by Andi Zeisler
By mid-decade, feminism had become so taboo on television that one popular work-around was to simply avoid writing roles for adult female characters, which brought about the popular subgenre of sitcoms in which a mother has either died or deserted: Diff’rent Strokes, Gimme a Break!, Punky Brewster, Silver Spoons, My Two Dads, Full House, Blossom, The Nanny, and Raising Miranda. Most of these shows never even mentioned the missing mother after establishing her dead-or-deadbeat status and introducing the invariably wacky parental substitute who was either pressed into service by the bewildered dad or was the dad himself. One possible explanation for the disappearance of sitcom moms was that as divorce became more normalized—by 1983, no-fault divorce laws had been adopted in all but two states—these stories offered a reassuring way to contest the belief that a family wasn’t a family without a mother present—all a dad needed, really, was a housekeeper, or a girlfriend, or at the very least, another dude or two. (See also the hit 1987 movie Three Men and a Baby.)
Two notable exceptions to TV’s feminist blackout in 1980s TV were Roseanne, the blue-collar family sitcom whose Learian mix of humor and social import was anchored by standup comedian Roseanne Barr’s no-bullshit brashness, and Murphy Brown, whose title character—a formerly alcoholic control-freak TV journalist—was arguably the closest thing sitcoms had seen to a female antihero. Both were variations on TV-comedy archetypes that would continue to be duplicated, and which spawned, over the next decade, sitcoms focusing on mouthy working-class women (Grace Under Fire, Reba) and privileged single ones grappling with dating, aging, and children (Cybill, Suddenly Susan, Veronica’s Closet).
A bit more of an outlier was Living Single, whose twist on the awesome-foursome female-focused sitcom (Designing Women, The Golden Girls) was its four black professional women living together in pre-hipster Brooklyn, contending and commiserating with careers, beauty standards, sex, and gender roles. Living Single’s popularity was one of the few alternatives to feminism’s televised face, which, much like its public one, had become increasingly homogenous. But it did share one key feature with its paler TV sistren in its firmly individualistic approach to choices. All of these women were living tacitly liberated lives—they made their own decisions, their own money, and their own mistakes; and they had no interest in being guilted or shamed for their independence, their sex lives, or their views. It was decentralized, decontextualized, and safely unaffiliated feminism. And, most important, it sold.
Mighty Big TV
That television, in particular, has emerged as a medium that regularly engages with, challenges, and re-envisions feminism seems all the more unlikely not only because of its history, but because of how the economics of the medium have changed over the past several decades.
In 1990s America, there was a Democratic president, a federal budget surplus, a tech revolution on the rise, a focus on multiculturalism, a reinvigoration of youth activism, and a feminist presence that, coughing on the rancid wind of backlash, was re-emerging into social and political discourse, often via music, indie film, and other pop culture. Antifashion was fashionable; indie and alternative youth cultures were being scouted by a new breed of corporate “cool hunters,” and the New York Times was so eager to be down with the kids that it unwittingly printed a glossary of made-up “grunge” slang. (Harsh realm, lamestains!)
And as the underground became mainstream, TV audiences were becoming more carefully target-marketed than ever before. The industry’s bread and butter had for decades been family viewing, with households gathering around their sets each night to watch the Walton, Ricardo, Cosby, or Keaton families do their thing. But starting in the 1980s, the advent of cable channels like HBO and Showtime, and independent ones like Nickelodeon, meant that shows could finally deviate, if only minimally, from the time-honored model of “least objectionable content” that had kept the Big Three networks robust. (Least-objectionable-content theory held that viewers didn’t necessarily like everything they watched, but would reliably watch what offended them the least.) Meanwhile, niche marketing—segmenting potential viewers by age, race, gender, household income, and more—replaced mass marketing as the primary strategy of audience building.
In pursuit of the prized 18-49 demographic, new television “netlets” were born from entertainment conglomerates that followed the example of Fox, the network launched by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in 1986 whose hits included The Cosby Show and its spin-off, A Different World, as well as Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place. With Warner Brothers debuting the WB (for teens and tweens); Paramount offering UPN (for young men and the audience known as “urban”), and Lifetime and WE aiming for the ladies (with the similarly targeted Oxygen debuting in 2000), the practice of “narrowcasting” was increasingly crucial for advertisers as long as such small audiences had big pocketbooks. In selling women to advertisers, the female-targeted netlets were careful to avoid the word “feminist,” lest it conjure the image of an audience that shunned beauty products, household cleaners, and baby needs—though Lifetime would later describe its target viewer as “a woman in her early forties, she is probably a working mom. . . . a busy, multitasking women, very interested in a lot of different things: information about health, parenting, social issues, violence against women and how to break the cycles, so she’s a multifaceted person.” And Oxygen’s president of programming offered advertisers a viewer who was “very interested in herself—moving herself forward . . . [she] feels like, ‘I’m not getting older, I’m getting better; these are the goals I have for myself; this is what I want to accomplish.’”5
But the most significant shift for television was Bill Clinton’s signing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a major piece of legislation designed to promote economic growth and competition between media companies by deregulating the communications industry, including radio, television, and the young Internet. The Telecom Act had positives, like its mandate that new televisions be manufactured with parental-consent V-chips and its plan to make sure that all U.S. schools, libraries, and other learning institutions had Internet access. But the act’s emphasis on deregulation led to the largest and most destructive wave of media mergers in history. For example, the limit on the number of radio and TV stations that could be owned by a single company was lifted, a policy that paved the way for behemoths like Clear Channel and Comcast to monopolize consumer access. Independent, local, and minority-owned entities were swallowed up; the giant companies who owned them were granted longer broadcast licenses that, among other things, rendered them far less accountable to the public.
If a movie is ever made of the aftermath of the Telecom Act, it could realistically just be another Godzilla remake, with the role of Godzilla filled by a series of multinational corporations stomping across the United States, snapping up thousands of locally-owned media companies and crushing them. The implied expectation of these mergers was that formerly independent broadcasting entities would still be able to hew to a standard of “television in the public interest”—a fairly roomy term that nods to “informational and educational needs,” particularly those of children.6 But the reality was that for the global entertainment conglomerates who now owned them—by the mid-2000s, more than 75 percent of prime-time TV viewing was controlled by five multinational entities—the only consideration was money. More television meant more advertisers, which meant more profits; making more television meant making it cheaper; making it cheaper meant fewer unions, fewer original scripts, and more product placement. And that’s how we ended up with today’s surplus of Bachelors, Bachelorettes, Survivors, Swans, Top Models, Basketball Wives, Storage Wars, Real Housewives, Dance Moms, Duck Dynasties, and more, as well as with approximately five million shows about flipping houses, hunting ghosts, lying in wait for Sasquatch, running tanning salons, and realizing way too late that breast implants don’t belong in your butt cheeks.
Reality TV existed before the Telecom Act, of course. When MTV’s The Real World debuted in 1992, it was a social experim
ent that mimicked 1973’s landmark TV miniseries An American Family—cameras everywhere, no narrative, let’s see what happens. For The Real World, the experiment was in how seven unrelated strangers would navigate their differences and learn from one another. Each season hinged on casting a likable, diverse set of regular-looking young adults that viewers could relate to; the show’s attempts to create a balanced ecosystem of learning moments (AIDS, homelessness) and inevitable conflict (racism, unhygienic peanut-butter habits) was either well-meaning or cynical, depending on whom you asked. But there was no question about the moment when the show turned a corner: the Season 7 episode when Seattle housemates Stephen and Irene exchanged words, followed by Stephen slapping Irene in the face. The slap became the central focus of the rest of the season, and changed the tone of every one that followed. Current events and social issues were back-burnered, hot tubs and gallons of booze were rolled in, and shows were less likely to be about teachable moments than about using bad behavior to make good TV. It was in this context-free vacuum that reality television, with its narratives, tropes, and “journeys,” became network gold.
The effect of the Telecom Act on news outlets, meanwhile, was transfiguring. In 1980, there was only one 24-hour news channel, CNN. When there wasn’t quite enough round-the-clock news to cover, the network turned to entertainment and human-interest stories, one genre of which prefigured viral videos. (Watch this goat eat the morning paper right out of its owner’s hands!) By the late 1990s, there were more than five national news channels and a multitude of regional ones, and none of those had enough actual news to fill twenty-four hours, either. By the early 2000s, as the Internet began increasingly to be a primary source of breaking news, televised news channels had to find a different way to appeal to viewers. “Infotainment”—health scares, ginned-up political scuttlebutt, celebrity gossip—became an ever-larger part of news broadcasting, and as time went on, the fluff padding out the hard news seemed to squeeze “info” entirely out of the picture. When Anna Nicole Smith died, I heard it first from CNN.
Ruling Reality
Media critic Jennifer L. Pozner has spent thousands of hours and an immense amount of patience watching both cable news and reality television, and understands better than the average person how alike they’ve become. “We treat stories that we would have never treated as journalism twenty years ago like headline news,” she muses. And we treat reality TV the same way. More relevant to feminism, however, is how the reality genre has harnessed the belief in a postfeminist world and, in doing so, reframed retrograde gender dynamics as expressions of freedom and empowerment. Far more than any backlash could have predicted, the feminist rhetoric of individuality, opportunity, autonomy, and choice has been co-opted by a consumer media that has very non-ulterior motives for presenting women as willingly sexualized, hyperfeminine ciphers.
In Pozner’s 2010 book Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty-Pleasure Television, she asserts that one of the most jarring features of reality TV is the way it urges its female participants—and, often, the women and girls who watch them—toward narrower and narrower definitions of beauty, self-worth, and success, as well as a truncated sense of what kind of life is possible and desirable, all while encouraging them to see other women only in terms of competition and comparison. But “reality” functions as a magic shield against accusations of racist and sexist cliché and regressive storylines: producers and participants alike will reason that if you put twenty-five women in a room with a man they barely know, of course the evening will end with the women sobbing, yelling, yanking each other’s hair extensions out, calling each other sluts, and drunkenly slurring, “We’re meant to be together” to floor lamps. Reality TV is part of an ongoing narrative of postfeminism that, like Wonderbra billboards once did, assures women that feminism has granted them the power and the freedom to be whatever they want to be. And if what they want to be just so happens to conform to a smorgasbord of insecure, catty, vapid, and villainous stereotypes that even Walt Disney’s frozen head would reject as too cartoonish, who’s to say that’s not empowering?
Let’s take The Bachelor—because, since it’s one of the highest-rated network shows for more than a decade, we kind of have to. Since its debut in 2002, ABC’s reality flagship has drawn in advertisers’ favorite cash-cow demographic, women 18–34, by the millions, and has served as a barometer of how young, heterosexual, and mostly white women are encouraged to alter their ambitions, personalities, and behaviors to compete in the dating market. The show, mused media critic Susan J. Douglas when it premiered, “offers highly normative female ‘types’ into which most women allegedly fall . . . urged to place themselves on a post-feminist scale of femininity to determine how far they have to go to please men without losing all shreds of their own identity and dignity. In the process, young women calibrate, for better and for worse, what kind of female traits are most likely to ensure success in a male-dominated world.”7 For twenty seasons, the series has confirmed centuries’ worth of entrenched beliefs about what women want (marriage, money, the knowledge that they’ve beaten out masses of other women for the a man they barely know), and what men seek (a thin, deferential woman who’s only as ambitious as she needs to be to bag a husband).
Season after season has proceeded according to formula, with a spray-tanned pack of interchangeable beauties in glittery pageant dresses pledging instantaneous love for an equally vague mass of square jaws and biceps, playing heavily stage-managed roles of crazy bitch, party girl, drunkity hot mess, and more. But over time, as the franchise soldiered on through doomed engagements (and expanded with The Bachelorette and Bachelor In Paradise), something a little odd began happening: women, most of them young and, again, white, began ascribing feminism to the show and, even more frequently, pledging allegiance to it as the ultimate feminist guilty pleasure.
One 2014 blog post, headlined “The Bachelor Season 19 Contestants Seem Proudly Feminist,” took snippets of the contestants’ bios (“Alisa said she’d be a wild mustang because they’re ‘free to run and explore [and] they’re unpredictable and beautiful.’ You go, girl. Just like Miley Cyrus, you can’t be tamed”) to make a case that the show was committing to a stance of equality. (Never mind that that season’s Bachelor was a farmer who took as a given that any future wife would give up her career to move to his Iowa hometown.) An exploration titled “The Feminist Bachelorette” gave props to reality TV for allowing women the same promiscuity as men, an assessment that somehow managed to overlook the glaring double standard particular to The Bachelor’s sister show: when Bachelors get frisky with two dozen strangers, it’s just part of the fairy tale; when Bachelorettes do the same, it’s a big slutty slutfest. (The storyline for The Bachelorette’s 2015 season was that our girl Kaitlyn slept with one contestant “too soon”; the rest of the season was built around the fallout from her guilt and the nasty hate mail she received from viewers for being “a whore.”) And listicles like “9 Reasons Strong, Intelligent Feminist Women Watch The Bachelor,” and “7 Reasons It’s Okay to Be a Feminist and Watch The Bachelor” worked themselves into impressive contortions to frame the show’s reliable tropes—references to “feeling like Cinderella,” contestants dissolving into tears because they just “have so much to give” the guy who’s dating twenty-four other women—as honest and refreshing strong-women representations.
The Bachelor and its counterparts have made their contestants’ desire for a full-blown princess narrative explicit, but the underlying themes of everything from America’s Next Top Model to the Real Housewives franchise, What Not to Wear and How Do I Look? and the I-feel-dirty-even-mentioning-it, Toddlers & Tiaras, aren’t all that different. Each one pushes the idea that appearance is the most important thing a woman has, and a man the most important thing she can get, and other women merely obstacles to knock down or kick over. If she’s still unhappy or alone, well, she just needs to try harder on all fronts.
As Pozner points out, this couldn’t be b
etter for advertisers. “It’s far easier to shill cosmetics and clothing—not to mention Match.com and Bally Fitness memberships—to insecure women scared of being alone than it is to self-confident people who believe they’re beautiful, lovable, and capable of being happy just as they are.”8 To this end, the most heinous premise ever committed to screen delivered a group of the former on a silver platter. A combination of Extreme Makeover and a beauty pageant held in a dumpster behind Satan’s 7-11, The Swan, which ran for two seasons in 2004, introduced viewers to a group of “ugly ducklings” who shared stories of how their looks have impacted their lives, from bullying and eating disorders to agoraphobia and abusive relationships. The fix? A head-to-toe surgical overhaul that board-certified plastic surgeons (and a largely ornamental psychologist) promised them would change their entire lives. But that’s not all. After they emerged from their gauze cocoons believing that they’d never be judged so harshly again, they were made to compete with one another in a beauty pageant—because even when you’ve literally been remolded to fit mainstream media’s ridiculously narrow beauty standard, you can still come up short in relation to another woman.
No one has looked to reality TV for feel-good authenticity in a long time, but there’s a case to be made that reality shows have been welcomed not just for economic reasons, but precisely because they occupy a weird sort of limbo with respect to attitudes about women. As in advertising, feminism has been taken into account, taken for granted, and neither explicitly repudiated nor overtly embraced. Every reality-show decision, from trying out for the show to undermining other women to cannily deploying sex as leverage, is an individual one that may not be considered feminist, but within a cultural discourse where “choice” is paramount, also can’t be dismissed as patently unfeminist.