Tag: Women in Television

Why We Need Leslie Knope and What Her Election on ‘Parks and Rec’ Means for Women and Girls

Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) in Parks and Recreation
Written by Megan Kearns. 
When I grow up, I want to be Leslie Knope. It’s no secret I love Parks and Recreation. A female-fronted series with a hilarious ensemble cast that’s the most feminist show on TV? C’mon, how could I not? It’s easy to write off Parks and Rec as a quirky and brilliant comedy. Yet it’s so much more than that. It broke ground revealing the highs and lows of political office and showing an intelligent, upbeat, passionate woman can not only run for office but win.
Inspired by The Wire’s portrayal of politics (another reason to love it even more!), it depicts local government in the small town Pawnee, revolving around the indomitable Leslie Knope. Amy Poehler (who happens to be one of my fave feminist celebs) anchors the show with her fantastic portrayal of the waffles-loving leader.With Leslie Knope’s win, women and girls see that women can become leaders. She helps normalize the image of female politicians, showing us that it’s not strange — rather it’s routine — for a woman to strive for political office. She allows us to dream of impacting change through politics. She tells us that it’s okay for women to be powerful.
Not only do we see a female politician. We see a FEMINIST female politician. And I can’t think of a more overtly feminist character on TV. Period.
Always striving to empower women and girls, Leslie started Camp Athena, a program for teen girls and the gender-bending Pawnee Goddesses, an originally all-girls (and later co-ed) girl scouts-esque group. When judging a beauty pageant, Leslie brilliantly brought “her own laminated scorecard with categories including “Knowledge of herstory” and “The Naomi Wolf factor.” She started “Galentine’s Day” for her lady friends to celebrate each other and how they don’t need men. Forever dreaming of running for office, Leslie idolizes strong women leaders posting pictures of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Madeline Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Janet Reno, and Nancy Pelosi. Leslie aspires to become the first female president of the United States. Did I mention she constructed a Geraldine Ferraro action figure? From a popsicle stick?? Priceless.
Parks and Rec continues the lady power by revolving around a female friendship. Creators Greg Daniels and Michael Schur conceived the show to focus on Leslie and Ann Perkins’ friendship. Fitting as Amy Poehler and Rashida Jones are real-life friends. In an age where you see women catty and backbiting towards one another or the Smurfette principle with only one woman in the cast, it’s great to see several women who not only get along but support one another’s goals.
But Parks and Rec skyrocketed into the feminist stratosphere when it featured Leslie’s decision to run for city council, her campaign and her win.
In “I’m Leslie Knope,” Leslie declares, “I’ve been dreaming of running for public office my whole life.” While other girls played with Barbies, Leslie had her trusty Geraldine Ferraro action figure (I cannot express just how much I love this). Leslie makes campaign speeches in her sleep and declares her campaign slogan “Knope We Can’t Not,” a hilarious riffs on President Obama’s slogan. We see Leslie participate in the usual campaign tasks such as field and GOTV (get out the vote), fundraising and debating. And her position on Egyptian debt relief.
Leslie chooses her career over a man…twice. In season 2, when she’s dating Louis C.K., he asks Leslie to move with him but she decides to stay in Pawnee for her career. Then in season 4’s premiere, Leslie must choose whether or not to break up with adorbs Ben in order to pursue her dream of running for office. And she chooses her career. We so rarely see this on TV. It’s so refreshing for a woman to put her work and herself first instead of a man.
During Leslie’s debates, not only is abortion mentioned (“I think we should all just have a good time”…thanks Bobby Newport!) but a commentary on sexism in politics arises too. Brandy, a city council candidate and former porn star, looks eerily similar to Leslie from her hairstyle to her clothes. She continuously compares herself to Leslie. Then the moderator even says they really are the same. It’s a funny commentary on how some people lump women candidates together as a monolithic force. You know, that we women are all the same because of our gender.
Leslie had to contend with her campaign manager leaving after she came forward with her relationship with Ben Wyatt, dirty spin tactics and even a smear campaign as she was accused of killing puppies (???) when the animal shelter closed due to her negotiation reallocating funds for the Parks Department. Each of these issues is dealt with humorously (duh). What’s surprising is that in a strange way — with its illustration of the hurdles women face and can overcome — Parks and Rec’s portrayal of Leslie Knope’s campaign might just be the most honest depiction of a campaign ever.
When Leslie responds to the lewd photos sent to all the female city hall workers, she tells reporter Perd Hapley, “When men in government behave this way, they betray the public’s trust. Maybe it’s time for more women to be in charge.”
Yes, yes it is time.
President Allison Taylor in 24, President Mac Allen in Commander in Chief, President Laura Roslin in Battlestar Galactica — we’ve never had a female president yet TV shows have imagined its reality. Currently, Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Vice President Selena Meyer in the female-fronted political satire Veep. While we’ve seen a handful of women as elected leaders on-screen, we’ve never seen a female candidate’s political campaign from start to finish. Until now. This season, audiences witnessed the campaigns of Modern Family’s Claire Dunphy and Parks and Rec’s Leslie Knope, both running for city council.
I was thrilled we had not one but two women running for office! Claire’s campaign for city council mostly took a back seat, only appearing in 3 episodes. And she lost. Although it was great to see her run at all. But Leslie’s campaign remained the crux of the 4th season.Hopefully, when we see more women leaders run for elected office on-screen, we’ll see more women running for off-screen.
For several years, I worked at a women’s center at Harvard University, coordinating a political training program for female grad students. Female political candidates face unique challenges and obstacles. Some women are reticent to run because they worry about fundraising (many women have no problem asking for money as activists yet have trouble when it comes to asking for money for themselves) and facing sexism in the media and the ridiculous scrutiny on their appearance. Women often have to be asked to run for office whereas men just run. Women often perceive that they need more training, more experience, regardless of their actual qualifications.
But I think there’s another reason women don’t run.
You can’t be what you can’t see. If little girls don’t see any female politicians in the media — in books, film and TV — it becomes that much harder for them to envision themselves as leaders or even knowing that politics is a potential path. If no politicians look like you — although having Hillary Clinton run for president and Sarah Palin as a Vice Presidential candidate certainly helped — it’s extremely difficult to imagine you can lead.
We need even more women to run for office, advocating for greater equity. Women must fight harder to prove themselves and their worth, due to their small numbers and societal expectations. Female politicians often submit more legislation and tend to advocate more for abortion, education and healthcare. They see the world from a different vantage point than men. When women sit at the table of the decision-making process, a greater diversity of voices and perspectives are heard.
Women overwhelmingly won this record-breaking election. With 20 women in the Senate and at least 77 women in the House, a historic number of women will serve in Congress. It will be the most diverse Congress in history. Additionally, with President Obama’s re-election, gay marriage passed in 4 states, and an anti-abortion amendment failing in Florida — all these successes struck a massive blow to the GOP’s onslaught of attacks against women, gay rights and reproductive rights.And I think feminist humor played a small yet vital role in the 2012 elections, spreading awareness about inequality.
As we’ve already seen in her brief term as City Councillor, Leslie has advocated for clean parks, passed a soda tax and fought back against abstinence-only education. As Diane Shipley points out in her must-read Bitch Flicks article on Leslie Knope:
“Leslie Knope *is* amazing. Over the course of three seasons, she’s gone from a small-time, small-town government employee with delusions of grandeur to someone it’s easy to believe could make a big splash on the larger political stage one day. I hope she does, and I hope we get to see it. What’s more, the popularity of her character signals an important change, a backlash against the backlash: the mainstream acceptance of a heroine who lives by feminist values and encourages others to do the same.”
Looking at the two comedies featuring women in political office on right now, Veep satirizes government, mocking politicians and their staff’s incompetency. While Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the rest of the ensemble are hilarious, I sometimes cringe as I want to see a woman in a position of power succeed. But with Leslie, you never doubt for one moment she can’t do exactly what she sets out to accomplish. And you never doubt she will stand up for women everywhere.
We need to see more depictions of women politicians. With Parks and Rec, not only do we see that women can and do run for office, but they can win. Leslie shows us that women can confidently follow their dreams and turn them into reality. As my friend and fellow writer Molly McCaffrey said to me:
“Watching Leslie win felt like a victory for not only women but people who care about the world.”
Now if only we had more Leslie Knopes in the world. With women and girls watching, we just might.

Megan Kearns is a Bitch Flicks Staff Writer, a freelance writer and a feminist vegan blogger. She tweets at @OpinionessWorld.

Quote of the Day: Screenwriter/Director Callie Khouri Weighs In On How TV Friendlier to Women

Callie Khouri

In a recent interview with Salon, Academy Award-winner Callie Khouri weighed in on how TV seems to be more friendly to shows about women. Khouri (who wrote Thelma and Louise for that Oscar) is the writer and producer for ABC’s new musical drama Nashville.
Salon asked her about television telling women’s stories and Khouri responded with thoughts that articulate the difficulties in writing feature films about women (adding that “I don’t think any studio in a million years would make Thelma and Louise right now”), and how to properly write stories once you get the green light.

Salon: People who make TV also seem much more comfortable making shows for women than people making movies do.

Khouri: “Because you’re allowed. You’re allowed to make things for women on television and there’s not like … you don’t have to go through the humiliation of having made something directed at women. There it’s just accepted, whereas if it’s a feature, it’s like “So, talk to me about chick flicks.” … I just think it’s insulting that if there is something with women in it, it’s relegated to this kind of trash heap. It doesn’t matter what it is, how good it is, if there is emotion in it, it’s immediately going to be talked down to. And I’m obviously irritated by that. Probably all women are. Certainly a lot of women filmmakers are.…Anyway, I don’t want to just complain about features, but it does seem unduly hard given the number of women that exist in the world.”

On the show not being “about a catfight,” even though it starts out that way:

Khouri: “…You come at things from the place where everybody thinks they know everything about what they are seeing. And then you just slowly peel back the layers until you’ve got very complicated human beings with very different sets of problems, all of them doing something that’s impossibly hard to begin with and trying to make their place in this world. Watching two women go at it is boring. There are so many other shows where you can get that. I want it to be about something more than that.”

The depth and breadth of female characters on TV is stunning right now. Whether the female is the protagonist (Homeland, The Mindy Project, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, etc.) or females are strong supporting characters (Boardwalk Empire, Sons of Anarchy, etc.), women’s stories on TV are becoming much less of an anomaly.
Women on the big screen, however… well, we still see a distinct difference, as Khouri notes, between “chick flicks” and “Hollywood blockbusters.” This is why the Bechdel Test has to exist; it’s rare for a film to place value on women’s stories and anything that might, as Khouri says, have “emotion in it.” 
As she goes on to observe, to properly tell women’s stories you have to “slowly peel back the layers” after presenting the audience with a stereotype. Perhaps that’s why it’s easier to do in TV — the sheer time that TV writers have to lure audiences in with character development and storytelling.
It seems Hollywood’s two hours, more or less, just aren’t enough to properly “peel back the layers.”  Are women’s stories really that much more complicated than men’s? Or is the “otherness” of women just so ingrained that a writer would need a few hours to first deconstruct the stereotypes and cultural myths that the audience walks in with?
Whatever the case may be, Khouri is right. This double standard is “unduly hard given the number of women that exist in the world.” Their stories are being showcased in the private sphere of the home, but they just can’t seem to break through to the public big screen. It’s time for that to change.

—

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

Quote of the Day: Screenwriter/Director Callie Khouri Weighs In On How TV Is Friendlier to Women

Callie Khouri

In a recent interview with Salon, Academy Award-winner Callie Khouri weighed in on how TV seems to be more friendly to shows about women. Khouri (who wrote Thelma and Louise for that Oscar) is the writer and producer for ABC’s new musical drama Nashville.
Salon asked her about television telling women’s stories and Khouri responded with thoughts that articulate the difficulties in writing feature films about women (adding that “I don’t think any studio in a million years would make Thelma and Louise right now”), and how to properly write stories once you get the green light.

Salon: People who make TV also seem much more comfortable making shows for women than people making movies do.

Khouri: “Because you’re allowed. You’re allowed to make things for women on television and there’s not like … you don’t have to go through the humiliation of having made something directed at women. There it’s just accepted, whereas if it’s a feature, it’s like “So, talk to me about chick flicks.” … I just think it’s insulting that if there is something with women in it, it’s relegated to this kind of trash heap. It doesn’t matter what it is, how good it is, if there is emotion in it, it’s immediately going to be talked down to. And I’m obviously irritated by that. Probably all women are. Certainly a lot of women filmmakers are.…Anyway, I don’t want to just complain about features, but it does seem unduly hard given the number of women that exist in the world.”

On the show not being “about a catfight,” even though it starts out that way:

Khouri: “…You come at things from the place where everybody thinks they know everything about what they are seeing. And then you just slowly peel back the layers until you’ve got very complicated human beings with very different sets of problems, all of them doing something that’s impossibly hard to begin with and trying to make their place in this world. Watching two women go at it is boring. There are so many other shows where you can get that. I want it to be about something more than that.”

The depth and breadth of female characters on TV is stunning right now. Whether the female is the protagonist (Homeland, The Mindy Project, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, etc.) or females are strong supporting characters (Boardwalk Empire, Sons of Anarchy, etc.), women’s stories on TV are becoming much less of an anomaly.
Women on the big screen, however… well, we still see a distinct difference, as Khouri notes, between “chick flicks” and “Hollywood blockbusters.” This is why the Bechdel Test has to exist; it’s rare for a film to place value on women’s stories and anything that might, as Khouri says, have “emotion in it.” 
As she goes on to observe, to properly tell women’s stories you have to “slowly peel back the layers” after presenting the audience with a stereotype. Perhaps that’s why it’s easier to do in TV — the sheer time that TV writers have to lure audiences in with character development and storytelling.
It seems Hollywood’s two hours, more or less, just aren’t enough to properly “peel back the layers.”  Are women’s stories really that much more complicated than men’s? Or is the “otherness” of women just so ingrained that a writer would need a few hours to first deconstruct the stereotypes and cultural myths that the audience walks in with?
Whatever the case may be, Khouri is right. This double standard is “unduly hard given the number of women that exist in the world.” Their stories are being showcased in the private sphere of the home, but they just can’t seem to break through to the public big screen. It’s time for that to change.

—

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

Why I Love ‘Adventure Time’

Title Screen for Adventure Time
Warning: Spoilers up to the end of Season 3

Adventure Time is a Cartoon Network animated series that combines surrealistic comedy, fantasy and science-fiction. Based on a 2008 short by Pendleton Ward that went viral, it parodies the tropes, archetypes and cliches of fairy tales, video games and childhood action figure battles. The basic premise is about Finn, the last remaining human, and his best friend/adoptive brother Jake (a shape-shifting dog), going on your typical slay-the-monster-save-the-princess adventures. Now in its fourth season, it’s an enormous hit with all genders and age groups and shows no signs of slowing down. And let me tell you, as a feminist, why I am absolutely celebrating this show.

The main cast of Adventure Time
  • Almost every female character is a princess, but the typical cliche Damsel In Distress and/or romance-obsessed girly-girl are parodied and subverted for all they’re worth. In several instances, the princess characters (Bubblegum especially) show little interest in romance, and far more interest in their own personal hobbies. Even more encouraging is that often the female characters are completely able to rescue themselves, and don’t need Finn & Jake’s help.
  • The characters are given genuine honest-to-goodness flaws. Finn is heroic, but has a terrible bad temper and an impulsive streak. Jake is easygoing, but not nearly as clever or level-headed as he thinks he is. Princess Bubblegum is a scientific genius, but can be incredibly callous about the feelings of others. Marceline is a talented musician, but also has deep insecurities about how her friends perceive her. Flame Princess is astoundingly powerful, but also has dangerously passionate emotions. In all of these cases, there’s no black and white morality. It’s an important lesson for children (since this is a children’s show) to present morality as it really is – in shades of grey.
  • I love all the female characters, including the gender flipped versions of Finn and Jake, Fionna and Cake. My main complaint with the series is that the female characters don’t appear nearly often enough, and especially not together. We eventually do get some Bechdel Test passing goodness (Bubblegum and Marceline don’t get along too well – and people have naturally interpreted this as sexual tension) but so far the three main female characters have not yet all appeared in the same story together. I suspect that the main reason for this is because each story is about 11-12 minutes in total, and there’s only so much time for introducing characters and conflicts.
Jake stretching around the other main cast members
  • Speaking of Fionna and Cake, I can see now why that episode is so astoundingly popular amongst the fandom. It’s easily my favourite one of the series. Fionna is an absolutely adorable character – slightly chubby instead of unrealistically slender, tomboyish instead of traditionally feminine, and she still retains her male counterpart’s bravery and heroicism. She still fights with a sword. For my fellow gamers, think of all the games you’ve played in which a female character is a sword fighter. Not very many, right? But there’s no reason they can’t, and this is one thing I really love about the gender flip episode. I also practically exploded with joy at the final scene where Fionna talks about how she has lots of guy friends, but isn’t interested in/isn’t ready to date them, and that there’s nothing wrong with that. THANK YOU. It’s incredibly frustrating how many people think that somehow something is missing if you don’t have an official romantic partner, or that men and women can’t have a platonic friendship. Shippers could do well to remember this – you can like someone without wanting to bang them. (Also, as a Sailor Moon fan, you can’t imagine my joy at seeing Fionna’s ballgown homage to Princess Serenity’s outfit) At any rate, I hope the Gender Swap episodes happen on a regular basis, rather than a once-a-season deal. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had more shows about an ass-kicking girl and her feline best friend? (*coughcoughSailorMooncoughcough*)
  • This is a fairly obvious point, but I really love how Princess Bubblegum’s interest in science is depicted. She’s an absolute genius – shattering the still pervasive stereotype that the sciences are the domain of men – and she also bucks the stereotype that nerdy/geeky people are unable to have fun or to relate to others. Similarly, Marceline’s interest in punk/indie rock also combats the stereotype that rock is a genre made by and for the enjoyment of men. Girls like to headbang too!
  • The Christmas special, which reveals that pseudo-antagonist Ice King was actually a human antique dealer driven insane by his find of a magic crown, is an interesting way of approaching and explaining his very archetypal tendency to kidnap and try to marry princesses. In the Ice King’s case, it’s not so much a wanting to stick to traditional fairy tale gender roles, but a manifestation of his grief over losing the fiance he used to nickname “Princess.” The Ice King is primarily a comic character, but this episode finally established him as being tragic.
Fionna and Cake
  • I appreciated that, for once, romantic tensions are resolved rather than dragged on, and on, and on, and on. They make it clear that while Princess Bubblegum likes Finn as a person, she feels she’s too old for him, and her sometimes callous treatment of his feelings proves that she isn’t the right partner for him. Flame Princess isn’t the perfect girlfriend either, but at least in their case, Finn and Flame got together very quickly, changing the romantic plotline from “Will they or won’t they?” to “What happens now they’ve got together?” I also like that Jake and Lady Rainicorn’s relationship is loving, positive, literally interracial, and well…adult. (Lady Rainicorn’s dialogue is only in Korean, and bilingual viewers have revealed she says some incredibly raunchy things that only Jake can understand)
  • In the “Memory of a Memory” episode, Marceline’s (ex) boyfriend tries to bully her into traditional gender roles. He even pulls the “Go back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich” bit. She finds out he tried to trick her, and kicks his ass. (Also, dear men who think this joke is funny: Wow. You’re original. YES I AM GOING TO GO IN THE KITCHEN AND I’M GOING TO MAKE LOTS OF DELICIOUS FOOD WHICH YOU CAN’T HAVE.)
  • In some ways, other than Marceline, Lumpy Space Princess is my favourite character. She is absolutely hilarious as a sassy valley girl type who, by most accounts, should not be as confident about her body and her sexiness as she “should” be. After all, she’s literally a purple ball of lumps. But this is an important message – you DON’T have to match cultural standards of beauty to be sexy. It’s all about confidence. I’m a fatass, and I’m friggin’ sexy if I do say so myself. And in her own way, LSP is sexy too. At least to fellow Space Lumps.
Finn
  • The show just keeps getting better every season. The quality of animation has spiked, the character arcs are realistic and well-defined, and the storylines are mature without losing their comedic edge. I’m absolutely hooked on this series, and it’s a refreshing feeling that this year, along with Gravity Falls, I got to watch some great new children’s shows that deserve every bit of praise they receive.
  • Lastly, I love the sense of humour in the show. I’ve always been a fan of surrealism, as well as referential humour. And I’m also a big fan of fart jokes, like the one where Jake morphs himself into a farting cheetah. I’m 25 years old, and fart jokes are still funny.

Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and tweets with reckless pottymouthed abandon at @SoapboxingGeek.

Counterreading ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’

Reality television has never held much appeal for me. I get plenty of reality in reality, thanks – I like my TV fictional. Besides, hasn’t the last decade or more of respectable journalism assured me, in the shrillest possible tones, that reality TV is the very lowest form of entertainment, positively reveling in the filth of humanity’s worst, most voyeuristic excesses: a Coliseum for the digital age?
SATIRE!!!1111!1
Even without watching it myself, I’ve become less and less comfortable with the traditional critiques of reality TV as I’ve sharpened my critical apparatus. For a start, it seems predicated on the notion of a hierarchy of art, the assumption that some forms of entertainment are somehow innately higher or better than others. It’s a terribly condescending form of knee-jerk moralizing.And if you don’t ever watch it, it’s a bit presumptuous to be judgmental about the whole genre.
I’ve tried to stay in the moral middle ground, having no real opinion on reality TV other than that it’s not for me. I’d likely have continued my reality-TV-free existence, had it not been for this excellent piece at the incomparable Womanist Musings.
Renee and Sparky watched TLC’s infamous Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, the reality show about six-year-old beauty pageant contestant Alana and her working-class Georgia family, and their reaction was not necessarily what you’d expect. They make many terrific points about how repugnant the show is as a piece of television, how it “other[s the family] at every turn,” but they also offer an invaluable counterreading. They like this family – the four daughters aged between six and seventeen, the quiet father figure, and heroic matriarch June – and they’ll continue to like them, no matter what the show’s structure seems to want us to think.
I love them all, but “Pumpkin” is my favorite.
If you consume entertainment and have any conscience at all, you are a practiced counterreader. You have to be, if you’re going to stand up to the hateful kyriarchal bullshit with which 21st-century westerners are bombarded every minute of the day. All responsible entertainment consumption requires a risk assessment, weighing the potential value to be gained against the potential harm to be done, and everybody’s evaluation is slightly different. For one person, well-rounded white female characters but no characters of color is worth the trade-off; for another, it simply isn’t. And sometimes performing an adequate counterreading requires you to marshal all your critical resources.
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is not a text that welcomes counterreadings with open arms. Operating well within the established format of reality television, it utilizes an arsenal of techniques – both subtle and not so much – to impel voyeurism. TLC makes it very, very easy to sneer at and judge Honey Boo Boo and her family. You have to work quite hard to counteract this compulsion. You really have to be on the critical ball the whole time. And is that okay?
All summer the debate has raged as to whether, or to what extent, the show is exploitative. Having watched all of it inside of a week, I’m still undecided. There are moments when June and the girls express a self-awareness and a confidence that has me cheering them to the skies, sure that their assertions of not caring what people think of them are sincere. At times, though – especially when outsiders arebrought in to interact with the family, an etiquette teacher or a pedicurist, and get all flustered and shocked by them – the whole thing seems enormously exploitative and gross.
It’s this indeterminacy, this openness to a multiplicity of different interpretations, that has the national conversation about Honey Boo Boo going so fiercely. As Time’s James Poniewozik observes:
…overall, she has a kind of sassy sweetness to her. In the second episode, she gets a pet teacup pig as consolation for losing a pageant and decides to dress him as a girl, which she says will make him gay. The ensuing argument with her older sister is both ridiculous and oddly wise in a 6-year-old way: “It’s not gonna be gay.” “Yes it is, because we’re making it a girl pig! And it’s actually a boy pig!” “O.K., but it’s not gonna be gay.” “It can if it wants to. You can’t tell that pig what to do.”
You can’t tell that pig what to do. See, you can look at that scene, like you can most of Honey Boo Boo, several ways. You can laugh at the intensity of Alana’s conviction that she’s right. You can tut-tut at the gender-role signals this pageant girl must be getting to conclude that you can “make” someone or something gay by dressing it in girl clothes. But you can also see something kind of remarkable in it: a little country girl, whatever confusion and misinformation she has in her mind, fervently arguing a teacup pig’s right to determine its own sexual identity.
AWWW
There are plenty of other interesting aspects of this show (Salon considers the race angle; Slate tackles the class issue), but the two that can’t be ignored are the gender dynamic and the class factor. The gender dynamic is pretty glorious: five strong, opinionated women who love each other deeply and don’t take anyone’s shit. They do what they want to do, they look how they want to look, and they are happy. Dare I suggest that one of the reasons the country’s spent its summer in thrall to these people is that we just don’t see women like this in our scripted entertainment?
Of course, it’s rare to see poor white people portrayed sympathetically on US TV at all. My understanding of class in the US is much less nuanced than my understanding of the British class system, but I’m aware of this country’s distaste for its own working poor. “Rednecks” appear in the media as rapists, as racists, as the butt of jokes and the object of revulsion. Voyeurism and disgust motivate hate-watching in our culture to an obscene degree, and that is why I think it’s important to perform a counterreading, to celebrate this family and refuse to let your responses be dictated by classism and hatred. If you want to be truly horrified by your fellow humans, check outthe comments on this Gawker article (I hope you have a strong stomach). To me, this is the aspect of Honey Boo Boo that’s truly awful – not a happy family letting a camera crew into their lives in exchange for some money they surely need, but the legions of haters who judge Honey Boo Boo and her family to be less human, less worthy of dignity and respect for their life choices, than themselves.
The family certainly does not reciprocate that sentiment. Even in the throes of labor agony, when asked, “Do you recommend to anybody else to get pregnant at 17?”, oldest daughter Anna replies, “Do whatever you want to do.” She just refuses to tell anyone else what to do with their body or their life. The rest of America – from legislators to judgmental internet commenters – could learn something from her.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Why I’ve Fallen in Love with ‘New Girl’

The main cast of New Girl

I’m not sure what’s happened, but I have fallen head over heels in love with FOX’s New Girl. I devoured the first season within a week and immediately caught up on the first few episodes of season two. 

New Girl wasn’t a show I ever planned on watching. I actually like Zooey Deschanel, but I didn’t feel like I needed to see half an hour of her “adorkable” antics every week. The initial ads also made me believe that this show was going to be about a weird woman-child who moved in with three men who would eventually either a) pull a My Fair Lady on her and craft her into a more normal human being, or b) come to appreciate the quirky elf magic of this manic pixie dream girl and learn how to live their lives, or c) both of the above. Then one of them would fall in love with her, and they’d have a “She saved him back” moment from Pretty Woman, and they’d live manically and pixie-like forever after.
Well, this goes to show how marketing can be misleading, because New Girl is not that show at all. 
Jess (Zooey Deschanel), Nick (Jake Johnson), Schmidt (Max Greenfield), and Winston (Lamorne Morris)
Yes, the first few episodes were largely about Zooey’s character Jess moving in and the male friends adjusting to her personality, but soon, the audience was introduced to the weirder sides of Nick, Winston, and Schmidt, and we quickly saw that this was a group of people who are all freaky oddballs. Sure, Jess makes up her own theme songs and speaks in silly accents, but Nick believes that an old man who speaks to him at the bar is himself from the future, Winston gets overly competitive about a middle school bells group, and Schmidt…is Schmidt. 

Sometimes Jess is the voice of reason among the weird people, sometimes she’s the odd one that one of the guys has to rein in, and sometimes, in the very best episodes, the whole gang is completely off the wall. More importantly, Jess  never has to be the mommy to a group of manchildren, and the guys never have to be the condescending Three Men and a Little Lady daddies to a girl-woman. I was afraid of both of those tropes before I started watching of the show, but neither has been the case.

On top of that, New Girl also showcases a female friendship that I find delightful to watch. Jess’s childhood best friend Cece, a confident, gorgeous model, is another main character on the show, and they complement each other perfectly. They’re highly supportive of each other, they share tough love when they need to, and their heartfelt moments are always genuine. When they fight, they fight like real women fight, not like a male fantasy of catty, bitchy women.

One of my favorite episodes of New Girl is “Secrets,” when Schmidt and Cece’s secret relationship becomes known to everyone else in the apartment. Jess is horrified to learn this information, but she’s also hurt that she was the last person to find out, thinking that Cece doesn’t trust her anymore. Cece, meanwhile, was afraid of Jess’s judgment, but was more afraid of admitting that she cared about Schmidt as something more than a hookup. The fight was over by the end of the episode, and there was a refreshing lack of catfight jokes.
Jess makes up with Cece (Hannah Simone)
There was another episode that featured an argument between two women – Jess and Nick’s girlfriend Julia – that was a great commentary on the way women fight when their personalities clash. Julia (Lizzy Caplan) is immediately put off by Jess’s whole persona, assuming that her super-girly attitude is nothing but an act, and feels threatened by Jess’s  place in Nick’s life:

“I know that I’m the mean lawyer girl who wears suits and works too much, and you – you’re the really fun teacher girl with all the colorful skirts, and you bake things, and eventually Nick will come running to you, and you’ll tuck him in under his blankie.”

This ends in an argument where Julia flat-out admits that she doesn’t like Jess and quietly asks her to go away so she can cry in the bathroom. Jess doesn’t want to leave because then she won’t have anywhere to cry, but runs into the men’s bathroom to see Nick crying, and is then forced to cry in the hallway. 

The sequence is hilarious and I watched it several times, but I also thought the scene, and the episode in general, was a great portrayal of how women sometimes misunderstand each other. Julia sees Jess as a threat because Jess is the living embodiment of the bubbly feminine stereotype that male writers use and re-use and over-use in their navel-gazing stories. Julia’s not being fair to Jess, but her feelings are more than understandable. Our society gives us such a narrow definition of how to be a woman that it’s easy to have knee-jerk feelings of resentment towards women who are more traditionally feminine, even if we know it’s irrational.
Julia (Lizzy Caplan) and Jess – two clashing personalities
And by the end of the episode, Jess and Julia have put their issues aside and bonded over some girl time crocheting. They’re not suddenly best friends, but they’re cool with each other, and it was so refreshing to see two women put aside their differences without a) showing any underlying cattiness, or b) turning the show into a Hallmark card. 

The show isn’t perfect, of course. The writers broke up Schmidt and Cece much too quickly, almost as though they bought into the idea that happy couples are never funny. Winston as a character still isn’t as clearly defined as the other three roommates, even though Lamorne Morris is a very funny actor. And as a former teacher, I’m perplexed as to why Jess has to quit teaching entirely after getting laid off from one school, instead of, I don’t know, trying to find a job at a different school, like most teachers do. But despite its flaws, I love New Girl for introducing me to this group of weird people and treating all of its characters with respect and affection. 
Did you think I would write a whole post about New Girl without a reference to the douchebag jar?

Quote of the Day: Nico Lang On Gaycism

A month ago, Lauren Bans coined the term gaycism, defined as “the wrongheaded idea that having gay characters gives you carte blanche to cut PC corners elsewhere.” Bans fingered the sitcoms Modern Family, The New Normal, Partners, and Two Broke Girls as major offenders.
The case of Two Broke Girls is especially frustrating. I want to see a show centering on two women who have ambitions beyond the romantic. I want to see an awesome show about female friendship which tackles class and economic issues and has characters of color. I want to watch and like that show; Two Broke Girls is not that show.
Two Broke Girls is like your white gay friend who thinks he’s entitled to say whatever he pleases because he’s been oppressed, so he’s allowed to oppress other people and call it being an “equal opportunity offender.”  He’s earned the right to be a racist, insensitive asshole, because I guess he asked Audre Lorde and she said it was okay?

Lang also criticizes The New Normal, which comes to us from the mind of Glee‘s Ryan Murphy:

Remember hipster racism?  This is that turned up to 11, like Murphy throwing a big blackface party on TV.  However, the biggest issue with pointing it out is that people often don’t realize that such “ironic racism” is still just racism.  And what actually makes the show’s gaycism so doubly troubling is that the act of being systemically oppressed should make people more aware of the ways in which they have the ability to marginalize others, because they have experienced the same thing themselves.

Read the whole piece; it’s great, and full of links to other great pieces.
Television right now is a bitter disappointment. It gives with one hand while taking away with the other. You can have a show about female friendship, but only if it’s full of racist stereotypes. You can have a show about gay parents, but only if it’s crammed with racist jokes. You can have one nice thing, but only if it’s garnished with horribleness.
My television will be intersectional or it will be bullshit. This year, the networks seem to have picked bullshit.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Ross and Rachel’s Caustic Rom-Com Conventions

Ross (David Schwimmer) and Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) after the infamous drunk-dial

I recently indulged in some Friends-related nostalgia with a good pal of mine over a rainy weekend. We took fifteen episodes over two days and I was reminded why I was obsessed with this show during my first two years in high school. I loved Chandler, Lisa Kudrow, the chemistry among the cast members, Chandler, the way the show made typical sitcom cliches seem original and funny, the “comfort food” nature of the show, and Chandler. 

One thing I did NOT love was the aspect of Friends that most people were obsessed with: the on-again, off-again relationship of the TV sitcom supercouple, Ross and Rachel.

I’ve spent some time looking at different romantic comedies and the cliches that are used and re-used in cookie-cutter scripts, and I finally pinpointed the reason why Ross and Rachel always bothered me as a couple: over ten years (seriously, ten years!) of a will-they-or-won’t-they relationship, they managed to cover almost every single one of my least favorite rom-com cliches.

“WE WERE ON A BREAK!” in five, four, three…

He loves her. She’s oblivious until he’s with someone else, and then he’s oblivious. In the pilot episode of the series, Ross tells Rachel that he had a crush on her since high school, and she admits that she already knew. He asks her if he could ask her out sometime, and she seems receptive to the idea, and it’s a cute moment between them.

But we can’t have something as simple as a man asking out a woman in episode two, her saying yes, and seeing the two of them date over time and eventually fall in love, now can we? No, we must insert drama and other complications. In this case, this drama results in Rachel conveniently forgetting that Ross liked her and becoming completely oblivious while he mooned after her for an entire season, making her look stupid and unobservant and him look pathetic. When she re-learns that he has a crush on her, she decides that she likes him too, but whoops – he’s moved onto someone else, and now, instead of a season of Ross whining, we’re treated to six episodes of Rachel being jealous and bratty to his new girlfriend.

When Ross is pining for Rachel, he’s a whiner. When Rachel is pining for Ross, she’s a jealous brat. Why am I supposed to root for them to get together?

Rachel hangs up the phone while Ross is talking to Julie

“We’re still in love (during season premieres and season finales).” Unfortunately, this “we only like each other when we’re with other people” trend doesn’t end after the second season. Ross and Rachel finally date, and then they break up, and then Rachel realizes that she’s still in love with Ross when he moves onto Phoebe’s friend Bonnie. Then she realizes she’s still in love with Ross, again, at the end of the fourth season and runs off to ruin his wedding. She tells him she still loves him at the beginning of season five, but then gets over it for some reason. Then they get married in Las Vegas at the end of the fifth season, and Ross doesn’t annul the marriage because it’s implied that he still has feelings for Rachel, but then conveniently forgets about those renewed feelings at around episode six. Then they have a baby together at the end of season eight, and they consider getting back together at the beginning of season nine, but that desire is forgotten by episode two.

Is there something about the months of May and September that make Ross and Rachel fall back in love? Or is there something wrong with my suspension of disbelief, as I simply don’t buy that the same two people can fall in and out of love with each other that many times? 

They had a KID together. A KID. And still didn’t get back together for two stinking years.

Jealousy is romantic. The worst thing that Ross ever did in his relationship with Rachel was become a jealous, possessive jerk after she got a new job. (I consider that worse than his sleeping with the copy-shop girl when he and Rachel “were on a break”). The worst thing that Rachel ever did in her relationship with Ross was run off to England to stop his wedding even though he had happily moved on to someone else.

To be fair, Friends was initially honest about these issues and showed why the characters were in the wrong. Monica criticized Ross for being jealous, and his inability to get over his jealousy cost him his relationship with Rachel. Phoebe (and Hugh Laurie, in a great guest appearance) criticized Rachel for being selfish and wanting to end Ross’s wedding.

But then Ross says Rachel’s name at the altar. And at the end of the series, Rachel chooses Ross over a great new career opportunity in Paris with no apparent job to fall back on.

In the end, it doesn’t matter that Ross lost Rachel when he was jealous, or that Rachel realized it was wrong to break up his wedding. In the end, Ross wins Rachel over her career, and Rachel gets to be with Ross instead of watching him marry someone else. Getting them together in the end seems to retroactively reward them for their previous bad behavior, justifying their actions as okay because they were really in love the whole time!

Ross is jealous. This is a natural state of his.

“Uh-oh. The placeholder love interest is more likable than the endgame couple. I know – we’ll turn them into jerks!” I can’t be the only one who thought Emily was a much better match for Ross than Rachel was. Ross and Emily had more in common than Ross and Rachel and he was more likable when he was around Emily – more genuinely romantic, more energetic, and she seemed to appreciate his geeky side more than Rachel did.

This was not a good thing for the Friends writers, apparently. Ross and Rachel were meant to be the endgame couple no matter what. The only thing to nip the Ross/Emily relationship in the bud was to turn Emily into a jerk who made him stay away from Rachel and move out of his apartment.

Rachel watches Ross and Emily (Helen Baxendale)

Why did they like each other, anyway? What did Ross and Rachel have in common, aside from being two decent human beings who have the same friends? He had no respect or interest in her career and she had no respect or interest in his. He thought she was selfish and spoiled and she thought he was a geek and an intellectual snob. Yes, opposites sometimes attract, but sometimes I didn’t know why they even liked each other, much less loved each other.

Ross in his tiny T-shirt.

The chase to the airport. They actually had a chase to the airport in the last episode. I mean, really?

“Oh, wait a minute,” you might be saying. “You’re telling me that you weren’t moved by the last scene where they got back together for real?”

Well, of course I was moved. I’m not made of stone, people. She got off the plane!

Yes, I “aww” and I tear up at their last scene together, as ridiculous as it is. To me, that’s a testament to how much Schwimmer and Aniston sold every step of the relationship. No matter how contrived the writing was, they committed to those romantic moments. Sometimes they made me forget how much their relationship got on my nerves. But when I’m re-watching old Friends episodes and indulging in some nostalgia, I tend to fast-forward the dramatic Ross and Rachel scenes, because those are too many cliches for me to handle with one couple.

Chandler and Monica, on the other hand – that’s where the magic was.

They got together – and STAYED together – with very little bullshit! How refreshing.

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.

Ross and Rachel’s Caustic Rom-Com Conventions

Ross (David Schwimmer) and Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) after the infamous drunk-dial

I recently indulged in some Friends-related nostalgia with a good pal of mine over a rainy weekend. We took fifteen episodes over two days and I was reminded why I was obsessed with this show during my first two years in high school. I loved Chandler, Lisa Kudrow, the chemistry among the cast members, Chandler, the way the show made typical sitcom cliches seem original and funny, the “comfort food” nature of the show, and Chandler. 

One thing I did NOT love was the aspect of Friends that most people were obsessed with: the on-again, off-again relationship of the TV sitcom supercouple, Ross and Rachel.

I’ve spent some time looking at different romantic comedies and the cliches that are used and re-used in cookie-cutter scripts, and I finally pinpointed the reason why Ross and Rachel always bothered me as a couple: over ten years (seriously, ten years!) of a will-they-or-won’t-they relationship, they managed to cover almost every single one of my least favorite rom-com cliches.

“WE WERE ON A BREAK!” in five, four, three…

He loves her. She’s oblivious until he’s with someone else, and then he’s oblivious. In the pilot episode of the series, Ross tells Rachel that he had a crush on her since high school, and she admits that she already knew. He asks her if he could ask her out sometime, and she seems receptive to the idea, and it’s a cute moment between them.

But we can’t have something as simple as a man asking out a woman in episode two, her saying yes, and seeing the two of them date over time and eventually fall in love, now can we? No, we must insert drama and other complications. In this case, this drama results in Rachel conveniently forgetting that Ross liked her and becoming completely oblivious while he mooned after her for an entire season, making her look stupid and unobservant and him look pathetic. When she re-learns that he has a crush on her, she decides that she likes him too, but whoops – he’s moved onto someone else, and now, instead of a season of Ross whining, we’re treated to six episodes of Rachel being jealous and bratty to his new girlfriend.

When Ross is pining for Rachel, he’s a whiner. When Rachel is pining for Ross, she’s a jealous brat. Why am I supposed to root for them to get together?

Rachel hangs up the phone while Ross is talking to Julie

“We’re still in love (during season premieres and season finales).” Unfortunately, this “we only like each other when we’re with other people” trend doesn’t end after the second season. Ross and Rachel finally date, and then they break up, and then Rachel realizes that she’s still in love with Ross when he moves onto Phoebe’s friend Bonnie. Then she realizes she’s still in love with Ross, again, at the end of the fourth season and runs off to ruin his wedding. She tells him she still loves him at the beginning of season five, but then gets over it for some reason. Then they get married in Las Vegas at the end of the fifth season, and Ross doesn’t annul the marriage because it’s implied that he still has feelings for Rachel, but then conveniently forgets about those renewed feelings at around episode six. Then they have a baby together at the end of season eight, and they consider getting back together at the beginning of season nine, but that desire is forgotten by episode two.

Is there something about the months of May and September that make Ross and Rachel fall back in love? Or is there something wrong with my suspension of disbelief, as I simply don’t buy that the same two people can fall in and out of love with each other that many times? 

They had a KID together. A KID. And still didn’t get back together for two stinking years.

Jealousy is romantic. The worst thing that Ross ever did in his relationship with Rachel was become a jealous, possessive jerk after she got a new job. (I consider that worse than his sleeping with the copy-shop girl when he and Rachel “were on a break”). The worst thing that Rachel ever did in her relationship with Ross was run off to England to stop his wedding even though he had happily moved on to someone else.

To be fair, Friends was initially honest about these issues and showed why the characters were in the wrong. Monica criticized Ross for being jealous, and his inability to get over his jealousy cost him his relationship with Rachel. Phoebe (and Hugh Laurie, in a great guest appearance) criticized Rachel for being selfish and wanting to end Ross’s wedding.

But then Ross says Rachel’s name at the altar. And at the end of the series, Rachel chooses Ross over a great new career opportunity in Paris with no apparent job to fall back on.

In the end, it doesn’t matter that Ross lost Rachel when he was jealous, or that Rachel realized it was wrong to break up his wedding. In the end, Ross wins Rachel over her career, and Rachel gets to be with Ross instead of watching him marry someone else. Getting them together in the end seems to retroactively reward them for their previous bad behavior, justifying their actions as okay because they were really in love the whole time!

Ross is jealous. This is a natural state of his.

“Uh-oh. The placeholder love interest is more likable than the endgame couple. I know – we’ll turn them into jerks!” I can’t be the only one who thought Emily was a much better match for Ross than Rachel was. Ross and Emily had more in common than Ross and Rachel and he was more likable when he was around Emily – more genuinely romantic, more energetic, and she seemed to appreciate his geeky side more than Rachel did.

This was not a good thing for the Friends writers, apparently. Ross and Rachel were meant to be the endgame couple no matter what. The only thing to nip the Ross/Emily relationship in the bud was to turn Emily into a jerk who made him stay away from Rachel and move out of his apartment.

Rachel watches Ross and Emily (Helen Baxendale)

Why did they like each other, anyway? What did Ross and Rachel have in common, aside from being two decent human beings who have the same friends? He had no respect or interest in her career and she had no respect or interest in his. He thought she was selfish and spoiled and she thought he was a geek and an intellectual snob. Yes, opposites sometimes attract, but sometimes I didn’t know why they even liked each other, much less loved each other.

Ross in his tiny T-shirt.

The chase to the airport. They actually had a chase to the airport in the last episode. I mean, really?

“Oh, wait a minute,” you might be saying. “You’re telling me that you weren’t moved by the last scene where they got back together for real?”

Well, of course I was moved. I’m not made of stone, people. She got off the plane!

Yes, I “aww” and I tear up at their last scene together, as ridiculous as it is. To me, that’s a testament to how much Schwimmer and Aniston sold every step of the relationship. No matter how contrived the writing was, they committed to those romantic moments. Sometimes they made me forget how much their relationship got on my nerves. But when I’m re-watching old Friends episodes and indulging in some nostalgia, I tend to fast-forward the dramatic Ross and Rachel scenes, because those are too many cliches for me to handle with one couple.

Chandler and Monica, on the other hand – that’s where the magic was.

They got together – and STAYED together – with very little bullshit! How refreshing.

Lady T is a 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 www.theresabasile.com.

Quote of the Day: Samhita Mukhopadhyay, from ‘Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life’

Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life

I hate dating. I’m really bad at dating. I meet up with a dude, and I’m usually like “eh” after five minutes, ready to move on. I don’t suffer from a throwing-in-the-towel mentality of sorts, where I’m willing to settle for any dude, just for the sake of filling one of my many supposed obligations as a woman–Finally Finding Love. I’m more of an impossibly-high-standards dater, one who stares at the dude in front of her, like, “You’re obviously not a progressive feminist with a clear understanding of the ramifications the media has on the self-esteem of women and young girls, and you haven’t listed one single female musician or a woman-driven film in your endless list of ‘favorite things’ … so why don’t you get out of my face.” Right?! Bad. At. Dating. 
So I bought Mukhopadhyay’s book to see if it could help me stop being horrible at dating; it definitely helped me think about dating in a different way.
She focuses on the sexist dating advice industry throughout the book, and she writes in the introduction that the book is about “conundrums and confusion; it’s about the contradicting messages we get from popular culture, feminism, our social circles, politics, and the romance industry. It’s about charting trends in how women and men are talked about in the media; it’s about pointing out hypocrisy, and it’s about dealing with a world that is still reliant on antiquated ideas of gender.” 
I found the book most helpful for me, however, in its discussion of finding The One. We live in a culture that obsesses over the idea of The One. The film industry especially pushes it (usually upon women) in the Romantic Comedy aka “chick flick” genre. I personally didn’t realize how much I (feminist! media critic! blogger! constant reader of the feminist blogosphere!) had actually internalized these messages until I read Mukhopadhyay’s book. Turns out, when you go into every date subconsciously ready to decide within five minutes if this person is The One, then you’re probably going to end up with a fuckload of first dates … without too many second or third or fourth dates with the same person. 
She also points out that the portrayals of single women in film and television often make single ladies look like total losers, which is also difficult to not internalize (even for someone who spends most of her free time critiquing media representations of women). Conundrums and confusion, indeed! Overall, the book shines a light on the dilemma of Dating While Feminist, and I encourage all daters to read it, even if you don’t necessarily consider yourself a Feminist, and even if you’re not as awful at dating as I am. 
One of the most important aspects of the book deals with exactly what we deal with at Bitch Flicks–how pop culture, especially film and television, works to perpetuate stereotypes and help maintain the status quo … while also making me a shitty dater (if I haven’t yet made that clear).
I’ll leave you with the following excerpt. Because it’s important to always keep an eye out for this bullshit. After all, knowing it exists is the only way to fight against it! #realtalk

Television is a reflection of our cultural norms at a given time, so it makes sense that during the ’60s and ’70s–a time of cultural revolution where the very definitions of family, sexuality, relationships, and femininity were being pushed–women were written as living comfortable, fun lives as single women who engaged in sex when they wanted it and often opted out of long-term relationships. Laverne & Shirley, at the height of its viewership, was the most watched sitcom in the United States, surpassing Happy Days, which is shocking considering its often serious and feminist themes. Laverne & Shirley took on unplanned pregnancy, sex before marriage, and workplace equality.
[…]
If we look to the sitcoms of today, we see weaker depictions of women dominating the tubes. We see women who are smaller in stature, more neurotic, confused, wishy-washy, and often dysfunctional. There are few sitcoms about single women even on the airwaves today, actually. But think of the leading ladies in sitcoms, from Everybody Loves Raymond to The King of Queens; both Debra and Carrie represent good, faithful (and hot) wives. And while the plotline shows they are often the ones in charge, their story lines are secondary to their goofy, irresponsible, “bro-ish” husbands. While these characters’ behavior could be chalked up to the shows being satirical or humorous, there is a noticeable difference between how women and their romantic relationships have been represented over the decades. 
Similarly, if we are to look at the representation of single black women even from the ’90s to the new millennium, a quick comparison of 227 and Living Single to Girlfriends shows you how differently actresses are cast today. Earlier shows cast black women of varying sizes, skin tones, and hairstyles, whereas more recent shows seem to only cast thinner black women with straighter hair and more Caucasian features. Let’s just acknowledge that you don’t turn on the TV and see a great actress like Esther Rolle these days (unless you’re watching The Biggest Loser). 
[…]
Popular television has changed, but what has entered the public domain are new caricatures of femininity that play to our most regressive stereotypes of how single women should think, talk, and act. And while reality TV is supposed to be “real,” the images of single women have only gotten less real. According to reality TV, all single women want to get married and their lives are meaningless without this milestone, despite any personal or professional successes they might have seen. This has closed up any real possibilities for characterizations of single women as anything but failing at the dream of romance. 

You can purchase the book here.

Additional Links

Why I Love Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life by Andrea (AJ) Plaid via Racialicious

Dating While Feminist: An Interview with Samhita Mukhopadhyay by Allison McCarthy via Ms. Magazine

The Rumpus Interview With Samhita Mukhopadhyay by Neelanjana Banerjee via The Rumpus

She’s Just Not That Into Dating by Tracy Clark-Flory via Salon

It’s Not Feminism That’s Ruining Romance: A Fresh Spin on Dating by Noelle de la Paz via Colorlines

Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s Web site

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Theme Week: The Roundup

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 1 Trailer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a series that redefined television in many ways. It combined drama, comedy, romance, action, and horror in an original and unique way. It portrayed a lesbian relationship as mainstream. It centered around metaphors for the trials and tribulations of everyday life that all its viewers, young and old, could relate to. But most importantly, creator Joss Whedon fashioned a world in which the stereotypes of teenage girls (and ultimately all women) were debunked and left at the wayside.

As a lover of Buffy and a theologian, I want Buffy to be theologically and metaphysically coherent. I want it eitherto establish one metaphysical system as true for the world it portrays, or to represent a believable variety of metaphysical beliefs among its characters. The former is an entirely lost cause; the latter is frustratingly undercooked. Willow’s Judaism is wholly Informed, and her turn to Wicca is entirely to do with magic. There is no sense at all of Wicca (or any other religion) as an ethical code, as a way of making meaning, as a way of personally relating to the world and others in it.

Around dinner tables and over cups of coffee, nearly a decade after the series concluded, I’ve witnessed this discussion unfold time and again. And, I think this is the key interpretative moment: are women, the series asks, dependent on men to create a new field of play? Or might the show call into question the norms and expectations of both genders? The answer to these queries may well be found in Spike’s role in the series’ finale. Certainly a number of conversations turn to Spike’s role. In its layers of ambivalence that call upon men to not only transgress but efface normative boundaries, it points to the latter.

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 2 Trailer

And then, of course, Buffy kicked a lot of ass. A very serious amount of ass. Over the course of the show’s seven television seasons, she averted multiple apocalypses. She punned and killed all very large monsters and vampires that she came across. She added clever insult to injury. She never apologized for not being a dumb, weak girl. And it was very physical — in the canon of the show, a Slayer is given extra-human powers of strength, speed and agility. She was a fashionable girl’s girl, and she slayed creatures that go bump in the night. It was Girl Power at its late-1990s peak and taken to an excellent extreme.

Though the show suffers from no shortage of powerful women, the ways in which they relate to one another throughout the series is a constant struggle. This is because the dominant patriarchal paradigm within which the show is operating insists that one powerful woman is a delightful anomaly, but multiple powerful women are a threat to hegemony. By these standards, Buffy, by herself, is set up as a superior paragon of womanhood: strong, independent, sassy, beautiful, smart, courageous, and compassionate. If all women, however, were empowered like Buffy, or even a small group, it would be a subversive threat to male dominance, which is why Buffy and her power are exceptional and solitary. This, in effect, handicaps her, limiting her power.

Xander sexualizes power, instead of maintaining a respectful attitude towards strong women. He lusts for most of the powerful women he meets, good or bad – Buffy, preying mantis lady, Incan mummy, Willow (as she begins to mature), Cordelia, Faith, and Anya. At the same time, he finds himself at odds with this attraction, which manifests into this strange almost self-loathing that drives him to assert dominance. Since he’s a rather awkward boy without strength, he uses his tongue, throwing insults and off-the-mark opinions as “Xander, the Chronicler of Buffy’s Failures.”

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 3 Trailer

Joss Whedon’s writing for Willow’s dream is clever and filled with misdirection. Characters talk about Willow and her “secret,” a secret that she only seems comfortable discussing with Tara. Dream-Buffy constantly comments on Willow’s “costume,” telling her to change out of it because “everyone already knows.” We’re led to believe that Willow is afraid that her friends will judge her for being gay and being in a relationship with another woman…but this isn’t the case at all.
Instead, when Dream-Buffy rips off Willow’s costume, we see a version of Willow that is eerily reminiscent of season one Willow: a geek with pretensions of being cool.

But its strengths are strengths that none of the other big US dramas have. For one, the flexibility of its form meant that it could be any kind of show it wanted: one week it’s a goofy comedy, the next it’s a frightening fairy tale, the week after it’s an all-singing all-dancing musical. It was clearly the work of a team of writers, too, and when I was young and watching it for the first time it was the first time I really started to learn how TV was constructed – I got a thrill from seeing who had written each episode and guessing at what kind of episode it was going to be by who wrote it. Above all, though, the thing that Buffy has in spades that most shows lack, and the aspect of the show that season five best showcases, is emotion. Even at its most laid back, Buffy is a show spilling over with emotion, and it’s this that gives the potentially goofy premise of show its weight. Whedon et. al. were absolute masters at making us really care about their characters, and every audacious plot contrivance was easily swallowed when viewed through the lens of the real, human emotion that they would imbue it with. 
 
I don’t want to get bogged down about how it sucks in a way that Buffy’s ability comes exclusively from superpowers. I get that, and I could write about it endlessly, but in this moment, I don’t care because Sophia doesn’t care. She watches Buffy and sees a woman who kicks ass, and she wants to emulate that. It’s tough to over-analyze and intellectualize a TV show when you’re watching a young girl practice roundhouse kicks because she wants to be a strong badass like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And I have to say, it’s much more heartwarming to see her excited about becoming a strong woman with martial arts skills than it was to watch her pretend she couldn’t speak–because she wanted to be Ariel from The Little Mermaid. 

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 4 Trailer

When the popular movie Twilight first appeared in theaters, it did not take long for fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) to shame Twilight’s Edward with a fan video smackdown (“Buffy Vs. Edward”). The video shows Edward stalking Buffy and professing his undying love, with Buffy responding in sarcastic incredulity and staking Edward. While it may appear that this “remix” of the two characters was about Buffy slaying a juvenile upstart and reinforcing her status as the queen of the genre, there was more at stake, so to speak. Buffy slaying Edward says more about the perceived masculinity and virility of the vampire in question than about Buffy herself as an independent woman. Buffy was never given that much agency in her own show. Buffy’s lovers stalked her, lied to her, and often ignored her own wishes about their relationships all in the name of “protecting” her. Many of these things are what fans of BtVS pointed out as anti-woman flaws in the narrative of Twilight, yet Buffy did not stake the vampires who denied her agency in her own relationships; instead, she pined for them! 

Equality Now: Joss Whedon’s Acceptance Speech by Stephanie Rogers

In 2007, the Warner Brothers production president, Jeff Robinov, announced that Warner Brothers would no longer make films with female leads.

A year before that announcement, Joss Whedon, the creator of such women-centric television shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Dollhouse, accepted an award from Equality Now at the event, “On the Road to Equality: Honoring Men on the Front Lines.”

Watch as he answers the question, “Why do you always write such strong women characters?”

Xander Harris Has Masculinity Issues by Lady T

When I look at Xander through a feminist lens, I find him fascinating because he’s a mass of contradictions. He’s a would-be “man’s man” – obsessed with being manly – whose only close friends are women. He’s both a perpetrator and victim of sexual assault and/or violation of consent. He’s both attracted to and intimidated by strong women. He jokes about objectifying women and viewing sex as some sort of game, but in more intimate moments, seems to value romance and real connection. He’s a willing participant in the patriarchy and also a victim of it.

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 5 Trailer

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 6 Trailer

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.

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?  

Willow is Whedon’s version of the answer to the underrepresented gay community. But, Willow appears to have had a healthy sexual relationship with her boyfriend Oz, and there is no hint at otherwise. She also pined for Xander for years. Both men. We see her gradually start a relationship with Tara, but she never talks about or reflects on her sexuality or coming out. We see that she is nervous about whether her friends approve. But, it doesn’t get much deeper than that. No characters have a deep conversation with her about her orientation. It’s not a thorough exploration. She goes from being with men to exclusively being with women and identifying as a lesbian. This is fine for Willow, but because there are really not many open gay or lesbian characters within the entire series we are dependent on her narrative alone.

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 7 Trailer