Even the judge presiding over the trial, Lance Ito, leapt into Skirtgate. After a prospective juror told Clark that her skirts were too short, Judge Ito added: “I wondered when someone was going to mention that.” Lawyers also condemned Clark in news articles for wearing sexy clothes to sway the court and get her verdict. A tabloid reported that Shapiro “privately expressed some concern that she will use seduction to sway male jurors.”
Clark was called “the pinup of the O. J. Simpson trial” and the “prosecutie.” A Marcia Clark look-alike in a tiny skirt and fishnets did high kicks on Jay Leno’s show. Lawyers and consultants protested Clark’s wardrobe, and many advised her to buy more conservative clothes so that she wouldn’t jeopardize the state’s case. “If it’s too short, hang it up,” the Associated Press scolded.
The country also fixated on the conspicuous mole above Clark’s lip, which “became as famous as Cindy Crawford’s,” according to the Baltimore Sun. A courtroom consultant recommended she accentuate it with pencil, because moles were on trend. The bar’s “most memorable mole” also called attention to Clark’s facial expressions, which were studied and critiqued mercilessly and said to range from dour to inflamed. Her hair was on trial, too. She had “more than her share of bad hair days,” and her perm was nicknamed “poodle ’do.” As with many women bitchified in the 90s, Clark-bashing came in Halloween costume form. The formulation was “a mole painted just above the right upper lip, a new hairdo on every doorstep, head held in hands,” recommended one newspaper.
While Clark tried to ignore this vapid attention, the sexist critiques lodged in the minds of those watching the trial and helped shape their opinions of the prosecution. Ty West, who coordinated Simpson coverage for Dateline NBC, told me, “With Marcia, it was her appearance, what was her hair today, what was she wearing, that kind of thing. It was six paragraphs on Marcia displayed at checkout with a photo. Not a lot of in-depth stuff going on. Very much what people read on the toilet.”
One tabloid even ran a topless photo of Clark. It was taken years earlier, during a vacation in Europe with her then husband. Her ex-mother-in-law had sold it to the publication. A secretary in her office tried to comfort her, but she was mortified. “That was a very bad day for me,” Clark recalled.
The checkout-aisle treatment undermined Clark’s credibility and competence. Her team was often described as “in over their heads.” With all the focus on Clark’s appearance, to the exclusion of her credentials, it’s easy to see why. After the televised nine-month trial ended, Clark told me that people often approached her to say, “I really miss your show.”
BITCHY BUT LOVABLE
If CBS had its way, Murphy Brown would have been a young blonde sexpot. Network executives wanted the indefatigable reporter character in the comedy of the same name to be thirty, not forty. Rather than returning to the newsroom from rehab, as she does in the 1988 premiere, they thought she should be back from detoxing at a spa. Producers had hoped to cast the nubile Heather Locklear as Murphy, who would later scorch Beverly Hills, 90210 spin-off Melrose Place as Amanda Woodward, Monday night’s notorious man-stealing bitch.
“Heather was very hot then. That was typical of the kind of casting that you would see,” Murphy Brown creator Diane English told me. English had envisioned Candice Bergen as the unapologetic newshound in the comedy series from the get-go. But the network found Bergen frigid and pretentious. “They felt that she was the ice princess of Park Avenue,” English said, and that she lacked “the fire to be this character.”
English couldn’t have disagreed more with these notes. And thanks to the Writers Guild of America strike, which halted studio productions in 1988, she didn’t have to take them. Since she contractually couldn’t edit the script, her Murphy Brown—the news anchor who is unmarried, childless by choice, outspoken, powerful, and overcoming addiction—appears in the pilot, which was shot “word for word.” English described Murphy as a woman who “lived her life as a man.” This Murphy terrified the network, which prized women characters’ likability, a word English says makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. But it turned out that English’s Murphy was exactly who America had been missing.
While many contemporary comedies turn on the story lines of complex, flawed single women characters—Broad City’s Abbi and Ilana, Veep’s Selina Meyer, and Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope—in the 90s this was something altogether new. Murphy Brown was talented and funny, but also selfish and obstinate. At the time, women characters on television typically spoke in honeyed tones and wouldn’t harm a bug. That Murphy’s character had negative qualities was a revelation.
A crackerjack reporter on a well-regarded nightly news program called FYI, Murphy values scoops and lacks any semblance of a personal life. She fights for plum assignments, back-talks to her bosses, and grills interview subjects. Male colleagues cower in her presence. A running joke of the series is her dissatisfaction with incompetent secretaries, whom she constantly fires. She employed ninety-three during the ten-year run of the series. Her suits and shoes are always gorgeous; her hair shines like meringue. Murphy was tough on coworkers but even tougher on herself, making her what critics called a “bitchy but lovable” character. She proved that television was “finally catching on to the reality of many women’s lives,” according to The Chicago Sun-Times.
“I basically wrote Murphy as a man in a skirt,” English told me. “I had never seen a strong, competent woman on television who also had the courage of her convictions, who wasn’t trying to please everyone, who allowed herself to be rude and who didn’t edit herself. These are traits you would normally find in a man.” In other words, in order to be taken seriously and push boundaries, Murphy needed to be an aggressor, a woman who would slug someone for calling her a girl. In one episode, she even threatened to kill her more delicate female coworker, mafioso-style.
Fans of all ages loved Murphy Brown. The series won eighteen Emmys over ten seasons. Bergen took home five Best Actress awards, which was the most ever given to an actress for portraying a single character until Julia Louis-Dreyfus unseated her in 2017. After winning her fifth in 1995, Bergen declined future Emmy nominations, out of respect for actresses in other shows.
THE RISE AND THREAT OF SINGLENESS
While 90s hit television shows like Murphy Brown, Roseanne, and Melrose Place focused almost completely on white women’s struggles at work and in their personal lives, Living Single told the stories of black women professionals dating and trying to make it in New York City. Since its inception, television network Fox aimed to attract young and urban audiences with programming that contrasted with the more staid fare on the big three networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC. The television industry began associating Fox with creating “black” hits that, unlike The Cosby Show, didn’t cross over to attract a diverse viewership, but appealed almost entirely to black viewers who were otherwise faced with a blindingly white primetime television lineup. Living Single epitomized this genre. It debuted in 1993, quickly became a hit, and ran until 1998. “Going black is simply smart business,” Newsweek reported.
The women in the comedy are lively, strong, and drive the action. The show was designed as a vehicle for recording artist Queen Latifah, who plays Flavor magazine editor Khadijah James. She is flanked by her cousin, a divorce attorney, and a retail buyer. Khadijah, Synclaire, Max, and Regine were singular characters on primetime television. Bawdy, entitled, and unapologetically sexual, they were loud and physical with their acting and comedy, and they ribbed one another unsparingly. They were also loyal friends. Watching them parse work dramas or dissect the seemingly endless flow of bad dates, viewers knew that they cared more about one another than they did about men, who were often one-dimensional, naive, or shallow. Male characters—such as handymen, neighbors, and love interests—were most often stock characters, supporting the action or serving as the butt of jokes. This felt like a much-needed role reversal, and a smart commentary on the sitcom genre. When a male
neighbor tries to give Synclaire career advice, she listens to her friends instead. A handyman spends an entire episode attempting to reprogram a television remote, and the women point out his ineptitude, telling him they could buy one faster down the block.
The series critiqued the kind of male-centrism and sexism that Martin and In Living Color doled out. The comedy genre has long satirized injustice and mocked the status quo. On most shows, however, men’s stories comprised the meat of the plot, while women were sexual conquests, companions, or mother figures. Living Single broke the mold by putting women in the driver’s seat and men in the role of sex objects. Soon, the show beat Martin in the ratings.
Khadijah’s ideal world without men consists of “a bunch of fat, happy women and no crime,” she says in the pilot. The women on the show critique men’s bodies with lines like, “His butt’s so hard you could bounce a quarter off it,” reclaiming such gems from the dustbin of male chauvinism. No other show at the time gave women the kind of power that Living Single did. And some viewers didn’t like it one bit.
The backlash smacked of sexism—and racism. Criticism relegated the female characters to a long-entrenched stereotype: the Sapphire, or the Angry Black Woman. Sociologist Sue Jewell explained that the Sapphire’s existence “is predicated on the presence of the corrupt African American male” to “provide her with an opportunity to emasculate him through her use of verbal put downs.” Critics’ arguments that the characters were “too obsessed with male-bashing” or “viewing men as sex objects” fulfilled this cliché. Despite their college degrees and good jobs, these women appeared to be squandering their achievements with sass and attitude. The black women on Living Single were stereotyped as “booty-shaking sugar mamas” and “man-crazed Fly Girls.” Such criticisms of female sexuality harkened to the “erotomaniac” insults hurled at Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky. The insinuation was clear: independent, loud women who excelled at work and controlled their own lives were objectionable—especially if they were black.
Murphy Brown exhibited similar strength to the women in Living Single, of course, but she got a pass, probably because she was white. Critics said Living Single fell short of its calling, as a classy “black Designing Women,” because it had “quadruple the sex drive and none of the smarts.” Newsweek reported that influential black entertainers were irked that Fox shows like Living Single cast men as “oversexed, wha’s-up, man buffoons.” Bill Cosby lambasted the show for limiting its women characters in an interview with the magazine. “Suppose I did a sitcom about four African-American women like Fox’s Living Single? In my show, two of them might be sitting around discussing men all the time. But the other two women are going someplace, something else is happening in their lives. Is that too much to ask?” Cosby’s subsequent credibility implosion aside, he ignores the many episodes in which the women on Living Single struggle with identity and careers. Synclaire fights for a promotion. The magazine she works for in the show reports a story on embezzlement at city hall. They play Scrabble. They also smartly satirize the crap black women put up with from black men, according to the show’s boosters.
The creator of Living Single, Yvette Lee Bowser, resisted a show that revolved around sex and dating. In a 1997 interview, she spoke about kowtowing to network pressure to strengthen the male characters and gear the show’s plot toward the women dating them. Fox reportedly told her, “You’re not going to get your female show on the air without a strong male presence.” So she acquiesced.
After the show had been called man-hating and too black, and its female characters dumb and frivolous, a curious thing happened. In 1994, a year after Living Single first debuted, a new sitcom hit the airwaves. Like Living Single, this new show also starred young urban singles. Unlike Living Single, it cast three women and three men, all white. Industry critics quickly recognized that NBC had copied Living Single’s winning formula and pumped it full of cash to make its own hit show, Friends. Perhaps Friends made itself more palatable by amping up the male characters’ dilemmas and dialogue, and tamping down the female characters, who were the strong center of Living Single. In Friends, the women fret about sex and dating and are often packaged into stereotypes, like Monica (the former fat girl and control freak), Rachel (the daddy’s girl), and Phoebe (the crazy one). They work domestic-style jobs in food services or fashion. Unlike Khadijah and Synclaire, they are mostly deferential to their male foils. Newsweek compared the bodies of both casts. Friends’ female stars were “classically beautiful and reed thin,” while Living Single’s were “a less Hollywood ideal” and “black women whose bodies are, well, real.”
The reedy, milquetoast gals of Friends signaled the beginning of the end for the fiery, independent women of Living Single. Rather than point out the debt Friends clearly owed to Living Single, and how Living Single created new possibilities for women on television, coverage of the cast’s reaction to Friends stoked a catfight. Queen Latifah was reportedly annoyed by the new series’s fancy billboard erected outside the Warner Bros. lot where both comedies filmed.
While the Friends cast would “cavort each week to the sound of their hit theme song,” Living Single’s was now “singing a much different tune,” according to a Los Angeles Times report called “‘Single’ Looks for a Little Help Against ‘Friends.’” Bowser lamented that “we have never gotten that kind of push that ‘Friends’ has had.” She aired her grievances with Fox for stifling her creativity and providing only lackluster promotion of Living Single. After Friends debuted, Living Single hung on for several more seasons before being canceled.
CATCH A HUSBAND
Living Single offered an independent ethos during a time of marriage decline. Between 1990 and 1999, the median marriage age rose from twenty-three to twenty-five, a significant increase considering it had previously hovered between twenty and twenty-two for almost one hundred years. More women were staying single longer, or skipping nuptials altogether. This signaled a national shift in priorities, away from traditional gender roles and toward increased sexual and financial freedom and a more independent existence for women.
The shift also triggered a vicious cultural backlash that warned women against uncommitted sexual agency and pressured them to marry. The counternarrative—fueled by the epidemics of AIDS, STDs, and date rape in the 90s—insisted that women didn’t want sexual freedom after all. It was too dangerous. What women wanted, and had wanted all along, was simple, safe monogamy—sex within the confines of marriage.
“The dominant impression in the media was that a single woman now wanted ‘commitment,’ not carnality; ‘courtship,’ not casual sex,” wrote Wendy Dennis in her 1992 study of sex, Hot and Bothered: Men and Women, Sex and Love in the 90s.
Well-timed dating guides stepped in to exploit the anxieties and confusion about women’s shifting place in society. Dating self-help hit new heights, largely propelled by two seminal books that promised women the security of commitment in a handful of steps. The Rules and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus seemed to create problems between men and women, then propose to fix them. They offered women the alluring prospect of everlasting love in return for retrograde self-sacrifice.
Published in 1995, The Rules guaranteed women happiness through sublimation. The tactics of the “beribboned husband-catching primer” included never approaching men, waiting to be approached, and never accepting a date for the weekend after the middle of the week. The book forbids women from moving in with men before marriage, and tells them to dump suitors who don’t buy romantic birthday gifts. Other advice included drastic diets, grooming regimes, and plastic surgery. Women shouldn’t let a flat chest or large nose inhibit their eligibility, authors Sherrie Schneider and Ellen Fein reasoned. “If you have a bad nose, get a nose job,” they recommended. Lots of women in the 90s seemed to comply; between 1992 and 2004, breast augmentations increased more than 700 percent.
The Rules marketed itself to women who had been burned under the mantle of feminism, women who h
ad achieved careers but lacked romance. This characterization at once celebrates and shames women’s workplace successes. “Women want to get married, and the way they’ve been acting for the last twenty years hasn’t worked,” Schneider said at a seminar. Being bosses had fulfilled women but stymied their love lives. Now they risked becoming the spinsters of American nightmares. They were to blame, but now there was help.
Boosters believed The Rules offered women agency. The text lists tools to “take control” of relationships and discourages women from “throwing themselves at guys who aren’t interested,” wrote a former adherent. It smashed bestseller lists. A cult following mushroomed. The authors became instant relationship experts and pseudo celebrities, ministering to lonely-hearted fangirls at workshops across the country.
But criticism mounted that these rules were outmoded and required women to return to obedient, deferential femininity. Reviewers disparaged the book as your mother’s dating advice, asking readers to “forget equality” and “revert back to the good ol’ days of playing hard-to-get and easy-to-be-with.” Many wondered whether it was “another manifestation of the New Conservatism,” a wild-female-taming plot authored by Newt Gingrich and the Moral Majority.
Rules girls, as adherents were called, were labeled helpless, desperate spinsters who couldn’t land men. Dateline did a segment on the book that took viewers inside one of the conference rooms where women paid forty-five dollars each “to erase years of bad dating habits.” Correspondent Josh Mankiewicz explained that “Understandably, most of them wanted to stay anonymous,” spotlighting their desperation.
Male pushback to The Rules was fierce. “This rules thing may be about the M word, but it doesn’t stand for marriage,” Dateline’s Mankiewicz says slowly, teeing up his big reveal. “What we’re talking about here is manipulating men, aren’t we?”
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