For the writers, about half of whom were female, manipulator characters like Amanda and Kimberly were the favorites because their motivations and story lines were so rich, Kahn recalled. “Amanda was the bitch you wanted to be, the bitch positioned for greatness because she was freed of the convention of caring what other people thought. Her modus operandi and meaning of life was about winning at all costs,” he said. Scripting women’s histrionics was catnip for viewers, and was designed to spark watercooler talk the next day.
Another way to see it is that Melrose fed viewers a deceptive premise—that women’s real power only existed in a world where sex was a weapon, and that their careers and achievements were merely props in vengeance plotlines or vehicles for enacting revenge. This myth was escapist at heart, like the sparkling shops and beach bodies of 90210, but it was also a hollow promise to women. Both Melrose Place and 90210 seemed to claim power and space for new kinds of girls and women who were beautiful, mouthy, and free to speak their minds. But what these shows really did was propagate an old formula for women on television. Women could be cunning, feisty, and smart, but only when it came to scoring men or getting revenge on other women.
By 1997, women characters on television were more likely than men to obsess about their appearance, and to use precious dialogue (particularly in short sitcoms, where each line must reveal something about a character or move the action forward) to receive or make comments about their looks. They were also far more likely to be shown grooming, shopping, or maintaining their appearance. Women were rewarded for these strides, as shows like Melrose and 90210 had made clear. Women characters in media were more likely to discuss romance or their looks than be shown in jobs or at school, according to a report by advocacy group Children Now and the Kaiser Family Foundation. Amanda and her cohort on Melrose Place reinforced to women and girls that their power was limited to sex, violence, and consumerism.
BITCH SLAP
In May of 1992, MTV premiered a series that seeded television’s most bitchifying and prolific genre, the kudzu of cable, which still reigns today: reality television. Real World is MTV’s longest-running series to date, and it is still going strong. The formula—casting young, attractive roommates to argue, share toothpaste, and hopefully fuck, all on camera—forged the retrograde female stereotypes that still haunt reality television.
At its start, Real World was groundbreaking, casting diverse Americans and covering topics infrequently elevated elsewhere, like AIDS, abortion, and racism. But it wasn’t long before the show’s capacious treatment of humanity and social issues devolved into ugly clichés. In particular, The Real World created the villain bitch reality television couldn’t live without. Women presented on The Real World were young, single, and educated. But their independence eventually became tethered to tropes like the bitch, slut, backstabber, and gold digger. These stereotypes were all discovered, cast, and nurtured on The Real World before they flourished on countless other programs.
Perhaps the most iconic female character of early episodes—and the one who was most often called a bitch—was Tami Roman (née Akbar) of The Real World: Los Angeles, which aired in 1993. During the show, she got an abortion, wired her jaw closed to drop pounds, and succeeded in booting off a fellow cast member, David, for sexual harassment. These experiences made her “the most screwed-up Real Worlder ever,” according to one review. She and two other female cast members had approached producers to complain about David, claiming they didn’t feel safe with him in the house. But reports blamed Tami for egging him on. Although Tami volunteered with AIDS patients and sparked a dialogue about abortion and body image, she is remembered most as a villainess for her perceived manipulations. In 1993, she told the Los Angeles Times that she was commonly stopped in shopping malls and asked, “Why did you kick David out of the house? . . . I mean, you acted like such a bitch, and now you seem so nice.”
The bitch became one of The Real World’s best-recognized roles for women. Producers emphasized that they weren’t looking to cast “stereotypes,” but hopefuls auditioning knew better. “I could be the bitch,” twenty-three-year-old Christine Sclafani told a Miami Herald reporter at a tryout in 1995. “I’d be the one arguing with everyone.” Another viewer liked The Real World because it was “just like those live cop shows. Real people fighting all the time. One woman even admitted to being a bitch on the show.”
When Melissa from the Miami season opened a cast member’s mail, he called her a bitch, on camera. Another Miami character, Flora, called herself a bitch. A third female character that season, Cynthia, was “cute and sassy, but a two-faced back-stabber,” according to one paper. These women all appear in one season, suggesting that catfights were a narrative priority.
By 1998, a Real World “bitch” was so normalized that even being a victim of violence didn’t win her sympathy. One of the show’s most discussed episodes featured a male cast member slapping a female cast member in the face during the Seattle season. The so-called “bitch slap” was named among VH1’s “40 Greatest Reality TV Moments.” Entertainment Weekly ranked it atop a TV roundup because it was refreshing to see “what happens when people stop being polite and start being real.”
During the 1990s, The Real World wrote the playbook designating the limited ways women could be portrayed on television, and also in real life. It planted and nurtured the villainess bitch in the documentary form the way Melrose Place had in fiction.
The show’s very title promised these women were not just television characters, but real women commonly found in the world. “Reality TV isn’t simply reflecting anachronistic social biases, it’s resurrecting them,” author Jennifer Pozner wrote in her critique of the genre, Reality Bites Back. “The genre has . . . created a universe in which women not only have no real choices, they don’t even want any.”
90s WITCHES
While 90s villainesses in nighttime soaps and The Real World commanded authority through sex, bitch slaps, and catfights, the supernatural realm afforded women characters actual power through magic. Paranormal women characters have long had more leeway than regular women to be messy, biting, and even unhinged. This tradition dates back to The Wizard of Oz, Sleeping Beauty, I Dream of Jeannie, and Bewitched. But most 90s witches and evil-thwarters wielded sex appeal alongside their spells, which they often cast to snare men or inflict revenge.
Sexy aliens and sorceresses skewed younger in the 90s to appeal to the sought-after teenage girl demographic. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and The Craft took the discovery of female power to the consummate hell for outsiders: high school. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy and Melissa Joan Hart’s Sabrina were not only enchantresses experimenting with the contours of their power, they were also teenagers learning how to grow up.
Buffy, “the Chosen One,” offs vampires, while Sabrina discovers that she is a witch on her sixteenth birthday and tries to use her powers for good. They also face mundane teen dilemmas—like trying out for cheerleading and working a summer job at a coffeehouse—that can accentuate their otherworldly ones. Sabrina casts simple spells to change her outfit or put bullies in their place. In the 1996 cult film The Craft, witchery unites four outcast girls who use their powers to heal themselves and avenge wrongs perpetrated by jerky classmates. Both Buffy’s and Sabrina’s rich interior lives and motivations are complex and unfold over many seasons. The Craft confronted real problems like acceptance, abuse, and bullying. But viewers were constantly reminded, simply by looking at the witches, that their power and uniqueness came in a sexy, ebullient shell. Buffy and Sabrina are perky blondes, while The Craft’s characters wear midriff-baring shirts, short skirts, and thigh-highs.
When 90210 and Melrose godfather Aaron Spelling finally got a hold of a witch series in 1998, sex appeal eclipsed magic. Charmed follows a coven of witches, the Halliwell sisters, played by Shannen Doherty, Alyssa Milano, and Holly Marie Combs. Casting Doherty as a witch became a laugh line for many critics, implying that her public
misbehavior and inherent bitchiness had won her the role. The Halliwell sisters fight evil in smoldering eye makeup and plunging tops too risqué for Sabrina or Buffy. They are described as “beautiful,” “fashionable,” and “feminine” witches. They may rid the world of warlocks, but the apogee of their power is their appearance. Interspersed with their spells—which mostly occur in their home, relegating them to domestic space—is their romancing “a procession of attractive males,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. “Charmed is a perfect postfeminist girl-power show,” Milano said in an interview. “These women are strong, but they’re still feminine and accessible.” Episode titles include “Dead Man Dating” and “Love Hurts.” Buffy, too, hunts for love, and “takes out the undead between dates,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
Nineties witches often used their powers to either find love or exact revenge, much like the nonmagical Amanda from Melrose Place. In the 1998 film Practical Magic, sisters Sally and Gillian (Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, respectively) tamp down their sorcery until they need it “to overcome the obstacles in discovering true love,” according to the film’s marketing copy. Witchcraft is therefore only “practical,” as the title suggests, when it’s used to catch a mate.
In The Craft, Sarah (Robin Tunney) gets revenge on a classmate who humiliates her by casting a spell that makes him fall in love with her. Nancy (Fairuza Balk) later tricks him into sleeping with her by making him think that she is Sarah. Nancy then kills him for rejecting her when he learns the truth.
Too much power drives the witches crazy and forces them to turn on each other in a series of catfights. Sarah practically battles Nancy to the death after Nancy abuses her power by killing people. The film suggests that women’s extreme power should be constrained or else it will be abused, and that women should be responsible for policing one another. Buffy’s abilities, too, need controlling. Her initial access to her power is shepherded by a male authority figure, the fuddy-duddy school librarian, Giles, who is dubbed “the Watcher.” Buffy’s otherworldly abilities are not only marshaled by male authority, they are also chastened by it. She is expelled from high school for causing trouble when she was really just trying to save the world. On her way to destroy evil demons, she is stopped by the school principal, who thinks she’s cutting class.
When women in supernatural settings rejected catfighting with other women or exploiting themselves sexually, they were seen as nags. On The X-Files, then television’s longest running sci-fi series, FBI agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) had no magical powers. But the show’s plotline, which involves a series of alien and paranormal investigations, allowed for Scully to be a complex and spirited character more dynamic than most women on television. And yet, she is the resident skeptic, charged with reining in her partner’s at-times irrational belief in extraterrestrial life.
Scully is the dogmatic realist, demanding that investigations be fact- and evidence-based. Her partner, FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), dreams of aliens and throws caution to the wind. Ultimately, the show reveals that he is right, aliens do exist, leading Scully’s tightfisted caution to seem annoying and overblown. Anderson, who portrayed Scully starting in 1993 and for all of the show’s ten seasons, said the network had wanted a sexpot Scully—“taller, leggier, blonder, and breasted”—for the role. Maybe if Scully had been hotter, she wouldn’t have been such a harpy.
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Sex in the 90s
Many look back at the 90s and remember sex. What might be less memorable is how the sex differed depending on your gender. Sex in the 90s was characterized by women being blamed and shamed, and by men being celebrated. This began as early as grade school. Abstinence-only sex education was the predominant school-based curriculum.
In 1996, abstinence-only became the national standard when it received a multimillion-dollar windfall. This was done, oddly enough, through welfare reform. The legislation that President Bill Clinton signed into law that year incentivized abstinence-only programs in America with an appropriation of $50 million per year. Abstinence-only programs taught children and teens that having sex before marriage was socially unacceptable and that avoiding sex was the only real way to prevent pregnancy and STDs. The law’s definition of abstinence-only education warned that sex before marriage caused “harmful psychological and physical effects.” Lessons included how to “reject sexual advances” and taught that drugs and alcohol “increase vulnerability to sexual advances.” In other words, the lessons stopped well short of practical sex education, such as how to use birth control and how to have a healthy sexual relationship.
My own sex education experience in middle Georgia in the 90s hewed to the abstinence standard, and dispensed fear of HIV/AIDS and STDs as a substitute for birth control. My middle school class filed into the auditorium to hear a lecture from a prominent HIV/AIDS expert in the Southeast who not only offered grave warnings, but also provided supposed photographic proof of his patients’ suffering. He projected their open sores, bloody limbs, and rotting sex organs onto our two-story-high auditorium wall. We exited the assembly stiff with fear and ready to skip lunch. It was a common tactic in abstinence-oriented sex education. “Teachers say, ‘Let’s gross these kids out so much they won’t want to have sex,’” a seventeen-year-old student named Annie told a Washington Post reporter in 1999. “But then we don’t remember the information.” Anything unrelated to disease catching or baby making was unspeakable.
As it turns out, abstinence-only sex education is ineffective, not just in America, but all across the globe. It doesn’t prevent sex, and it surely doesn’t stop the spread of disease, according to legions of policy and healthcare experts and studies. In fact, abstinence education is often blamed for the high rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases that struck the US in the 90s and early 2000s. And so, sex education in the 1990s wasn’t about sex. It was about control. Abstinence education forced girls to go on the defensive, guarding against sexual overtures from boys, while absorbing blame for any consequences. It also neglected non-heterosexual experiences.
Disease as punishment for unsanctioned sex was a common theme in abstinence-oriented sex education. Becoming a sexually active woman in the 90s was colored by the fear of contracting HIV/AIDS. The need for fear was real. By 1994, the disease had become the number one killer of twenty-five- to forty-four-year-olds in the United States. More than 440,000 cases had been reported, and more than a quarter million people had died of the disease.
Men were in the majority. But women were undercounted due to lack of participation in clinical trials and a narrower clinical definition of the disease before 1993. In 1996, women comprised 20 percent of all cases. Many girls’ fears were stoked by the 1995 film Kids, in which a teenager played by Chloë Sevigny contracts HIV after having sex just once. On television, teen sex that didn’t trigger repercussions (particularly for women) was widely frowned upon. When Brenda lost her virginity to Dylan on 90210, “the affiliates were scandalized—not because they had sex, but because Brenda was happy about it, and it didn’t have any dire consequences,” creator Darren Star told a reporter.
As the decade progressed, fear of sexually transmitted infections other than HIV/AIDS crescendoed because more people were getting them. More than three million teenagers were contracting STDs each year, according to a 1995 report by the National Commission on Adolescent Sexual Health. It noted that European teenagers experienced much lower rates of STDs and pregnancy because “European countries tend to be more open about sexuality, and their official governmental policies focus on reducing unprotected intercourse, rather than reducing sexual behaviors.” The report recommended scrapping abstinence-only education, but that didn’t happen. By the end of the decade, fifteen million Americans were contracting STDs each year, and two-thirds of the infected were under twenty-five.
Women became de facto custodians of sexual health and safety during this outbreak. They were blamed and shamed for contracting infections like chlamydia, gono
rrhea, or syphilis. This was in part because their symptoms and infections were less obvious than men’s. It was suggested that they could trick unsuspecting partners. Women also had more to lose, since untreated infections could cause infertility or cancer.
Reports about the rise of STDs in the 90s often featured more young women being interviewed about the diseases than men, which not so subtly reinforced the idea that women were at fault for transmitting them. One story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune attributed the spike in STD rates among teenage girls in the area to the increasing number of them sleeping with older men called “Cat Daddies.” These men extend “promises of jewelry, snappy shoes and fancy nails and hair in return for sex,” the paper wrote. An expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that young girls would need “special attention” when it came to STDs, specifically because they dated older men like “Cat Daddies.”
Meanwhile, it was collegiate women who hustled to campus health centers to get tested, not their male counterparts. Women saw iconic female television and film characters like Kim Cattrall’s Samantha in Sex and the City, Tiffani Thiessen’s Valerie in 90120, and Janeane Garofalo’s Vickie in Reality Bites seek out HIV testing, but only after they exhibited sexual promiscuity. Seeing these beloved women test themselves marked new moments of cultural awareness about STDs. But it also signaled that wantonness had finally caught up with these women and that their freewheeling sexuality had a cost. Why didn’t we see their male partners getting tested, too? And why weren’t other STDs as discussed as HIV/AIDS? “There are no Magic Johnsons for gonorrhea,” the Washington Post glibly observed.
SEX IS HOT HOT HOT
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