Sapphire Stereotype – Bitch Flicks

‘Living Single’ and ‘Girlfriends’: The Roots of Sex Positivity for Black Women on TV

There were never any shows that centered happy, single, child-free Black women that prioritized good sex as part of successful living. That is until two television shows came on the scene, ‘Living Single’ (1993-1998, created by Yvette Lee Bowser) and ‘Girlfriends’ (2000-2007, created by Mara Brock Akil).

Women in the African diaspora have had a hard time claiming healthy ownership of their own bodies. From slavery to the present, Black women (and Black girls) have endured the stigma of having their bodies shamed and sexualized in ways that have been physically, psychologically, and spiritually damaging (see the history of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman). They had not been afforded healthy representations of Black female sexuality. The Black female body has been viewed as naturally wanton, lascivious, or “fast-tailed” because of sexual exploitation during enslavement. If the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s liberated White women to explore their bodies with abandon, this sex positivity didn’t free Black women from the baggage of their inhumane body history.

Historically in U.S. film and television, Black women have never been allowed to have sexual agency without stigma. If Black women actually showed up in the media, typically she was boxed into several known stereotypes— the Mammy (the asexual being who fixes white people problems while neglecting her own), the Sapphire (angry Black woman or Sassy Black woman), Tragic Mulatto (the light-skinned Black woman who can’t seem to fit into the White world because of the stain of Black blood), or a Jezebel (the hypersexual, loose woman, known today as a THOT—that hoe over there), and even the Respectable Negro (a Black woman who is married/widowed, often pious, and successful based on selfless motherhood. She often places judgment on other Black women who don’t fit her mold).

From the earliest days of television featuring Black characters, shows like Beulah, The Amos ‘n Andy Show, Julia, Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and right on through Gimme A Break, and 227, Black women have played riffs of the traditional stereotypes. The emergence of Claire Huxtable, the successful attorney and mother of five children on The Cosby Show, fashioned a new type of Black woman we hadn’t seen before (although low-key, she could be sassy and gave off a whiff of subtle respectability in some episodes), and yet she was still bound up in family life. There were never any shows that centered happy, single, child-free Black women that prioritized good sex as part of successful living. That is until two television shows came on the scene, Living Single (1993-1998, created by Yvette Lee Bowser) and Girlfriends (2000-2007, created by Mara Brock Akil).

These two shows revolutionized Black female sexuality on television by giving Black women sexual agency without falling back on tired tropes. They also opened the door to later shows featuring Black single women who embraced sex as a part of good living without stigma (Half and Half, Single Ladies, and Scandal). Two characters in particular stood out from both series that became the precursors for sexually carefree Black women:

Maxine Shaw (Erika Alexander) and Lynn Searcy (Persia White)

Living Single

Living Single followed a group of four female friends and their two male neighbors living in a Brooklyn brownstone apartment. They were upwardly mobile in their careers as lawyers, magazine owners, stockbrokers, and independent building maintenance handymen. The show gravitated around rap star Queen Latifah’s character, Khadijah James, and each week found the crew in various complications related to their jobs, love lives, and each other. It was rare to see a show dominated by Black professionals. Finding “Mr. Right” is often the end goal for women-centered shows, but thankfully Living Single didn’t spend too much time having the women lament about not having found “the one.” One character, Régine (Kim Fields), was painted as a gold-digger, but she was the only one who had a hint of desperation in terms of having a relationship based on material comfort. Khadijah’s cousin Synclaire (Kim Coles) was the naïve, sweet-natured friend who dripped with positivity and wholesomeness. But it was Maxine, the high-powered attorney who was the standout favorite.

From her shaved head with braids, gorgeous dark skin, and power suits, Maxine had healthy sexual relationships without strings. She dated often, and was typically the one to cut relationships short when men wanted more serious (and more monogamous) relations. Some women who watched the show faithfully wore their hair like Maxine as well as imitating her fashion sense. She lived her life on her own terms (she was not a roommate with the other women because she had her own place), and she had the income to do as she pleased. She was verbally assertive, and was quick to challenge men, especially her epic battles with Khadijah’s neighbor and friend, stockbroker Kyle Baker (T.C. Carson). Their verbal spats underscored the sexual tension and attraction they really had for each other. When they get drunk one night and slept together, they choose to keep the relationship a secret, with Maxine pushing to keep the hot sex in the realm of platonic fuck buddies.

Unlike Black women from previous TV shows, pleasure and freedom was the goal for Maxine. This didn’t mean that marriage or motherhood, or some form of connection wasn’t a possibility for her, it just wasn’t the ONLY goal in her life. Her career and her friendships meant just as much as having a man, or dreaming of a family. After finally revealing their sexual connection to their friends, Kyle accepts a job in London and asks Maxine to join him. Kyle was the best sex partner Maxine ever had. He was successful, gorgeous, and her equal in every way. And yet Maxine turned him down because she valued her autonomy and wasn’t willing to give up her life and lifestyle to follow him. She didn’t try to convince him to stay (even though she really wanted him), and they parted as lovers who respected each other’s decision, even though it was a difficult one. Maxine had such a sense of self that she allowed her dream man to leave without a fight. That was a revelation to the core audience.

Unfortunately, in the last season of the series, Maxine was shown to miss Kyle, and had the wild idea that her life would have meaning if she had a baby. She goes to a sperm bank and inadvertently gets inseminated with Kyle’s sperm. In the series finale she reconciles with Kyle and we are left to believe that they will be happy raising their baby together. It is a cliché happy ending, especially since Maxine had been presented as the ultimate carefree Black woman. However, the fans loved it, and on some level, it was nice to see her get the partner she deserved, one who was as sexually uninhibited as she was, and one who respected her choice to be that way. She owned her beautiful Black body. Maxine offered Black women watching the show an opportunity to embrace their sexual sides with humor and much needed positivity.

Girlfriends

Much like the template of Living Single, Girlfriends followed the humorous trials and tribulations of four young success driven Black women living in Los Angeles. In this world, attorney Joan Clayton (Tracee Ellis Ross) was the main protagonist who set the pace for her three friends– Maya Wilkes (Golden Brooks) her Compton hood girl personal assistant, Toni Childs (Jill Marie Jones) her college roommate and a high end real estate agent with a taste for expensive things, and Lynn Searcy (Persia White), another former college roommate with several post graduate degrees and counting, but no real job because of her unsettled bohemian lifestyle.

All the women on Girlfriends were sexually active and enjoyed good sex (although Joan had a ninety day waiting period for her beaus prior to sex which became an issue with some), but it was Lynn who was the most sexually experimental. She openly discussed her sex toys and personal sex tricks (The “Lynn Spin”), ménage à trois, group sex, sex swings/chairs, and same-gender hook-ups. There was no sexual experience she hadn’t tried or was afraid to engage in. She even had her own fuck buddy arrangement with the clique’s mutual male friend, the lawyer William Dent (Reggie Hayes).

Lynn essentially stepped up the sexual freedom of Maxine on Living Single, and overall, the women of Girlfriends were a little more nuanced in their performances than the characters of Living Single (except for Maya, who took some time to lower the hood shtick she displayed in earlier episodes). Both Maxine and Lynn brought a refreshing and openly accepted sexuality that had never been present in Black female television characters. These two women were the ones viewers like me wanted to sit around with holding glasses of wine and listening to the details of their sexual exploits.

None of the women from either show carried the stigmas of the past that haunted the Black female body. They revealed to the world the Black Female Gaze in sexual matters which upset some critics (including Bill Cosby, and Spike Lee who accused them of being oversexed embarrassments). Like most new shows, it did take time for Living Single and Girlfriends to hit their stride, and each had their corny struggle moments to figure out their voice. However, in the end, they brought forth Black women with positive and healthy sexual pursuits. They left the sexual baggage and shaming in the past in order to present Black female sexuality in a healthy new light.

Staff writer Lisa Bolekaja co-hosts Hilliard Guess’ Screenwriters Rant Room, and her latest speculative fiction short story “Three Voices” can be read in Uncanny Magazine. She divides her time between California and Italy. She can be found on Twitter @LisaBolekaja lurking in the hashtags #SaturdayNightSciFi and #FridayNightHorror

‘Chef!’: The Perfectly Imperfect Marital Eroticism of Janice and Gareth

Gareth does not “happen to be Black”; the pressure on him to conform to white culture, to avoid limiting his own narrative, mirrors the show’s own need to conform to that culture, to avoid limiting its audience. This conflict is slyly embodied in plausibly deniable food metaphor.

Janice and Gareth's stressful ideal — Janice and Gareth’s stressful ideal

Written by Brigit McCone as part of our theme week on Black Families.

If I had to point to one screen marriage that shaped my childhood ideas about marriage’s potential as positive partnership and intense intimacy, it would be Janice and Gareth Blackstock on the first two seasons of the British sitcom Chef!. The original writer, Peter Tilbury (working from star Lenny Henry’s concept), left after two seasons, and the final season’s crude divorce drama only highlights what made Tilbury’s vision so brilliant. In the final season, Janice is not a fully rounded partner, but an obstacle and challenge for Gareth. Where her constructive criticism was a form of protective support, it is now scornful nagging and abandonment. Her desire for a child is now her main motivation and source of conflict with Gareth. The third season’s Janice is the irritating, castrating and baby-crazy screen wife that viewers have seen a thousand times before; the contrast illustrates everything that was subtle and human about Janice’s original characterization.

From a racial perspective, Chef! might be compared to The Cosby Show, as portraying an exceptionally talented, sophisticated, and wealthy Black family. But where the Huxtables effortlessly “have it all,” somehow combining two careers and a large family with inhumanly minimal friction, the Blackstocks acknowledge that their lifestyle demands real sacrifice. Janice had to leave a flourishing career in the city to accompany Gareth, after his promotion to head chef of a prestigious, rural restaurant; she is outspokenly frustrated and eager to work again. When the restaurant has financial problems, the couple must sacrifice their house and car to buy it, admitting that the resulting tension “feels like you’ve eaten a lorry-load of All-Bran.” They are childless, and the conflict between their workaholic careerism and their hopes for children is openly explored. Each has a defensive facade of toughness and hyper-competence, but their scenes together explore the toll that this facade takes and the vulnerability it conceals. The sitcom’s central comedy is the farcical exaggeration of Gareth’s intimidating facade – “totally driven. We’re talking severe personality disorder here” – and its contrast with his inner softness. The perfection of Janice and Gareth’s marriage is not based on a perfection of their lives or personalities, but on their shared concept of marriage as a space of solidarity that accepts flaws and conflict.

That model of acceptant marriage is the bedrock of the show. In the opening credits, the lyrics “I’m the best, so do not test, the top of my profession” play over a montage of Gareth’s hyper-competence – working out and preparing the immaculate tools of his culinary trade – broken only when he briefly strokes the glossy picture of Janice that hangs in his locker, as though for reassurance. This image of her face comes before Gareth’s own face, underlining her importance to the show. Janice’s character can be read as rewriting the Sapphire stereotype, exploring the loving foundations of constructive criticism and the emotional intimacy of openly expressed frustration. Gareth’s farcical posturing can equally be read as parodying hypermasculine models of Black manhood, as much as bad-tempered celebrity chefs, while his sensitivity and capacity for nurture is his character’s true strength. The show’s unusually erotic portrait of monogamous marriage compares with the marital eroticism of Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love” which, along with the self-identified feminist’s proud adoption of Mrs. Carter as a title, radically rejects stereotypes of absent fathers in the Black community. John Legend’s “All of Me” video showcases similar aesthetics of marital eroticism, while that song’s description of loving “perfect imperfections” is a good summary of Janice and Gareth’s relationship. But reducing their relationship to a cultural trend of Black marital eroticism would be far too limiting: it is, quite simply, television’s most perfectly imperfect marriage.

As well as the strain of hyper-competence, Chef! confronts the cultural tensions in narratives of Black exceptionalism, mainly through Everton, Gareth’s never-really-liked-you-anyway-probably-flush-your-head-down-the-toilet-as-soon-as-look-at-you old schoolmate, who shares Gareth’s working class, British Caribbean background. Though Janice and Gareth help Everton, by offering him an unpaid apprenticeship in Gareth’s kitchen, it is clear that this is owing to the restaurant’s desperate finances, with Gareth particularly reluctant to take Everton on. On the surface, Everton fills the familiar role of goofy sidekick. Actually, although his unfamiliarity with restaurant etiquette causes some farce, he is capable and acquires skills steadily as the series progresses. The comical embarrassment that Everton causes Gareth is less a reflection of his foolishness than of his culture.

Gareth squirms at Everton’s pride in Caribbean cooking, having fully internalized cultural messages about the superior prestige of French haute cuisine and frequently boasting of his two Michelin stars. He automatically assumes that Everton is a “dope-head” (the marijuana belongs to a white co-worker) and fiercely attacks him for it, separating himself from that cultural stereotype with a barked “I hate dope-heads!” Gareth’s intense rejection of his own culture is rooted in personal conflict with his parents. Again, this tension is expressed in culinary terms: his mother’s neglect is illustrated by her incompetence as a chef, or perhaps by Gareth’s bitterness over that incompetence, while his father abandons the family for a short-order cook. When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, young Gareth answered “an orphan.” Janice becomes insecure when Gareth shows admiration for the cooking skills of pretty, blonde sous-chef Lucinda, though he is otherwise “Mr. Monogamy.” Dominant stereotypes of Black life – absent fathers, neglectful mothers and attraction to blondes – are all slyly embodied by the show’s cooking metaphors, giving complicated symbolic resonance to Gareth’s determination to master society’s most prestigious cuisine.

Gareth’s broadly accented Caribbean father is introduced in the first season’s “Rice and Peas” finale, goading Gareth into trying to cook Caribbean food. The master chef is humbled by being forced to learn from Everton, highlighting his detachment from his roots, while Everton reveals a genius for Caribbean cookery that rivals Gareth’s own skill at haute cuisine. By the end of the second season, Everton has become a confident chef who combines Caribbean influences and haute cuisine, unapologetically owning his cultural identity but refusing to be limited by it. However, this is only made possible by the opportunity the Blackstocks have given him; their strained and self-conscious hyper-competence is a necessary first step to wider cultural change. Through Gareth’s complex relationship with Everton, Chef! foregrounds the tensions of so-called “choc ice” (British for “oreo”) cultural positions, without simplistically condemning them. The show’s Wikipedia entry commends Chef! as “a landmark programme in the sense that Henry plays a character who just happens to be black; the fact of his blackness does not limit the narrative or the audience the series reaches.” This misses the point. Gareth does not “happen to be Black”; the pressure on him to conform to white culture, to avoid limiting his own narrative, mirrors the show’s own need to conform to that culture, to avoid limiting its audience. This conflict is slyly embodied in plausibly deniable food metaphor.

Back to Janice. Janice is all kinds of awesome as a character. A brilliant businesswoman, she is practical in all the ways the flamboyant artist, Gareth, is not, but shares his preoccupation with status. Janice is hilariously open about her materialism, yet prepared to sacrifice everything for Gareth if absolutely, absolutely necessary. Both Janice and Gareth are self-conscious social performers, but the basis of their relationship is their shared recognition of that performance’s artificiality, by no more than a quirk of a smile or a raised eyebrow. Their affinity, beautifully shown in their common flaws as much as in their virtues, creates the deep understanding between them. Janice is strong, but this doesn’t prevent her from admitting weakness: “I’m going to be brave in a minute. But, just right now, I’m going to break down completely, OK? I don’t mean a dignified tear or a trembling lip, I’m talking wet, snotty bawling!” With a sharp-tongued wit of her own, Janice may often play the foil to Gareth’s shrieking manbaby, but she is allowed to be his equal in comedy as well as in business. Gareth is also allowed to be Janice’s equal in emotional vulnerability: “I’m not going to cry because I’m a big boy now, but if I wasn’t, or if I was a ‘New Man,’ we could be talking wet, snotty bawling here.”

The Blackstocks’ relationship is physically intimate; Janice’s frustration is a running gag as Gareth’s workload leaves him too tired for sex, but the couple’s sex life remains “well above average.” Indeed, jokes about Janice’s sexual frustration only highlight how much more sex she’s depicted getting than other sitcom wives. It is less spectacular intimacies, however, that make the relationship convincing: Lenny Henry and Caroline Lee Johnson capture the subtleties of body language that convey affection and mutual reassurance in long-term relationships. Secure in this foundation of bodily affection, the Blackstocks are free to argue and vent their frustrations openly. Much of their relationship’s conflict springs from Janice’s sense of being neglected by her workaholic husband; that is, it is fundamentally rooted in the pair’s deep love for each other. When the final season’s (male) writers attempted to create drama by escalating the couple’s rows into full-blown separation, they could do so only at the expense of Janice’s character, flattening her into unsympathetic coldness. While this season shows how important Janice is to Gareth, through his devastation when she leaves and his desperation to win her back, that demonstration was unnecessary. Chef! wasn’t another clichéd show about a man who doesn’t appreciate what he has until it’s gone. The co-dependence of Janice and Gareth was fundamental to all their interactions.

Such co-dependence may be criticized. Janice would struggle to pass a Bechdel test, as she relates so exclusively to Gareth, though I see this as reflecting her rural isolation and the sacrifices she has made for Gareth’s career. Janice regularly complains about her loneliness, career frustrations and feelings of neglect; the insufficiency of a life that revolves only around her husband is core to her role. Such a portrait, of female frustration with the confines of a dependent role, can be as valuable as portraits of ideal female solidarity and independence. Janice needs a sense of vocation, which she gains by managing Gareth’s restaurant. Janice also needs friends and interests beyond her husband, which is explicitly addressed in the Tilbury-scripted episode Private Lives. In the finale of Chef!, Gareth’s underlying issues, his cultural identity crisis, and neglect of his private life, are tackled as he must sacrifice a trip to Paris to fly instead to Jamaica with Janice and work on their relationship. But the (so very male) writers of the final season are mistaken to interpret Janice’s relationship as the source of her frustrations. It is Janice’s life that is constricting, as she shares Gareth’s conflict between her materialist ambition and her emotional needs. But her marriage is a model of mutual support and open communication.

This is classic “patriarchy hurts men, too”: if a woman is understood only in relation to men, this means her male partner must be unfairly burdened with sole responsibility for her entire psychological well-being. The fact that the (oh so painfully male) writers could see no solution to Janice’s problems but a choice between divorce or more sex, with a romantic holiday to Jamaica thrown in, points to deeper problems in our concept of relationships and female roles. A chance for Gareth and Janice to grow as individuals, within the supportive framework of a relationship that needed no repair, would have been the more perfect ending for this perfectly imperfect marriage.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVBSKVsr0a0″]

Janice and Gareth: they’re the best, so do not test.

Brigit McCone has unrealistically gendered catering expectations, since her father was the chef at home. She writes short films, radio dramas and “The Erotic Adventures of Vivica” (as Voluptua von Temptitillatrix). Her hobbies include doodling and she now lives off baked potatoes.