Suits – Bitch Flicks

Virtue, Vulgarity, and the Vulva

The equality of men and women on the basis of healthy and consensual sex is sex positivity according to the Women and Gender Advocacy Center. Thus, to desire sex positivity is to be inherently feminist.

This guest post by Erin Relford appears as part of our theme week on Sex Positivity.

If TV shows were lovers, I’d argue women haven’t had great sex since Sex and the City. Much like your first time and the strategically latent mile markers you’ve placed on partners since then, you know good sex when you encounter it. From a woman’s point of view, good sex is control without judgment, a convergence of discovery, submission beyond fear, and a jungle gym full of toys where choice puts you in the driver’s seat (debauchery being an optional passenger of course).

Considering Sex and the City TV’s certifiable rubber stamp of good female sex, Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda echoed the tales of countless women, giving ode to the free missives of womanhood and female prowess. The lessons in relationships, the selfish romps of good delight, all were reasons to shout “yes, yes, yes” by virtue of sex positivity.

So why then has good female sex gone missing from television? Arguably, cable and broadcast networks have shared in their ill-fated attempts at sexploitation, mostly at the expense of women. The proof is in the pudding or pootnanny in this case. Showtime’s Californication led seven seasons of “accidental cunnilingus” and sapless sucking, while Ray Donovan’s no frills 1-2-3 pump action has left Showtime’s female audience high and dry. HBO’s Ballers is a good time in the sack, if you’re a woman willing to suffice with balls of dry humping and no “Mr. Big” (par for the course Dwayne Johnson).

Lest one forget HBO’s seduction of rape and torture porn, Game of Thrones’ female characters experience it all in guile of good TV. These depictions aren’t to suggest the storytelling behind such shows are short of genius, but remiss of variety. The female sex narrative has been relegated to an industry turned tits for trade commonwealth, a vulva and violence republic.

Sex is an inalienable right, sacred and undeniable, an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate in its pursuance of life, liberty, and rapture. The privilege is everyone’s to be expressed as a declaration of independence and therefore should be engaged from the perspectives of both men and women. On the contrary, the Declaration of Independence was written “that all men are created equal,” yet our stories involving sex are still being viewed from the perspectives of men.

However, let’s not be haste and expel the idea sex positivity has gone hiding into the forests of Westeros. Evidence exists that sex positivity is flourishing in light of TV’s new golden era and new wave of feminism. It’s come in the embodiment of female sex appeal, the brand of woman that is fabulously fierce, yet deliciously palpable. The fire of Daenerys Targaryen, the tenacity of Brienne of Tarth, or the inexplicable “Stark” of Arya and Sansa are all due a conceded applause thanks to Game of Thrones portrayal of strong, bountiful female characters. Scandal’s Olivia Pope earns top brass for her bastion of prose and breastwork, delivering willful rhubarbs to Washington’s elite though judged often and tenaciously for her challenge to disbelief that women can command power and pleasure in it from the highest tent pole in the land.

Alicia Florrick’s beau Will Gardner may be gone, but her sense of smart and sexy is almost too naughty for CBS’ The Good Wife.

And dare not forget the women of USA Network’s Suits, led by the strut, poise, and pivot of the inimitable Jessica Pearson.

Suffice to say there are many Masters of Sex on television, but does women’s exploration of sex on television have to be justified in pioneering scientists? Can the enjoyment of love and lust be equal parts man, equal parts woman? Not so, according to the 2015 Writers Guild of America TV staffing brief, where women remain underrepresented among staff writers by nearly two to one.

All things being equal, one could satiate in the fact women being 50.8 percent of the US population, would also mean a majority of female driven TV programming, written by women. But the reality is, most female characters are written by men. Some exceptionally well, as in FX’s You’re The Worst where creator Stephen Falk gives equal Judas Priest to the sexes or Darren Star’s Sex and the City. But there are more than 31 flavors to cherry popping ecstasy as proven early on by Ilene Chaiken’s The L Word. Perhaps one of the more prevailing scapes into female intimacy and feminism, The L Word managed to be intriguing and vanguard, paving the way for shows like Orange is the New Black where women could be domineering and emphatic, let alone in control of their very naturism as on Girls.

In an age of digital storytelling, where men still dominate culture and the writer’s room, we can continue to look forward to Pussy Galores.

Meanwhile, feminists and female viewers alike will revel in the Lisbeth Salanders, Olivia Popes, and Mary Janes, persevering far and wide in search of the next big “O,” that is open, outstanding, and out of the ordinary television that engages women from the female point of view. Will there ever be great sex on TV for women?

The answer may befall in there’s simply more to come…

Erin Relford is an author and screenwriter currently working in Los Angeles. Her writings involve female empowerment and engaging girls in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). You can follow her on Twitter @AdrienneFord or her website pinkyandkinky.com

Women and Work/Labor Issues: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for Women and Work/Labor Issues Theme Week here.

A Plea For More Roseannes and Norma Raes: Addressing The Lack of Working-Class Female Characters on American Screens by Rachael Johnson

Working-class female protagonists remain rare, however. More often than not, working-class women play supporting roles as mothers, wives or lovers. Their characters are invariably underwritten or stereotypical.

The Power of Work/Life Balance in Charmed by Scarlett Harris

Phoebe and Paige’s evolution through their working lives is particularly poignant to the millennial Charmed audience; many people I know grew up watching the three (or is it four?) sisters flitting from job to job in their quest to find purpose and fulfillment. And we don’t even have daily demon attacks to contend with!

Insubordination and Feminism in Norma Rae by Amber Leab

A primary question about social fiction is whether the story remains relevant, or if the sociopolitical situation remains mired in the past. Norma Rae does retain relevance, though she’d likely be working in Walmart today instead of a textile mill (as I watched, I wondered how many textile mills still operate in the U.S.). While the movie seems to be a window on a past time in working America, it’s still relevant—and progressive—on many levels.

Moms Mabley and The Hard Work of Show Business by Ren Jender

People who don’t work in the arts don’t realize how much work goes into it. Writers write hundreds of pages before any reader (who isn’t a blood relative) loves their work. Musicians practice for countless hours and write a lot of shitty songs before they compose a tune that makes someone want to sing along. Moms Mabley, the Black, queer woman comedian born in 1894 in the Jim Crow south, ran away at age 14 to become a performer and spent much of the next 66 years onstage, performing and polishing her own comedy routines. Her long experience may be why her work, nearly 40 years after her death, still elicits laughs.

The Corporate Catfight in Working Girl by Chantelle Monique

Because Katharine steals Tess’s idea, we automatically pull for Tess, the lower-class underdog; consequently, we are forced to view Katharine, the upper-class princess, as the demonized, selfish boss, determined to achieve success no matter what. Hurt, yet motivated to take control of her career, Tess is now forced to lie in order to have her voice heard. This causes her to be pitted against a boss who has clearly abused her power. Even though Working Girl seems like a harmless, romantic drama, its female representation is firmly rooted in classism and sexism.

9 to 5: Still a Fantasy by Leigh Kolb

“Hey we’ve come this far, haven’t we? This is just the beginning.”

The beginning was in 1980, when this feminist comedy classic was released. Dolly Parton belted out the title song, which features a “boss man” who is “out to get her”–it’s an uplifting song, though, that echoes the closing celebratory sentiment: this is just the beginning. Things are going to change.

Well how have we done in 34 years?

The Devil in The Devil Wears Prada by Amanda Civitello

Our contempt for Miranda Priestly is due, in large part, to the way the film contextualizes her decisions, not just her personality. In making her into a shrill caricature of a woman executive whose single-minded focus on her career ruins her personal life, the film, like so many others, shortchanges the potential of a character like Miranda.

Women, Professional Ambition, and Grey’s Anatomy by Erin K. O’Neill

It is the overwhelming drive for excellence that makes the women on the show so real. It sometimes feels that this kind of ambition is not allowed to exist on TV. Sure, women can have high-powered careers and be very successful. But this is different. This is a show that not just portrays ambitious women, but is actively about professionally ambitious women and how they relate to each other and society.

Working Women in Film by Amber Leab

Women of color who are workers don’t weigh heavily in the American cultural imagination. When women of color appear in films, they tend to be secondary characters in low-paying jobs. Rarely do we see movies about working women who happen to be women of color.

Suits: Secretly Subversive When It Comes to Talking About Women in the Workforce by Deborah Pless

Jessica, Rachel, and Donna are all women working in a male-dominated industry. Jessica has overcome the sexism in the workforce by out-thinking it and by dominating the competition. Rachel has chosen to forego any help from her father, in favor of trying (and failing) on her own. And Donna has seen the patriarchal systems of power, and used them to her own advantage.

Working Class Family With a Touch of Absurdity: Raising Hope by Elizabeth Kiy

TV families are generally presented as aspirational. They usually live an upper middle class livestyle and frequently live comfortably on a single salary, have college degrees and wealthy backgrounds.
Usually when characters work menial labor or minimum wage jobs, they are presented as being in a transitory period. This is the stage before the character gets their life together, when the artist waits for a big break or where a youth supplements their allowance with their earnings. It’s rare that this work is presented as the character’s real life, how it will likely always be.

‘Suits’: Secretly Subversive When It Comes to Talking About Women in the Workforce

This guest post by Deborah Pless appears as part of our theme week on Women and Work/Labor Issues. It previously appeared at Kiss My Wonder Woman.

It only takes a single look at the posters to know that Suits, USA’s little darling show about inordinately attractive people doing morally ambiguous things, is a man’s show. Or, maybe more accurately, a show about men. The plot revolves around two white, straight, attractive men: Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), an egotistical but talented lawyer, and Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams), his brilliant but undereducated associate.

The hook is that Mike doesn’t actually have a law degree. He was kicked out of Columbia and never finished college, and spent the last few years taking the LSAT for money. But Mike is smart–crazy smart–and Harvey knows that. Since Harvey needs to hire an associate (kind of like a baby lawyer assistant thing) when he’s promoted to Senior Partner, and because he hates all the other candidates, Harvey hires Mike, and they both collude to hide Mike’s real background.

Sounds catchy, right? But definitely a show about men. The central conflict is whether or not anyone will figure out that Mike is a fraud, and all the episodes revolve around a case that can only be fixed by one of the two men. Even the main antagonist, the divinely slimy Louis (Rick Hoffman), is a man.

What’s notable here, though, isn’t that a USA show chose to make the main conflict and storyline center around attractive white men (shocker), but that there are, as it turns out, so many female characters of worth in the show–women who are just as developed, interesting, and integral to the plot as the men. I’m not saying the show is a bastion of feminism, but I do think it’s worth noting how much the creator, Aaron Korsch, seems to have attempted to say here, specifically on the topic of women in the workforce, and how race, class, and gender all intersect to create a vision of discrimination, and, in some cases, triumph.

Jessica Pearson (Gina Torres), founder and managing partner of Pearson-Hardman

Pearson-Hardman (and later, Pearson-Darby), the firm at which most of the show’s action takes place, is represented as a top Manhattan law firm, pretty typical in its practices, gender dynamics, and hiring habits. What makes the show unique is that it criticizes these hiring habits: the firm’s conceit is that they always hire lawyers and associates with Harvard Law degrees, because presumably Harvard is the best. What this means, other than that Mike is doubly screwed because he didn’t go to law school anywhere, but he has to fake having gone to a school that everyone knows every detail about, is that there is an implicit class bias built into the hiring strategies at Pearson-Hardman. Harvard is a hard school to get into, yes, but it’s an even harder school to pay for. As a result, most of the lawyers at Pearson-Hardman are from privileged families, and used to trading on that privilege.

And when I say privileged, what I mean is that most of the men we see on the show, all of the associates, most of the lawyers, even most of the background characters, are young white men. While this seems like the casual whitewashing we can usually expect in shows like this, it actually appears to be something a little deeper.

Mike’s introduction as a lower-class, undereducated character is the first blow to this image of upper-class white male supremacy, but he’s certainly not the last or the most important. When it comes down to it, the intersectional struggle on the show is defined not by Mike, but by the women they work with. By their boss, Jessica Pearson (Gina Torres), a black woman who runs the top law firm in Manhattan, commands the respect of everyone she meets, and mentors the male lead (Harvey). By their coworker, Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle), a talented paralegal who desperately wants to be a lawyer, but can’t quite make the cut. And by their subordinate, Donna Paulsen (Sarah Rafferty), a seemingly all-knowing assistant who remembers exactly where the bodies are buried, can cry on cue and isn’t afraid to use it to her advantage, and who seems content to be the “power behind the throne.” All three characters represent very different images of what it means to be a woman at work in one of Manhattan’s top firms. And all three characters are vitally important to an understanding of women’s role in the workplace. Besides, did I mention? They’re all friends.

I first mentioned Jessica Pearson (Gina Torres) because, well, who wouldn’t mention Jessica first? She’s by far the most exceptional woman on the show, and also the most politically charged. By that I mean not that the character herself is political – she appears to have the same laissez-faire attitude towards politics that the show itself has, and has no moral compunctions about the extreme wealth and moral quandaries to which her occupation lends itself. Rather, I mean that making Jessica Pearson both a woman and a character of color is in itself a political statement.

Let’s talk implicit backstory, shall we? Now, we know from the very get-go that Jessica is both a powerful woman, and a smart one. We know that she’s the managing partner and co-founder of Pearson-Hardman and then later Pearson-Darby (note that it’s her name on the firms’ letterhead), and that she’s Harvey’s mentor. She found him in the mailroom and sponsored him all the way through Harvard, his first job at the DA’s office, and on until he made senior partner. Jessica is a tough lawyer, and she taught Harvey everything he knows.

That would be reason enough to stand up and cheer, since platonic female-male mentorships between non-relatives are virtually non-existent, but it’s not all. What we really want to get at here is the simple fact that Jessica, an African-American woman in her 40s, is the co-founder and managing partner of a top law firm in Manhattan. That means that not only did she achieve great things relatively early in her life, but also that she was the daughter of second-wave feminism, fighting her way through law school as it was only just starting to open up to women, and that she faced immense gender and race discrimination. She’s amazing. There’s no two ways about it.

And then we have Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle), a paralegal who’s been with Pearson-Hardman for years, but who longs to be a lawyer. Rachel has the money and the talent to go to law school, but she’s held back by a test anxiety that makes taking the LSAT virtually impossible. Still, Rachel perseveres and eventually manages to get a solid score on the test, only to later be turned down by Harvard Law School.

Rachel is also Mike’s closest friend in the firm, the first face he meets there, and one of the very few to know his secret. She later becomes his girlfriend, a relationship which seems to be good for both of them. She’s classy, well-educated besides her test anxiety, and a foodie. She has quirks. She’s complex. And she’s a biracial woman working in a highly sexist and more than moderately racist environment. But while Jessica is implied to have really worked her way up to the top with some help from her mentor, Daniel Hardman, Rachel is actively trying not to trade on her family name. It’s established that her father is a celebrated attorney, and that Rachel has intentionally chosen to go her own way through the legal world, not trading on her name, but doing it the hard way. That she fails is actually a more interesting story than if she were (at this point, the story’s not over yet) successful. She’s a woman working in a man’s world, trying to walk in her father’s shoes, and not really succeeding. Which is OK.

Sarah Rafferty as Donna Paulsen and Gabriel Macht as Harvey Specter

Rounding out the threesome, then, is Donna Paulsen (Sarah Rafferty), Harvey’s long-time assistant. Donna is arguably the least realistic female character we’re given, in that she’s presented as a submissive genius: beautiful, cunning, resourceful, and yet totally willing to subsume her career into Harvey’s, to devote her life to his success. I’m not saying that there aren’t women who do this, just that it’s a little unrealistic to think that with Donna’s skills, which are shown to be many and varied, she’s decided to be content with making Harvey the best lawyer he can be. It seems even that her character, by adhering to so many tropes of the white, attractive, submissive secretary, is a fetish object rather than a character in her own right. But, that’s not exactly the case here.

Donna is an interesting character. Her devotion to Harvey is actually matched by his devotion to her. When he made the leap from working as the Assistant Defense Attorney to working at Pearson-Hardman, he did so with the caveat that she came with him. He was the one who paid her salary until he made partner and the firm officially allowed him a legal secretary. And, while it is sometimes hinted that their relationship could tip over into romantic, it has stayed firmly platonic, making them life-partners without a sexual undertone, something hard to find on television.

What makes Donna compelling on the show, however, is her place in the world of Pearson-Hardman. It’s much harder to define than Jessica’s or even Rachel’s. Because Donna is a secretary, she’s under the radar most of the time. Like furniture. And she unabashedly uses that to her advantage. She acts sweet, she dresses sexy, she lets people underestimate her, and then she helps Harvey to destroy them. Donna is aware of the ways in which her sex and chosen profession try to limit her, but she has chosen to use those limitations to her advantage.

Donna Paulsen (Sarah Rafferty) and Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle) conspiring together

And, really, that’s what makes all of these women interesting. That’s what makes the show interesting. Jessica, Rachel, and Donna are all women working in a male-dominated industry. Jessica has overcome the sexism in the workforce by out-thinking it and by dominating the competition. Rachel has chosen to forego any help from her father, in favor of trying (and failing) on her own. And Donna has seen the patriarchal systems of power, and used them to her own advantage.

It’s no accident that the female characters we’re given represent a wide spectrum of female experience. Sure, Mike and Harvey are the nominal main characters on Suits, but they’re not the reason you should watch it. And I’m not saying the show is without its problems. By no means is this a feminist utopia of a show. But it’s interesting. It’s trying. And that’s more than you can say for most shows.

Deborah Pless runs Kiss My Wonder Woman and works as a freelance writer and editor in Western Washington, when she’s not busy camping out at the movies or watching too much TV. You can follow her on Twitter and Tumblr just as long as you like feminist rants, an obsession with superheroes, and sandwiches.