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irregulars
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For our fourth issue, the team of the Irregulars section have decided to get out of the realm of literature and into the one of TV. So we bring you two pieces on dating shows and the portrayal of women in self-proclaimed feminist series.
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Some years ago, when I was younger, tousled of hair and knobbled of knee, I knew what good television was and when it could be watched.
STAYING IN FOR TAKE ME OUT
In the tentative light of the early morning there were hairy puppets, garish cartoons and wide-eyed by Oliver Ray human presenters whom, in retrospective, looked as if their sanity rested on a knife’s edge. What would they pull out from under that desk? Would it be a letter from Jenny, 5, who starts school today, good luck my love, or would it be a shotgun which, with a cheery sign off, they would place under their chin before the producer cut to Bill and Ben?
The other time was around tea. NOT A MINUTE EARLIER. The programmes were British, and starred children who spoke properly. E. Nesbitt adaptations topped the bill I fondly remember. I avoided school-based drama. I could almost smell the acrylic jumpers and monster munch through the screen. And some serious shit went down at Grange Hill. I liked to keep things light. Though that being said, giving a Phoenix and a carpet to some children can raise all kinds of merry Hell. Give one girl the wrong 50 pence piece and things get sinister. Weekends were of a different character, and if I wasn’t playing football or gymnastics in the morning (oh I was quite the sportsman in my younger days) I would witness those sweeping Saturday morning shows, generally featuring gunge and prizes handed out regardless of merit which confused me. Weekends had their later bed times too, and I think it was around this time a show called Blind Date was on, hosted by the effulgent, unfailingly professional (Saint) Cilla Black. Assisting her was her enigmatic companion, Graham. Ne’er did we lay eyes upon him, only hearing his booming baritone providing astute commentary when required. This show was impossibly trashy, but heavens to Betsy it was damned good television. Moving beyond the asinine questions my favourite part was when the interviewer saw whom he had let slip away, back to Doncaster. Oh, the disappointment when a woman of unlikely
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IRREGULARS proportions and dubious hair colour wafted past. Oh, the relief when the girl with the infected piercing left the stage. Then the screen would retreat, the two star-crossed lovers would meet and be whisked away to somewhere with sun, sea and radioactive sewage. Years later, I am older, yet more knobbled of knee and still just as easily entertained. So what then, did I make of Take Me Out, a show with broadly similar intentions but differing dramatically in execution (and unbelievably in its second series)? I shan’t bore you with a description of the format. You’ve seen it and I’ve seen it so lets be honest. We’re all friends here. Never have I seen such a bunch of overly made up troglodytes all gathered in one place. Nor can I quite understand how orange, waxed, breast implanted men, who can’t pull their trousers past their testicles nor button their shirts past their navels—and in neglecting to do so displaying some bile-inducing ghoulish male décolletage—be judged attractive by the opposite sex, even these harpies. By the first break, I could only assume that it was some advertisement for mass sterilisation. By the end of the second, I was hooked. The hook was rusty, barbed and through the more sensitive of my nipples, but lodged there it was, preventing my escape. In large part this was because of Paddy McGuiness, who is so jolly and expansive one can’t help but love him. And with no end of catch phrases he is a constant source of entertainment: ‘Let the prawn see the cracker!’ and the perhaps ill-judged: ‘Let the hocus see the pocus!’ I am cognisant that Take Me Out would tempt the more culturally refined viewer to defenestrate his or her television set in disgust. I am aware it appeals to people who think the Jaffa Cake is the height of sophistication. I know it’s bad for me, but then so is using a Vicks Inhaler recreationally. And I rather like Jaffa Cakes. Take Me Out continues on ITV when we all really ought to have better things to do.
DO IT LIKE A MAN
What do a journalist looking for love in Manhattan and a divorcee looking for sex in Florida have in common? Well, they’re emancipated women, or so it seems on your TV screen. In Sex and the City (1998by Manon Ardisson 2004) Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) is a thirty year old journalist whose column is based on her, and her friends’, sexual relationships. In Cougar Town (2009-present) real estate agent Jules Cobb (Courteney Cox) gets a divorce at forty years old and decides to make up for the time she lost with her unfaithful husband by dating younger men. Both are professional women, both are sexually liberated and the viewer is tempted to see them as emancipated women. However, a closer analysis of the two series’ pilots – the episode meant to define the whole series, although it might then move away from its initial approach – highlights that Carrie and Jules are actually far from being emancipated. Both shows were conceived with a vague sense of post-feminism, a trend of feminism emphasizing individual and material achievements for women rather than collective political
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IRREGULARS action. As Carrie is prompt to point out, emancipated women “travel, they pay taxes, they’d spend 400 dollars on a pair of Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals, and they’re alone”. Even though Carrie and Jules both work, it is obvious enough from the series’ titles and storylines that their emancipation is primarily sexual. Sex and the City’s pilot is explicitly about “having sex like a man”, meaning “without feelings”, which Carrie decides to do with one of her on-and-off boyfriends, Kurt. Similarly, in Cougar Town, Jules is encouraged by her friend and assistant Laurie to re-enter the dating world because Jules got pregnant at 19 and ‘missed’ on her twenties. In the bar, Jules meets other cougars, one of whom is “wondering which one of those young bucks to let spin (her) tonight like a pinwheel”. All in all, it seems that Carrie, Jules and most women in the post-feminist era have are as free as their male counterparts: they are independent financially and, most importantly, sexually. However, is emancipation, or feminism for that matter, really about having access to the exact same privileges as men without ever questioning those? Carrie and Jules despise men who behave like they do. Jules’ neighbour, Grayson, a recently divorced forty years old man, routinely brings back younger women to his house, leading Jules to shout at him “stop having sex with babies”. Ironically enough, she then goes and has sex with twenty years old Matt and, at the end of the episode, she even asks Matt to stop talking: he is obviously nothing more than a sex toy. Another way to put things in perspective is to compare these shows with their equivalents targeting men. For instance, Entourage (2004-present) portrays the lives of four newly rich male friends in Los Angeles, and mostly how they manage to have sex with cheap-looking Californian girls. As might be expected, they obey one rule concerning girls: “no girlfriends, no commitments”. The way women are treated in Entourage is nauseating, but there is no reason why Samantha saying she uses men as “sex objects” should be more acceptable. This double standard is particularly obvious in Sex and the City when unmarried women in their thirties are simply presented as “unmarried women” while unmarried men are labelled “toxic bachelors”. I doubt that women’s emancipation is about blindly embracing masculine privileges, but if some women do, they have no legitimacy in criticising the men they emulate. In addition to trying to behave like the men they despise most, Carrie and, to a lesser extent, Jules are seemingly unable to do it ‘as well’ as men. Carrie is hurt when Kurt tells her he really likes her new – promiscuous – ways, because she was (secretly) hoping to make him as needy towards her as she used to be towards him. Not only is she trying to hurt the man she had sex with, but it does not even work, the implication being that women cannot have sex like men. Similarly, Jules is insecure about her new sexual life, feeling judged by herself and by others, while her male alter ego Grayson is clearly having a good time. Hence, both series imply that women are unable to act like men because they are fundamentally different: they have feelings and men don’t. While feminism is difficult to define, the common banner is to be critical towards the patriarchal hierarchy that ensures men’s supremacy. However, in both these series, women who are represented as ‘emancipated’ are actually reinforcing assumptions upholding patriarchy, especially since they are depicted as overwhelmingly more emotional than men. To use Simone de Beauvoir’s terminology, representation of emancipated women on screen reinforces the construction of women as ‘Others’, as diametrically different from men, and therefore inferior because they cannot fit in the man-defined norms. Overall, Sex and the City and Cougar Town both represent ‘emancipated’ women as professional women desperately trying to act like the men they hate most, and failing to do so
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IRREGULARS because they are oh-so-different from their male counterparts. The problem is that generalisations about ‘men’ and ‘women’ not only ignore individual experiences, but also have an impact on the way individuals construct their own identity in a media-saturated environment. As long as ‘emancipated’ women are represented as promiscuous and needy, some girls and women will take them as role models: when watching a group to which you can relate (in this case ‘women’), the viewer is necessarily affected by the on-screen depiction. Men also face representation of themselves according to which – pardon my French –, being a cold-blooded asshole is cool. When Jules asks Grayson “ever get the feeling that you missed out on something?” he simply answers, “I don’t have overwhelming feelings”, which is a good line but also one that once again imply that men do not have feelings. And if they do, they are or should be gay: Carrie asks her friend Skipper if he is gay simply because he says: “I don’t objectify women”. These are the reasons why I think that shows about ‘emancipated’ women are in the end detrimental to feminism and women’s emancipation in general.
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