Tag: TV Drama

Women Doctors: Professionally Competent, Messy Personal Lives

Mindy Kaling as Dr. Mindy Lahiri in The Mindy Project
Originally published at The Funny Feminist.
You know what I’d like to see more of on television? Stories about women who are successful in their professional lives, but whose personal lives are a complete mess. I especially want to see more of these stories about female doctors.
Take Emily Owens, M.D., for example. Starring Mamie Gummer, Emily Owens, M.D. tells the story of a medical intern who discovers that life in a hospital is just like high school. In the first episode, she confesses to her old high school crush that she likes him only to be shot down, and realizes that her high school nemesis is interested in her high school crush, but she also diagnoses a condition and performs a life-saving procedure during her first day on the job.
Or let’s look at Mindy Kaling’s new sitcom. The Mindy Project, recently picked up for a full season, tells the story of Mindy Lahiri, a gynecologist whose dating life is a mess. In the first episode of the show, she rudely interrupts an ex-boyfriend’s wedding and drives a bicycle into a pool, but by the end of the pilot, she’s heroically delivering a baby to a patient who doesn’t have health insurance – even interrupting a date to do it.
Or let’s go back in time a few years to a show called Grey’s Anatomy, the drama that won’t die (even when most of its characters do). Ellen Pompeo plays Meredith Grey, an intern who accidentally sleeps with her boss the night before her first day. (By “accidentally sleep with,” I mean that the sex was intentional, but she did not know the man was her boss.) She struggles with a patient, but gets a sexy love interest and a guy crushing on her forlornly from the minute he meets her. She’s also the intern who makes the miraculous discovery of what’s wrong with her patient, and figures out how to help a fellow intern’s patient.
Am I mess or a rock star intern? I can’t remember! | Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) in Grey’s Anatomy
Now, pretend you’ve been living under a pop culture rock for the last few years and know nothing about these three shows or the actresses who play these characters. Based just on the descriptions, would you be able to tell which program was the satire/comedy and which two programs took the “professionally skilled, personal mess” trope seriously?
…Okay, so maybe the bicycle in the pool was the giveaway. Fair enough. The point remains that television continues to have a problem with professional women. Showrunners don’t seem to know how to write professional women characters without turning them into neurotic messes who can control nothing about their personal lives, and lately, female doctors are getting the brunt of that particular cliche.
I like comparing these female doctor characters to a character like House on House, M.D. or Dr. Perry Cox on Scrubs (who has been compared to House by other characters on Scrubs, amusingly enough). These men are professional geniuses whose personal lives are also fraught with drama, but we’d never call them neurotic. They’re curmudgeonly assholes who bark perfectly crafted sarcasm at their professional inferiors, colleagues, and bosses. Their personal lives are messes because they’re misanthropic, or because they’re masking years of built-up pain. Women doctors have messy personal lives because they overanalyze and are neurotic and always pick the wrong men.
I don’t know if showrunners write women doctors this way because they lack imagination, or because they’ve internalized sexist stereotypes, or because they don’t know how else to make a professionally competent women sympathetic to an audience. “We’ve got a woman doctor here, because women can be doctors now, but women who are TOO put-together will be a turnoff, so we’ll make her a mess outside of work! INSTANT EMPATHY!”
Fortunately, Mindy Kaling is aware of this cliche, and the episodes of The Mindy Project following the pilot have veered away from “professionally competent, personally messy” plots.Show-Mindy is often portrayed as less neurotic and more of a jerk, and Kaling is more interested in making the character funny than making her likable. Show-Mindy is several steps in the right direction, and I hope we start seeing more characters like her, soon.
But not too soon, because I want there to still be a market for my own pilot about a professionally competent, neurotic female doctor. Doctor Love tells the story of Hilarie Love, a young physician who can’t seem to get her personal life together. In the pilot episode, Hilarie goes on her first date since high school, where her prom date stood her up to go have sex with the cheerleader. Unfortunately, she winds up wearing an outfit where none of the clothes match, and gets so nervous that she throws up on her date in the middle of a restaurant, and almost accidentally kills him when she stands up and knocks the table on him. Then she gets called into work, and performs a miraculous, life-saving surgery (even though she’s not a surgeon) on a young blind boy who’s been shot, removing the bullet with her bare hands and donating her own blood to rejuvenate the child. This catches the attention of a handsome attending physician who finds her competent and pretty, and is still intrigued by Hilarie even after she throws up on him, too.
What do you think? Do we have a hit?
Oh, I get it. It’s butterflies in the…er, ribcage. | Mamie Gummer in Emily Owens, M.D.
Lady T is an aspiring writer and comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.

Women Doctors: Professionally Competent, Messy Personal Lives

Mindy Kaling as Dr. Mindy Lahiri in The Mindy Project
Originally published at The Funny Feminist.
You know what I’d like to see more of on television? Stories about women who are successful in their professional lives, but whose personal lives are a complete mess. I especially want to see more of these stories about female doctors.
Take Emily Owens, M.D., for example. Starring Mamie Gummer, Emily Owens, M.D. tells the story of a medical intern who discovers that life in a hospital is just like high school. In the first episode, she confesses to her old high school crush that she likes him only to be shot down, and realizes that her high school nemesis is interested in her high school crush, but she also diagnoses a condition and performs a life-saving procedure during her first day on the job.
Or let’s look at Mindy Kaling’s new sitcom. The Mindy Project, recently picked up for a full season, tells the story of Mindy Lahiri, a gynecologist whose dating life is a mess. In the first episode of the show, she rudely interrupts an ex-boyfriend’s wedding and drives a bicycle into a pool, but by the end of the pilot, she’s heroically delivering a baby to a patient who doesn’t have health insurance – even interrupting a date to do it.
Or let’s go back in time a few years to a show called Grey’s Anatomy, the drama that won’t die (even when most of its characters do). Ellen Pompeo plays Meredith Grey, an intern who accidentally sleeps with her boss the night before her first day. (By “accidentally sleep with,” I mean that the sex was intentional, but she did not know the man was her boss.) She struggles with a patient, but gets a sexy love interest and a guy crushing on her forlornly from the minute he meets her. She’s also the intern who makes the miraculous discovery of what’s wrong with her patient, and figures out how to help a fellow intern’s patient.
Am I mess or a rock star intern? I can’t remember! | Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) in Grey’s Anatomy
Now, pretend you’ve been living under a pop culture rock for the last few years and know nothing about these three shows or the actresses who play these characters. Based just on the descriptions, would you be able to tell which program was the satire/comedy and which two programs took the “professionally skilled, personal mess” trope seriously?
…Okay, so maybe the bicycle in the pool was the giveaway. Fair enough. The point remains that television continues to have a problem with professional women. Showrunners don’t seem to know how to write professional women characters without turning them into neurotic messes who can control nothing about their personal lives, and lately, female doctors are getting the brunt of that particular cliche.
I like comparing these female doctor characters to a character like House on House, M.D. or Dr. Perry Cox on Scrubs (who has been compared to House by other characters on Scrubs, amusingly enough). These men are professional geniuses whose personal lives are also fraught with drama, but we’d never call them neurotic. They’re curmudgeonly assholes who bark perfectly crafted sarcasm at their professional inferiors, colleagues, and bosses. Their personal lives are messes because they’re misanthropic, or because they’re masking years of built-up pain. Women doctors have messy personal lives because they overanalyze and are neurotic and always pick the wrong men.
I don’t know if showrunners write women doctors this way because they lack imagination, or because they’ve internalized sexist stereotypes, or because they don’t know how else to make a professionally competent women sympathetic to an audience. “We’ve got a woman doctor here, because women can be doctors now, but women who are TOO put-together will be a turnoff, so we’ll make her a mess outside of work! INSTANT EMPATHY!”
Fortunately, Mindy Kaling is aware of this cliche, and the episodes of The Mindy Project following the pilot have veered away from “professionally competent, personally messy” plots.Show-Mindy is often portrayed as less neurotic and more of a jerk, and Kaling is more interested in making the character funny than making her likable. Show-Mindy is several steps in the right direction, and I hope we start seeing more characters like her, soon.
But not too soon, because I want there to still be a market for my own pilot about a professionally competent, neurotic female doctor. Doctor Love tells the story of Hilarie Love, a young physician who can’t seem to get her personal life together. In the pilot episode, Hilarie goes on her first date since high school, where her prom date stood her up to go have sex with the cheerleader. Unfortunately, she winds up wearing an outfit where none of the clothes match, and gets so nervous that she throws up on her date in the middle of a restaurant, and almost accidentally kills him when she stands up and knocks the table on him. Then she gets called into work, and performs a miraculous, life-saving surgery (even though she’s not a surgeon) on a young blind boy who’s been shot, removing the bullet with her bare hands and donating her own blood to rejuvenate the child. This catches the attention of a handsome attending physician who finds her competent and pretty, and is still intrigued by Hilarie even after she throws up on him, too.
What do you think? Do we have a hit?
Oh, I get it. It’s butterflies in the…er, ribcage. | Mamie Gummer in Emily Owens, M.D.
Lady T is a writer with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at www.theresabasile.com.

‘Boardwalk Empire’: Margaret Thompson, Margaret Sanger, and the Cultural Commentary of Historical Fiction

In 1923, Margaret Sanger opened the first legal birth control clinic in America.
Almost 90 years later, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire is reminding audiences of those early struggles for women’s reproductive health and education, which don’t seem as foreign as they should.
In the premiere episode of season 3, Margaret (Schroeder) Thompson hears a radio story about Carrie Duncan, a woman who is about to take off as the first aviator to attempt a cross-continental flight.
Later in the episode, she takes a private tour of the Enoch and Margaret Thompson Pediatric Annex in St. Theresa’s Hospital, as she and her husband (“Nucky”) are its benefactors. As she tours the halls, a pregnant woman comes in and collapses, and she’s obviously miscarrying. The doctors whisk her away and Dr. Mason later tells Margaret that the loss could have been prevented, but the woman (her name is later revealed as Edwina Shearer) drank raw milk that was infected with E.coli. He goes on to explain that pregnant women are not given any instruction about nutrition or hygiene. Margaret, horrified, wants to use her benefactor status to change this.
Edwina Shearer has a miscarriage in the first episode of season 3.
At her and Nucky’s New Year’s celebration–they are ringing in 1923–she approaches Dr. Landau (St. Theresa’s medical director) about the inadequate prenatal care at the hospital. He is insulted and condescending, and Nucky chastises her.
However, as her determination and tenacity in the last two seasons has proven, Margaret will not stand down.
At the end of the episode, Margaret gets up at dawn to witness Duncan fly over the coast. She smiles as she sees Duncan’s plane.
Margaret watches Carrie Duncan fly overhead.
While Margaret’s feminist activism is a sub-plot–in fact, it doesn’t even appear in every episode–the establishment of a prenatal education program (and evolving views on birth control) is an important, sobering reminder of our history and provides context for much of what propels current conversations on reproduction and women’s health.
Margaret manages to open the St. Theresa’s Women’s Clinic after going above the director’s head to appeal directly to the bishop (although he warns her that “delicate topics would have to be avoided”). Margaret has become a power player in season 3. Certainly it’s worth noting that the hospital’s namesake could either be found in St. Therese of Lisieux, who went directly to the Pope to beg to become a nun after priests and bishops had turned her away, or St. Teresa of Avila, who was forced into the convent by her father and then became a reformer and was posthumously declared a Doctor of the Church.
Margaret, also, has been dually wedged into circumstances by her own stubborn motivations and by the men in her life. In previous seasons, she has deftly navigated her world to provide better circumstances for her children and her community, but this season she is securing her place as more than just an activist–she is a leader.
In episode 4, she and Dr. Mason set up the women’s clinic and are met with resistance by the nuns. As they discuss the mission statement, a nun says, “This is rather infelicitous language, isn’t it?” “Vagina?” Margaret asks. The doctor says that it’s a medical term, and the nun replies, “I’ve never enjoyed the sound of it.” Dr. Mason says, “I’ve never liked brussels sprouts, but I don’t deny they exist.”
Dr. Mason, left, and Margaret prep for their evening women’s health class (they are holding boxes of Kotex, and the nun in the background disapproves).
“The entire area is problematic,” the nun scoffs, adding that she doesn’t approve of the term “pregnant.”
“You are at odds with ‘menstruation’?” Margaret asks.
The nun finally storms off after seeing brown packages that Margaret tells her are Kotex–a relatively new product–which are gifts for the women in the class. “Let’s hope our evening students aren’t quite so sensitive,” Margaret quips.
As she passes out fliers for the new class on the boardwalk, she runs in to Mrs. Shearer–the woman who inspired the clinic. She seems uncomfortable, and her husband interjects, “When she’s feeling better, we’ll try again.”
Margaret passes out flyers on the boardwalk.
At the end of the episode, Margaret is reading the newspaper. Wreckage of Carrie Duncan’s plane was found, and the headline reads “Aviatrix Presumed Killed During Ill-Fated Journey.” Duncan’s trip, which clearly was inspirational to Margaret, was unsuccessful. 
This moment in American history–the 1920s–was a promising time for women. The 19th amendment granted women the right to vote in 1920, and Margaret Sanger was making headway (and finding loopholes) to help women plan their reproduction.
However, there were no figurative cross-country flights completed during this era. It would be decades before the Pill was legalized and first-trimester abortion de-criminalized. Still in 2012, contraception is a divisive issue in America.
But women kept fighting, as does Margaret.
In the beginning of the next episode, she’s looking over a class flyer with a friend. “Do you wish for more knowledge? sounds mystical,” her friend teased.
Margaret responds, “I can’t very well say Let’s talk about your vagina.”
Later in the episode, Dr. Mason is wrapping up their evening women’s education class (a crucifix looms above him), and one of the few women in the class says, “I wish someone would have told me all of this when I was 13–I wouldn’t have thought I was dying!”
The need for comprehensive education was clear, and for the few women who came to the first classes, Margaret and Dr. Mason were making a difference.
When Dr. Mason is called into an emergency surgery during their next class, Margaret steps to the front of the room and smiles. “We have our book, we have our chart, we have ourselves–what else is needed?”
She’s gotten the permission she needed to open the clinic and fly under the radar of the conservative leadership, and she is comfortable taking the lead.
At the beginning of episode 6, Margaret opens the mail and pulls out a copy of the Birth Control Review (along with a letter signed by Margaret Sanger).
Margaret receives a copy of Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review in the mail,.
This isn’t the first time that Sanger has appeared in Boardwalk Empire. In season 1, the episode “Family Limitation” (named after a brochure of the same name that Sanger produced in the early 1900s) showed Margaret douching with Lysol to prevent another pregnancy (a method that was touted as a method of birth control). Season 1–with its focus on temperance leagues, suffrage and reproductive issues–offered a preview to the show’s complex sub-plots that focus on women’s issues.
Throughout the series, men’s reactions to birth control and family planning have been venemous (Nucky referred to Margaret as a “common whore” when he discovered she’d been trying to prevent pregnancy, and Mr. Shearer insists that he and his wife will continue to procreate). Dr. Mason is the exception thus far in his progressive attitudes about women’s health.
In episode 8, Mrs. Shearer comes to Margaret, pleading. “My husband won’t keep off me,” she says, and wants to know how to not get pregnant.
She says, “I don’t need a pamphlet, or some man to tell me what I already know.”
She hesitates, and says, “I wasn’t–I stored the milk, I waited. It wasn’t an accident, you understand? I drank it on purpose to lose the baby–I won’t go through that again.”
The E.coli was self-inflicted, because she refused to have another child. This example of self-induced abortion was nothing new or rare for the time, and it was one of the reasons Sanger pushed for education and birth control.
Without judgment, Margaret simply asks, “What do you need?”
“One of those Dutch caps, that go up here,” she answers (indicating a diaphragm).
When Margaret says that those need to come from a doctor, Mrs. Shearer says, “Doctors only listen to ladies like you.”
Wealthy women of privilege generally have always had access to family planning. Mrs. Shearer knows that, and finally trusts Margaret enough to be a connection between working class exclusion and upper class privilege.
Margaret waits for Dr. Mason outside of the hospital, and tells him directly, “I need your help with something and it’s rather delicate… I would like to ask you to help me obtain a diaphragm.” He understands that that is what Mrs. Shearer wanted. “Actually,” Margaret adds, “I suppose I need two–one for her, and one for me.” (Margaret’s need for a diaphragm isn’t because of her relationship with Nucky; Nucky has had a mistress in the city, and Margaret picks up her affair with his driver, Owen.)
The issues surrounding the female characters of Boardwalk Empire are instrumental in the male characters’ lives (the late Angela Darmondy and her lesbian relationship, Gillian Darmondy’s brothel the Artemis Club, Chalky White’s daughter’s resistance to marriage, Assistant Attorney General Esther Randolph–based off Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Nucky’s late lover Billie Kent’s desire for independence and of course, Margaret), and they also serve as history lessons for the audience.
Boardwalk Empire is, essentially, a boys club. So is American history. While Nucky’s world of politics, power, alcohol smuggling and bloody violence is central to the entire plot of the show, the women’s stories underneath the surface are integral to their stories and to the audience.
In 2012 America, a female legislator was punished for using the word “vagina” in a debate about reproductive choice. Religious groups are fighting the Affordable Care Act’s provision that contraception be covered by insurance as preventative medicine. States are attempting to close women’s health clinics that don’t even provide abortion, but provide women’s health services. Abstinence-only education is pushed nationwide. The same resistance that Margaret faces in Boardwalk Empire is the same resistance faced by activists and leaders in today’s fights to prioritize reproductive education, health and choice. 
By showing these struggles in an award-winning, critically acclaimed HBO drama, audiences are able to hold a mirror up to the failures of not only prohibition, but also limiting women’s reproductive choices. Boardwalk Empire serves as a reminder that when women’s options are limited, they will fight back–even if it means risking their lives. With only three episodes left in season 3, we can hope that Margaret will remain steadfast in her fight for women’s reproductive education and choice.

—

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

Women’s Anger or Women’s Violence in ‘Sons of Anarchy’?

L-R: Tara (Maggie Siff) and Gemma (Katey Sagal) in Sons of Anarchy

In a recent interview, Mark ‘Boone’ Junior, the actor who plays Bobby in Sons of Anarchy, stated that one of the strengths of the show is that it has, “tapped into a lot of women’s anger.”

It’s an interesting point about a show that does have some very angry women, but more so than that, it has some very violent women. Several times a season there’s a pretty physical fight between a few of the women, and not a standard hair-pulling and a few slaps kind of fight either. Gemma “nails some tart from Nevada” with a skateboard, throws around a very peppy Ashley Tisdale, Gemma and Tara beat up Nero’s assistant Carla, Tara shoots up another girls car, punches her boss, and most recently decks Gemma.

While there is often a sexual fantasy aspect associated with most ‘girl fights,’ I would posit that there is very little sexualizing of the Sons of Anarchy women during these moments, rather these fights seem to mirror the more ‘outside of society’ feeling that the male fights have.

Women’s anger is often portrayed as very catty and manipulative, rarely as physical, so in that respect, Sons of Anarchy is unique. I wonder though, are the physical encounters between these women really expressions of anger, or more a demonstration of women’s own brand of violence? 

In order to access the interview, follow this link, scroll down to the section ‘Before the Anarchy’ and click on ‘Bobby.’

Horror Week 2012: ‘The Walking Dead’ and Gender: Why I’m Skeptical the Addition of Badass Michonne Will Change the TV Series’ Sexism

Michonne (Danai Gurira) in The Walking Dead

Warning: if you haven’t seen Seasons 1 and 2 of The Walking Dead, there are spoilers ahead.

Have you ever dated someone because of their potential rather than what she/he/ze brings to the table? Or is that just me?? Well, that’s how I feel about AMC’s The Walking Dead.

While I like the show, I keep watching the zombie apocalypse, based on the comic books, because I keep hoping and expecting it to become great – especially when it comes to the female characters and the show’s sexist portrayal of gender roles.

The conservative characters continually depict retro gender norms. The men talk about protecting the women. The women cook and clean while the men go off and hunt or protect the camp or farm. Yes, Andrea is the exception to the rule. She shoots and kills zombies and patrols the perimeter. But the women take a backseat to the men. They let the men debate, argue, decide.

I criticized Game of Thrones, a show I adore, for its misogyny. But at least it contains strong, intelligent and powerful female characters. Where the hell are they on The Walking Dead???

Which is why I’m so excited about the introduction of Michonne.

In Season 2’s record-breaking finale, Andrea (Laurie Holden) is rescued by a katana-wielding, hooded woman holding two chained, jawless, armless zombies. It was probably the best introduction I’ve ever witnessed. Ever. And that mystery woman would be Michonne. Not only am I delighted to see another female character. But the show so desperately needs another bad-ass woman.

For those who haven’t read the comics (like me), Michonne, who will be played by Danai Gurira (who’s simply amazing in The Visitor and Treme) seems to be a strong, powerful, complex character. She’s clever since she uses two incapacitated walkers in order to seek out the living hide from other walkers. She appears to be a fierce and fearless survivor. But what’s even more exciting is that she’s a woman of color.

Yet I’m skeptical as the show hasn’t done a great job portraying gender so far.

Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) does whatever Rick (Andrew Lincoln), her husband and leader of the group, says, blindly and unquestioningly standing by him. Carol (Melissa McBride), who’s keeping it together pretty well considering she’s lost her daughter and her husband, still clings to men, first her abusive husband Ed and now Daryl (Norman Reedus), who tell her what to do. The writers squandered the opportunity to explore a domestic violence survivor rather than making her a caricature. When we first meet Maggie (Lauren Cohan), she’s riding in on a horse, bashing a Walker (aka zombie) with a baseball bat. She started off so fierce, spunky and sexually assertive. It’s just unfortunate she’s unraveling, a hysterical mess who seems to cling to her BF Glenn (Steven Yeun) for protection.

The two bright spots are Andrea and Jacqui. Andrea is one of my favorite characters. A tough survivor, she’s one of the best shots and guards the camp. She did try to commit suicide, despondent after her sister died. But she’s become determined to live. She’s smart, questions the status quo, and has become more assertive, unafraid to voice her opinion. Jacqui was outspoken and seemed to possess a quiet inner strength. While I wish she’d fought harder to survive, she chooses to end her life, dying peacefully at the end of Season 1. Even though Andrea and Jacqui are the only ones, I’m glad SOMEBODY questions the ridiculous gender nonsense.

In the very first episode in Season 1, there’s a flashback depicting Rick and Shane joking about gender differences. When Rick confides that he’s having marital problems, he tells Shane that Lori accused him of “not caring about his family in front of” their son Carl. And then Rick (who I actually like a lot) says:

“The difference between men and women? I would never say something that cruel to her.”

Wow, so we’re treated to gender essentialism and a lovely tidbit that women are cruel, heartless shrews all in the first episode. This is definitely an omen of things to come.

Andrea (Laurie Holden), Amy (Emma Bell), Carol (Melissa McBride) doing laundry on The Walking Dead

In “Tell It To the Frogs,” Andrea, Amy, Carol, Jacqui wash laundry in a lake. As the women work, they see the men splashing around enjoying themselves. Jacqui, one of the only women with any common sense and a spark of strength, asks:

“I’m really beginning to question the division of labor around here. Can someone explain to me how the women ended up doing all the Hattie McDaniel work?”

YES!! Love this! How about maybe they rotate chores? Or what if (radical idea here) some of the men wanted to cook or clean? Why should the women do all the domestic tasks??

The women proceed to bond over missing their washing machines and vibrators. But then the frivolity is cut short by Carol’s abusive husband Ed who threatens the women and then slaps Carol. While the women try to defend her, Shane steps in and starts beating the shit out of him, getting out all his aggression and frustration about Lori spurning him. So even though Shane warns Ed that he better not ever lay a hand on Carol or Sophia, he’s not acting out of nobility or the belief that men shouldn’t abuse women. Not surprising as this is the same douchebag who later tries to rape Lori and then brushes it off when she confronts him about it.

Talking about women in post-apocalyptic genres, Balancing Jane asserts that while strong women exist, it’s the men who rescue them and allow them their strength:

“[The Walking Dead goes out of its] way to demonstrate that those women had to first be saved by a righteous man. In order for women to become competent and determined, a man had to first stand up and make a space for them. Until a man appeared as savior, the women were doomed to be physically overpowered and sexually exploited.”

Men continually deny women power and autonomy. Dale takes Andrea’s gun away from her (“What Lies Ahead”) like she’s a child, backed up by rapist Shane. So a grown-ass woman shouldn’t have a gun but Carl, an ELEVEN-year-old can carry one! Oh but the little woman can’t be trusted. Ugh. Dale also comments on Andrea and Maggie’s sex lives. Speaking of Carl and guns…Lori voices her opposition for her son shooting yet no one listens to her concerns. When Lori discovers she’s pregnant, Glenn scolds her for not taking her vitamins as if she doesn’t know how to care for herself. Gee thanks, Glenn, it’s not like she’s never been pregnant before.

And then of course there’s the infamous abortion/emergency contraception storyline in “Secrets.” After Lori discovers she’s pregnant, she asks Glenn to obtain medication from the pharmacy for her to terminate her pregnancy (which she admits she’s not sure if it will work). But EC is contraception, doesn’t terminate an existing pregnancy and must be taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex or failed contraception. RU-486, which does terminate an existing pregnancy, has to be procured from a doctor, not a pharmacy.

Jezebel, Slate, ACLU and many others wrote about this episode and the myths it perpetuates. Of course showrunner Glenn Mazzara brushed off the criticism saying the writers took “artistic creative license” and he “hopes people aren’t turning to the fictional world of The Walking Dead for medical advice.” Well of course people shouldn’t be. But the media influences people’s perceptions, including medicine and abortion. There’s so much misinformation swirling around abortion and contraception. And it’s this misinformation that anti-choicers use to their advantage.

If ever there was a time for a show to depict a pregnant character having an abortion…yeah, I think a zombie apocalypse would be it. But it’s strange that this abortion/contraception arc occurs in the same episode where people are debating the zombies in the barn and what constitutes life.

Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) and Rick (Andrew Lincoln) on The Walking Dead

But it’s the reaction of those around Lori that most disturbs me. Rick screams at Lori for even thinking about terminating the pregnancy. After Maggie and Glenn return from the pharmacy (granted, they’ve just been attacked by zombies), Maggie chucks the pills at Lori saying, “Here’s your abortion pills!” So not only does Lori not turn to another woman for help (turning to Glenn instead), but Maggie yells at her for her reproductive choice. As Bitch Magazine blogger Katherine Don writes:

“When reproductive choices are navigated by a stereotyped character and manhandled by scriptwriters who don’t recognize a woman’s ability to weight options and make decisions, the woman is robbed of her individuality, humanity and dignity.”

Beyond their “individuality, humanity and dignity,” the women are also robbed of their voice. In “Judge, Jury, Executioner,” the group congregate in the farmhouse to discuss the fate of captured Randall. While Dale vehemently opposes the decision to execute him, he’s the only one who speaks up. Eventually, Andrea, who was a civil rights lawyer pre-walkers, voices her opinion that Dale’s right. Lori, who opposes the death penalty, says nothing, almost always blindly agreeing with Rick. But the worst comes when Carol says she wants no part of the decision and wants them to decide it for her. Excuse me?? You want to forget all about making the hard decisions and just sit back, letting others decide for you??

I’m so fucking tired of the writers silencing the women.

The show’s treatment of race and heteronormativity isn’t a whole lot better. Why does the one black man (what happened to Morgan and his son from Season 1??) have to be silent for most episodes and have a ridiculous name like T-Dog? Where are the LGBTQ characters? What does it say about a show where the most interesting and complex character is a racist?? Yep, sad to say but Daryl’s my favorite. Why do we have to keep hearing racist Asian jokes? Why did Jacqui, the one black woman on the show, have to kill herself??

We see female empowerment continually stripped away. Lori seems to be the worst perpetrator of gender stereotypes and reinforcing hyper-masculinity. Glenn tells Maggie that he was distracted shooting at the bar because all he could think about was her. When Maggie confesses this in “18 Miles Out,” Lori in her infinite wisdom tells her that she should let “the men do their man-work” and that it’s women’s jobs to support the men. Oh yeah, she also says, “Tell him to man up.” Gee thanks, Lori. Swell advice. So men aren’t allowed to be emotional or sentimental. Only women.

(L-R): Glenn, Andrea, Shane, T-Dog, Daryl on The Walking Dead

Later, Lori, on another anti-feminist tirade (!!!), scolds Andrea for burdening the other women by not cooking and cleaning. Lori says Andrea should leave the other work for the men, like a good little woman, don’t ya know. What. The. Fuck. When Andrea says that she contributes to the group by offering protection and keeping watch (which she does), Lori blurts out,

“You sit up on that RV working on your tan with a shotgun in your lap.”

I’m sorry, did the zombipocalypse also signal a rip in the fabric of time where The Walking Dead characters now live in fucking 1955?! So Lori, women shouldn’t be “playing” with guns or hunting for food or protecting the camp. Nope. Women are only good for domestic duties like cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. Leave the tough stuff to the men. Silly me for forgetting. Thank god Andrea told Lori and her bullshit off. Maybe Lori’s just jealous of Andrea’s skills since Lori can’t drive a car without flipping it into a ditch.

While blaming it on Lori’s “irrational behavior” due to her pregnancy and “going through a lot of stuff” (um, aren’t they all?), writer and The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman ultimately defends this exchange and the show’s depiction of traditional gender roles:

“Lori is really just aggravated over a lot of things and she’s lashing out. She was serious and she wants Andrea to pull her weight; certain people are stuck with certain tasks and to a certain extent people are retreating back into traditional gender roles because of how this survival-crazy world seems to work.”

So I’m really supposed to believe that when the zombie shit hits the fan, we’re all going to take a time warp? And why the fuck is it a woman, the wife of the leader of the group, who keeps spouting sexist bullshit?!

The horror genre often makes commentaries on humanity vs. brutality. Yet Kirkman clearly doesn’t care about making a social commentary on gender. And to a point that’s fine – not everything must possess some deep message. But there’s no reason the opposite couldn’t be true – an apocalypse spurring egalitarian rather than “traditional” gender roles.

All of the survivors have endured unspeakable horrors, witnessing the slaughter of their loved ones. People react differently to tragedy, some will come unhinged while others grow stronger. And wielding a gun isn’t necessarily synonymous with strength. But why must we constantly see a rearticulation of sexist gender stereotypes? Do people actually think this sexism is justified because they erroneously think we live in a post-feminist society?? When it comes to genres like horror, fantasy and scif-fi, writers can imagine any world they wish. Why imagine a sexist one? Why is everyone on the show struggling to maintain white male patriarchy??

We haven’t witnessed a fierce woman in any leadership role yet. With the arrival Michonne, I’m finally truly excited about The Walking Dead. I’m hopeful that the writers can still turn things around. With Michonne and Lauren Cohan who plays Maggie promoted to series regular, some speculate “Season 3 is shaping up to be a big one for the ladies.” But I’m still skeptical. Michonne has a lot to do to erase the stench of sexist bullshit contaminating the show.

‘Homeland’s Carrie Mathison: A Pulsing Beat of Jazz and ‘Crazy Genius’

Carrie Mathison, a haunted yet brilliant CIA analyst.

Warning: spoilers ahead!

“I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know.”
 

— Billie Holiday

In the pilot episode of Homeland, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), hurries back to her Washington D.C. apartment after a night out, and the audience sees a photo of jazz musicians and pieces of artwork emblazoned with the word “Jazz.” Jazz–the nebulous, wholly American musical genre–is improvisation. It is individualism and collaboration. It is color-outside-the-lines, boundary-pushing rhythm. It is Carrie, a CIA analyst who must push and navigate her way around the patriarchal CIA and her brilliant and bipolar mind.
Carrie shows very early on that she doesn’t strictly play by the rules. In the opening scene of the pilot, she is driving around the streets of Baghdad, headscarf down, and talking on the phone with her superior back in D.C. When she gets stuck in traffic, she simply gets out of the car and starts walking, pulling up her headscarf. She doesn’t hesitate to improvise, and is constantly navigating to make inroads that seem impossible.
The Ken Burns Jazz documentary website states,

“So while it is true that jazz is a demanding and competitive field for both men and women, it is also true that a woman who shows up for an audition or jam session with a tenor sax or trumpet in her gig bag is greeted with a special variety of raised eyebrows, curiosity and skepticism. Is she serious? Can she play? Time-worn questions about women and jazz buzz through the room before she blows a note.”

Carrie’s personal and professional lives weave together–the professional trumps the personal, but her private battles threaten her career.

When Carrie is questioning the American POW Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) for the first time, she is calm and firm, yet her pressing questions make her supervisor question her, as Brody is clearly uncomfortable. The CIA has moved past its extreme “woman problem” of the 80s and 90s, but certainly it’s not immune to continued gender bias.
The audience knows that Saul (Mandy Patinkin) has been Carrie’s mentor, and he continues to be one throughout the series. This older man, who helps guide and protect a young female protagonist, is a popular trope (Ron Swanson, Jack Donaghy and Don Draper, to name a few). It makes sense to the audience that a young woman doesn’t break into the boys’ club alone, so oftentimes these male mentors serve as powerful gatekeepers to gendered worlds. Whether this trope is realistic or reductionist, or somewhere in between, is an important point of discussion (much like the fact that Carrie’s mother is an absent character and her father shares an intense connection with her as they share the same bipolar disorder–this recurrent “absent mother” trope for female protagonists is problematic to say the least). 

Saul serves as a mentor to Carrie. (Patinkin has been outspoken about issues of television and feminism.)

While the audience can assume that Carrie has seen and felt many “raised eyebrows, curiosity and skepticism” in her rise through the ranks, her creativity and improvisational talent give her power.
“It’s ill-becoming for an old broad to sing about how bad she wants it. But occasionally we do.”

— Lena Horne

In the aforementioned scene, when Carrie rushes home after a night out, she strips down to a slip and wipes her crotch with a damp washcloth while brushing her teeth. She hurriedly slips off a wedding ring as she leaves to go to work at CIA Headquarters.
Later, she goes to a jazz bar (after laboriously–not pleasurably–putting on black lace) and tells a man in a suit that she wears the ring to “weed out guys looking for a relationship.” After some obligatory flirting, she suggests they leave and go elsewhere.
When Carrie strikes up a sexual relationship with Brody later in the first season (after drunken, raw sex in her backseat), it’s always mildly unclear whether she’s doing so for professional gain. The relationship ebbs and flows in and out of her favor, and the audience realizes that Carrie enjoys sex and some level of human connection. Even when it looks and feels like a chore (as she puts on her black lace, for example), sex is something that Carrie needs. Period.
No strings, no clear ulterior motives, no obsession with marriage. Carrie’s sexual persona is as startling–and as normal–as the crotch-wipe after a night out.
The complexity of relationships and marriages is a central theme in many subplots (Brody’s wife, Jessica, believing her husband dead, has a serious relationship with his best friend; Saul’s wife struggles with his work schedule, although she is a highly successful professional herself). The relationships all reflect very realistic scenarios, and the women–supporting characters, even–are complex and whole.
“Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking. . . . the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things — all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.”
— Nina Simone
When Carrie gets up to leave the jazz bar with her catch of the night, she stops and notices Brody and his family on television. She observes the finger movements of the trumpeter, pianist and bassist, and connects them to the finger-tapping motions Brody is making on his televised press conferences. She leaves her date behind and rushes to Saul’s house, more convinced that Brody has been turned.
Carrie has a wall in her apartment dedicated to unraveling the al-Qaeda terror plot she believes Brody to be operating in. Her personal life and professional life have few boundaries (and her only clear pleasures–jazz music and sex–bleed into her career as well).
Her thought processes are very rarely black and white, as are her male colleague’s. She always seems to be trying to connect new and different dots, and looking at other pieces of stories. When Aileen Morgan and Raqim Faisel were being hunted as prime terrorist suspects, the male agents assumed Aileen was the “terrorist’s girlfriend.” It was Carrie who finally said, “Maybe she’s the one driving this…” And she was. The blonde white woman was the catalyst to their involvement with a terror plot, and Carrie had to point out the possibility that their assumptions (white woman tricked and trapped by a Middle Eastern extremist) were wrong.
A Guardian blog post connected the fact that a Thelonious Monk song was playing as a backdrop when Carrie drove to attend a meeting at the CIA Headquarters. The writer notes,

“Monk was hospitalised at various points in his career due to an unspecified mental illness and there has been some debate about whether he could have had a schizophrenic or bipolar disorder. (In fact, jazz and schizophrenia have long been linked. It is argued that New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden, the ‘inventor of jazz’, improvised the music he played as his schizophrenia did not allow him to read music, evolving ragtime into a more free form of music in the process.) It is an association that positions Carrie, who takes anti-psychotics, as a ‘crazy genius’ like Monk.”

Carrie’s mental and emotional well-being, as is exposed in the first season, is held together by those non-aspirin pills she takes out of the aspirin bottle every morning. Her sister gives her anti-psychotics illegally, since she would not be able to be a CIA agent if they knew she had bipolar disorder. Her tenacity, her genius and her fragility (she sobs to her sister at one point, “I’ve been on my own for a while now…”) are in constant battle. She is, very often, on the edge.

Nick Brody and Carrie develop a complicated relationship, although her theories of his terrorist involvement were correct.

When she got (many) drinks with Brody before they first had sex, she told him,

“When I was a girl, my friends and I used to play chicken with the train on the tracks near our house and no one could ever beat me, not even the boys.”

One can see Carrie’s life as an endless game of chicken, whether it’s with trains, sex, surveillance without warrants or hiding a mood disorder. That constant challenge–not unlike a call-and-response jazz pattern that encourages louder and faster feedback–both energizes and limits Carrie throughout the series.

“One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head.”
— Billie Holiday

Carrie’s right. She knew Brody was turned, though no one would listen. Brody’s teenage daughter, Dana (in all of her teenage angst), with Carrie’s help, figured it out as well (and some argue it was Dana who really stopped Brody).
However, Brody stopped himself (his conscience and a malfunctioning bomb stopped him, rather, or even Dana’s phone call). He reigns in the public eye as the good guy, the rising politician, and the complexities of his terrorist motives (connected to drone strikes that killed a young boy) are difficult for the audience to make right and wrong out of. (This is, of course, what good storytelling does.)
Carrie, however, has been found out. A hospitalization left her without her medication, and she chooses to undergo electroconvulsive therapy (ECT, or shock treatment, which is becoming more popular in the US, mostly with female patients) to “heal” her mental disorder. The treatment makes her forget much of what she knew, and she can’t realize that she’s helped thwart another terrorist attack. Her intense guilt after “missing something” on 9/11 certainly drove her mania deeper, yet she is compelled to give up the part of herself that drives her forward with the ECT.
Just as the song is truly falling into place in her head, she loses it.
Not to discount the real and debilitating nature of Carrie’s bipolar disorder, one must also reflect upon women’s history in terms of mental illness and the diagnosis and treatment plans women were subjected to. Carrie enters into Season 2 a more domesticated woman (teaching English, gardening, attempting “domestic normalcy”). Treatment for women’s emotional disorders–or perceived disorders–in the late 1800s and early 1900s was often the “rest cure,” when women were isolated and kept away from mental and physical stimulation. This harmed more women than anything, and Carrie being kept from her challenging mental stimulation and work is not, most viewers would argue, good for her. This feminine fragility at the hands of a mental illness isn’t new, nor is the treatment. She’s consistently second-guessed and made to feel insecure, which leads her to doubt herself. However, Saul understands their need for her at this point in Season 2, and will hopefully continue to be her cheerleader and help her navigate the waters.
Carrie’s inner conflicts, starting from her girlhood, are repeated every episode in the show’s opening credits. Dissonant jazz trumpets play in the background, and scenes showing a little girl’s hands playing the piano and trumpet are cut with professionals’ playing. As the audience sees pictures of a young Carrie growing up–in a mask, in a maze, smiling for the camera–news footage from America’s recent history is spliced in (from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, with sound bites from numerous domestic tragedies). Her sleeping eyes dart, and her panicked adult voice repeats her guilt and fear of “missing” something from ten years before. Even from this opening sequence, the audience is left tense and uncomfortable feeling and seeing Carrie’s thought patterns.
Improvising is much more difficult than reading sheet music. Jazz musicians must perform on a much different plane than classical musicians–the uncertainty, the complexity and the unexpectedness of what your fingers, or your band mate’s fingers, might do next is nothing short of terrifying. But in this game of “chicken,” the end result is a masterpiece.
Momentarily, Carrie has been relegated to the padded room of elevator music, soft and predictable.

Carrie chooses to undergo ECT, as she convinces herself in Season 1 that her suspicions about Brody are delusions.

Former CIA covert-operations officer Valerie Plame Wilson, who wrote “The Women of the CIA” nearly two years before Homeland first aired, says of Carrie Mathison:

“Carrie does not suffer from the common female need-to-please trait and, in fact, insists she is usually right. She is impulsive in a job that rewards patience and lies to the few people who can tolerate her…You root for her because those very despicable qualities also make her extraordinarily good at her mission. Danes breathes life and realism into a character who, for once, goes against the clichés of what a female CIA officer is supposed to do and look like.”

Carrie is back in action in Season 2, and Saul is listening.
Carrie, much like the female jazz musicians before her, does her best to break boundaries and succeed in the boys’ world. Perhaps she could, and hopefully she will, as long as she can both overcome her bipolar disorder while at the same time retaining the impulsive, creative, compulsive thinking that makes her brilliant.
—

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

A Gilded Cage: A Feminist Critique of the ‘Downton Abbey’ Christmas Special

This is a guest review by Amanda Civitello and is published with permission. Note: this review contains no spoilers for Season Three.
“Christmas at Downton Abbey” (The Christmas Special). Downton Abbey: Season Two Original UK Edition. Writ. Julian Fellowes. Dir. Brian Percival. Masterpiece Classic/PBS Distribution, 2012.

The cast of Downton Abbey
The Emmy-nominated second season of Downton Abbey opened with its characters on the precipice of the destruction of their rarified pocket of Edwardian English aristocracy, with the Great War at Downton’s doorstep. [i] The season’s final episode, “Christmas at Downton Abbey,” submitted as part of the PBS Masterpiece 2012 Emmy campaign, mostly avoids talk of social upheaval in favor of returning to the human drama that was so popular in the first season. The Great War, explored at length during the second season, has already wrought significant – though frequently indirect – change at Downton Abbey. Youngest daughter Lady Sibyl, who trained as a nurse during the War, is now married to the family chauffeur-turned-Republican-journalist and at home in Ireland for Christmas; heir apparent Matthew’s fiancée Lavinia has succumbed to Spanish flu, having outlived her usefulness once Matthew recovered from his battle injuries; and Lord Grantham’s wealthy, widowed sister Lady Rosamund has brought home a new beau for the holidays – and that’s just the news from upstairs.
Lady Rosamund’s narrative thread plays second fiddle to the episode’s main concerns, the murder trial of Lord Grantham’s valet, John Bates, and the imploding engagement of eldest daughter Lady Mary to newspaper magnate Sir Richard Carlisle. The tempestuous and controlling relationship between Lady Mary and Sir Richard is worthy of an in-depth feminist critique, but because its development occurs over several episodes, it’s not feasible to do it justice in this piece. However, the Christmas special’s treatment of Lady Rosamund and her love interest, fortune-hunter Lord Hepworth, encapsulates most concisely the paternalistic, patriarchal society in which they lived. Moreover, Lady Rosamund’s story serves as a useful way to begin a discussion about the way that Downton Abbey portrays two of the senior ladies of the family: Lady Rosamund and her sister-in-law, the Countess of Grantham.
In the first and most of the second seasons, Lady Rosamund is essentially a plot device who interferes in her nieces’ lives and runs reconnaissance for her mother when necessary to move the story along. Fortunately, the considerable talent of Samantha Bond rescues the character from marginalized oblivion. Lady Rosamund is compelling, even when her scenes don’t contain very much for her to do. There’s a complexity and nuance to Bond’s performance that makes Lady Rosamund someone worth caring about, in part because she’s an actor who makes excellent use of her voice. She’s very much like Maggie Smith in that respect: they are both cognizant of the voice as a flexible, powerful instrument and exercise it accordingly.
“Christmas at Downton Abbey” finally gives Lady Rosamund a storyline of her own, and one worthy of Bond’s thoughtful portrayal. Lady Rosamund’s suitor’s family fortune is so diminished that, as the Dowager Countess of Grantham puts it, “he’s lucky not to be playing the violin in Leicester Square.” Indeed, Hepworth only apprises Lady Rosamund of his dire financial straits at the insistence of the Dowager Countess. “I’m tired of being alone,” Bond’s Lady Rosamund says, and the brilliance of the portrayal is that she sounds exhausted; there’s only the barest glimmer of enthusiasm for a new romance. Lady Rosamund acquiesces to the best future she thinks she can buy: heartbreakingly, she adds, “And I have money.” In Bond’s hands, Lady Rosamund doesn’t sound desperate, as her words would suggest; rather, she’s resigned to an unfortunate, uncomfortable reality. She knows how society values her – and it’s not for her intrinsic merits, but rather for her late husband’s considerable fortune. She’s shrewd: she knows she’s entering into a business arrangement as much as anything else, but she’s motivated by her desire for a partnership as well. When she catches Hepworth bedding her maid, Shore, Lady Rosamund is certainly stung by the betrayal: “I just can’t stand it when Mama is proved right,” she declares, bitterly. She knew he wanted her for her money; she simply dared to hope for more.
But Lady Rosamund is not the only person charting her course. Unbeknownst to her, her mother and brother discussed the match and its ramifications before she discovers Hepworth’s duplicity. “Is a woman of Rosamund’s age entitled to marry a fortune-hunter?” the Dowager Countess asks her son. Yes, he concedes, providing she’s been made aware of the circumstances, “but for God’s sake, let’s tie up the money.” It’s clear that Lady Rosamund finds herself trapped in a gilded cage. She is twice damned: as a widow, she’s essentially passed back to her family, who permit her to make significant life decisions; and despite the independent image she presents, the final say regarding her finances rests with her brother. 
Lady Rosamund and her beau, Lord Hepworth
Of course, it’s not a personal slight against Lady Rosamund. The paternalism that Lord Grantham exhibits (and that his mother defends) isn’t the fault of the show: Downton Abbey is, after all, a historically-minded serial; writer Julian Fellowes can’t help the prejudices of the time period. While there’s historical precedent for a woman in Lady Rosamund’s position, the show is fictional and so functions within its own universe, with its own rules. We can watch with an eye toward parallelisms because the world of Downton Abbey is a carefully crafted one, and contrasting Lord Grantham’s handling of his own history and his sister’s nascent romance invites the viewer to realize the prevalence of paternalism in aristocratic families. It’s not accidental that Lord Grantham himself was a fortune-hunter actively searching for a bride wealthy enough to rescue Downton Abbey. The Countess of Grantham and Lady Rosamund are commodities, and their value is their net worth. Lord Grantham doesn’t much mind what his sister does with her affections so long as her money is tied up; some thirty years earlier, he didn’t much mind who he married so long as she balanced his accounts. Julian Fellowes’s use of parallelism in the narrative is shrewd: we discuss these issues because of the way he chooses to tell the story.
That’s not to say that Fellowes is waving the feminist flag; he’s not. He’s in the business of writing well-crafted, witty scripts that tell a good story and maintain as close a degree of fidelity to the historical record as possible. The choices he makes as the writer are entirely to that end. Sometimes, they’re pro-woman, whether in a roundabout way, as in asking the audience to consider what life used to be like, or in a more explicit manner, such as Sybil’s interest in woman’s suffrage and ambition to work and pursue a more autonomous life for herself.
In other instances, however, the show shies away from the most challenging of its subplots. The Christmas special is notable for the storylines which it does not address, and the three most prominent of these concern women: the unresolved question of Lord Grantham’s infidelity; Lady Grantham’s sense of purpose derived from running the hospital housed in her home during the war; and the inter-class intimacy that develops between Lady Grantham and her lady’s maid Sarah O’Brien following the former’s miscarriage in the season one finale.
The first two missed opportunities are linked: as presented in the season, Lady Grantham finds such meaning in her work for the hospital during the war that she initially can’t contemplate returning to her old life of attending to her social obligations. Her husband bristles at her newfound direction, which means she has less time for him. During the seventh and eighth episodes, his flirting with a housemaid, Jane, becomes more and more serious, culminating in an encounter halted only by the precipitous interruption of Lord Grantham’s valet. After Bates leaves, Lord Grantham seems to have reevaluated the situation and remembered his marriage vows – and the fact that his wife is next door, gravely ill with the Spanish influenza.
These two storylines, though linked, fail in their portrayal of women in different ways. In the instance of Lady Grantham’s independence, her narrative simply peters out. In the penultimate episode, Lady Grantham apologizes for “neglecting” her husband; by the Christmas special, she has happily returned to playing lady of the manor, worrying over whether there’s sufficient time to change for dinner.
The apology in question occurs just after Lady Grantham’s brush with death; in response, Lord Grantham simply says, “Don’t apologize to me.” But refusing her apology doesn’t absolve Lord Grantham of his guilt; nor does he seem to have any inclination to admit his indiscretion to his wife. From a feminist perspective, this is a perplexing editorial decision. The script allows Lady Grantham’s apology to stand, because she wasn’t the wife she was supposed to be. He might not accept it, but she’s the one who says the words. Lady Grantham’s tentative steps toward greater independence are immediately retracted; she apologizes for it. In a drama serial that deals primarily with interpersonal relationships, there’s no compelling reason to not address Lord Grantham’s infidelity. In the end, it’s Lady Grantham who’s punished and corrected.
The other missed opportunity in the “Christmas at Downton Abbey” concerns Lady Grantham and her lady’s maid, Sarah O’Brien. In the last episode of the first season, O’Brien’s anger at Lady Grantham’s perceived slight takes a fateful turn when she deliberately endangers her mistress and inadvertently causes Lady Grantham to miscarry. Throughout the second season, then, O’Brien channels her guilt into taking extraordinary care of her mistress; their relationship is characterized by increasing complicity and mutual affection. It is O’Brien who nurses Lady Grantham through her grave bout with Spanish influenza. The overtures of friendship are never quite realized, however, and O’Brien’s touching, climactic scene in which she asks Lady Grantham’s forgiveness occurs when the latter is delirious with fever. Having made the affection she feels for her mistress readily apparent (Mrs. Patmore, the cook, comments on it), O’Brien’s devotion is even acknowledged by Lord Grantham, who actively dislikes her. The Christmas special, however, never addresses the issue at all. It’s a missed opportunity to consider female friendship within a socio-economic context: after all, O’Brien has waited exclusively on Lady Grantham for over fifteen years, resulting in a curious master-servant relationship marked by necessary affinity and learned intimacy. Their tentative steps towards greater familiarity would be an interesting avenue for the show to explore, given the increasing social mobility that’s on the horizon. The fact that the storyline is wholly ignored in the Christmas special is disappointing.
Indeed, the lack of female friendships is a curious omission in Downton Abbey. There is minimal complicity between the main upstairs female characters: most relationships are marked by outright dislike or disinterest. It’s disconcerting; these ladies who are perfectly charming, each and all, around men, but who seem to lack any kind of amity with other women. When moments of camaraderie do come, they are typically between the ladies and their maids: Lady Sybil befriends Gwen, a housemaid, in the first season, but Gwen leaves Downton; eldest daughter Lady Mary has an affectionate relationship with her maid, Anna, that’s similar to her mother’s with her lady’s maid. What renders the dearth of female friendship so extraordinary is that it would have been unusual at the time. [ii] By rendering women either objects of desire or economic necessity, and essentially presenting them only vis-à-vis men, Downton Abbey doesn’t engage with its female characters as fully-realized people. They only rarely step outside of a male-defined paradigm, and when they do, they’re inevitably walked back. Gwen leaves Downton, content with her new job; Lavinia dies on the cusp of a budding friendship with Mary (complicated, of course, by Mary’s continued affection for Lavinia’s fiancé); O’Brien cries bitter tears at her mistress’s bedside and is treated no differently from anyone else on the receiving line for the staff’s obligatory Christmas presents. 
Lord Grantham and the Dowager Countess discuss Lady Rosamund’s finances
Ultimately, the lens of patriarchy influences the female characters’ understanding of their self-worth. Lady Grantham tells her daughter that she’s “damaged goods” in the first season after Lady Mary loses her virginity to a handsome, rogue diplomat. Initially we bemoan Lady Grantham’s inability to empathize with her daughter’s plight. As the series progresses, that opinion begins to change. By the Christmas special, when Lady Grantham’s steps to independence have been halted by her husband, it’s possible to see that early scene with Lady Mary in a new light: if Lady Grantham understands her daughter’s worth to be entirely wrapped up in her virginity (read: her marriageability), what does that say about her own sense of self? Julian Fellowes’s tendency to return to similar themes in new contexts enables his audience to reassess those early impressions. In this instance, the audience reconsiders the knee-jerk condemnation of Lady Grantham so as to sympathize with her plight as well. For all that she’s terribly wealthy and beautiful, she’s not expected to be much more than that. What’s sad is that she doesn’t expect to be, either; when she does, she’s put back in her place by her courtly – but no less paternalistic – husband.
Downton Abbey is, in effect, a thoughtful portrayal of the harsh reality of aristocratic women’s lives that lurked beneath the gilded exterior. They lacked autonomy and individual agency, were frequently treated as commodities, and the patriarchal, paternalistic society in which they moved colored their own self-worth. Men like Lord Grantham, as much a product of that society, nevertheless perpetuated their privilege, becoming active apologists for the very hierarchy that constrained their daughters. But beyond the beautiful clothes and the fabulous sets and the compelling acting is strong writing and purposeful manipulation of narrative structure. Julian Fellowes has rightly received glowing criticism for Downton Abbey’s plethora of witticisms and sharp one-liners, but the real achievement is in the narrative’s use of parallelisms to explore a single theme from different angles. 

———-

[i] While the term “Edwardian” derives from the reign of Edward VII of England (1901-1910), historians sometimes extend the upper bound to include the sinking of the RMS Titanic (1912) or the start of European hostilities in the First World War (1914). For aristocratic families like the Crawley family at Downton Abbey, the rigid classism and social hierarchy (and its attendant mores) continued well into wartime.

[ii] Sharon Marcus’s excellent 2007 Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England is a wonderful, immensely readable but rigorously scholarly exploration of the full spectrum of female friendships, from the platonic to the intensely erotic. However, Marcus’s data is primarily drawn from sources written by historical women of the middle class, and some of their experiences (going to school, e.g.) would not have applied to any of the Crawley daughters. Lillian Faderman deals with the spectrum of friendships in the United States in roughly the same time in 2001’s To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America, which includes chapters on upper-class women.

———-

Amanda Civitello is a Chicago-based freelance writer and Northwestern alum. She’s written on Daphne and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for Bitch Flicks. You can find her online at amandacivitello.com.

 

Listening and the Art of Good Storytelling in Louis C.K.’s ‘Louie’



Louis C.K.’s Louie
“I remember thinking in fifth grade, ‘I have to get inside that box and make this shit better’… It made me mad that the shows were so bad. People have a right to relax and watch theater about themselves that makes them reflect and feel and have a good time doing it.” – Louis C.K.
The subversive feminism of a show is most striking when it is underneath, not necessarily a part of, the writing. From season 1 of FX’s critically acclaimed Louie, it has been clear that Louis C.K. isn’t trying to make some grand commentary on gender or social norms. He’s simply weaving stories out of life.

Louie–starring C.K. as Louie–is one of those shows that doesn’t leave a feminist audience balking at stereotypes or scrambling to celebrate its female empowerment (although C.K. is, in general, a feminist darling). In fact, its power lies in its ability to allow us to not think too much about gender; instead, we are focused on the stories and the sheer humanity of the characters. 

Louie is a single father co-parenting two daughters in New York City and working as a comedian. The obviously semi-autobiographical sitcom is wrapping up its third season next week. A TV auteur, C.K. produces, writes, directs, edits, and stars in each episode. He has been nominated for three Emmy awards for the series (for acting, directing, and writing).

Early on, audiences felt there was something different about Louie. The best way to describe the ebb and flow of comedy and dramatic genius would be intensely human. Everyone is flawed (not just Louie, and not just his love interests and friends), and his relationship with his on-screen daughters is particularly moving in its stark honesty. We worry, panic, yearn, laugh, and cry along with our protagonist.

Parenting–a subject most often reserved for the action and commentary of mothers–is central to C.K.’s stand-up and to Louie. In the show, Louie is consistently shown as a capable father who loves and is loved by his daughters. He’s no heroic single father, but we see him as a parent, nothing less. On the subject of gender roles in parenting, C.K. has said, “Roles have all changed. There’s a lot of fathers who take care of their kids, there’s a lot of mothers who have careers. But in culture, those roles are still the same. When I take my kids out for dinner or lunch, people smile at us. A waitress said to my kids the other day, ‘Isn’t that nice that you’re getting to have a little lunch with your daddy?’ And I was insulted by it, because I’m like, I’m f**king taking them to lunch, and then I’m taking them home, and then I’m feeding them and doing their homework with them and putting them to bed. She’s like, Oh, this is special time with daddy. Well, no, this is boring time with daddy, the same as everything.” This philosophy is clear in Louie.

Louie eats dinner with his two on-screen daughters.

C.K.’s stand-up acts frame the plot(s) of each episode, which are usually independent to what has happened in previous episodes. This season alone, Louie has dealt with being sexually assaulted on a date (although some bloggers problematically downplayed the assault in semi-celebration of the challenged double standard), wrestling with a friendly attachment to a young handsome man on a trip to Miami, and experiencing awkward encounters with women as flawed as he is. He is frequently depicted as having the more stereotypically feminine role in relationships (emotional, needy, and looking for serious companionship). Previous seasons have featured him having sex with (and being inspired by) Joan Rivers, dealing with childhood issues surrounding religion and sexual awakening, and being an adequate son and brother. His daughters are continually portrayed as empowered and fully realized (including one episode in season 2 in which his youngest daughter helps scare off some teenage thugs on Halloween). As the girls grow up, their character traits become more pronounced and realistic.

Parker Posey plays one of Louie’s love interests in season 3.

Season 2’s critically acclaimed “Duckling” was an hour-long episode that followed Louie on a fictional USO tour to the Middle East. According to C.K., it was an accurate depiction of his real experiences on a USO tour to Afghanistan, and the idea for the episode came from his daughter, who was four at the time.

And for his show in general, C.K. says, “I just like listening. I try to take people who are way far away from what I think or understand and put a representative of them on my show.”


Indeed, one of the aspects of C.K. as a comedian, producer/director/writer/actor, and person that makes him who he is and Louie what it has been is that he listens. He listened to a four-year-old little girl and created a television show that is up for an Emmy. It’s also clear that he spent his original trip doing a great deal of listening to his fellow USO performers and the soldiers he met. That is what leads to great storytelling.

C.K. used his own experiences and inspiration from his daughter to create “Duckling” in season 2.


Outside of the television show, C.K. has also made it clear that listening is key to everything he does. After Daniel Tosh’s rape joke went viral earlier this summer, C.K. was brought into the spotlight after tweeting a complimentary tweet to Tosh (which he said he sent not knowing about the rape joke or the backlash). In an interview with Jon Stewart, C.K. addressed the fact that he listened to the bloggers–feminists, comedians, feminist-comedians–and altered his thoughts about the situation. He said, “I think you should listen when you read – If somebody has an opposite feeling from me, I wanna hear it so I can add to mine. I don’t wanna obliterate theirs with mine; that’s how I feel.” He went on to say that in being enlightened to the true ramifications of rape culture: “Now that’s part of me that wasn’t there before.”

In an interview with NPR last winter, C.K. was asked about his thoughts on those who identify as “right-wing” (after a discussion about Christians often stumbling across his stand-up after seeing a mild clip and asking him to “clean up” his comedy): “There’s been a lot of simple vilification of right-wing people. It’s really easy to say, ‘Well, you’re Christian, you’re anti-this and that, and I hate you.’ But to me, it’s more interesting to say, ‘What is this person like and how do they really think?’ Do I have any common ground with people like that who find me really, really offensive? Do I have common ground with them? It’s worth exploring.” C.K. clearly explores every piece of life he encounters, and that seeking, that analysis, makes all of the difference.

It’s no secret that listening to others’ stories leads to better storytelling (listening well pretty much leads to better everything). However, it’s rare that we witness that kind of storytelling on half-hour TV sitcoms. On the surface, a show produced, written, directed, and edited by one man (who also stars as the protagonist and is a comedian) doesn’t sound like it would be the panacea for three-dimensional storytelling. But as C.K. continually shows his audiences, episode after episode, listening to others and thinking about life critically has led him to accurately tell stories in a fully human way.

In an interview with the New York Times last summer, C.K. said, “An uphill battle is just more interesting to me.” Choosing to not rely on tropes and recycled story lines and stock characters is an uphill battle, but as Louie demonstrates, what’s on top of that hill is well worth the climb.


—

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

Seeking the Alpha in ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Sons of Anarchy’

**I’m assuming that the people who are reading this article, have caught up pretty far into both of these shows, so some spoilers are present.

In the past few years I’ve noticed a shift in the televised portrayal of the villain. Character shows such as Mad Men, the Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, Game of Thrones, and several other high-profile shows are now highlighting the complicated nature of humanity. Rather than black and white hero and anti-hero, we have character portrayals that feature more in-depth considerations of choices and the motivations that drive those choices. While few would agree with the behaviors espoused by these protagonists, neither can we hate them; instead, we’re drawn further into their world, a grittier one not shown on the mainstream shows. 

Breaking Bad

 

High school chemist turned god-like meth creator. Walter White’s (Bryan Cranston) journey from quiet grading to bloody drug kingpin is engrossing and incredibly well done. May I also say, that “Yo, bitch” and “Yo, Mr. White” have officially become standard in my vocabulary and I root daily for Jesse (Aaron Paul) to be a winner.

Sons of Anarchy 
 

Sons of Anarchy follows the misadventures of the original chapter of a motorcycle club in Central California, the Sons of Anarchy. Sons of Anarchy are an obvious reference to Hells Angel’s (which has been classified as a criminal organization by the US Department of Justice) and likewise the Sons are arms dealers who sell IRA guns to drug lords. The arrangement is more complicated than just some gun runners though, the Sons of Anarchy are a respected organization in their small town of Charming; they own the police and in exchange for their cooperation and silence, protect Charming from drugs and gang violence. The show is further complicated by it’s Hamlet-esque plot line for the young protagonist, Jax (Charles Hunnam), who begins to doubt the Sons actions and wants to move away from arms dealing (although he manages his fair share of brawls, murders and the occasional knife fight).

Being from Northern California, the backdrops and town names are familiar to me, as is the sight of a large group of bikers cruising down a California highway. Even the sights of New Mexico in Breaking Bad seem homelike, with that crisp desert and blue sky. I find it interesting that both shows take place in the West—the home of cowboy justice; the Wild West still holds some draw to us and remains the place where fortunes can be made and men become men.

Anyone would say that Walter White from Breaking Bad is a raging egomaniac trying to become an alpha male (“I’m the one who knocks”) and that the Sons of Anarchy are territorial egomaniacs who seek to maintain their alpha male status. Both groups of men, while able to beat-up various other bad guys with impunity and whose criminal activities just serve to fuel their need to do so, constantly reiterate that their violent activities are necessary for the protection of their families.

Each group uses family and honor as a justification for their own aggressive desires, espousing an almost medieval chivalric code of honor, one where “the family” is paramount, but pride, strength, and respect are the true priorities. This portrayal of such harsh masculinity is one where the only way to reclaim one’s sense of honor and control, is through violence.

The men in each of these shows maintain this violence with constant rationalizations about how they and their protection is needed by the ones they love. Jax puts a man into the hospital with a horrific beating when he discovers that he sold drugs to his ex-wife. Walt kills Tuco and his cousin, up close and personal, because he believes that they might hurt his family. Vigilantism and backdoor deals are treated as the only way to keep their families safe, despite the obvious truth that it’s that very behavior which has brought them to that point.

There is an obvious hierarchy displayed by each group: either you’re smart enough to live outside of the law, or you’re a sheep. These men who embrace a counterculture lifestyle, place themselves, their intellect, even their consciousness at a higher level than those around them, as if they are entitled to live the way that they do because they remain free from it’s taint. Their honor remains intact because their motivation (family, freedom, love) is pure (or so they believe), a fact that places them above common gangsters.

However, the reasons for the justification have to remain pure as well, meaning that gender roles, must be strictly upheld, otherwise, what are they fighting for? Walt resents Skyler’s need to work, only being supportive when she is actually laundering money for him. His sexual dominance towards her increases as well, needing to feel in control of her behavior.

Sons of Anarchy especially uses gender roles with women pushed into two groups, prostitutes to be played with and passed around the men, and the legitimate “Old Ladies” who are the matriarchs. While these women (in particular Gemma and Tara) are afforded great respect, they are still expected to oversee the comfort and maintenance of the families, while also turning a blind eye to any wayward straying of their men.

The women in Sons of Anarchy are complicated and full of their own issues and ideas and even their own unethical and immoral rationalizations. For me, one of the most interesting arcs of the show has been to see the change in Tara, an intelligent doctor who becomes dangerous in her own right when she attacks a hospital administrator who has suspended her. Gemma is likewise fierce, being gun toting, punch throwing, and threatening all on her own.

Skyler and Marie are complicated protagonists as well, and not fully innocent either. Skyler starts to launder money, has Saul on her speed dial, and arranges for Ted Beneke’s intimidation (even finishing the job herself).

Yet, even as these women are somewhat outside of the norm because of their lifestyles, I think that both shows do a great job at featuring women who are varied and interesting, many of who have reclaimed their sexual nature in spite of the way that they are manipulated and treated by the men in their lives (Bitch Flicks contributor Leigh has a great article discussing this trend).

However, those considerations are secondary to this article. Rather, the focus is this question, what does it mean to be an “alpha” among humans? Is that drive still as present as these shows say it is? And, can you be an “alpha” without being a criminal? 

—

Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and it’s intersection, however she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.

Max’s Field Guide to Returning Fall TV Shows

The rosterof newtelevision shows premiering each year in the fall ought to be an exciting time for any TV fan. Unfortunately, I am a jaded, cynical curmudgeon, burned by my previous experiences in the field of new fall shows, and I read the previews with dread roiling in the pit of my stomach. In our age of podcasts, webseries, and countless other competing forms of entertainment, the networks seem to be getting more and more desperate, scraping the barnacles off the bottom of the barrel.
Broad stereotypes? Check.
Dominated by straight white men? Check.
God help us all, a new Ryan Murphy show? Check.
It’s predictably depressing and depressingly predictable. Once upon a time, as a starry-eyed viewer full of hope and gillyflowers, I had a “three-episode rule” for judging any show whose premise piqued my interest even a tiny bit. This year, I don’t expect to watch any of the new shows unless critical opinion snowballs in the course of the season.
However, fall still brings its sweet gifts even unto the cantankerous television fan, in the form of returning shows. Someof these shows have spiraled so far down the U-bend that I can’t even hate-watch them anymore, but there are still enough watchable returning shows to compensate for all the awful new ones (and to wreak havoc on my degree). In the absence of new shows that don’t make me want to claw my eyes out, here is a list of returning shows worth watching.
The Thick Of It (9/9)
I already covered this. It’s on Hulu. Watch it. (N.B. Because it is full of swears, Hulu will make you log in to watch it, and for some reason this entails declaring yourself male or female. If this disgusts you as much as it does me, and you wish to, ahem, seek out alternate methods of watching, I will turn a blind eye.)
Boardwalk Empire (9/16)
A questionable creative decision last season nearly made me rage-quit this show, but it drew me back in with a jaw-dropping finale. Slow, dense, and luscious, this isn’t a show to everyone’s taste, but I remain compelled by the epic-scale world-building of 1920s New Jersey, and especially by the way the show explores the lives of not only the rich white men who run things but also marginalized minorities: people of color, women, queer people. This is not a perfect show by any means, but it fascinates me.
Parks and Recreation (9/20)
Yaaaaay!

This, on the other hand, might well be a perfect show. Leslie Knope, April Ludgate, Ron F—ing Swanson… Just typing the names gives me a big goofy grin. Every episode is a half-hour ray of blissful sunshine, brightening my spirits with a healthy dose of feminism, Amy Poehler, and laughter. Roll on Thursday (by then I might even have stopped crying about the breakup of the century).
How I Met Your Mother (9/24)
I still watch this show, I guess. I can’t really remember why.
Bob’s Burgers (9/30)
The charming adventures of the most delightful animated family since The Simpsons deserve a full-length treatment on this site at some point. For now I simply say: Watch it. If the hijinks of close-knit siblings Tina, Gene, and Louise don’t fill you with joy, you have a shriveled husk in place of a soul. Also, Kristen Schaal! Eugene Mirman! H. Jon Benjamin, for crying out loud! (HEY, FX, WHEN IS ARCHER COMING BACK ALREADY?)
Tina’s my favorite. No, Gene is. No, it’s Louise. Oh, don’t make me choose!
The Good Wife (9/30)
For a sitcom-loving sci-fi nerd like myself, a legal drama is well outside the comfort zone, but this is about as good as they come. The juxtaposition of title and premise alone should grab any feminist’s attention: When her husband is embroiled in an Eliot Spitzer-style scandal, Alicia Florrick returns to the bar in order to make ends meet. The rich ironies and tensions suggested by the show’s title play out on Julianna Margulies’ understated yet beautifully expressive face as she navigates personal and professional life when she has so long been defined as Peter Florrick’s wife. And sometimes Michael J. Fox guest stars, and it’s awesome.
30 Rock (10/4)
For several seasons now, 30 Rock has been but a pale shadow of its best self, but laughs are still guaranteed, and my love for Liz Lemon is fierce and undying. I will almost certainly complain vociferously about every episode, but I wouldn’t dream of missing out on bidding farewell to the TGS crew.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (10/11)
In some ways, this is the anti-Parks and Rec: A crass and often vicious show about crass, wholly unlikeable people. You won’t see anyone hailing the Sunnygang as feminist icons anytime soon (though, for what it’s worth, the jokes are usually on the holders of prejudice rather than the victims thereof). I’d like to revisit the episodes featuring Carmen, a trans woman, to see how they stack up against the generally appalling mainstream pop-culture depiction of trans women, but I’m honestly a little afraid to do so. When Sunny misses, it misses hard, but it’s also capable of making me laugh until I cry; and, unlike a certain other 2005-premiering show mentioned above, I’m actually optimistic about the chance for creativity and entertainment in Sunny‘s eighth season.
Community (10/19)
The date is on my calendar and on my heart. Friday, October 19th, 8:30pm: The stars will align. The cosmos will come into harmony. Wars will end. Justice will prevail. God will be in his heaven and all will be right with the world.
ASDFSDALF;HDSLGJKHSJDK

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Defending Dawn Summers: From One Kid Sister to Another

Michelle Trachtenberg as Dawn Summers
In the final scene of the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Season 5, Dawn Summers, Buffy’s never before seen or heard-of little sister, appears seemingly out of nowhere. While she’s completely new to the audience, oddly, it is clear that from the characters’ perspectives that Dawn has been there all along.  
Dawn and Tara, fellow outsiders from the Scooby gang, pass time with a thumb war.
To quote my husband’s reaction as we reached season 5 during his (in-progress) Buffy indoctrination: “Why on earth are they doing this?”
Most of the Buffy fandom reacted with the same puzzlement. As Dawn’s character was fleshed out over the first few episodes of the season as the archetypical annoying little sister, the audience was still denied all but the vaguest of clues as to Dawn’s true nature and reason for being retconned into the Buffyverse.  
Dawn as annoying little sister.
It was not until the fifth episode of the season, “No Place Like Home”, that the Dawn’s existence is explained: she is a mystical key that opens gateways between dimensions, magically given human form with blood relation to the slayer, woven into her memories and all of those around her so that Buffy would protect her with her life, to keep the evil god Glory from using the Key to destroy the universe.  
Unfortunately, the only place the monks’ spell couldn’t reach was the minds of the audience, and Dawn Summers had to win us over without the benefit of false memories.  Which may have been an impossible feat, given her character is pretty much laid out as an immature, whiny, brat with a tendency to get into trouble. 
Dawn in damsel-in-distress mode.
Also, she occasionally does this thing where she piercingly shrieks “Get out, get out, GET OUT!” which ranks up there with nails on a chalkboard, dental drills, and Katy Perry songs when it comes to horrible sounds to endure:
And so it is that Dawn is one of the least-liked characters in the Buffyverse. But not by me.  I love Dawn Summers.
I suspect my unusually high tolerance for Dawn comes from my OWN memories.  In “Real Me,” the episode which properly introduces Dawn’s character, she writes in her diary/narrates: “No one understands. No one has an older sister who is the slayer.”
Dawn writes in her diary.
But I understand. OK, sure, my big sister didn’t have superpowers, and as far as I know she did not save the world even one time, much less “a lot.”  But from my perspective as her bratty little sister, I felt like I could never escape her long and intimidating shadow.  I could never be as smart as her, as special as her; I couldn’t hope to collect even a fraction the awards and accolades she racked up through high school. And she didn’t even properly counteract her super smarts with social awkwardness: she always had a tight group of friends and the romantic affections of cute boys.  She was the pride and joy of my family, and I always felt like an also-ran.  Trust me: this makes it very hard to not be at least a little bratty and whiny.
And my big sister was a lot nicer to me than Buffy usually was to Dawn.  If the audience found out before Buffy did that Dawn was created to induce the slayer to protect the key, it might have been a little hard to swallow.  Buffy shows only hostile resentment toward Dawn for the first half of Season 5.  It is only after Dawn learns herself that she is new to the world that Buffy shows her true sisterly love, when she lovingly insists to Dawn that she is Buffy’s “real sister” despite her mystical origins.  
“It doesn’t matter where you came from, or how you got here, you are my sister.”
Because I relate to Dawn as a fellow annoying little brat following around her remarkable older sister, I am more forgiving of her character flaws. But I do think viewers without my background ought to take it easier on Dawn as well.  
A common criticism of Dawn is that she’s much more immature than the main characters were at the start of the series, when they were close to her in age (Dawn is introduced as a 14-year-old in the eighth grade; Buffy, Xander, and Willow were high school sophomores around age 15 or 16 in Season 1).  Writer David Fury responds to this in his DVD commentary on the episode “Real Me,” saying that Dawn was originally conceived as around age 12 and aged up a few years after Michelle Trachtenberg was cast, but it took a while for him and the other writers to get the originally-conceived younger version of the character out of their brains.  But I don’t need this excuse; I think it makes perfect narrative sense that Dawn comes across as more immature than our point-of-view characters were when they were younger.  Who among us didn’t think of themselves as being just as smart and capable as grown-ups when we were teens? Who among us, when confronted with the next generation of teenagers ten years down the line, were not horrified by their blatant immaturity?  
Additionally, Dawn starting her character arc as whiny brat lets us watch her grow and mature into a pretty awesome young woman.  It is a long road, beset by personal tragedy and a theme of abandonment: Dawn loses her mother and her sister within a matter of months in Season 5, and in Season 6 sees her surrogate parent figures Willow and Tara split up just as a returned-from-the-grave Buffy is too detached from humanity to be there emotionally for Dawn.  Throughout Season 6, Dawn acts out: lying to Buffy to stay out all night with friends, habitually and perhaps compulsively stealing, and ultimately sublimating her abandonment issues into a curse (with the help of Vengeance “Justice” Demon Halfrek), temporarily trapping the Scooby gang and some innocent bystanders in the Summers home.  
Dawn’s tantrum in Season 6’s “Older and Faraway”
But Season 6 represents an era of bad choices for almost the entire cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so Dawn should be given as much slack for her missteps as we give the other wayward characters, including Buffy herself.  And it is Dawn who finally pulls Buffy out of the emotional purgatory she is suffering in this season.  In the Season 6 finale “Grave”, Buffy finally truly regains her will to live and recaptures her complete humanity, and this epiphany comes in large part because she finally sees Dawn as a gift in her life rather than a burden:
Buffy and Dawn hug in “Grave”
“Things have really sucked lately, but that’s all gonna change—and I want to be there when it does. I want to see my friends happy again. I want to see you grow up. The woman you’re gonna become… Because she’s gonna be beautiful. And she’s gonna be powerful. I got it so wrong. I don’t want to protect you from the world—I want to show it to you. There’s so much that I wanna to show you.” –  Buffy to Dawn in “Grave.”
Dawn with Buffy during her metaphorical rebirth in “Grave.”
Dawn finds her own self-actualization in the Season 7 episode “Potential.” Having once again been shoved to the sidelines of Buffy’s attention by the arrival of a collection of young “potential slayers” who need protection from the Bringers who have been systematically wiping out the future slayer lineage.  While Buffy focuses on protecting and training the potentials, Dawn clearly feels left out, trapped by her own ordinariness and unimportance (a significant change for a girl who was once the key to the fabric between dimensions).
Dawn lurks in the background as Buffy gives a speech to potential slayers.
That all changes when a spell cast by Willow appears to identify Dawn as a potential slayer herself.  Dawn is emotionally overwhelmed by the news, mainly because she thinks it means that Buffy must die before Dawn could ever realize this potential (I’m pretty sure the next potential would be called only by the death of Faith, but that’s neither here nor there).  A part of Dawn is clearly excited by the news, and given a huge jolt of self-confidence that lets her bravely defend herself against a vampire and then fight off the group of Bringers who come for her classmate Amanda, the true potential slayer identified by Willow’s spell.  Dawn handles the news of her lack of slayer potential with perfect grace, saving Amanda’s life and transferring to her the confidence that comes with knowing you are “special.”  
At the episode’s end, Xander, the only other remaining character without any superpowers, has a heart-to-heart with Dawn.  He shares with her the wisdom he’s gained in seven years in these circumstances:
Xander has a heart-to-heart with Dawn
“They’ll never know how tough it is, Dawnie, to be the one who isn’t chosen. To live so near to the spotlight and never step in it. But I know. I see more than anybody realizes because nobody’s watching me. I saw you last night. I see you working here today. You’re not special. You’re extraordinary.” – Xander to Dawn in “Potential.”

 Dawn accepts her humanity and finds her maturity.
After “Potential”, Dawn, who began life at age 14, crafted from a ball of mystical energy and a spell creating powerful false memories, is finally defined by her humanity, her normalcy.  She accepts this position with dignity, grace, and bravery.  And in so doing, Dawn also steps up to her place as a mature young adult. And at least for this one-time bratty kid sister, that makes Dawn Summers is just as heroic and inspiring a character as Buffy herself.  
—
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa.  She is a regular contributor to Bitch Flicks with a new piece appearing each Friday.  She is still upset that the Season 5 Buffy DVDs don’t include the awesome “previously on” montage from “The Gift”.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Why Faith, Anya, and Willow Beat Buffy

The cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
This is a guest post by Gabriella Apicella. 

I missed Buffy the Vampire Slayer first time around. When it appeared on TV, I was the age the characters were meant to be, so was busy being fixated on appearing cool and hanging out with friends in my town’s equivalent of “The Bronze.” But in my mid-twenties, after studying film and media at university, after reading Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, and after writing a couple of scripts filled with rage at the lack of interesting female characters anywhere, Buffy finally came into my life.

At the end of my first 45 minutes with Sunnydale’s finest, I remember feeling absolute delight. On the promise that they be returned in perfect condition, I borrowed one series after another of my friend’s treasured DVD boxsets, handed over with warnings and reverence, and received with the desperation of an addict. Needless to say I watched nothing but Buffy until reaching the final episode of Season 7 (it didn’t take long). I love this show. I believe it to be one of the most important television shows that has ever been conceived. Yes, there is the Riley blip, and Tara is no natural Scooby, despite her witchy credentials. But out of 144 episodes – that’s almost 7 days of watching Buffy continuously for 16 hours a day* (you’ve got to sleep right) – these niggles are small. It is a work of genius, and I will argue violently against any dissenters.

And yet … I am not particularly a fan of Buffy herself. I’m always on her side when she’s facing the bad guys, whether it’s The Master, Mayor Wilkins, Glory or the downright terrifying Caleb. But when it’s Willow, Faith or Anya that Buffy’s fighting, I can’t help feeling she sort of has it coming.

The entire show champions under-dogs: the nerdy, the quirky, and the excluded. People who aren’t classically beautiful; the unpopular ones that you’re embarrassed to hang out with; the screw-ups and lost souls. And with her perfect hair, kick-ass fighting skills, cool outfits, and dangerously sexy boyfriends, Buffy just doesn’t evoke the empathy of some of her fellow Scoobies. Sure, she has some romantic tangles along the way (excuse the enormous understatement), and definitely messes up occasionally: trying to kill her friends and sister; running away to leave Sunnydale to certain destruction; dying – all notable examples. But when it comes to saving the world, she delivers. She’s awesome at her job. And boy does she know it.

Faith, Buffy’s “rival” slayer

So when Faith arrives and ends up rocking Buffy’s world, there’s a wonderful satisfaction in watching the pair battle it out. Unpredictable, sexy and wild, Faith personifies the dark side of Buffy: what she could have been if she wasn’t so annoyingly right all the time. But more than that, Faith’s psychological issues make her empathetic: her psychotic behaviour is not only understandable, but almost forgivable. From an unstable and implied abandoned background, Faith openly wishes for the wholesome simplicity Buffy’s life retains despite her Slayer responsibilities. She has a touchingly childlike desperation for the conventional stability that the Scoobies, Giles, Angel and Joyce provide for Buffy. The Mayor’s fatherly affection for Faith appears the only stable relationship she has ever come across, where she is treated like the innocent little girl she seems to have never been allowed to be. It is no wonder that she would do anything for him: wouldn’t most of us do anything for our family after all?

Faith is an emotional Slayer, and it is not a straightforward job for her – she is driven by instinct, pain and desperation, and pushes Buffy further than any of her other adversaries up until that point. When Buffy stabs her at the end of their final confrontation in Season 3, she commits the very action that she condemned Faith for. That Faith survives is the only thing which saves Buffy from a hypocrisy that will stalk her in further conflicts.

But when it comes to Buffy’s hypocrisy and double-standards, no situation makes them clearer than the moment she all too easily decides she has to kill Anya in Season 7’s “Selfless.” Being a bad-ass Vengeance Demon notorious across numerous hell dimensions, Anya is nowhere near as harmless as the bunnies she has an illogical phobia of. Her confrontation with Buffy is vicious, and bloody, and is without a doubt one fight we’re really not rooting for Buffy to win.

Vengeance Demon Anya

Anya’s devastation after being jilted at the altar by Xander guts her emotionally. When she renews her status as a Vengeance Demon, it’s driven by desolation and grief. Like a lost soul she is doomed to meander through Sunnydale with no sense of purpose after her excruciating break-up with the love of her life, and finally resorts to her work as her only source of pride and fulfilment. The fact that that happens to include administering gory punishment to insensitive frat boys serves first to show the ravages her soul has endured – but subsequently her compassion when she bargains for them to be brought back to life.

Similarly Xander is all too aware of how painful the repercussions of his commitment-phobia are, and pleads with Buffy not to kill his one true love. When Buffy tells him she faced this problem when she stabbed Angel way back in Season 2, I can’t be the only one that felt she had milked that drama one time too many! And here’s why … To compare that relationship with Xander and Anya’s is immature at best, and delusional at worst. Xander and Anya move in together. They get engaged. They profess their love for one another openly. They plan to have children. They can spend whole days together without apocalypse as an excuse. And most importantly of all, they have lots and lots of sex.

Their physical connection, their delight in carnal intimacy, their inappropriate lustful outbursts are demonstrations that Anya and Xander are a grown-up couple. To compare the adult subtleties of the way they relate to one another with the doomed fairytale of Buffy’s teenage love affair shows a complete lack of empathy and understanding on Buffy’s part. She has no idea what it is like to experience love of the kind Anya and Xander share: where it isn’t “end-of-the-world” urgency all the time! Her response to Xander’s pleas with, “I am the law,” before leaving to kill fellow Scooby, Anya, out of some presumed sense of morality simply reeks of arrogance.

Thankfully, Anya survives Buffy’s assault, and in doing so she gives her a glimmer of insight into the lengths love, and not responsibility, will drive a person to. Amazing that after the show’s most exhilarating confrontation of all, she’d need a reminder of that, but it’s a lesson Buffy clearly doesn’t learn easily.

Buffy vs Willow: replacing “and” with “vs” surely never had a more devastatingly exciting depiction onscreen!

As one of the most popular characters, and with an incredibly complex character arc, Willow is arguably the reason why I love this show so much! Endlessly patient and studious throughout Seasons 1 and 2, over time Willow transforms into the embodiment of the “Woman Scorned” becoming a murderous and merciless master of dark magic in Season 6. In this gothic incarnation of unrestrained power Willow expresses all the suppressed frustrations she’s endured as Buffy’s “sideman.” She flaunts her strength, exhibits her magical prowess and becomes the personification of her enraged emotions. There’s a cathartic thrill at seeing someone previously so meek rebel. Countless times over numerous episodes we watch Willow put her own dramas to one side to prioritise Buffy’s needs, but with the death of Willow’s soul-mate she finally lets her instincts take over. Right or wrong lose significance and at last, Willow’s emotional needs are given priority – that she almost destroys the world in the process doesn’t say much for Buffy’s ability to empathise with her dearest friends!

Dark Willow

So whilst Buffy can defeat demons and save the world over and over, her emotional detachment and self-righteous sense of martyrdom (have some humility woman!) make these fights she doesn’t actually win, absolutely crucial to the Series’ greatness. Ultimately that’s why I find it hard not to let out a little yelp of glee when Dark Willow declares, “You really need to have every square inch of your ass kicked.” Faith, Willow and Anya teach Buffy to lose the ego and remember what she’s really fighting for, and that’s feminism in action right there.

*I am no mathematician, and it is testament to my love for Buffy that I actually worked this out.

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Gabriella Apicella is a feminist writer and tutor living in London, England. She has a degree in Film and Media from Birkbeck College, University of London, is on the board of Script Development organisation Euroscript, and in 2010 co-founded the UnderWire Festival that aims to recognise the raw filmmaking talent of women. Her writing features women in the central roles, and she has been commissioned to write short films, experimental theatre and prose for independent directors and artists.