Written by Katherine Murray.
Consider this a late addition to the Women and Work Week, if you like. This plot line aired on Rescue Me almost ten years ago, but it was so interesting and so frustrating that I haven’t forgotten it since.
Rescue Me is an hour-long drama/comedy about a group of New York City firefighters that aired on FX from 2004 to 2011. I stopped watching after the third season (for scheduling reasons, rather than the content of the show) but, up until that point, it was a weird Libertarian blend of conservative and progressive ideas wrapped in a blanket of swearing.
The show stars and was created by Denis Leary, and you can hear his voice very clearly in the writing – which is to say that it’s sometimes very funny, but it’s also hostile toward anything it perceives as “political correctness.” Leary and Rescue Me are both invested in honouring the work that firefighters do (Leary has raised a great deal of money to support fire departments in real life), and the show is also invested in portraying a particular image of (predominantly white) working class masculinity. The straight men on this show call each other “fag,” use violence to solve their problems, and transmute any vulnerable emotion into an outward display of anger. The show is sympathetic to them without (usually) idealizing their behaviour.
The portrayal of women on Rescue Me is a lot less thoughtful, and usually falls under the heading of “bitches be crazy,” but there’s an absolutely fascinating story during the first two seasons where a female firefighter named Laura joins the team and the guys are really mean to her. It’s fascinating (and frustrating) in part because the show takes such an agnostic approach to the conflict – it doesn’t firmly side with either Laura or the guys who hate her guts. Instead, it acknowledges that she has good reasons for being upset, but takes the position that there’s nothing anyone can really do about it. It’s unfortunate, but she’s entered the masculine space of the firehouse, and she doesn’t fit in. Period.
The most important moment in this conflict comes early in season two, when Laura finally files a complaint because one of the senior firefighters, Lou, calls her a stupid twat while they’re responding to a call. I’m going to go into a painful level of detail describing that exchange to you now, because there are so many layers to what’s going on that it makes for one of the best and most nuanced portrayals of gender discrimination I’ve ever seen on television, and it gives us a good jumping off point to talk about what we mean when we say we want to be treated “like everyone else.”
That Time Lou Called Laura a Twat
The conflict between Lou and Laura begins in the episode “Balls” (for real; that’s what it’s called), when the crew responds to a call at a burning building. Lou goes into the basement of the building with Laura and a male firefighter named Garrity. They find someone passed out on the floor, and Lou tells Garrity to carry that person outside. Laura misunderstands that thinks that she’s supposed to help Garrity, so she stays behind while Lou goes into the basement alone, thinking that Laura’s behind him. He doesn’t realize what’s happened until he asks Laura for help and finds out that she’s not there. He’s understandably freaked out by this – being in the middle of a fire by himself – and, when he gets back outside, he finds Laura and reams her out for abandoning him. In the process of doing that, he yells that she obviously never learned to do her job, and calls her a stupid twat.
Laura approaches Lou later and tells him in a reasonable tone of voice that, while she understands that she made a mistake, the way he spoke to her wasn’t acceptable. Lou initially pretends that he doesn’t remember what he said, but then he calls her a stupid twat again, and condescendingly refuses to apologize, saying, “I don’t think so, honey.” Laura tells him not to call her “honey,” either, and says that she doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it, and will consider the issue closed if he just says he’s sorry. Lou refuses to say he’s sorry.
Laura makes a formal complaint against Lou, and what follows is two episodes in which the other guys try to convince her that she has no right to feel upset, before they all get sent to mandatory sensitivity training (which is a joke). The guys take the position that Laura’s choosing to work in a male-dominated field, and that this is how men talk to each other – like it or lump it. They don’t see any difference between what Lou said to her and the kind of trash talk they exchange on a daily basis, and they clearly think that she’s being too sensitive and asking for special treatment by making a big issue out of it.
The male characters remain completely oblivious to the context in which the comment was made. It’s different to tease someone or to use rough language in the spirit of camaraderie when your relationship is fundamentally based on respect. In Laura’s case, she’s well aware that the guys don’t want her there – the very first thing they do (at Lou’s suggestion, it bears mentioning) is freeze her out by refusing to speak to her when she arrives. She has to fight to get a private bathroom (so that she can shower separately) and, once she does, they take turns leaving the foulest things they can in her toilet. Laura tries various strategies to break the ice and make herself part of the group – ranging from an ill-advised decision to bring in baked goods to taking on assignments that no one else wants to do – but she’s frustrated to discover that they treat her with contempt no matter what. Within that context – the context of having been specifically rejected, excluded, and bullied because of her gender – having someone scream a gendered insult at her lands a little differently. It lands differently than the insult would land in the context of an otherwise respectful relationship, and it lands differently than a non-gendered insult, like “asshole,” would land.
The men also ignore the attitude with which the comment was made. In the episode “&#!&,” Franco, who’s Puerto Rican, tells Laura that it’s totally fine for the other guys to call him a “spic,” and therefore she shouldn’t be mad about specifically gendered insults. What we see in practice, though (in season two and, later, in season three), is that, while Franco seems okay with people saying “spic” in casual conversation, he’s definitely not okay with it when Lou (again) uses that word in anger. In fact, Lou ends up apologizing when he does that, because he understands it wasn’t cool. If Lou were using derogatory terms to refer to women in casual conversation, it still wouldn’t be a great thing to do, but it would come across differently than when he uses those words deliberately as a weapon to hurt Laura.
The men on this show don’t display any awareness of those contextual differences, though, and they instead do an awful thing that men sometimes do in real life where they make themselves the arbiters of what’s offensive to women. These characters, with their limited imaginative powers, don’t feel like they would be offended if they were Laura, so she can’t be offended, either.
To the show’s credit, Laura’s reaction to these well-meaning lectures on How Guys Talk to Each Other and Why It’s Totally Not a Big Deal is to look angry, hurt, and frustrated at being ganged-up on again. She points out, at various moments, that she would be doing a disservice to the women who come after her if she just ignored this kind of thing, and that she didn’t create the problem by reporting it – Lou created the problem by saying something inappropriate in the first place. She never changes her mind about whether she’s right to be offended, but she comes to see that she’s not going to get the result she wants. It’s a lose-lose situation where nothing she says or does is going to make any difference.
Lou, in the meantime, never apologizes. After Laura files her complaint, he’s called into a meeting with his superiors where they tell him that, because it’s his word against Laura’s, he should just deny that he said anything and get the other guys to make her miserable enough to transfer out. That suggestion seems to sober him a little bit, and he chooses to go on record saying that he did call her a name, which leads to the sensitivity training. He talks to Laura again after and tells her that the (chauvinist) world inside the firehouse is the only thing in his life that’s stayed constant and that, if she forces that to change, he won’t even know who he is anymore. Laura says that she’ll accept that as an apology, even though Lou doesn’t want her to.
I’m not going to say that the show succeeds in dramatizing both sides of this particular argument because, while I feel sorry for Lou, I also think his “side” – the side where he wants his workplace to be a safe space for him to say whatever awful thing he wants without having to hear a complaint about it – is just wrong. That’s not how we share society with other people. What the show does do successfully, though, is portray the clash of worldviews taking place in the struggle for gender equality.
On the one hand, there’s the worldview that says, “All people have equal worth as human beings and are entitled to the same base level of respect,” and, on the other hand, there’s a worldview that says, “All people are arranged into a single hierarchy, and your position on the hierarchy is determined by how well you measure up to the standards of the dominant group.” That means that, depending on your worldview, “I want to be treated like everyone else” can either mean, “I want to be treated respectfully, as all people deserve to be treated,” or “I want to be measured against the same standard as everyone else, never mind if the standard is biased.”
The way that the men on this show reject Laura is more complicated than saying, “No girls allowed,” because the second worldview – the one they appear to subscribe to – allows that women can enter the dick-measuring contest; it just guarantees that they’ll lose.
The male characters in Rescue Me completely believe that they’re treating Laura “like everyone else” by being meaner to her than they are to men in the same position (we see this, for example, when male firefighters transfer into the house and are welcomed with open arms, or when a male firefighter makes a mistake on the job and is instantly forgiven). They’re treating her according to where they think she falls on the hierarchy and they’re annoyed by what they perceive as her demanding respect that’s unearned.
These are men who’ve worked hard to measure up to the masculine ideal – to earn respect that they don’t feel was afforded to them just for being people. They’re not suddenly going to change their minds and decide that that was all for nothing. Instead, they defend what they perceive as their territory, by telling Laura that she’s wrong for upsetting the balance.
It’s awful, and it’s frustrating both for Laura and for the audience, but it plays out in a very realistic way. It’s scene after scene of Laura by herself against everyone else in a battle that’s years away from being won. It’s painful, but it’s really good television.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about TV and movies on her blog.