TV Comedy – Bitch Flicks

‘Fleabag’ and Finding Comedy in Life After Losing a Best Friend

A particular focus in women-driven TV comedy is the importance of female friendship. … ‘Fleabag’ breaks from this pattern by exploring the effects of losing a best friend, and continuing to live in the world without her. Fleabag talks to us like we’re her new best friend because she can no longer talk to her real one. That the series is so funny while telling a tragic story about a very sad woman speaks to the power of comedy in addressing such difficult topics.

This guest post is written by Holly McKenzie-Sutter. | Spoilers ahead.

“It’s kind of a funny story, actually,” the titular character of the television series Fleabag explains, when asked by a taxi driver if she is running her independent business on her own. “I opened a café with my friend Boo. She’s dead now. She accidentally killed herself.” This exchange, during the final moments of the series’ first episode, is as much of a shock to the driver as it is to the viewer. He doesn’t find it funny, and neither do we. This moment is probably the first time that we haven’t shared Fleabag’s sense of humor, in the unsettling reveal that her best friend, who we have also met this episode, is dead.

“So yeah,” Fleabag concludes her anecdote, “I’m kind of on my own.”

The audience has spent the last twenty-five minutes befriending the unnamed protagonist, played by writer and creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge (“adapted from her award-winning Edinburgh play“), through fourth-wall breaking, Frank Underwood-esque asides and glances. These moments, interjections where she comments on her interactions with dates, bank managers, sexual partners, dogs, cucumbers, family members, and everyone in between, “turn the viewer into Fleabag’s new best friend,” as Emily Nussbaum writes for The New Yorker.

A particular focus in women-driven TV comedy is the importance of female friendship. Broad City, Insecure, Parks and Recreation, Golden Girls, Girlfriends, Orange Is the New Black, Sex and the City, Living Single, and countless others fit this description. Fleabag breaks from this pattern by exploring the effects of losing a best friend, and continuing to live in the world without her. Fleabag talks to us like we’re her new best friend because she can no longer talk to her real one. That the series is so funny while telling a tragic story about a very sad woman speaks to the power of comedy in addressing such difficult topics.

In an interview with Paste magazine, Waller-Bridge says:

“I guess it’s an articulation of something I see [around me] and very simply just makes me laugh. Like people openly lying to each other: ‘I’m fine, I’m fine’ and both these people can see that they’re not fine, and that the other person’s not fine. And that just makes everyone feel calmer: that they’re all lying. It’s so funny, I don’t know what it is, but it just makes me laugh.”

Finding humor in pain, and in lying, is at the heart of the series – and it’s a character trait of Fleabag’s that comes under criticism from her family and from herself. When driving to a mother’s day “silent retreat” in memory of their late mother, Fleabag’s sister Claire (Sian Clifford) cracks up at one of her sister’s inappropriate jokes, only to immediately start crying. “Don’t make this fun,” Claire says.

Their inability to not have fun, or to be silent, results in the two of them nearly being kicked out of the weekend program. Fleabag makes Claire laugh by mocking the faux-seriousness of the retreat activities, which mostly entail silently doing household chores for the mansion hosting them. The impossible task of being silent, and Fleabag’s inability to “shut out the noise” as she had hoped, is ironized by the “Better Man” retreat happening on the grounds at the same time. This group’s activities involve a repeated exercise where the attendees work through their aggression by yelling “slut” at the top of their lungs, punctuating Fleabag’s silent retreat with sexist descriptors that deep down, she feels might true about herself.

This joke is consistently funny throughout the episode, and the idea of intrusive, inappropriate thoughts punctuating serious moments is a recurring one in Fleabag. In one scene, Fleabag and Claire’s horrendous godmother-turned-stepmother (“She’s not an evil stepmother, she’s just a cunt.”) bustles around and interrupts the family gathering while the girls’ father (Bill Paterson) memorializes their mother. “Ignore me,” Stepmother (Olivia Colman) demands in a dramatic stage whisper as she loudly pops a champagne bottle. Clearly, Stepmother is there, she cannot be ignored and her awful intrusive presence in the would-be sentimental family moment, while very uncomfortable, is also just really funny. Pretending that the very loud, horrible thing is not present, when it clearly is, is one of Fleabag’s go-to joke formulas. It’s consistently hilarious, except when it’s horribly sad. For Fleabag, her relentless joking banter with us is her attempt at drowning out the very loud, horrible thing that constantly threatens to overwhelm her – the reality of Boo’s death.

Boo’s character (Jenny Rainsford) appears in every episode of Fleabag, in flashbacks that offer us a glimpse of the close bond the two women shared. These scenes are the only ones in which Fleabag does not directly address the audience, indicating that it was a time before she needed us. Many of them take place in Boo’s apartment, an unfamiliar space we can never access in our own relationship with Fleabag. The presence of these memories in every episode demonstrates that this was an irreplaceable relationship, one that will stay with Fleabag for the rest of her life. In the only somewhat tender scene between Fleabag and her father, he compares the way he misses the girls’ mother to the way Fleabag must miss her friend – in a way that the two of them will never fully get over.

With the recent losses of her best friend and her mother, Fleabag is living with the reality of death constantly on her mind. The cold open of the third episode is a visual gag on Fleabag jogging into frame – in a graveyard. She meets Claire there for her birthday, implicitly to visit their mother’s grave. Claire tells Fleabag that it’s “really inappropriate” to jog through a graveyard, “flaunting your life,” and is later shocked to learn that Fleabag comes there every day. The episode concludes with Fleabag cordially nodding to a fellow regular visitor on one of her jogs. This space of memorializing the dead is a part of Fleabag’s daily routine.

The void left in the wake of Boo, and Fleabag’s mother, cannot be easily filled. For most of the series, Fleabag is lying to her family, and to us, her “new best friends,” about the fact that she’s fine. But the show makes an argument for “flaunting your life” in the graveyard, by finding a way to laugh with people in the inappropriate moments, even when you’re very sad.

Waller-Bridge tells Paste:

“In my heart, for any of these characters to succeed they need to make human connection and be honest and open with each other. To know that success is something that will come and go. It’s not something you can hold onto tight enough. It’s not something that will keep you safe forever, whereas family and friends often will.”

In a review for Indiewire, Ben Travers writes that “by the end of just six episodes,” Fleabag’s use of direct address “pays off in a bigger way than House of Cards has provided in four full seasons.” The direct address “pays off” because, by the end of season one, we understand why Fleabag is speaking to us directly: she is desperate to connect.

We don’t see Fleabag break down fully until the last scene of the series. Her café is about to go under – and with it, the remnants of the passion project she started with Boo. She is losing her livelihood and the most significant physical reminder of her best friend. In this moment, Fleabag unloads all of her true feelings of guilt about hurting Boo, about hurting her family, and about her fears of being a selfish person. “Either everyone feels this way a little bit and they’re not talking about it, or I’m completely fucking alone, which isn’t fucking funny,” she says.

After spending six episodes with her, we know the answer to this. Everyone feels that way a little bit, and it’s definitely fucking funny.

Thankfully, the first season ends on a laugh. The bank manager (Hugh Dennis), who denied Fleabag a loan necessary to save her café in the first episode, happens upon Fleabag at her lowest point. After hearing her break down, he reopens her loan application on the spot. “Let’s start over,” he says, about the application he found “funny” because he thought it was a café for guinea pigs (it’s actually “guinea pig themed”). Hearing her loan application read back to her, Fleabag laughs, too. The bank manager delivers the last line of the series by saying, “See? I told you it was funny.”

Despite its tilt towards tragedy, Fleabag is a funny-sad comedy about a lonely woman who has lost her best friend, that makes a convincing case for laughing with each other about the fact that everything is not fine, until maybe it starts to be fine again.

Holly McKenzie-Sutter is a Vancouver-based writer, journalist, and graduate student. She recently graduated from the University of Toronto with a double major in English and Cinema Studies, and is currently working on a Master’s of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. Follow her on Twitter @hollerdoller.

Why Lorelai Gilmore from ‘Gilmore Girls’ Is a “Cool Girl”

The Cool Girl is positioned as being so because she’s not like other women. You’ll notice that apart from Sookie St. James, Rory, and the select few townswomen that put the Gilmore Girls on a pedestal, Lorelai doesn’t play nice with other women. In fact, I would go as far as to say she disdains them.

This guest post written by Scarlett Harris appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions.

We all know the famous “Cool Girl” screed from Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel, Gone Girl. But since it’s been four years since the book’s release, and two years since its big screen adaptation, here’s a refresher:

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”

Watching Gilmore Girls for the first time in the lead up to the revival because, even though I was in its target demographic, somehow I missed it the first time around, it hit me that Lorelai Gilmore was a Cool Girl long before Flynn, and Buzzfeed writer Anne Helen Petersen, popularized the term and Jennifer Lawrence became the living embodiment of it. Let me count the ways.

Not Like Other Girls.

The Cool Girl is positioned as being so because she’s not like other women. You’ll notice that apart from Sookie St. James (Melissa McCarthy), Rory (Alexis Bledel), and the select few townswomen that put the Gilmore Girls on a pedestal, Lorelai (Lauren Graham) doesn’t play nice with other women. In fact, I would go as far as to say she disdains them. While the problems between Lorelai and her mother Emily (Kelly Bishop) are for another article, one of Lorelai’s many criticisms of her mother is that she’s concerned with manners, proper presentation, and social acceptance, all traditionally feminine markers. Lorelai — and the television show as an extension of her — vilifies other women who share traits similar to her mother, such as Sherry (Madchen Amick) and Lindsay (Arielle Kebbel), for catering too much to others, particularly men. For example, Lorelai mocks Sherry for being excited for her baby shower and Dean’s (Jared Padalecki) new bride, Lindsay, for bringing baked goods to his workplace and wanting to be a good wife. But in Lorelai’s cultivation of her Cool Girl persona, she also makes a covert effort to appeal to men in just as damaging ways, placing herself as different from and therefore better than those other girls. Even the long-suffering Michel (Yanic Truesdale) displays too much femininity for Lorelai’s taste, making him the butt of her jokes. Gilmore Girls creator and showrunner, Amy Sherman-Palladino, said that the character “was pretty tough, made her own money, but she also liked men. She wasn’t demonizing them.” Because Cool Girls love men while other girls don’t.

All About Lorelai.

In the mini-series Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, during an argument with her daughter — because what would a revival be without at least one? — Emily says, “Nothing ever matters to Lorelai Gilmore except what she wants, what she feels,” a recurring theme for Lorelai throughout the show. One of her paramours, Digger, picks up on this on their first date. “Does everything have to be fun for you?” he asks when Lorelai expresses restlessness with an intimate dinner in a private room of a happening club. Lorelai doesn’t care that she shows up to Rory’s first day of Chilton in cowboy boots and tie-dye, or about the parade of on-again off-again men affecting her daughter’s life, or about Luke’s (Scott Patterson) obvious discomfort with the workmen renovating their house seeing her naked because she’s just one of the guys except, you know, one they want to fuck. There are no gay men in Stars Hollow, a fact the revival makes light of when the town struggles to find LGBTQIA residents to march in its first ever gay pride parade. Lorelai’s a cool mom who just wants to have fun and [insert whatever other pop cultural stereotype about women here].

Food. Oh, the Food.

If Gilmore Girls can be associated with one thing, it’s food. Cherry danishes, coffee, pizza, Pop Tarts, Tater Tots and Red Vines. As we read above, Cool Girls are all about eating the food that other, not-as-Cool Girls would shun in favor of their diets. Though Lorelai and Rory hate exercise as much as they love junk food, at least Gone Girl’s protagonist Amy Dunne had the decency to expose the lie that eating junk food while movie marathoning and seldom exercising won’t get you the lithe bodies of the Gilmore clan.

Gilmore Girls, Indeed.

Though Lorelai raised a child on her own as a teenager and the Cool Girl is more than capable of handling day-to-day inanities and complex hijinks herself (hello, Amy Dunne), the archetype is imbued with a certain childlike quality. Despite her propensity for playing 40-year-old mothers, Hollywood Cool Girl Jennifer Lawrence (who’s 26) certainly has that carefree youthfulness about her. As does Emma Stone and Anna Kendrick (you’ll notice that Cool Girls are almost always white). Because Lorelai’s childhood was cut short, plus the fact that her best friend is her teenage daughter, her immaturity often shows through. She doesn’t care that she disturbs the sleep of Rory during exams or Luke when he has to get up for an early delivery: it’s snowing in the middle of the night, damn it, and Lorelai will frolic in it because she’s quirky like that.

What a Difference A Year in the Life Makes…

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life does make some strides in dismantling the Cool Girl stereotype. When Rory tells her mother that she’s writing a book about their relationship, Lorelai is displeased, asserting that, “I went to all this effort for many, many years making sure that people only knew what I wanted them to know.”

Cool Girls are supposed to not give a fuck, cultivating an air of carefree- and go-with-the-flow-ness. In actuality, a lot of effort goes into the artifice of the Cool Girl, just like the no-makeup look. Lorelai drives a beat-up old jeep because a less conspicuous car just won’t do, but as season seven draws to a close we saw it starting to sputter and, ten years later in the revival, she’s still hell-bent on keeping it, if much of her other Cool Girl traits have dissipated with age. Because as Flynn writes, the Cool Girl doesn’t exist effortlessly: a lot of work actually goes into maintaining her air of apathy leading us to wonder what even is a Cool Girl and why is Lorelai — and by extension, us — holding on to her so dearly?

Lorelai Gilmore and Gilmore Girlsitself were products of their time. Seldom would television shows of today get away with the homophobia, ableism, and racism of the original series except, you know, in its Netflix revival, which was just as blatant, if not more crafty, in its bigotry.

Ten years have passed since husband and wife team Amy Sherman-Palladino (creator, showrunner) and Daniel Palladino (producer, writer, director) departed the series but you wouldn’t know it from the stagnant feel of the revival. Their vice-like grip on the penultimate season and their apparent bitterness that Gilmore Girls continued without them meant that Rory regressed while Lorelai tried desperately to find some meaning after her father’s death while reckoning with her fading Cool Girl persona.

Maybe a modern-day Lorelai would be more informed, and thus, angrier at the feminine ideal she and the women around her have been forced to embody. Angelica Jade Bastién writes of “the particular brand of anger that blooms in intelligent women when you realize how hard it is to live by your own definition of being a woman,” in a piece about Gone Girland the femme fatale. Lorelai left a stifling home for a just-as-stifling small town that equates her worth as a woman with what she can offer the town (’s men), of which the Stars Hollow basket auction is just one example. Perhaps a thoroughly modern Lorelai would be forging her path through single motherhood in the big city, as Rory attempted in her career as a journalist. We may never know, even if there is a second/ninth season of the show, because Lorelai Gilmore’s creators seem intent on upholding archetypes instead of examining what it actually means to be a woman — and not the titular Girls — today.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Emily Gilmore and the Humanization of Bad Mothers

The Kims Next Door: Korean Identity on Gilmore Girls

Pop-Tarts and Pizza: Food, Gender, and Class in Gilmore Girls

The Paradox of the Gilmore Diet in Gilmore Girls

Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer based in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter @ScarlettEHarris and read her previous published work at her website The Scarlett Woman.

Why, as an Intersectional Feminist, I Can’t Get Behind the TV Land ‘Heathers’ Reboot

The television reboot will give marginalized people power that they don’t have in real life. As a result, they cast cis straight white people as the oppressed underclass. This misrepresentation of the real world will ultimately work to reinforce the fallacious idea that marginalized groups are “taking over” and gaining power over white, cis, straight, or otherwise privileged people. … I am not at all against a ‘Heathers’ reboot, but I want one that is progressive and intersectional, one that expands on the feminism of the original rather than scaling it back.

This guest post written by Emily Scott appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions. | Spoilers ahead.

The cult classic status of the 1988 black comedy movie Heathers is firmly cemented in modern culture. The particular combination of high school hierarchy and gallows humor has struck a chord with millions of teenagers throughout the decades. The advent of Netflix has exposed the film to a whole new audience, and its campiness lent itself well to a highly popular Off-Broadway musical adaptation. Maybe most importantly, its portrayal of the power of young women has made it a favorite of many smart and self-aware girls, from its creation to today.

As with most cult classics, Heathers is ripe for a television reboot, and TV Land jumped at the opportunity. The network ordered a pilot for an anthology series based on a script by Jason Micallef and executive produced by Tom Rosenberg and Gary Lucchesi of Lakeshore Entertainment. But those who were hoping for a modern update to a dark, goofy, yet empowering story remain disappointed. The announced concept of the TV series adaptation makes extreme changes to the premise of Heathers, and not in a good way.

The original Heathers follows the top tier of the high school hierarchy, a group of three wealthy girls all named Heather and one girl named Veronica. Veronica (Winona Ryder) is somewhat of an outsider; she likes the benefits and privileges of being popular, but she has conflicted feelings about their treatment of those they consider beneath them. She starts to divulge her disillusionment to J.D. (Christian Slater), a mysterious, trench coat-clad new kid. After a fight with Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), Veronica decides to play a prank on her by serving her a mug of milk and orange juice. But when J.D. pours a mug of liquid drain cleaner, ostensibly as a joke, Veronica accidentally takes it to her instead, inadvertently killing Heather. Panicked, J.D. convinces Veronica to help him stage her suicide by forging a note. Throughout the rest of the film, it begins to become clear to Veronica that J.D. is orchestrating these killings because he feels disenfranchised by the system of power; he is trying to shake up the social hierarchy by destroying everyone in it.

Heathers represents a certain set of feminist ideals that makes it an empowering experience for young women. While the film engages heavily in the “mean girls” trope, the inclusion of the protagonist (Veronica) in the antagonistic group (the Heathers) subverts the standard popular vs. unpopular dichotomy. But even though Veronica originally believes the Heathers to be evil and worthy of punishment, she comes to realize that there is a bigger threat – J.D. The Heathers are mean girls, but they are just that. They don’t deserve to die. In this way, the movie allows Veronica to condemn the practices of the Heathers while still acknowledging their humanity.

Ultimately, the feminism of the film is centered on Veronica’s journey to finding and reclaiming her own power. As Alize Emme discusses in her Bitch Flicks article, Veronica is initially unable to stand up for anyone, even herself, against the Heathers. But at the end of the movie, she literally saves their lives. By the time she finishes with J.D. — the greater evil — Veronica has the strength to denounce the conniving, judgmental ways of the Heathers. She goes on to engage in friendships with Martha Dunnstock (Carrie Lynn) and Betty Finn (Renée Estevez), girls who were considered beneath the Heathers. By saving the Heathers, but rejecting their hierarchy and condescension towards other women, Veronica proves to have grown as both a person and a feminist.

The television adaptation of Heathers, however, presents a set of competing, feminist ideals that, if the show progresses in the way the film does, will send a message of exclusivity and non-intersectionality in feminism. In this new version of Heathers, the TV series will portray a world that does not exist in reality. In the updated Westerburg High School, the popular crowd, including the Heathers, will be made up of marginalized people. The new Heather Chandler (Melanie Field), the queen bee, will be a plus-size woman. The new Heather Duke (Brendan Scannell), the bookish turned diabolical one, will be “Heath,” who identifies as genderqueer. The new Heather McNamara (Jasmine Mathews), the cheerleader, will be a Black lesbian. And if they are the oppressors in this new world, then who will be the oppressed? White, thin, cis, straight people.

In fact, the new Veronica is Grace Victoria Cox, a talented young actress who fits very much within the white, thin, stereotypically feminine beauty ideal of Hollywood. James Scully, the new J.D., looks more like Kurt and Ram, the football players from the original movie, than the murderous high school outcast that Christian Slater once embodied. In the world that the TV series is creating, the diverse members of the Heathers will seek to torment and tear down these vulnerable, pretty white kids, leading them to stage their murders.

While this premise was likely chosen because it seemed edgy, this restructuring of the power dynamic between marginalized people and privileged people is ill-advised and, frankly, irresponsible. The writers and producers (who, notably, all appear to be white men) have used this concept to give marginalized people power that they don’t have in real life. As a result, they cast cis straight white people as the oppressed underclass. This misrepresentation of the real world will ultimately work to reinforce the fallacious idea that marginalized groups are “taking over” and gaining power over white, cis, straight, or otherwise privileged people.

If the television adaptation follows the plot of the original movie, then Veronica and J.D. will be killing and staging the suicide of at least one of the Heathers, as well as other members of the popular crowd. J.D. enacts this plot because he feels oppressed by the high school hierarchy, and he seeks to destroy all those who have power within that system in order to gain power himself. In the original film, which is virtually devoid of identity politics, this notion is extremely troubling, but realistic, as proven by real-life cases of high school shootings. In the world of the TV Land Heathers, this plot makes J.D. into, at best, an internet troll, and at worst, a violent alt-right vigilante. J.D. perceives the Black, queer, non-thin Heathers as having too much power, more than they deserve. His plot to kill them reads as an effort to take them down a notch, to put them in their place as marginalized people, so that he, a privileged white boy, can rise to his rightful place at the top. In the television adaptation of Heathers, J.D. is not just a messed-up kid. He’s a misogynist, homophobic, white supremacist. In a world where such rhetoric is becoming increasingly common, the idea that a purportedly comedic television show would represent such a character is disturbing and endlessly problematic.

Additionally, this restructure of the hierarchy causes Veronica’s journey to become problematic as well. One could argue that J.D.’s implicit racism, sexism, and homophobia will not be an issue, as he is clearly set as the antagonist, and because the protagonist (Veronica) ultimately rejects his ideas and plans. But again, if the plot of the TV adaptation is parallel to the film, Veronica’s rejection of J.D.’s extremism will only result in a more insidious form of white supremacy. As mentioned previously, Veronica ultimately saves the Heathers but rejects their cruelty, choosing instead to befriend the kind but unpopular Martha. In the series adaptation, Veronica’s decision will act as an affirmation of White Feminism. Even as Veronica rejects J.D.’s racism, sexism, and homophobia, her ultimate choice will be to ditch her marginalized friends for the other privileged white kids of the adaptation’s false underclass. Veronica can claim a lack of prejudice because she didn’t want them to die, but she doesn’t want to include them in her personal life. She, like many white feminists, doesn’t seek to understand what they may be going through or how their experiences may have differed from her own. Instead, she decides that she would just rather hang out with people like her — cis, straight, white, and thin. In the original film, her decision to befriend Martha, who’s plus size, was a way of confirming the value of every person, regardless of their outward appearance or social standing. In the adaptation, it will act as an exclusion of marginalized people from Veronica’s conception of worthiness.

When a movie becomes as iconic as Heathers, remakes and revivals are inevitable. Any production company that takes on such a project has a responsibility to take the current sociopolitical climate into account. It appears that TV Land and Lakeshore Entertainment have attempted to do so with the inclusion of people of color, LGBTQ, and plus size characters. But the concept of the Heathers television adaptation uses these characters to give legitimacy to false ideas about the power of minorities and marginalized groups, as well as giving credence to the idea of White Feminism. Though the original Heathers features all white characters and largely avoids commenting on race or sexual orientation (although it does feature the deaths of two homophobic jocks, staged as the suicides of gay lovers), it culminated in a feminist, inclusive shake-up of the social order. But the ill-conceived premise of the TV Land reboot will only serve to reinforce power structures and harmful gender and racial dynamics that already exist everywhere. By restructuring Westerburg High School’s social order, the Heathers series will only solidify the inequality of our social order. The one that sets minorities and marginalized folks beneath cis, straight, white people; the one that perpetuates hate and intolerance; the one we all live with everyday.

While a pilot is currently being filmed, the television adaptation of Heathers has not yet been ordered to series. Hopefully, the studio will take the sociopolitical context into account when choosing whether to continue with the adaptation. I am not at all against a Heathers reboot, but I want one that is progressive and intersectional, one that expands on the feminism of the original rather than scaling it back. Ideally, the ill-advised concept behind the TV Land adaptation will be abandoned, and then the world can have the new, forward-thinking, inclusive Heathers that it deserves. This time, let’s make Veronica a Black lesbian.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

“I’m a Veronica”: Power and Transformation Through Female Friendships in Heathers

Veronica Decides Not to Die — Heathers: The Proto-Mean Girls

Cult Films that Changed Cinematic History

Teenage Girl Gang Movies Through the Years

Emily Scott is an actress, writer, and filmmaker currently living in the Bay Area. In addition to freelance work, she writes regularly for Culturess. You can find her on Twitter @Emascott92 or at http://emily–scott.weebly.com.

‘Parks and Recreation’: Leslie Knope’s Problem with Women

For Leslie, feminism means, rather simplistically, that she admires women who are in power, believing that gender should be no barrier for achievement. Unfortunately, despite Leslie’s determination to highlight her dedication to furthering the feminist cause, her understanding is not only crude and rather rudimentary, but can, frequently, be damaging. Her identification as a feminist is, much like Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon on ’30 Rock,’ hugely lacking in intersectionality. This is even more frustrating considering that three of the four female cast members are women of color.

This guest post written by Siobhan Denton appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions.

Leslie Knope, the much loved and indulged protagonist of Parks and Recreation, is by her own account, a feminist. For Leslie (Amy Poehler), feminism means, rather simplistically, that she admires women who are in power, believing that gender should be no barrier for achievement. Unfortunately, despite Leslie’s determination to highlight her dedication to furthering the feminist cause, her understanding is not only crude and rather rudimentary, but can, frequently, be damaging.

Her identification as a feminist is, much like Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon on 30 Rock, hugely lacking in intersectionality. This is even more frustrating considering that three of the four female cast members are women of color. Leslie is a feminist when it comes to her own interests, or encouraging other women who resemble her. She is more than willing to actively encourage April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza) in her pursuit of career success, but works hard to distance herself from women that are not aligned with her own personal beliefs. While she does advocate for comprehensive sex education and contraception access, Leslie’s version of feminism is entirely reliant on her own morals and desires. She never truly wants to further the feminist cause, but applauds her own personal efforts as achievements for the movement.

Leslie often finds herself threatened by other women, despite no reasonable impetus. Regularly, this threat is manifested into jealously. Take, for example, her numerous interactions with Shauna Malwae-Tweep (Alison Becker). Shauna, a journalist, is regularly critiqued by Leslie. Her initial issue stems from Shauna’s romantic interactions with Mark Brendanawicz. Mark has shown no romantic interest in Leslie, and in fact, seems to find her relatively irritating at the start of the series. Despite this, Leslie places blame on Shauna, and attempts to question her professionalism and worth.

Meeting Shauna again in a similar scenario, when Leslie observes Shauna speaking to and flirting with Ben, Leslie immediately pits herself Shauna. She perceives her as a rival, rather than a fellow professional woman.

Perhaps Leslie’s disdain for other women is highlighted the most when it comes to her interactions with Brandi Maxxxx (Mara Marini). Leslie has made her views on sex workers clear from the start of the series. Spending time in a strip club, she questions the women’s life choices without recognizing her own privilege as a white, educated, middle-class woman.

Leslie would rather silence Brandi during a public forum than be associated with her. Brandi offers Leslie her support, but Leslie consistently attempts to distance herself. Her character is held up to be a figure of humor, derived both from her occupation and her perceived lack of intellect.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoDV7iacqg8″]

Take the scene in which both Leslie and Brandi are discussing the concept of hard work. Brandi, in recognizing Leslie’s work ethic and clearly admiring it, attempts to draw parallels between them. She states that, like Leslie, she too works hard. Rather than commend Brandi’s hard work, or thank her for her praise, Leslie is clearly horrified.

Leslie is not on Brandi’s side, and we, the viewer, are also told to treat Brandi in the same way. She should be laughed at, and ridiculed, not applauded.

The viewer, in looking at both women and their physical similarity, is effectively instructed to draw comparisons between the two. Brandi is clearly presented as an example of a vacuous woman who should be treated with disdain. While Leslie, thanks to her privilege and education, should be commended for her intellectual approach.

Notably, much of the praise surrounding Parks and Recreation has surrounded Leslie and Ann’s (Rashida Jones) friendship. Yet, as has been noted, for Leslie, Ann is never really her equal. Ann, rather than fulfilling an equivalent role, is content to act as Leslie’s sidekick, cheering on her aspirations rather than necessarily fulfilling her own.

Leslie’s friendship with Ann originally stems from her personal desire to further her career, rather than truly helping Ann’s plight. The dynamics of their friendship is entirely uneven. Leslie clearly holds power, and even in her hyperbolic praise, focuses more on Ann’s physical appearance than her intellect. When she does praise her career abilities, she does so in such an exaggerated manner, that it becomes supercilious, forcing Ann to downplay her skills and in turn, undermine her own ability and qualifications.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5qUg6DQBeg”]

Many of her hyperbolic compliments are used to obscure Leslie’s real intention; asking Ann to support her without question or judgement, to be silent and supportive.

As the series progresses, Ann, under pressure from Leslie, begins to work at City Hall, despite being happy in her current occupation as a nurse. Leslie does not consider Ann’s feelings in this decision, but rather focuses on the benefits that it will bring her. Ann is a sounding board for Leslie; a compliant friend who will readily allow Leslie to offload with little in return.

Fans of Leslie will note that she is regularly applauded by other characters in the series for her kindness and consideration. She regularly provides friends with elaborate, carefully thought-out gifts, but these gifts, rather than being given selflessly are, too often, a means for Leslie to feel valued. Leslie revels in her ability to provide these presents, and gains much satisfaction from doing so. Ann and Ben both note in one episode, that they feel immense pressure to provide Leslie with a similarly thoughtful present. If Leslie’s habit of purchasing such gifts were to be truly selfless, it would not leave her loved ones feeling so despondent.

Leslie’s version of feminism is entirely informed through her own privileges and limited life experiences. Certainly the series is intentionally “small-town” in its approach, using this central conceit as the source of much of its idiosyncratic humor. Yet, when a show is going to be broadcast to such a large audience, and a character’s perceived feminism is so ingrained in character construct, it is damaging and short-sighted to allow this character to espouse the virtues of feminism when she displays so little interaction or understanding of wider intersectional issues.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Parks and Recreation: How Fat Phobia Is Invisible

Shirley, Donna, and Lana: African American Women in Thursday Night Sitcoms

Ann Perkins and Me: It’s Complicated

Why We Need Leslie Knope and What Her Election on Parks and Recreation Means for Women and Girls

Are You There, Hollywood? It’s Me, the Average Girl

What Baby Daddy Can Learn from Parks and Recreation

I Want to Establish the Ron Swanson Scholarship in Women’s Studies

Parks and Recreation Seasons 1 and 2

Emmy Week 2011: Leslie Knope

Siobhan Denton is a teacher and writer living in Wales, UK. She holds a BA in English and an MA in Film and Television Studies. She is especially interested in depictions of female desire and transitions from youth to adulthood. She tweets at @siobhan_denton and writes at The Blue and the Dim.

The Rise of Women with Mental Illness in TV Series

With the sleeper success of ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,’ the increased focus on Kimmy Schmidt’s PTSD this season on ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,’ and Rachel Goldberg’s mental illness on ‘UnREAL,’ there seems to be a rise in depictions of mental health — in particular, women’s mental health — on television.

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris.

With the sleeper success of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the increased focus on Kimmy Schmidt’s PTSD this season on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Rachel Goldberg’s mental illness on UnREAL, there seems to be a rise in depictions of mental health — in particular, women’s mental health — on television.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend deals perhaps most explicitly with mental health. Unfortunately, the series has an awful, ableist title. Unhappy in her high-powered career as a New York lawyer, Rebecca Bunch bumps into her summer camp boyfriend Josh Chan in the street and decides to follow him to West Covina, California, though she repeatedly claims that’s not the reason for her sea change. There we see her transition through depression, anxiety, and “smidges of [obsessive] compulsive disorder” in her quest to win back Josh, as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s co-creators Rachel Bloom (who plays Rebecca) and Aline Brosh McKenna told Vulture.

The hormones in play when you’re falling in love — increased dopamine levels and a decrease in serotonin — mirror those released when taking a hit of cocaine and having obsessive compulsive disorder. Not only is Crazy Ex-Girlfriend a commentary on Rebecca’s mental health struggles but it covertly examines the general absurdity of romance in our society. Romantic comedies, the glorification of violent couples such as Sid and Nancy and Harley Quinn and The Joker, and excusing playground bullying as affection all equate intense passion, and at times even abuse, with true love. Bloom and Brosh McKenna told Vulture that many characters in rom-coms exhibit extremely unhealthy or destructive behavior and they differentiate Rebecca’s behavior from this.

That brings us to UnReal, created by Marti Noxon and Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, which finished its second season on Lifetime. Despite its well–documented problems this season regarding race and its depiction of people of color, the show is another that portrays a woman living and working with mental illness to varying degrees of success. As Alyssa Rosenberg writes at The Washington Post:

“The most interesting element of UnREAL, though… is the idea that mental illness is an appropriate response to certain social conditions and expectations for modern women. The Bachelor-style show Rachel works for pushes the women who appear on it to their absolute limits, forcing them to adopt artificial personas and suppress their feelings to compete for the affections of a man who’s appearing on the show only to boost his business. Being the person involved in manipulating other women is a highly unpleasant task. And an on-air meltdown Rachel suffered shortly before the events of the first season of UnREAL may actually be the sanest and most humane possible reaction to the job.”

Though UnReal hasn’t done Rachel — nor most of its other characters, for that matter — justice this season, she manipulates people to get what she wants and struggles with mental illness internally in equal measure, showing that a woman with mental illness doesn’t have to be a traditionally sympathetic character.

On the other hand, though, Kimmy Schmidt is a character we can more easily empathize with due to her jovial, almost childlike (which is another trope of women with mental illness in itself) demeanor. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt took us by surprise this season as it dealt savilly with the fallout from Kimmy’s imprisonment by Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne. Bread crumbs like Kimmy’s stress burping, her behavior around war veteran Keith, and her involuntary responses to getting intimate with Dong are scattered throughout the earlier parts of season two, which lead to Kimmy seeking therapy from Dr. Andrea (Tina Fey, who also co-created the series) in later episodes. Kimmy’s reluctance to see a psychiatrist is realistic, as is the turmoil she increasingly sees her life devolve into as she ignores her problems. For so long, Kimmy played the role of therapist in her friends’ and fellow captives’ lives that she can’t see how much she herself needs one.

By bringing mental health issues to the forefront — along with other complex portrayals, such as those in Being Mary Jane, You’re the Worst, Bojack Horseman, Girls, Lady Dynamite, and Homeland — television is changing the perception of women with mental illness from fetishized objects to more nuanced and realistic portrayals, at once granting greater representation to women with disabilities and hopefully reducing the stigma of mental illness.

Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer based in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter @ScarlettEHarris and read her previous published work at her website The Scarlett Woman.

Interview with First-Time Web Series Creators Ilana Rubin and Lana Schwartz on Comedy Thriller ‘Secrets & Liars’

[Web series are] “the best opportunity we have to express our voices, because we can use any type of format we want. I think it’d be great to see more shows that represent different viewpoints and experiences than are typically seen in comedy…” “The internet has been great for creators to get their voices heard! … I think having a diverse writer’s room isn’t just essential but should be mandatory.”

Written by Katherine Murray.

Secrets & Liars, a seven-episode comedy about a texting serial killer and the less-than-motivated friends who try to track him down, is the first web series from comedy duo Ilana Rubin and Lana Schwartz, available on their website. Not only did they create and write the series, they also star in it as the leads who are best friends. Schwartz and Rubin kindly took the time to speak to us about the process of creating their first series, and the projects they’d like to see more of, now that there are fewer barriers to production.

Bitch Flicks: What inspired you to make a web series? What drew you to the idea of making a comedic thriller?

Lana Schwartz: Ilana and I have been working together, writing and filming sketches for a few years now, and we felt like now was the time for us to do something a little more ambitious. There are so many different ways to tell a story and we wanted to do something that we felt represented our comedic voice. We were interested in doing a comedic thriller because we both love dramatic teen shows, and these dramatic situations seemed like such a sharp contrast to being a regular person.

Ilana Rubin: I think we were enticed by the idea of committing to something a bit bigger than a sketch where an idea begins and ends in 3-5 minutes. Longer narratives are the kind of entertainment we both enjoyed, so we wanted to try our hand at that. Personally, I love acting. It’s my favorite part of creating something of your own, and I was excited to play someone very different from who I am in real life.

I think we were drawn to this specific genre because we both enjoy those kinds of shows. Lana is a huge fan of Pretty Little Liars while I really enjoy shows like True Detective. With Secrets & Liars we were able to bring the absurdities of both shows under one umbrella, while really emphasizing the ridiculousness of teen thriller tropes. There was so much to play with!

Bitch Flicks: What was the most challenging part in making the series? What was the most rewarding part?

Lana Schwartz: The most challenging part was getting all of the details together. It was hard to bring together so many different people, and coordinate with our locations and crew. But I think that’s also why it was so rewarding – because we got to see everything come together in a final product.

Ilana Rubin: I will save the best for last and start with the most challenging parts. I think the most difficult thing was having our hands in every area of the production. While we did have a wonderful and talented crew (Brittany Tomkin) producing and directing (Jorja Hudson), we really were involved in every aspect when it came to the logistics. We sought out the locations, [did the casting], and had input on cinematography as well. Logistical planning is my least favorite part of any production because there’s so much that goes into it. I have so much admiration for the production managers and line producers whose literal job is to make sure that’s all under control.

The most rewarding part was actually shooting everything and doing it and at the end of the day having this thing that we wrote and created and could show the world. I’m still so proud of us. It’s just a drop in the bucket of what we will create in our lives, but I think it’s a really big testament to our work ethic. It was also pretty great to be able to shoot in the high school we went to and see some of our old teachers in the process and know that we have their support as well. Shout out to Francis Lewis, one of the best public high schools in Queens!

Bitch Flicks: How long did it take to film? What kind of equipment did you use?

Ilana Rubin: The process was a little stop/start. Our first shoot day was before Christmas and then we took a bit of a break because of the holidays and started back up in January and then we finished around March, I believe.

Jorja used a Canon T3I, and we rented an Astra Light Panel but shot without a tripod. It was mostly handheld because we wanted a more gritty feel to it. For audio, we used lavalier mics and our sound operator (and editor), Carina Jollie, was also using a boom. She is a superwoman.

Bitch Flicks: It seems like web series have opened a lot of doors in terms of the type of stories people can tell, and the number of people who can produce their own shows. What kinds of opportunities do you see for performers online? What kinds of shows would you like to see getting made?

Lana Schwartz: It’s been really great to see the opportunities and recognition a lot of our friends have gotten for their web series. The Other Kennedys is a really great one, and Life, After is another series that recently came out that also centers around two best friends under unique circumstances. It’s the best opportunity we have to express our voices, because we can use any type of format we want. I think it’d be great to see more shows that represent different viewpoints and experiences than are typically seen in comedy, and stuff that delves deeper into people’s real experiences.

Ilana Rubin: I definitely agree. The internet has been great for creators to get their voices heard! The world obviously always needs improvement, but I think this has been a great thing to come of this digital age we’re living in. I think having a diverse writer’s room isn’t just essential but should be mandatory. This is tricky coming from a straight white woman who writes with another straight white woman, but I would love to see more web series with different voices being heard. I also write for a web-talk-show, Deadass, and our writing team is one of the most diverse I have ever seen. I don’t believe you can create a dynamic story/concept without the minds of people from different backgrounds and experiences.

I think I’d like to see more series with heart. There are incredible ones that are just plain silly and joke-filled, and those are great too. A good mixture is healthy! But some of my favorite ones are Clench and Release, Under the Table, Awkward Black Girl, and Triplets of Kings County, where you can invest in the characters while also enjoying the goofs.

Bitch Flicks: Is there going to be a second season of Secrets & Liars? What other projects do you have coming up?

Ilana Rubin: Yes! As of now, we will be doing a season two, but we have some other things we want to work on first. I just had a play go up at the Annoyance Theater called Phat Camp. Lana has a sketch show that I’ll also be acting in going up at The PIT called The Best Part. We have a couple of videos that we’ll be releasing in the meantime and some that we plan to shoot before we start writing season two. We also host My Hometown, a monthly comedy show about the places people are from, so there is a lot to be excited about!

Lana Schwartz: Everything Ilana said! Plus, also, my sketch team Deathbird has a second spank (an audition for a run) going up at Upright Citizens Brigade.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

‘Grace and Frankie’ and the Binary of Bisexual Erasure and Representation

What makes it even more exciting to me, as a queer woman, is that not only are we being treated to these stories of our elders but that queerness is acknowledged and exists amongst older people in this television series. … My one bone to pick with ‘Grace and Frankie,’ for all of my true and deep love, is the decision to make Sol and Robert come out as being gay after 40 years of consummated, loving marriage to their wives. Surely, there was a possibility they were in fact bisexual?

This guest post written by Leena van Deventer appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

Advancing women’s representation in film and television is without a doubt a noble cause, as is improving the representation of many different marginalized groups. Our media should reflect the community the story is about, and our communities are full of people of different genders, races, ages, sizes, and sexual orientations. Failure to do so can contribute to the greater erasure, dehumanization, and intentional ignorance of a marginalized group’s existence, which can have devastating effects on marginalized folks in our society.

Cheers can be heard all through the internet every time a new movie is announced with a strong female character as the lead role. But those roles have changed over the last 20 or so years, and if we’re concerned with raising a generation of girls readying themselves for the coming feminist revolution, we need to consider whether we’re doing them a disservice by holding up this combat and conflict-driven Lone Wolf Badass as Finally The Female Character That Will Deliver Us From Evil and Seize the Means of Production While Looking Fabulous.

When I look back at the movies I held dear as a teen (no judgment okay), I’m reminded of The Craft, Thelma and Louise, Sister Act (1 & 2), A League of Their Own, Now and Then, or Steel Magnolias. A common thread through all of these stories was that of women’s friendship. These women knew they would live and die for each other; they knew they were better off together than alone. This has probably subconsciously affected my feminist practice, and influenced how much Molly Lambert’s article, “Can’t Be Tamed: A Manifesto,” resonated with me on a molecular level. It’s a tool of the patriarchy to convince women that women are their own worst enemies and can’t get along; it’s a radical act to actively push against that and love harder than you ever have before.

Imagine how much more Hermione Granger could have achieved if she had a Thelma to her Louise? A smart or brave or rough best friend who would do anything for her? What about Katniss Everdeen or Bella from Twilight? Who would they spend Galentine’s Day with? Who would die to protect her? While it’s inspiring to see badass women, like Rey, Furiosa, or possibly even a new Rocketeer (which is exciting as the sequel will star a Black woman), it’s easy to see the narrative being easily hijacked from women’s collective advancement to one of insular capitalist bootstrapping, a narrative which broadly prioritizes men (and stereotypically masculine qualities) over women. We shouldn’t be leaving a trail of bodies behind us, we should be amassing an army along the way.

The modern tale of female friendship I was looking for popped up in an unexpected place, to minimal fanfare, and has now officially taken up residence in a permanently rent-controlled corner of my heart. Netflix’s Grace and Frankie is a tale of female friendship and strength, with season two recently dropping and a third season on its way. It’s a tale of two septuagenarian women being bound together by adversity to find the good in each other and potentially resign to the fact that they may be the last great loves of their lives.

The first season introduced the main characters: Robert and Grace Hanson (played by Martin Sheen and Jane Fonda), and Sol and Frankie Bergstein (played by Sam Waterson and Lily Tomlin). These couples were brought together by Sol and Robert working together as partners in their law firm, and as such, both families spent a lot of time together over their 40 years of marriage, including their now adult children, who all have cousin-esque relationships with each other for the most part. They bought a shared beach house, which after Sol and Robert come clean that they have in fact been in love with each other for the last half of their marriages, becomes the primary residence of the now-displaced wives, Grace and Frankie.

Season one had many saccharine moments that I have no doubt turned a lot of people off continuing to watch, but Season two doesn’t make that same mistake. It’s sharper, wittier, and we get to see more of what makes these women tick. They know each other’s routines and quirks now, after living together for so long, and they’ve grown more fond of each other. What was once a one-dimensional joke about a control freak, push-your-feelings-down, Type A woman living with a pot-smoking, tie-dye wearing, hippie (Ho ho! The odd couple! What hijinks will ensue?) has now become less about how different the two women are and more about how they can parlay their respective strengths and weaknesses into finding a way to be there for each other no matter what.

Grace and Frankie understand the importance of banding together, and we see this in the episode where Grace catches up with some snooty country club friends after not being in contact since the break-up. The women scoff at what it must be like to live with a strange eccentric like Frankie, and Grace reminds them that she’s the only person who understands what this situation feels like, and the only person who reached out to help her, before telling them they’re assholes and leaving to go hang out with Frankie instead. The second season is underscored by a commitment between these two women; they will be there for each other to the end.

It’s thrilling for me to experience the stories of these women. As a 31-year-old woman, I cannot possibly comprehend what it would be like to lose a friend I’d loved deeply for 40 years. I was yelping and hooting and hollering at the closing scene, as Grace and Frankie walk in slow motion out of the house, onward to their new sex-toy-making empire that markets vibrators to older women (dishwasher-safe with large font instructions and comfortable grips to compensate for arthritis). We don’t hear these stories about older people enough.

What makes it even more exciting to me, as a queer woman, is that not only are we being treated to these stories of our elders but that queerness is acknowledged and exists amongst older people in this television series. Homophobia is so often linked with being old-fashioned; more prolific in previous generations. Queer stories of our elders are crucially important to our history, a sentiment further impressed upon me at the recent screening of Winter and Westbeth, a stunning and uplifting documentary about queer older people and the rich, full lives they led as artists in public housing in New York’s West Village. We need more older characters on-screen, especially LGBTQ people and people of color.

While we may be coming in leaps and bounds in terms of LGBTQ representation, I fear we still have a long way to go for equal acceptance for the “B” (and definitely the “T”) portions of that acronym. My one bone to pick with Grace and Frankie, for all of my true and deep love, is the decision to make Sol and Robert come out as being gay after 40 years of consummated, loving marriage to their wives. Surely, there was a possibility they were in fact bisexual? Was it because gay is easier for audiences to understand than “those confusing bisexuals”? Bisexual erasure frequently occurs in media and is common even within our own activist circles. People (even prominent LGBTQ activists) make biphobic comments about how bisexual teens are just confused; or bi people are promiscuous, greedy, and can’t be monogamous; or the very tired quip, “Bisexuality is just a truck stop on the road to gay,” as if bisexuality doesn’t exist and people must choose. So I can understand how difficult it can be for us who are bisexual to have some issues with representation when we struggle with representation in our very own dedicated spaces.

With a lack of bisexual characters in film and television and damaging tropes about bi people in media, it would have been great to see two bi men in Grace and Frankie, especially two older men. Bi men characters and queer characters who are older are both rarely depicted in film and television.

Because I do love the show so much, perhaps I would like to imagine the decision to make Sol and Robert gay as opposed to bisexual is because of the history of the (undeserving, cruel) association between bisexual people and infidelity, given that the men in this show engaged in a 20-year affair with each other. Perhaps co-creators Marta Kauffman (who has absolutely managed to inject more heart into this show than previous works such as Friends) and Howard J. Morris wanted to avoid contributing to that damaging stereotype? But that’s probably being too kind.

We have a long way to go with representation of all kinds: race, gender, age, size, disability, sexuality. We can get better at advancing this cause by being critical of the things we love. We can write as many strong female characters as we like in the hopes it will advance feminism, but a lone wolf isn’t going to get much done. We also need more female characters who aren’t just young, cis, straight, white women. We need to inspire girls by showing them inclusive representation and the power of women’s friendship, and we need to show them that those women can be of any age, and that strength isn’t always about picking up a bow or aiming the crosshairs at the bad guys. Sometimes it’s about holding your best friend’s hand while you do something scary.

Leena van Deventer is a game developer, writer, and educator from Melbourne, Australia. She has taught interactive storytelling at RMIT and Swinburne Universities and is co-author of Game Changers: From Minecraft to Misogyny, the Fight for the Future of Videogames with Dan Golding for Affirm Press. You can find her on Twitter @LeenaVanD.

‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ Gets Bisexual Representation Right

The musical sitcom shows the gradual development of a male bisexual character, who willfully rejects bi stereotypes to the point of addressing them in song and dance. And for anyone who cares about bisexual representation on-screen, it is magnificent. … The image of a bi character both confident in his identity and committed to addressing biphobic stereotypes — not to mention the incredible catchiness of the tune — is deeply satisfying.

This guest post written by Alex Kittle appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

Rachel Bloom’s risky, groundbreaking, Emmy-winning musical sitcom Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is often (and rightfully) praised for its focus on a protagonist with mental illness, depicting the ins and outs of anxiety and depression with frankness, compassion, and humor (despite the series’ ableist title). What might be equally significant for some viewers is the gradual development of a male bisexual character, who willfully rejects bi stereotypes to the point of addressing them in song and dance. And for anyone who cares about bisexual representation on-screen, it is magnificent.

In the pilot, Darryl Whitefeather (played by Pete Gardner) is introduced as a fairly flat supporting character: our protagonist’s new boss and something of a walking punchline. Rebecca (Rachel Bloom), a well-educated but emotionally precarious lawyer, takes a job at Whitefeather & Associates as an excuse to move to West Covina, CA, where her first love Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III) just happens to live. Though his name is on the letterhead, Darryl doesn’t seem to have much authority or confidence, and he is ecstatic that a well-respected New York lawyer like Rebecca would deign to join his firm. He immediately overshares about his pending divorce as well as his Native American heritage (1/8 Chippewa), while managing to embarrass himself in front of his new Jewish employee with an anti-Semitic remark. It feels like the show is setting him up as a kind of Michael Scott-esque character, a floundering, ineffectual, ignorant boss who talks too much and is overly self-involved.

As the season progresses he becomes more fleshed out, more sympathetic, and more likable. We see that the most important thing in his life is his young daughter, of whom he is considered the “primary parent,” as he argues for custody during his divorce. His first song is a country-western parody about his love for her, which jokingly reveals how easy it is for for declarations of fatherly affection to sound, well, icky. Darryl is shown as unabashedly emotional and loving, setting him apart early on from the other men in the show who exhibit more traditionally “masculine” traits.

But Darryl’s sexuality is never a question until he meets Josh “White Josh” Wilson (David Hull), a handsome, good-natured trainer and one of Josh Chan’s best friends. They meet on a party bus rented by Rebecca for a Josh Chan-related scheme, and immediately separate themselves from the drama, bonding over fitness talk. Some time later, feeling lonely and out of sorts while his daughter is away, Darryl throws a party for Josh and some of his friends. After staying to help him clean up, Josh kisses Darryl goodbye, igniting a chain reaction of self-discovery. He finds out Josh is gay and that Josh had assumed he was gay (he picked up “the gay vibe”), but Darryl reacts defensively, asserting that he is attracted to women, was married to a woman, and had a child with a woman. Josh assumes he’s in denial but doesn’t push it.

Still clearly unsure about whatever feelings Josh seems to have stirred within him, Darryl has a sudden realization during dance class, as he appreciatively eyes the backsides of both a man and woman in front of him: he is attracted to both! Thrilled that it all makes sense, he rushes to come out to Josh, but is nervous about embarking publicly in a same-sex relationship. Josh — who has been out since he was a tween — has no desire to hide any of his relationships from others. After wrestling with it, Darryl realizes he was wrong in trying to keep it secret, and that he is ready to be an out bisexual as he re-enters the dating pool. Over the rest of the season, they gradually become the most stable, uncomplicated relationship on the show, spending the finale together at the climactic wedding, proudly wearing matching tuxedos and seeming comfortable both with each other and with anyone else who might see them.

In the episode “Josh is Going to Hawaii!,” Darryl comes out to his staff through a Huey Lewis-inspired musical number, in what is to me one of the most important and enjoyable segments of the entire first season of this series. With candy-colored lighting, multiple popped collars, and a heaping dose of saxophone, he sings his way through the simple facts of bisexuality, the unfair stereotyping associated with it, and the excitement of coming out. With the through-line “I’m g-g-g-g-gettin’ bi,” lyrics include: “Now some may say / Are you just gay? / Why don’t you just go gay all the way? / But that’s not it / ‘Cause bi’s legit!”; “I tell you what / Being bi does not imply / That you’re a ‘player’ or a ‘slut’”; “It’s not a phase / I’m not confused / Not indecisive / I don’t have the gotta-choose blues”; and of course, the soon-to-be-classic, “It doesn’t take an intellectual / To get that I’m bisexual.”

Darryl dances and bounds around the meeting room as well as an imaginary stage, relieved upon having this realization about himself and gleeful about sharing it with others. The image of a bi character both confident in his identity and committed to addressing biphobic stereotypes — not to mention the incredible catchiness of the tune — is deeply satisfying. And revealing the mixture of support and disinterest from his friends and coworkers imagines a possible future where people are accepting of different sexual orientations, while not being fixated on them. As one of his staff points out, the weirdest thing about their boss coming out is that he called a meeting just to tell everyone in the office that.

Bi characters are already less common in film and television, and when they do show up, they are often predatory, overly sexualized, or “going through a phase.” In many cases, the term “bisexual” (or pansexual or any of the concept’s variants) may never even be used, erasing the identity altogether by refusing to name it. One common experience I’ve observed among many bisexual people is that the lack of media representation led to some confusion while growing up, questioning the validity of the identity, and struggling to come to terms with what it means and how it fits into the larger queer community. Can I say I’m bisexual if I’m not fully sure of my preference? If I haven’t dated anyone? If I’ve only dated one gender? If I’m in a serious male/female relationship? Could this be a phase? Do I have to pick a side?

Today, more and more visible celebrities are coming out as bi, and that’s fantastic, but it is still crucial for popular media to positively depict bi characters and give them their own stories. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend not only names it, but celebrates and nurtures it, developing Darryl’s subplot across several episodes as he moves from being in a monogamous “straight” relationship in which he was unhappy for years, to recognizing his own preferences and finding acceptance from both self and others. By the season one finale, he is even given the possibility of a happy (and adorable) ending, and I can’t wait to see where things go from here.

Alex Kittle is an artist, writer, retail buyer, and curator who lives and works in the Boston area. She is passionate about many things, including horror movies, 80s new wave, feminist art history, crossword puzzles, and science-fiction. You can find her at almost any given time of day hanging out on Twitter @alexxkittle.

‘The O.C.’s Alex Kelly Deserved Better; All Bisexual Characters Do

I’ve had countless conversations with other queer women who had similar awakenings in 2004, when Alex Kelly burst onto our TV screens and shook up the Orange County. But upon subsequent re-watches, I’ve been forced to notice that Alex’s storyline isn’t the empowering queer narrative I remembered. For one thing, all of her romantic interests take advantage of her and use her for personal gain.

This guest post written by Kate Sloan appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

The first time Olivia Wilde’s character Alex Kelly appears on-screen in The O.C., protagonist Seth (Adam Brody) creeps up behind her while she’s wearing headphones. Startled, she traps him in a headlock. “Touch me again, I’ll hurt you,” she promises. But actually, it’s Alex who ends up getting hurt, over and over again, by every character she gets close to. She enters the television show tough and fighting, and leaves it heartbroken and crying. She’s used, thrown aside, and objectified. I want better for Alex, because she deserves it, and I want better for every other bisexual character, too.

Alex is introduced in season two of The O.C. as a love interest for Seth Cohen, the show’s awkward, geeky, self-absorbed antihero. Seth needs tickets to a sold-out concert to impress his ex-girlfriend Summer (Rachel Bilson), so he shows up at music venue the Bait Shop to try to weasel his way into the show. There, he finds Alex, the Bait Shop’s bartender and de facto manager. To get the tickets, he applies to work at the club as a janitor, and she hires him. But as is always the way with drama-soaked soap operas like The O.C., their professional relationship quickly becomes more than that.

Alex is everything the show’s spoiled protagonists are not (with the exception of “beautiful,” because everyone on this show is beautiful). Her blue-streaked blonde hair, tough tattoos, and rock-’n’-roll fashion sense make her stick out like a cactus spike amongst all the wealthy girl-next-door types in the cast. By the age of 17, we learn, Alex has been expelled from three different high schools for misbehaving, and her parents kicked her out when they discovered she was dating a girl. But she petitioned the court for emancipation, successfully escaped her parents, got the Bait Shop job, and moved into her own apartment. She’s doing well; she’s happy. At least, until Seth and his friends enter her life.

I’m enormously sentimental about The O.C. It was formative viewing for me at the tender age of 12, when the openly bisexual Alex made me realize that I, too, might be queer. I devoured each new episode with rabid enthusiasm, and pored over Alex-related fanfiction, LiveJournal discussions, and screencaps. She was tenacious and bold, but also feminine and sweet. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to make out with her, be her best friend, or be her. I’ve had countless conversations with other queer women who had similar awakenings in 2004, when Alex Kelly burst onto our TV screens and shook up the Orange County.

But upon subsequent re-watches, I’ve been forced to notice that Alex’s storyline isn’t the empowering queer narrative I remembered.

For one thing, all of her romantic interests take advantage of her and use her for personal gain. Seth, the cute dweeb she starts dating shortly after she hires him to clean her club’s toilets, just wants her so he can make his ex-girlfriend jealous: he brags about her in front of Summer. He consistently fetishizes her rebelliousness and queerness, talking about her like her tattoos, underage alcohol consumption, and sexual encounters with other girls are the most interesting things about her. He eventually breaks up with her because he says her too-cool persona is an “act,” a “crutch,” when in fact it seems to be the only thing that drew him to her in the first place.

From the ashes of her romance with Seth, Alex falls into a fling with Marissa (Mischa Barton), the show’s beautiful, rich, vapid female lead. Marissa’s spent the entire series rebelling against her mom, whom she hates. Earlier in the season, Marissa dates her family’s hot gardener, intentionally inciting her mother’s classist rage by mingling with such an undesirable person. “I’m not saying you didn’t like me,” he says when he breaks up with her, “just not as much as you hate [your mom].” But just a few episodes later, Marissa’s pulling the exact same trick again, by dating someone who’s not only working-class but also (gasp!) a girl.

To the credit of actors Olivia Wilde and Mischa Barton, their courtship is portrayed with an authenticity and vulnerability that the writing lacks. There’s one memorable episode where Alex’s vindictive ex makes off with her favorite heart-shaped necklace and Marissa accompanies her on a road trip to recover it. “You can’t let her steal your heart,” Marissa says, and the look they share is meant to be smoldering but comes across as sweet. It’s an emotional closeness I recognize from my own exciting initial forays into queer romance.

It’s heartbreaking for both Alex and the viewer, then, when Marissa gets overwhelmed by the social stigma of dating a girl and runs back into the arms of her safe ex-boyfriend. “I didn’t ask you to give up your life,” Alex pleads during their break-up scene, “All I ever wanted was to be a part of it.” For the remainder of the show’s four-season run, there were no further indications that Marissa actually liked women or identified as anything other than straight. She tried on bisexuality, and Alex, like a Marc Jacobs trench coat, before deciding it was so last season and she didn’t want it after all. And Alex disappeared from the show, just a footnote in the lives of the characters who had walked all over her.

Because of the sweet and brave way Olivia Wilde played her, I love Alex. I want a different outcome for her every time I rewatch her plot arc, but she always gets pigeonholed and mistreated in the end. I want her to be more than a “sweeps-week lesbian”; I want the other characters to appreciate her for qualities other than her aesthetic and her sex life; I want the show’s creator to have thought of her as more than just a punchline for the male lead. Josh Schwartz has written other queer characters whose storylines were meaningful and defied stereotypes: Eric van der Woodsen and Jonathan Whitney in Gossip Girl, and even another character from earlier in The O.C.’s run: Carson Ward. Why can’t he seem to craft a female queer character who isn’t a mishmash of stereotypes, objectification, and sad endings?

Call me a sap if you will, but I want a better outcome for Marissa, too. Actual queer women know how life-changing it is to fall for another woman for the first time. You don’t just dust yourself off and go back to a fancy-free life of shopping, lounging by the pool, and dating exclusively boys after a breakthrough like that. I want a Marissa whose queer identity matters to her, informs her decisions, or at least brings up some big questions for her. I don’t want it swept under the rug as soon as the “lesbian storyline” is wrapped up.

Bisexual characters shouldn’t be props, caricatures, or Manic Pixie Dream Girls. They deserve better than that. Bisexual people deserve better than that.

Kate Sloan’s writing on sex, kink, and feminism has appeared in The Establishment, The Plaid Zebra, Maisonneuve, Herizons, and her blog. You can follow her on Twitter @Girly_Juice and Instagram, and subscribe to her podcast for sex nerds, The Dildorks, on iTunes. Kate lives in Toronto and spends her free time playing the ukulele, curating her impeccable sex toy collection, and swooning over Olivia Wilde.

If It Were, We’d be Dating: The Tale of Brittany and Bisexuality on ‘Glee’

Brittany’s sexuality, while never explicitly stated by the character as bisexual, goes unconcealed for the most part because the ‘Glee’ audience is led to believe that she doesn’t have much agency over her own personal life. … Sure, ‘Glee’ might be one of the only shows on television to use the word bisexual to describe a character, but all the biphobia it exhibits sort of nullifies that progress.

This guest post written by Shira Feder appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

“Sex is not dating,” Santana Lopez (Naya Rivera), the outspoken Latina cheerleader, announces. It is season one, episode thirteen of Glee, the newest hit teen show to grace America’s television sets, and millions of people are watching.

“If it were, Santana and I would be dating,” parries Brittany S. Pierce (Heather Morris). An unquantifiable number of interested audiences lean forward, crane their heads. Did she really just say that? Yes, Brittany did, and thus the romance between goofy, purportedly bisexual Brittany Pierce and self-proclaimed “bitch” with a heart of gold, Latina lesbian Santana Lopez would go on to catalyze some of Glee’s highest highs and lowest lows.

TV isn’t created in a vacuum. Today more than ever, fan influence has planted itself inside the writers room. Brittany’s throwaway joke inspired interested fans in what was potentially Glee’s first Sapphic coupling. Fans rallied themselves in endorsement of the couple, but had to wait until season two, episode four, to see any intimacy between the two, presented in the form of neck nuzzling because on-camera kissing may have been “too scandalous” for a family show.

“Bisexual’s a term that gay guys in high school use when they wanna hold hands with girls and feel like a normal person for a change,” Kurt tells the undecided Blaine in season two, episode fourteen. While Kurt’s comment could have been further explored, it’s not; it’s a stance of bi erasure, and one that remains firmly in place amongst the series’ ideologies, right between “The show must go on!” and “80% of screen time is reserved for heterosexual couples.”

Brittany’s sexuality, while never explicitly stated by the character as bisexual, goes unconcealed for the most part because the Glee audience is led to believe that she doesn’t have much agency over her own personal life. The folks behind Glee, Ryan Murphy and company, have never known quite what to do with Brittany. Her character fluctuates from being an infantilized teen who believes in magic combs and allows Santana to manipulate her into sex — which reinforces rape culture and plays into the ugly underpinnings of stereotypes, all of them involving the myth of the voracious lesbian who preys on innocent straight girls — to a Mensa-accepted mathematical genius. The implication that Brittany is flighty or vapid thus “excuses” her bisexuality by the show’s terms because she is not fully aware of what she is doing, bouncing from one person to the next. Various writers and critics have even questioned her ability to even consent to sex after exhibiting such childlike tendencies. So, the only known bisexual character on Glee is not exactly drowning in self-awareness, making this already lukewarm support of bisexuality even less encouraging than it could (or should) be. Then again, this is Glee; if you’re not insulted by something the series does, you aren’t paying attention.

In season four, episode nine, Brittany tells Sam she cannot date him because she is worried the lesbians of the nation will harass him:

“It’s like, all the lesbians of the nation, and I don’t know how they found out about Santana and I dating, but once they did, they started sending me, like, tweets and Facebook messages on Lord Tubbington’s wall. I think it means a lot to them to see two super hot, popular girls in love, and I worry if they find out about you and I dating that they’ll turn on you and get really violent and hurt your beautiful face and mouth.”

In trying to prevent fan backlash by acknowledging it, the writers instead managed to alienate a diverse fanbase, by refusing to even mention bisexuality. The preemptive assumption in these lines, that Brittany and Santana’s relationship is only for the “lesbians of the nation,” thereby excluding any other sexualities, ignores the variety of different “Brittana” fans who exist that might have been proud to see a fellow bisexual person on-screen. The writers should’ve known better than to alienate their fanbase by defensively accusing them of caring too much, immediately followed by the threat of violence. Brittany’s confusing response, where she doesn’t mention her own sexual orientation and instead speaks in vague terms about lesbians, presents Glee’s lack of clarity on sexual fluidity.

The other narrow-minded conjecture here is that lesbians in the audience will be actively upset that Brittany is not dating another girl because of the television fallacy that bisexual people “become straight” when they are dating someone of the opposite gender. The so called “lesbians of the nation” were not angry about Sam; they were concerned about the possibility of Glee reinventing Brittany’s character as someone who experimented in high school, as character continuity was never Glee’s strong suit. They’re angry about being insulted in a tossed off meta-reference reducing their valid emotions and opinions about representation into a punchline. There is definitely an interesting argument to make against fan entitlement, but it doesn’t belong here.

The lesbian anger that erupted because of Brittany’s line seemed to be less about Brit moving on with Sam and more about the fact that their new relationship was given more airtime than Brittany and Santana’s relationship ever was. Brittany being with Sam doesn’t dilute her bisexuality, yet by the narrow binary Glee created, it does. “But she was bi!” protests Sam about Brittany in this same episode, as though being bisexual precludes him from ever being able to think of Brittany romantically. When Brittany finally decides Sam is too hilarious to let go, Brittany tells a worried Sam that the lesbian blogger community is “not gonna like it, but the way I figure is that, they know they’re my sisters, and love is love.”

Using the phrase “love is love” is a pretty interesting word choice here, considering that exact phrase was used as a campaign tool during the marriage equality fight to legalize same-sex marriages in the U.S. The phrase was used to appeal to the straight majority of Americans by showing them how “normal” LGBTQ people are, that queer people are capable of love and monogamy just like straight people and they wanted access to the same rights as everyone else. Using this queer-coded terminology here, after railing against the lesbian blogger community, is an odd choice to defend a relationship that passes as heterosexual.

In season five, episode two, long after the couple has broken up, Santana says about her new lesbian girlfriend:

“Isn’t it amazing how life seems so easy when you just don’t give a fart? I mean, look at this: Hummel is getting married, Berry is just full of confidence, and I finally have a girlfriend who I don’t have to worry about straying for penis.”

Now, this is Brittany who Santana is referencing. This is the girl who worshiped and protected Santana, who took awhile to even think about another person after Santana broke up with her. This biphobic line furthers the trope of the promiscuous bisexual. Santana says this in front of people who knew her and Brittany in high school and were aware of how sacred Brittany saw their relationship. Santana’s “hilarious” zinger goes unchallenged, even though it flies in the face of every minute of character development we’ve previously seen from both Brittany and Santana, painting Brittany as sexually rapacious and Santana as the self righteous, biphobic lesbian. Sure, Glee might be one of the only shows on television to use the word bisexual to describe a character, but all the biphobia it exhibits sort of nullifies that progress.

It wasn’t just the show’s writing that confused viewers; its personal politics were often drawn into question as well. The actors involved ventured into perilous territory when discussing the two girls. Chris Colfer, who played Kurt Hummel, said in an AfterEllen interview: “Maybe Brittany and Santana are just so sexual they don’t know how to have a relationship with anyone that isn’t sexual.” This is an unfortunate statement that pushes the damaging stereotype of the predatory, promiscuous bisexual.

When asked in an interview with The Advocate about the possibility of an on-screen kiss between the girls, Heather Morris said, “I don’t think so. I asked Ryan [Murphy] about that and he said there was no way. He said that since we’re a prime-time television show, he didn’t want to do that.” Brittany had already been filmed kissing a member of the opposite sex. The abundance of screen time Brittany was given when in a heterosexually passing relationship (with Sam and Artie) only complicates the fraught relationship Glee has with representation, walking a fine line between being a “family-friendly show” (as if somehow LGBTQ characters and their relationships aren’t family-friendly) and a television series that is a safe haven for the misunderstood and marginalized.

In season six of Glee, Brittany and Santana reunite. They get their own happily ever after episode, complete with two wedding dresses and talks of forever. They shared more on-screen kisses in season six than any other season, which perhaps has something to do with the fact that this is the disgraced Glee’s final swan song, in a last ditch attempt to cement its legacy as an LGBTQ-friendly prime-time television show. Brittany seems to have forgotten she ever dated Sam, which can be generously viewed as Brittany wanting to commit to her future without thinking of the past, rather than the writers again not knowing how to handle Brittany’s sexual orientation.

Amid the murky mire of Glee’s personal politics, a path to a blissful conclusion has been carved out for the fan favorites. “The world seemed so scary and confusing. It was just too fast. It made me feel dumb, just because my brain worked differently,” says Brittany in her vows. “I would’ve suffered it all just for the tiny chance to be standing up here marrying you.” Next to her, Santana beams. Bisexuality is irrelevant when there is monogamy to think about. While it’s great to see a happy ending for two queer women characters (one a woman of color), it’s frustrating it occurred amidst bi erasure and biphobia.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Queer Women as Sexual Beings: The L Word and More
Glee and Trans Men
Becky, Adelaide, and Nan: Women with Down Syndrome on Glee and American Horror Story
Glee‘s Not So Gleeful Representation of Women with Disabilities
Women and Gender in Musicals Week: Glee

Recommended Reading:

The Most Random Fandom | A well curated blog with brilliant analysis of Brittany and Santana that handles each Glee episode individually.
13 TV Shows with Lesbian and Bisexual Female Characters Who Are Getting It Right via Autostraddle

Shira Feder is a writer from New York who can be found at http://shirafeder.tumblr.com/ if she ever figures out how to use it.

What ‘Steven Universe’ Creator Rebecca Sugar Means to Me as a Writer and a Bisexual Woman

The creator and showrunner of this popular, groundbreaking, and beautiful show is an openly bisexual woman. That is historic and thrilling, and it means that could be me (alas, if only I could write something half as brilliant as ‘Steven Universe’!). … Yes, we need bisexual characters. But even more importantly, we need bisexual creators telling stories…

This guest post written by Heidi Teague appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

Identity is fundamental to writing. The stories we tell, the stories we absorb, are vital to our sense of self.

I am a writer. I have been an avid reader and consumer of stories of all kinds, as well as writing in one form or another, for my entire life.

I am also a bisexual woman. I didn’t know or understand this about myself until a couple of years ago, because I never really felt this was an option. It was something some other people were, and not many of them at that. It wasn’t something a slightly dull academic girl who liked poetry and Shakespeare and Doctor Who would be. Bisexual didn’t look like me, so how could it be me?

Character and identity is key to my writing; I love creating nuanced, interesting, and deeply flawed characters and watching them overcome the obstacles I throw in their way. Any truly intersectional feminist writer knows that the best stories are full of beautifully diverse people of different identities and walks of life. What the best TV dramas do, what the best stories do, is find a way to create empathy with people whose lives, identities, and experiences are vastly different to the viewers’ own. To see yourself and your own experiences reflected in a story is a deeply reassuring, transcendent human experience; being erased, seemingly invisible, or mythical is isolating and creates a disconnect where people are able to disassociate people who are different as ‘other.’ Erasure not only breeds hatred and intolerance, but it also means that the people who don’t fit the dominant narrative are unable to understand and express their difference and feel a sense of belonging. That can have a profound effect on a life; mental health issues among those that identify as LGBTQ are troublingly high.

Writing is exposing yourself, opening yourself up to criticism and ridicule, and that is even more pertinent if yours is a marginalized voice and if your stories challenge the dominant discourses, tropes, and cultural hegemony of traditional narratives. Few (out) queer writers have success or freedom within mainstream television networks, with many creatives curbed by executives who fear that anything too radically different might lose money. But every so often, a beacon of brave storytelling on a mainstream network shines the path for others.

Steven Universe is an animated television series on Cartoon Network of 10-minute episodes charting the coming-of-age of half-human, half magical gem Steven, and his unorthodox family of alien Crystal Gems: Pearl, Amethyst, and Garnet. Steven and his best friend Connie learn how to fight together and use Steven’s protective and healing powers to help the Crystal Gems protect Earth. It is a highly creative and finely detailed world, with complex character development and story arcs to rival hour-long dramas. It has already explored depression, anxiety, abusive relationships, grief, and PTSD, as well as teaching its demographic-spanning audience to meet hatred, fear, and ignorance with love, compassion, and forgiveness. This is a show that cares, and wants to make the world a better place, and encourages love of all kinds as being central to this vision.

Steven Universe is progressive in many ways. The Gems, despite being sexless space rocks, use she/her pronouns and have femme presentations. They are all voiced by women of color and have shown what could be potentially read as romantic interest in other Gems and also sometimes in humans. The show uses a narrative conceit known as fusion to indicate a relationship of trust and understanding between two or more Gems as they become one being; this has been shown to be anything from platonic to explicitly romantic, with two Gems being outcast from their society for their taboo love which they express through being permanently fused; they literally are a relationship. Outlawed on their Homeworld, and seen by some as a dangerous threat to the hierarchy of Gem society, the parallels with queer marriage are unabashedly apparent.

The Disney-esque episode charting the origins of this love story, The Answer, was nominated for an Emmy this year, and has just been adapted into a children’s book of the same name.

This cartoon queers more than just one relationship however; there is no tokenism here, as a queer perspective permeates the whole show. Female characters are drawn with visible leg hair and shown to be desirable within the same episode; the main character is a 14-year-old boy who has been shown wearing a skirt, crop top, heels, and make-up and it wasn’t played even slightly for laughs.

A boy and girl fuse together to become a beautiful genderqueer character that is flirted with and admired by both men and women that are otherwise coded as straight, and this is never questioned, lampshaded, or ridiculed.

It has some of the most inclusive and progressive characters on TV as a whole, let alone children’s TV; beautiful characters of different sizes, shapes, genders, presentations, races, and sexualities; characters that are fully rounded, flawed, and story-worthy, not just curiosities or a lazy stab at inclusivity.

Steven’s mother, Rose Quartz, is a large, curvy Gem that was seen as unquestionably beautiful by everyone who encountered her. There is also a lot of subtext to suggest she was not monosexual; in so far as we can label the sexuality of a sentient rock from a matriarchal alien race, it is not binary. She had a highly charged relationship with Pearl, who has openly admitted she loved her, and Rose also loved Steven’s human father, Greg Universe, amongst other humans.

Although there are no characters on the show that are explicitly labelled as bisexual, this is undoubtedly a show with a beating, queer heart.

I already adored Steven Universe, and found joy and solace in it. When I heard Rebecca Sugar publicly identify as bisexual (at Comic Con, filmed here by Felipe Flores, relevant part at approximately 46:30), I simultaneously went, “Of course!” and whooped and punched the air. The creator and showrunner of this popular, groundbreaking, and beautiful show is an openly bisexual woman. That is historic and thrilling, and it means that could be me (alas, if only I could write something half as brilliant as Steven Universe!).

Characters can be inspiring and life-affirming, but giving and seeing real life bisexual folks out in prominent and powerful positions, especially in the entertainment industry is part of creating an environment where queer characters can have full and rich stories that aren’t only centered on coming out or perpetuating harmful tropes. Instead of straight writers profiting off the relative zeitgeist of queer characters, with bisexual characters often falling foul of this as they are seen as the “easy option” — ‘Janet can leave her husband, have an affair with a woman, have a breakdown as she is outed to her children and work colleagues, then go back to her husband… that’s the LGBTQ quota met!’ — having actual bisexual writers allows truth in television, and gives us the honest and complex characterizations we deserve.

Yes, we need bisexual characters. But even more importantly, we need bisexual creators telling stories and letting those nerds in the middle of suburbia know that there are people out there like them that they can aspire to emulate.

Rebecca Sugar, if you’re reading this, know you are loved and admired by so many. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Strong in the Real Way: Steven Universe and the Shape of Masculinity to Come
The Revolutionary Fatness of Steven Universe
Steven Universe: Many Dimensions of Fat Positivity
Steven Universe: A Superhero Team We Can Believe In

Heidi Teague is an aspiring British screenwriter and an accomplished nerd. She sporadically updates her feminism and pop culture blog Shrewish Thoughts and writes for Debut online.

If She Can See It, She Can Be It: Women of STEM on Television

It is important to have women represented in fictional media as scientists from across the spectrum of sciences… By making women more visible in science settings on television – in both fictional and factual programming – the inspiring images of science that can and are being produced can be associated with women who are not only represented as smart individuals but as part of a network of diverse and complex professional women.

This guest post written by Amy C. Chambers originally appeared at The Science and Entertainment Laboratory and an edited version appears here as part of our theme week on Women Scientists. It is cross-posted with permission.

I am a self-proclaimed Orphan Black geek monkey and I am obsessed with Clone Club (and their marvelous dance parties). When I first started to explore the representation of women in science in entertainment media I wrote a blog post on the subject to help organize my thoughts on how and where women working in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) were represented. I got a great response from people who read the article and received lots of tweets about the mysterious Cosima Niehaus. After a quick google I binge-watched the first two seasons of Orphan Black (an almost entirely female-led science-based series) and excitedly watching seasons three on four on TV.

I have now discovered that Cosima is an evolutionary biologist (the geek-monkey) who is one of the show’s main characters; part of a cast of clones (#CloneClub) all played by the mesmerizing Tatiana Maslany. Cosima is named after Orphan Black’s own science advisor Cosima Herter (one of the few women acting as a science consultant in mainstream film/TV) who is a science writer interested “in the ethics, philosophy, and history of biology, especially cloning, evolutionary theory, and genetic engineering.” In Orphan Black, Cosima is both an active scientist who helps to drive the plot and explain much of the series’ scientific complexities, and a science experiment as part of a convoluted conspiracy plot surrounding the Dyad Institute, the Neolutionists, the Proletheans, and Topside, amongst many others. It is a narratively dense series, but at its core it is fixated upon science and women — something that I discovered was severely lacking in the mother / daughter / lover women I found on the silver screen.

I am restricting my examples to TV series released after 2000 and I chose to split discussions of film and television because there is a disparity between the number of women scientists in mainstream Hollywood movies, and the volume of women present in television shows. Some of this is due to the fact that there are far more TV programs made than films, and that the production process is very different with the option for pilot-episodes (to test out potentially unprofitable female characters…), early cancellations (in the U.S. context), and long-running shows such as FOX’s Bones that provide the opportunity for existing female characters to be developed and for new ones to be introduced.

Bones is led by Dr Temperance “Bones” Brennan with a comparatively substantial list of female co-stars in scientific professions (in the main cast the gender split is 50:50). The women are not outnumbered, the women have conversations about things other than men, and they are not ‘damsels in distress’ – they fight their own battles and wield their own firearms. The series passes both the Smurfette test and the Bechdel test. However, Bones does not comment on the very real issue of sexism in the hard sciences but it, in part, helps to address the problem by making women, from a variety of different backgrounds, scientific role models for its viewers.

Women make up between 60-65% of the US TV viewership but, as noted in a 2013 study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, only 38.9% of characters in prime-time programs are women, and only 22% of prime-time programs feature women in half of all speaking parts. Science-based television series seem to fair better with women taking some significant roles within their respective shows. There are some brilliant examples of women in STEM on the small screen for example: Astrid Farnsworth (Jasica Nicole) and Nina Sharp (Blair Brown) from Fringe; Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette) from NCIS; Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) from Masters of Sex; Nikki Alexander (Emilia Fox), Clarissa Mullery (Liz Carr), and Sam Ryan (Amanda Burton) from the UK’s Silent Witness; Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), and Daisy ‘Skye’ Johnson (Chloe Bennet) from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; Alison Carter (Salli Richardson-Whitfield) from Eureka; Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) – from Stargate: SG1, Stargate Universe, and Stargate: Atlantis. Where I struggled to build a long post-2000 list of women of science in cinema in a couple of hours I managed to amass a list of more than fifty women of STEM on mainstream shows with a mix of science fiction and science-based/medical dramas. I also included mechanical engineers Kaylee Frye (Jewel Staite) from Firefly, The 100’s Raven Reyes (Lindsey Morgan), and Scorpion’s Happy Quinn (Jadyn Wong). Yet despite these good examples, women still pale in comparison to their male counterparts who are often the lead characters.

“Both young girls and boys should see female decision-makers, political leaders, managers, and scientists as the norm, not the exception. By increasing the number and diversity of female leaders and role models on screen, content creators may affect the ambitions and career aspirations of girls and young women domestically and internationally. As Geena Davis frequently states: ‘If she can see it, she can be it.’” —Gender Roles & Occupations: A Look at Character Attributes and Job-Related Aspirations in Film and Television

It is important to have women represented in fictional media as scientists from across the spectrum of sciences, not just biological and medical sciences. Although I did not struggle to create a post-2000 TV list of women with science-based professions, I did find that a higher percent of the women I found were working in the biosciences including all the female medics on House, Body of Proof, CSI, Rizzoli & Isles, The Strain. Finding women represented in the hard sciences was more of a challenge – in The Big Bang Theory for example, of the female scientists that are series regulars Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik) and Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz (Melissa Rauch), one is a neurologist and the other is microbiologist. They are repeatedly shown to be academically brilliant and their scientific prowess adds to their characterization but they are both bioscientists – the hard physical sciences are almost entirely left to the men. Earlier in the series, there was the wonderful Leslie Winkle (Sara Gilbert) who was a physicist who was able to hold her own and often exceed the achievements of the boys – but she was not retained as a series regular.

I had to search through several of the The Big Bang Theory seasons to find a second example of a woman outside of the biosciences and medicine: Elizabeth Plimpton (Judy Greer), cosmological physicist, appears in one episode – “The Plimpton Stimulation” in season 3 – but her academic prowess is soon undermined by the character’s voracious sexual appetite. Other women include Leonard’s (Johnny Galecki) mother, psychologist Beverly Hofstadter (Christine Baranski); Leonard’s ex, Stephanie Barnett, MD (Sara Rue); and Raj’s (Kunal Nayyar) girlfriend, dermatologist Emily Sweeney (Laura Spencer, who also plays intern Jessica Warren on Bones). Rashel Li and Lindy A. Orthia conducted a study on viewer responses to scientific ability and gender balance/imbalance on The Big Bang Theory. Many participants were irritated by the gender-based stereotypes of men in physics and women in biology but conceded that all scientist characters were shown to be equally scientifically capable despite their restriction to particular fields.

This made me think about how the female characters are incorporated into The Big Bang Theory. When the sitcom began in 2007 there was only Penny (she had no last name until recently, when she married one of the male scientists and took his name, don’t even get me started on that) a supposedly ditzy actress/food server played by Kaley Cuoco to provide gender “balance.” But over its nine seasons, the show has evolved from being a tired trope of “nerdy male scientists can’t get a dates” to a show with developed female characters who are more than romantic accessories or weak comedic stereotypes. The show has been praised for its realistic representation of bench science, but up until its fourth season it failed to show professional women in STEM settings unless they were administrators, assistants, or students. Amy and Bernadette start off as the oddball lady-Sheldon and the squeaky-voiced vertically-challenged blonde – but these initially problematic characters develop to show the real-world issues faced by professional women who struggle with not being taken seriously because they are women who don’t reject their femininity. They are not the stereotypical representations of STEM women as described by Jocelyn Steinke in her study of female scientist representation in movies 1991-2001, and they are not simply sci-candy brought in to solve problems for the male leads. The women of The Big Bang Theory are now given screen-time without the male characters and Amy, Bernadette, and Penny (who left waiting tables to forge a career in pharmaceutical sales) have their own lives to discuss beyond their romantic entanglements. The show still needs to work on its representation of gender (and race) in STEM, but it remains one of the most realistic representations of real science on television, and may inspire some women to pursue a career in the sciences.

“In recent years the so called ‘fourth wave’ activists and organisations have been making great strides in bringing feminism back up the social and political agenda. Groups like the Everyday Sexism Project, No More Page Three, the Women of the World festival (WOW) and the Women on Bank Notes campaign have all contributed to widening understanding of our social inequalities. This is the wider context within which we can begin to address the inequalities in STEM.

We call on TV and other media to use the gender lens when casting new characters in widely viewed programmes, commissioning new series that challenge gender stereotypes, and to both train and use female experts.” – Science Grrl, THROUGH BOTH EYES: The case for a gender lens in STEM

Media producers need to think more actively about incorporating female characters into their science-based TV series; they should, as recommended by a report produced by Science Grrl (quoted above), use a gender lens when commissioning new shows. They need to work towards producing shows that “challenge gender stereotypes” – women should not be an afterthought or a late addition; they should be part of the initial design of the program. A huge majority of science-based television programs and films have science consultants who advise on science content and science-based storylines to make them more believable and entertaining. It is important to have scientists involved in a production at an early stage as collaborators to allow for a more organic incorporation of scientific principles and more accurate representations of the systems of science (laboratories, experiments, results). This should also be applied to the incorporation of women in STEM – as part of my developing research I want to analyze the incorporation of women into science-based shows and ask how improving the involvement of women (as science advisors, writers, directors, etc.) could genuinely improve and diversify the representation of scientists.

The film and television industry is still an extremely male dominated field. “In 2013-14, women comprised 27% of all individuals working as creators, directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and directors of photography,” according to “Boxed In Report,” commissioned by Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. For me, the most important media recommendation made by the Science Grrl report is the idea that women need to be incorporated into the process early and that media producers should even be involved in training women scientists to be active contributors. Science consultants are an increasingly important part of producing exciting and entertaining science-based TV and film. Dr. Kevin R. Grazier, the science advisor for Battlestar Galactica, Defiance, Falling Skies, and the movie Gravity spoke at an event I was involved with about his involvement in the these projects from the beginning – science was a core element of their creation. Science-based narratives are informed by the science-based worlds created by both the creative teams and their science advisors.

The experience of female scientists is an important thing to be presenting on-screen not only for young women but also for young men who can have the idea of seeing women of STEM on their screens normalized. By involving women in STEM as advisors and collaborators, the representation of women can move from being token figures and anomalies to being regular and entirely expected leading figures in science-based narratives on either the big or the small screen. By making women more visible in science settings on television – in both fictional and factual programming – the inspiring images of science that can and are being produced can be associated with women who are not only represented as smart individuals but as part of a network of diverse and complex professional women.

Women don’t need to be told that science can be girly, and they don’t need to be given pretty role models to show them the way into science; but they do need to be shown that science is for everyone.

Amy C. Chambers is a postdoctoral researcher at Newcastle University in the UK researching the intersection of science and entertainment media. Her newest project explores the representation and the projected futures of women within scientific cultures in science fiction. She blogs about her research and interests at the Science and Entertainment Laboratory and The Unsettling Scientific Stories Project, and you can follow her on Twitter at @AmyCChambers.