hardly look at his lovely wife. After a playful and refreshing display of feminine sexuality, Don is left feeling so raw and exposed that he refuses to have sex with his wife as punishment for her unladylike actions. Interestingly, Don wasn’t the only one who overreacted. The episode’s aftermath caused the twitterverse to go bizerk.  #ZouBisouBisou erupted with such Nascar speed, anyone who hadn’t seen the show simply had to know what all the fuss was about. Meanwhile, on HBO, scads of Dawn Age women were lounging around naked on Game of Thrones, and sadomasochistic vampires were having unsafe vamp sex on True Blood, not causing half the stir. How is this possible? Is female longing really that shocking? Or, are we so desensitized to the objectification of women and simultaneously starved for a glimpse into real female desire that when a moment finally makes it on screen, it proves intensely provocative.

Megan sings and dances at Don's birthday party
Megan sings and dances at Don’s birthday party

 

In another bold move by Megan this season, after she discovers Don has been lying to her for a year about his job, she stands up to him and tells him, “This is how it ends.” Then, in a perplexing following episode, not only is there is no mention of their breakup, it’s as though a Stepford-Megan has stepped into Megan’s heels. No longer assertive, she appears wilted and insecure, when under the guise of kindness, she pays off a pregnant quasi-relative of Don’s to leave town, worried he might be attracted to her. And if that’s not enough for us to wonder where the actual Megan Draper has gone, she invites her girlfriend over and convinces Don to have a ménage a trois with them, even though Don seems rather bored with the whole idea. Sadly, instead of a display of desire, this appears a last ditch act of desperation to spice up her marriage by acting out a cliché male fantasy. 

Many of Mad Men’s most compelling moments exist in the quiet, and that’s part of its brilliance. However, female desire occasionally lives in the subtext of Mad Men like fire ants fighting to dig themselves out of a mountain of sand. The show’s complex female characters are regularly lusted after, and at times brave leaps are taken into the sea of their cravings. Other times, their behaviors appear inconsistent, and it seems we’ve been cheated out of crucial discoveries that lurk just beneath their surfaces.

 

Danielle Winston is a Manhattan-based freelance writer, screenwriter/director. Her latest project is a psychological thriller called Hands of Fate. Find her on twitter @winstonwrites @Handsoffatefilm.

History We Need: ‘Chisholm ’72’

Directed by Shola Lynch, the 2004 documentary ‘Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed’ tells the story of Chisholm’s campaign for her party’s nomination, and without even trying to, the film offers a necessary antidote to popular culture representation of the dominant white male supremacist lens of history-making that is reified when it goes unchallenged.

If you’ve been following Mad Men this season then you know that the year is 1969, and Nixon has just taken office.  Although the show is centered on white upper-middle class men and women, we are finally seeing a wee bit of narrative texture in the two minority women characters employed at the Madison Avenue advertising firm that is the show’s locus.  But this is not a takedown of Mad Men, a show whose characters, writing, and style I find compelling even though I support the critiques offered by the likes of W. Kamau Bell and Daniel Mendelsohn. I bring up this series because, unless the writers this season will reveal otherwise, the New York City of 1969 on this show is not likely to highlight a major historical moment of this time and place:  in that year and in that city Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress. Three years later, she would launch the first major bid by a woman for candidacy for the Democratic Party for the President of the United States. While there had been other candidates for third and fourth parties as far back as 1872 (Victoria Woodhull, to be precise), Chisholm’s campaign was serious in its determination to represent the United States and all its citizens in no uncertain terms. Directed by Shola Lynch, the 2004 documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed tells the story of Chisholm’s campaign for her party’s nomination, and without even trying to, the film offers a necessary antidote to popular culture representation of the dominant white male supremacist lens of history-making that is reified when it goes unchallenged.

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Lynch’s film follows a familiar style of documentary that viewers have come to expect from the POV series. There are numerous interviews with politicians, activists, and intellectuals who worked alongside Chisholm on her campaign or are called upon to reflect on why they did not support her nomination even while they supported her as a politician.  The accounts of author/activist Amiri Baraka and former Congressmen Reverend Walter Fauntroy and Ronald Dellums are especially fascinating in that they reveal the complex interplay of concerns over standing behind a candidate they believed in vs. one who they thought could realistically defeat Nixon.  Chisholm understood these concerns, but nonetheless offered a direct challenge to the conventional wisdom of electoral politics in her campaign announcement speech:

“I have faith in the American people. I believe that we are smart enough to correct our mistakes. I believe that we are intelligent enough to recognize the talent, energy, and dedication, which all American including women and minorities have to offer. I know from my travels to the cities and small towns of America that we have a vast potential, which can and must be put to constructive use in getting this great nation together.[…] I stand before you today, to repudiate the ridiculous notion that the American people will not vote for qualified candidates, simply because he is not right or because she is not a male. I do not believe that in 1972, the great majority of Americans will continue to harbor such narrow and petty prejudice.”

shirley-chisholm

Though it is clear Chisholm sought the support of a united party, she was also explicit in her desire to bring together two groups to which she has dual membership: women and black people. After all, she opens her campaign announcement speech like this:

“I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that.”

chisholm-1972

The film’s archival footage is rich with evidence of her attempting to demonstrate her goal to encourage her party toward inclusiveness.  We see her move with total confidence and self-possession through crowds of supporters on the campaign trail, on voter registration drives, and facing crowds of thousands. What is perhaps the most remarkable thing about her political presence is she seems to address each audience she encounters with an exacting sense of urgency to motivate all people to seize the rights and privileges of full citizenship. In interviews and behind-the-scenes campaign footage, Chisholm comes across as almost unbelievably authentic (especially for a politician), and embodies the film’s subtitle (taken from her 1970 political autobiography): she was truly “unbought” when it came to her refusal to make political deals that would compromise her constituents and “unbossed” by those who have her remain firmly entrenched in the status quo she was elected to challenge.

Although it’s no spoiler to say that she lost the bid to George McGovern (who would lose to Nixon), the film’s real dramatic force is in the enduring impact felt by those who would go on to realize their own political power as a result of Chisholm’s courageous work. For instance, U.S. Representative Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) recalls when she first met Chisholm and joined the campaign. At the time she was both a student on public assistance and a single mother, and she remembers what Chisholm told her about her own will to act: “[She] told me, no matter what I do in life, use your power judiciously, use it with humility, but use it.”

I could spend all day quoting Chisholm; her famous 1969 speech on “Equal Rights for Women,” for instance, remains as relevant today as it did then (sadly). But rather than do that here, I’ll turn to reading and researching the words and history of a great human being who, as the Shola Lynch said, possesses “a story is an important reminder of the power of a dedicated individual to make a difference.”