Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

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Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women Page 22

by Susan Faludi


  But a few journalists at this event can’t resist asking: Isn’t “Angels ’88” just a reprise of Spelling’s “Charlie’s Angels,” where three jiggle-prone private eyes took orders from invisible boss Charlie and bounced around in bikinis? “No, no, no!” Shepherd, the chain-smoking great-grandson of Louis B. Mayer, exhales a fierce stream of smoke. “They didn’t have distinct characters. They were just beauties.” The characters in “Angels ’88,” he says, are more “advanced,” independent women who won’t even necessarily be fashion plates. That’s why the network interviewed so many real women for the leading roles. These new angels “might not have perfect hair and be the perfect model types,” he says. “In Angels ‘88,’ you’re going to find these girls sometimes wearing no makeup at all. Particularly, you know, when they are running around on the beach.”

  Just then, a Fox publicist takes the stage to announce the angels’ imminent debut. No interviews, he warns the media, until the photographers finish their “beauty shots.” The angels file on stage and the cameramen begin shouting, “Girls, over here, over here!” “Oh, young ladies, right here!” The angels turn this way and that, well-coiffed hair swinging around flawlessly made-up faces. The idle reporters leaf through their press kits, which offer large photographs and brief biographies of each star—Tea Leoni, “the 5’7″ blonde beauty;” Karen Kopins, “the 5’8″ brunette beauty;” and so on. Of the four, only Leoni was actually picked from the nationwide casting call. The others are models with minor acting backgrounds.

  The angels spend a carefully timed five minutes with the press before they are whisked off for a lengthy photo session for Time. The stage mike is turned over to Aaron Spelling, creator of some of the most lucrative programs in television history, a list ranging from “Love Boat” to “Fantasy Island.” “How’s this show going to be different from ‘Charlie’s Angels’?” a reporter asks. “These young ladies are on their own; they do not report to any men,” Spelling says. “It’s an entire ladies’ show without guidance. It’s a young ladies’ buddy-buddy show is what it is.” He turns a beseeching face on his audience. “Why, why,” he wants to know, would anyone think that he wants to bring back “the beautiful bimbos”? He shakes his head. “It’s going to be a show of today’s young ladies of today [sic], and we’ll go into their personal lives, we’ll treat today’s issues, we’ll treat the problems of their dating and sex and safe sex and sex of our time. It’s going to be a very attractive show.”

  Later that same day in Santa Monica, screenwriter Brad Markowitz rolls his eyes as he hears the details of the press conference. A few months earlier, Spelling had hired Markowitz and his writing partner to script the series pilot. “Spelling made all these fine speeches to us about how ‘the girls’ would be more real,” Markowitz recalls. “He talked a good game about how the show would be more representative of how women really are, as opposed to that idealized, frosted look.” But when it came down to drafting a script, Markowitz says, Spelling instructed the screenwriters to open the episode with scantily clad angels wriggling to a rock video. Spelling was unhappy with their first draft, Markowitz recalls, because “we didn’t have enough girls in bikinis;” he ordered them to add more bathing-beauty scenes. Spelling also insisted that the thirty-two-year-old police academy—trained detectives (their original status in “Charlie’s Angels”) be demoted to unemployed actresses in their early twenties who just fall into police work and bungle the job. Spelling, who later denies demanding these changes—“the script just wasn’t good enough is all I know”—defended the alterations this way: “That’s what makes the show funny—that they are supposed to be doing it by themselves and they can’t! They are incompetent!”

  After various delays and script battles, “Angels ’88” was put on hold, then reformatted as a “telefilm,” in which, Spelling says, the women will be even younger college “coeds.” Meanwhile, for the 1988–89 season, Spelling applied his “young ladies’ buddy-buddy show” concept to “Nightingales,” an NBC prime-time series about five jiggly student nurses who prance around the locker room in their underwear. While they aren’t independent, their boss is a woman, Spelling says proudly—as if a female head nurse represents nontraditional casting.

  Anyway, as Spelling pointed out at the “Angels” press conference, at least his shows have women in lead roles. “Go and look at television today. Tell me how many shows outside of a few comedies are dominated by women. You’ll find the answer is very few.”

  True enough. In the 1987–88 season, the backlash’s high watermark on TV, only three of twenty-two new prime-time dramas featured female leads—and only two of them were adults. One was a sorority girl and another a nubile private eye who spent much of her time posing and complaining about the dating scene. (The title of that show, “Leg Work,” speaks for itself.) In a sharp dropoff from previous seasons, 60 percent of the shows launched as series in this season had either no regular female characters or included women only as minor background figures; 20 percent had no women at all. And women over the age of consent were especially hard to find.

  Women were also losing ground in the one television genre they had always called their own: situation comedy. In a resurgence of the old “Odd Couple” format, bachelor buddies took up house together without adult women in one out of five new sitcoms, a list that included “Everything’s Relative,” “My Two Dads,” “Trial and Error,” and “Full House.” In the single-parent household sitcoms that took over prime time that year, two-thirds of the children lived with dad or a male guardian—compared with 11 percent in the real world. “This season it’s especially clear that TV writers are uncomfortable with the concept of working mothers,” New York Woman observed. The magazine offered a quiz that starkly documented this discomfort; the “Moms at Work” puzzle invited readers to match each new prime-time show with the current status of the working-mother character. The correct answers: “A Year in the Life”—dead. “Full House”—dead. “I Married Dora”—dead. “My Two Dads”—dead. “Valerie’s Family”—dead. “Thirtysomething”—quits work to become a housewife. “Everything’s Relative”—show canceled. “Mama’s Boy”—show canceled.

  Women’s disappearance from prime-time television in the late ’80s repeats a programming pattern from the last backlash when, in the late ’50s and early ’60s, single dads ruled the TV roosts and female characters were suddenly erased from the set. By the 1960 season, only two of the top ten rated shows had regular female characters—“Gunsmoke” and “Real McCoys”—and by 1962 the one woman on “Real McCoys” had been killed off, too. The vanishing act eventually spread to domestic dramas, where the single father took charge of the household on “Bachelor Father,” “My Three Sons,” “Family Affair,” and “The Andy Griffith Show.”

  In the ’80s, women began to shrink and dwindle in the 1985-86 season, as a new breed of action-adventure series that included women only as victimized girls began crowding out more balanced fare. In this new crop of programs, as uneasy critics commented at the time, the viciousness of the assaults on the young female characters rivaled slasher films. On “Lady Blue,” for example, teenage boys armed with scalpels eviscerate their female prey; on “Our Family Honor,” a seventeen-year-old girl is slashed to death with a coat hanger. And that season, female characters who weren’t under attack were likely to be muzzled or missing from action: An analysis of prime-time TV in 1987 found 66 percent of the 882 speaking characters were male—about the same proportion as in the ’50s.

  While the new male villains were busy pulverizing women, male heroes on continuing series were toughening their act. The “return of the hard-boiled male,” New York Times television writer Peter Boyer dubbed it in an article on the phenomenon. In “St. Elsewhere,” the affable Dr. Caldwell was recast as an unapologetic womanizer. In “Moonlighting,” the immature hireling of the elegantly confident Maddie Hayes now overshadowed his boss lady—and cut her down to size. Network executives even instructed Tom Selleck to get m
ore masculine on “Magnum, P.I.” And the networks continued to boost their macho output; of the ten new dramas unveiled in the fall of 1989, five were about male cops or cowboys, with such self-explanatory titles as “Nasty Boys” and “Hardball.” The latter show’s premiere made it clear who would be on the receiving—and losing—end of this game. In the debut episode, a homicidal and evil female cop is beaten into submission by the male hero—a scene that reenacts the climactic confrontation in Fatal Attraction. (He holds her head under water in the bathroom and tries to drown her.)

  If TV programmers had their reasons for bringing on the he-men, popular demand wasn’t among them. In audience surveys, TV viewers show the least interest in police dramas and westerns. Nonetheless, Brandon Tartikoff, president of entertainment at NBC, asserted in the New York Times that the TV men were turning brutish because “the audience” was sick of male “wimps” and “Alan Alda-esque heroes who wore their sensitivity on their shirtsleeves;” as proof, he pointed not to real people but to the outpouring of macho movies—yet another case of the makers of one cultural medium invoking another’s handiwork to reinforce the backlash. Glenn Gordon Caron, producer of “Moonlighting,” admitted to more personal motives in an interview in the New York Times: “I very much wanted to see a man on television.” He complained that the last decade of social change had elbowed his sex off the screen. “[For] a long time, men just sort of went away,” he grumbled; one could only tell the gender of these ineffectual guys “because their voices were lower and their chests were flatter.” Glen Charles, coproducer of “Cheers,” was even blunter: he turned his show’s bartender Sam into a chauvinistic womanizer because “he’s a spokesman for a large group of people who thought that [the women’s movement] was a bunch of bull and look with disdain upon people who don’t think it was.”

  The backlash on television would to a degree follow the film industry’s lead. Fatal Attraction became ABC’s “Obsessive Love” a year later; Baby Boom became a television series of the same name; Working Girl, Parenthood, and Look Who’s Talking all resurfaced as TV series; the western returned to the big screen and the small set. (And in keeping with the single-dad theme, bachelor cowboy Ethan Allen, the hero of TV’s “Paradise,” gets saddled with four orphans.) The same backlash trends were recycled: single women panicked by the man shortage dashed into the arms of a maniac on “Addicted to His Love.” (The ABC TV movie even cited the Harvard-Yale marriage study’s 20 percent odds for college-educated single women over thirty.) Career women swooned with baby fever and infertility on shows like “Babies.” (“My biological clock is beginning to sound like Big Ben!” cries one of the empty-vessel heroines.) Even the “epidemic” of sex abuse at day care centers was turned into ratings fodder: In “Do You Know the Muffin Man?” a divorced working mother discovers her four-year-old son has been raped and contracted gonorrhea at nursery school.

  But TV’s counterassault on women’s liberation would be, by necessity, more restrained than Hollywood’s. Women have more influence in front of their sets than they do at the movies; women represent not only the majority of viewers but, more important, they represent the viewers that advertisers most want to reach. When the TV programmers tried to force-feed its cast of overweening guys and wilting gals in the 1987—88 season, a devastating proportion of the female audience simply shut off their sets. None of the twenty-five new prime-time shows made it into the top twenty except for “A Different World,” which was a spinoff of the “Cosby” show (and one of the rare new shows with a female lead). By December, the networks’ prime-time ratings had plunged a spectacular nine points from a year earlier, an average loss of 3.5 million households a night and the lowest rated TV season ever. While the dropoff can be partly attributed to the phasing in of the “people meter,” a more finely tuned measure of viewership, that technological change doesn’t explain why the audience flight was so disproportionately female. Nor does it explain why, in subsequent backlash seasons, when the people meter was no longer at issue, a lopsidedly female exodus kept recurring. Moreover, the people meters were reputed to favor younger viewers more than the old “diary” methods of audience measurement had. But while younger men increased their weekly viewing time by more than two hours in the fall of 1987 over the previous year, younger women decreased their viewing time by almost an hour in the same period.

  By the following season, the programmers backed off a bit to admit a couple of strong female leads to the prime-time scene. “Roseanne” and “Murphy Brown,” both featuring outspoken women—and both, not coincidentally, created by women—became instant and massive hits: “Roseanne” was one of the most successful series launched in television history and held the number-one ratings slot season after season. But two strong women were seen as two too many. Independent women were “seizing control of prime time,” Newsweek griped in a 1989 cover story. “The video pendulum has swung too far from the blissfully domestic supermoms who once warmed the electronic hearth.” Behind the scenes, the network tried to make changes that amounted to “taking all the stuffing out of Murphy,” the show’s creator Diane English observed. The tart-tongued Roseanne Barr especially became a lightning rod for that rancor. While her penchant for mooning crowds and singing the national anthem off-key clearly warrants no Miss Congeniality prizes, the level of bile and hysteria directed at this comic seemed peculiarly out of proportion with her offenses. The media declared her, just like the Fatal Attraction temptress, “the most hated woman in America;” television executives savaged her in print; her former executive producer even took out a full-page ad in Daily Variety to deride the comedian; and, despite critical acclaim and spectacular ratings, “Roseanne” was shut out of the Emmys year after year after year. Outside the network suites, a chorus of male voices joined the Barr-bashing crusade. Sportswriters, baseball players, and news columnists damned her in print as a “bitch” and a “dog.” Even George Bush felt compelled to issue a condemnatory statement; he called her “disgraceful.” (And later he told the troops in the Middle East that he would like to make her a secret weapon again Iraq.) Businessman James Rees, the son of the former congressman, launched a nationwide “Bar Roseanne Club,” soliciting members in the classifieds sections of Rolling Stone and The National. (“Hate Roseanne Barr?” the ad copy inquired. “Join the club.”) In a few weeks, he had more than six hundred responses, almost all from men who thoroughly agreed with Rees’s assessment of “old lard butt.” She’s “a nasty filthy ugly Jell-O-Bodied tasteless monster from the black lagoon,” wrote one man. Another proposed, “Let’s shish-Kebab [her].”

  By the following season, prime time reverted to traditional feminine icons, as the new series filled the screen with teenage models, home-makers, a nun and—that peculiar prototype of the last TV backlash—the good suburban housekeeper witch. An updated version of the tamed genie of “Bewitched” reappeared in the ironically named “Free Spirit.” By the next season, women were shut out of so many new shows that even comic Jay Leno joked about it at the Emmys. TV critic Joyce Millman, observing that the new offerings were “overloaded with adolescent boys and motherless households,” asked, “Whatever happened to TV’s ‘Year of the Woman’? . . . [I]t’s back to ‘Boys’ Night Out’ for the upcoming fall season.” Only two of thirty-three new shows were about women with jobs; on the rest they were housewives, little girls, or invisible.

  The lurching quality of television’s backlash against independent women is the product of the industry’s own deeply ambivalent affair with its female audience. TV prime-time programmers are both more dependent on women’s approval than filmmakers and, because of their dependence, more resentful. To serve a female master is not why the TV men came west to Hollywood. (And most are men; more than 90 percent of television writers, for example, are white males.) They say they want shows that draw a large audience, but when those shows feature autonomous women, they try to cancel them. “Designing Women” and “Kate and Allie,” both tremendously popular series, have fough
t back repeated network attempts to chase them off the set.

  The modern network programmers find themselves in a situation roughly analogous to that of the late Victorian clergymen. Like those leaders of the last century’s backlash, TV executives watch anxiously as their female congregation abandons the pews—in the daytime for work and in the evening for other forms of electronic entertainment that offer more control and real choices. Women are turning to VCRs and cable offerings. In 1987, as the networks took their free fall in the ratings, prime-time cable viewership increased 35 percent and the proportion of TV households that owned VCRs rose from 19 to 60 percent in one year. The networks’ audience shrank by more than 25 percent in the decade—and women contributed most to that shrinkage. By 1990, Nielsen was reporting that the percentage of decline in female prime-time viewers was two to three times steeper than male’s. Women’s desertion was more than an insult; it represented a massive financial loss. (A mere one-point drop in prime-time ratings equals a loss of more than $90 million in the network’s revenue in one season.)

  Not only do some programming executives personally want to expel the independent women from the American set; their advertisers, who still view the housewife as the ideal shopper, demand it. This puts TV programmers in an impossible bind: the message advertisers want the networks to promote appeals least to modern women. Female viewers consistently give their highest ratings to nontraditional female characters such as leaders, heroines, and comedians. But TV’s biggest advertisers, packaged-foods and household-goods manufacturers, want traditional “family” shows that fit a sales pitch virtually unchanged in two decades. Advertisers prefer to reflect the housewife viewer because she is perceived as a more passive and willing consumer, because she is likely to have more children, and because they are simply used to this arrangement. Since its inception, television has been marketed as a family-gathering experience—the modern-day flickering hearth—where merchandisers’ commercial messages can hit the whole clan at once.

 

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