Bunnies, Babies and Broads (Women on TV)

[Sparkly]

Bunnies, babies and broads: What is TV trying to tell us about women?

(snip)

Whether fictional or quasi-real, TV’s women occupy a world of placation and sublimation through cupcakes and extreme couponing and physically impossible jujitsu. It’s Bravo’s “Housewives” threatening to ruin one another, egged on by fans. It’s a false sense of outspoken independence, shackled by beauty myths and the pretend liberation of promiscuity.

Many nights — save for those in which you encounter the rare sort of character seen in “The Good Wife” or “30 Rock,” or in Claire Danes’s role in Showtime’s new espionage thriller “Homeland” — you watch TV and sense that Steinem’s stone has rolled all the way back downhill. There is but one Alicia Florrick and one Liz Lemon and one Carrie Mathison (Danes’s character) unfairly burdened with the task of rolling the rock back up.

(snip)

To go with NBC’s bunnies, we have yesterday’s stewardesses in ABC’s attentively detailed but sorely mediocre “Pan Am.” Both shows clumsily reach for “Mad Men’s” coolly calibrated regard for the past, presenting themselves as tales of covert proto-feminism: By time-traveling backward, the premise seeks to upend the idea that women were ever truly oppressed. By serving cocktails for Hefner, women were in fact seizing their destinies. By serving cocktails for Pan Am, they were charting a course for tomorrow’s career women. Their hardships — girdle checks for the stewardesses in “Pan Am,” the squeeze of tighter, wire-framed bunny suits in “The Playboy Club” — are seen as so much light hazing in an endless initiation into a man’s world.

As Steinem noted, those shows are less about women and more about this era of nonstop nostalgia that we live in. Retro is an addiction that rages out of control in a recession; the more we drink it in — the more times we remake “Charlie’s Angels” or wish for a return of stewardesses and other clear-cut visual cues of gender rigidity — the less able we are to move forward and come up with our own ideas.

I highly recommend reading this. Yes, it's only TV (I haven't watched sitcoms or other series in decades), but TV both reflects and influences the common zeitgeist. The so-called "post-feminist" disdain for the women's movement is another sign the ball has rolled all the way back.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/television/bunnies-babies-and-broads-what-is-tv-trying-to-tell-us-about-women/2011/08/31/gIQAhuzPVK_story.html

[seabeyond]

1. Steinem’s stone has rolled all the way back downhill.

i can't get the third page, but yes. it is a good article. would have liked to see what third page said.

i will only add... and so much more. so very much more

[Sparkly]

2. My favorite sentence plucked from page 3

"On today’s sitcoms, the undercurrent of an imaginary gender war has broken banks and become a flood, dismantling social norms only to reconstruct them more rigidly in the last few moments of an episode."

[applegrove]

3. They are redoing Prime Suspect. That is good.

[Blue_In_AK]

4. Pretty much the only network TV I watch

is The Mentalist and Fringe, both of which have strong female characters. (And my guilty pleasure, Big Brother, in which Rachel kicked ass despite all odds. LOVE that girl, even if she is an emotional trainwreck.)