What's Not on TV: an Armchair Feminist Take

There are many other things I could be doing. There are many other things I should be doing. However, at the end of a very busy week, what I somehow want to do is blog about TV shows. TV shows have been haunting me lately. I look at a piece of feminist theory these days, and it inevitably invokes a kind of feminist TV nostalgia.

Hypothesis: Even though we pretend that modern-day entertainment media is progressive, egalitarian and so Girl Power that we might as well just sit back and enjoy the show(s), television serials have actually been getting less feminist in the last ten years, and instead of addressing this problem, we close our eyes and think of England (that was for you, Shadowedge). Buffy is just the exception that proves the rule.

Things I miss in/on television:

Girls who talk to each other about things other than sex, men, fashion and the main (usually male) character of any given series. Now repeat the previous sentence, replacing "girls" with "women." I also miss the presentation of "women" in television. You know, women with problems beyond stinky relationships with men.

Once upon a day, from the mid-80s to the 90s, we had TV shows that offered things that are no longer being offered on "mainstream" cable television.

Allow me to submit the following evidence for the court's consideration:

Kate & Allie (1984-1989)
Who's the Boss? (1984-1992)
The Golden Girls (1985-1992)
Designing Women (1986-1993)
Myrphy Brown (1988-1989)
Caroline in the City (1995-1999)

What do these shows have in common? 1. The women have lives. 2. The women have (or have had) jobs. 3. The women are the main characters, and speak to other women about things that are not necessarily guys.

Just for fun, let's try a little "Then and Now" exercise using Designing Women and the comparatively modern (and by now, thoroughly mainstreamed) hit Sex and the City:

Julia = Miranda
Mary Jo = Carrie
Charlene = Charlotte
Suzanne = Samantha

How new and progressive does Sex and the City seem now, really?

Alright, so maybe that's a little unfair to late-night TV's favorite PR agent, but it still matches up pretty well: you've got your uberfeminist, your "normal" girl, your innocent damsel and your Queen Bee.

Now, just for kicks, let's try it again with The Golden Girls:

Blanche = Samantha
Rose = Charlotte
Dorothy = Miranda/Carrie
Sophia = all the recurring snarky people (mostly gay male friends)

It's a shame that I can't much up the four women in one show with the four women in the next, but Bea Arthur's character provides both the "normal person" glue of Carrie and the "no nonsense edge" of Miranda in one convenient package, while Sophia exists to add a lot of pointed one-liners that do not usually have an impact on any episode storyline, no matter how silly.

Is this a sign of stagnation in the televised presentation of women in groups? Maybe so, maybe not. Perhaps any fictional group of approximately 4 people needs an innocent/idiot, a "strong" character, a "glamorous" character and an everyman/woman. Someone should look into it. At this moment, I'm not volunteering, but I am willing to start:

The bi-gendered, uber-formulaic Will & Grace gets awfully close to the above formula, only with two everypersons (Will & Grace), one Queen Bee (who pulls double duty as an idiot, triple if you count her breasts as well) and one standard-issue idiot. Will & Grace may get mad props for trying to make it "okay to be gay" on plain old mainstream American television, but its utter lack of strong female characters, strong gay characters, strong characters of any kind and successful, long term gay partnerships makes it something I would not recommend to, well, anyone. Do self-respecting women see themselves or an acceptable role model in Grace? In (gack!) Karen? Are the men in the show any better, as role models or fictional stand-ins for anyone, no matter what gender or sexual orientation? If I want to look at a televised interior designer and think "role model," I'll take Dixie Carter over Debra Messing any day.

I hate Will & Grace and I am not a homophobe, at least as far as I know. If there is a petition out there for "Please, please, you Hollywood jerks, make a sitcom about a gay couple rather than a heteronormative show that just includes gay people who never get to have fully developed love lives or even on-screen TLC," let me know and I will rush to sign it. I would love to see that show. (Queer as Folk does not meet this criterion for me. If you are, whether bi, gay, straight, narcissist, omni or whatever, watching that show for a reason other than the hot guys, you confuse me.) Actually, if that petition does not exist, maybe I should create one . . .

But back to presentations of women. Some more of the positive: Murphy Brown.

Murphy Brown does some things that I'm not sure have ever been done since. Murphy defines herself through her career rather than her sexuality, but manages to still be a sexually active woman who does not spend all of her time freaking out about whether she can ever find Mr. Big--I mean Mr. Right. Yes, she is a stereotypical ball-busting feminist. (I would love to argue that she transcends stereotype and embodies an Archetypal Feminist, but that might be more of a fun intellectual exercise than anything else--and I would have to watch the show again.) She can be mean, scary and rude. At the same time, there is something absolutely wonderful about a woman who can express anger openly without facing Dire Consequences every time that she does. Sure, Murphy's over-the-top, but when so many women were (and still are) taught that it's Wrong to express desire, frustration, anger, themselves, a little on-screen pushiness that does not instantly turn a woman into a social untouchable becomes a blessing in and of itself.

Murphy also acts (and dresses) professionally without gratuitously (yes, I'm looking at you, Samantha) showing off her "assets" (what a horribly mercantile term for parts of our own bodies). We know that Murphy, unlike many modern-day heroines, does not need to and would not exchange sexual or sexualized "favors" (even favors so relatively tame as glimpses of cleavage given Erin Brokavich-style) to get what she needs to get in order to get her job done: she would never shtoop to conquer.

I love Murphy Brown. I grew up with her, and the zaniness of the cast's adventures never really registered with me. I thought the show was "realistic," and I think that in the end this was a boon, because it meant that I thought a strong, aggressive woman with a high-powered job and, eventually, a child that she raised on her own was realistic. I thought that I could be powerful, aggressive and single, with no Cinderella makeover, and still be "successful" when I grew up.

Where are all the modern shows about women in jobs that focus on women in jobs and not on the sex lives of women in jobs?

The most recent show on my Feminist Nostalgia list is Caroline in the City, and even though it offers up veritable mountains of ridiculous, I can't help but love it. Reason I love it the first: Caroline has a male employee. As you can probably tell from the general nature of this blog, I am a big sucker for the femdom/malesub dynamic in fiction.

Reason the second: it's about a female cartoonist. ::swoon:: Not only does Caroline have a job, but she has a job on my short list of personal dream-jobs. That comes complete with a cute male assistant. Female fantasy, anyone? Wish fulfillment that might actually appeal to women for once? What a concept.

Seriously. What a concept. It may seem obvious, but so many current TV writers and producers are missing the boat on this one.

Speaking of female-targeted wish fulfillment: Aside from the overall cheesiness that reaches and then surpasses critical mass in its later seasons, all that Who's the Boss really needs to apologize for is its name. Who's the Boss? is not a legitimate question; the two main characters have an employer/employee relationship (though Barney's answer in How I Met Your Mother certainly has the ring of truth--so perhaps it is a legitimate question, with the rivals for the title being Angela and Mona rather than Angela and Tony). Be that as it may, the show has a lot going for it. Yes, yes, I'm far too easy on shows with female employers and male domestics, but I think they're important, if only because they constitute such a small force to stand up against the scads of shows with female domestics (Will & Grace, Two and a Half Men, The Nanny (which does offer compensatory butler-service, but sadly has women relegated to the position of only employees and children--at least until marriage) Arrested Development, even Sex and the City, etc.). And while the witty butler is an enjoyable trope, he generally only shows up in technically male-dominant shows and relationships (Nanny, Fresh Prince). To the Manor Born makes a lovely exception, but we had to import that.

A side note: I remember seeing previews for a sitcom about a divorced man who became the butler to his ex-wife and family. Did anything ever come of that? It looked pretty terrible, and it was hard to watch even the previews without feeling just a little too humiliated on his behalf, but I would be interested to see how the power dynamics played out.

Anyway, Tony is not a snarky butler. He starts the show as a "man's man," and one of the show's many (cheesy, not wrong) after-school-special messages is that he can be a "man" and a homemaker at the same time. He may lose some machismo points in the pursuit of his job, but the message from day one is: If you're man enough, you can take that kind of thing. While many modern women might think twice before inviting Tony Danza into their homes (he's one of those fascinatingly iconic, perpetually typecast TV actors who we tend no longer to envision as Real People), we can choose to accept the show's premise that he's a cute, dumb, friendly guy. Hmmm . . . a cute, friendly guy who waits on a "high-powered executive" woman. Affectionately. Where are there other TV shows like this? Is there even porn like this? We look at it now, and we can complain about the name. "We could never make a show like that now," we think. "It would be offensive to build a show on the 'female employer/male employee' dynamic as if it were something unusual and strange."

Well, fine. We got rid of the shows that offered that dynamic as an offensive "exception," but where are all the shows that offer it as the norm?