by Andi Zeisler
Feminist critics in particular have been vocal in pushing back on themes and tropes that are both frustratingly common and undoubtedly popular. In the spring of 2015, for instance, The Mary Sue, an omnivorous geek-culture Web site geared toward female readers, announced that it would no longer be promoting the HBO series Game of Thrones. Its reasons were understandable: over five seasons, the fantasy epic based on George R.R. Martin’s best-selling series A Song of Ice and Fire didn’t scrimp on showing terrible people committing horrible acts, but there was something especially unsettling about the show’s reliance on the rape of female characters as the driver of their stories. (As Maris Kriezman put it in one consideration, “Game of Thrones is a show for Star Wars fans who thought Princess Leia should have been raped.”13) The Mary Sue didn’t throw in the towel because its writers wanted GoT’s producers to see the error of their ways and change; rather, it was making explicit the terms of a marketplace transaction: the return on our investment in this show is diminishing. Thus, as Mary Sue editor Jill Pantozzi wrote, “There will no longer be recaps, photo galleries, trailers, or otherwise promotional items about Game of Thrones on The Mary Sue.” Blay recalls a similar incident with the FOX show Sleepy Hollow, a racially diverse revisiting of the tale of the Headless Horseman. Fans loved its black female lead, Abbie Mills, and revolted when she was shunted to the sidelines after the first season so more time could be spent with white characters. Viewers tuned out, ratings plummeted, a hashtag campaign (#abbiemillsdeservesbetter) mourned the show’s bait-and-switch—and the show’s creators heard them loud and clear.
In a buyer’s market, amid the constant hum of social media, people who create television can’t wholly ignore the grumbles, complaints, or reasoned arguments of viewers. Simultaneously, our stake in the honesty and authenticity of pop culture shouldn’t overrule creative freedom. But when viewers ask questions like “How many pointless rapes are too many pointless rapes?” (hopefully Ryan Murphy, whose anthology series American Horror Story has featured violent rapes of both men and women in each of its five seasons, can answer), it’s not an ultimatum, but a way to point out the failure of imagination that remains apparent in a still-gendered medium.
Some creators have actually addressed their critics via plot points in their shows, with mixed results. In 2011, an episode of 30 Rock went more meta than usual in its show within a show, with a plot that nodded to a discussion that was percolating in the feminist blogosphere, about women and sex appeal in male-dominated comedy spaces. The episode featured a new hire on the fictional TGS: Abby, a standup comedian with a “sexy baby voice,” that Liz Lemon, the showrunner played by Tina Fey, argues is a self-defeating sop to the patriarchy. Liz believes that the TGS “fem-o-lution” she hopes to foment will be hampered by Abby’s braless, smut-talking, bubblehead schtick, so she tries to prove that Abby is just as funny as a non-sexy, non-baby-voiced comic by dredging up old video footage and sending it to Jezebel manqué JoanofSnark.com (“this really cool feminist Web site where women talk about how far we’ve come and which celebrities have the worst beach bodies”). But it turns out that Abby’s ditzy-smutty charade is an attempt to conceal her identity from an abusive ex. Liz, in trying to be what she thinks is a “good” feminist, has done the exact opposite.
The episode was an attempt to confront the ouroboros of contemporary discourse around choice, agency, and judgments, and resolved itself by, ultimately, not resolving anything. As Fey explained in a Fresh Air interview shortly after the show aired, “It’s just such a tangled-up issue, the way women present themselves—whether or not they choose to put their thumbs in their panties on the cover of Maxim and judge each other back and forth on it. It’s a complicated issue, and we didn’t go much further on saying anything other than to say, ‘Yeah, it’s a complicated issue and we’re all kind of figuring it out as we go.’”
Criticism of other female-created pop culture, including Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project and Lena Dunham’s GIRLS, have similarly wrestled with the heightened expectations that come with viewing pop culture through a feminist lens. The critical reception greeting both shows—GIRLS as the latest in a long history of narratives about four somewhat unlikely female friends, Mindy as a classic work-place-as-family sitcom—has been disproportionate to the aims of the shows themselves. Both Dunham and Kaling were hustled under the hot lights of feminist-media interrogation as soon as their respective shows debuted, called upon to answer for the shows’ racial diversity, attitudes toward and representations of sex and romance, and portrayal of female friendships. Instead of being acknowledged as young creatives in an industry where the playing field is not yet level, they have been forced to defend their visions in ways that male creators are rarely asked to. Dunham, for instance, was promptly swarmed with criticism about the fact that her show, set in modern-day Brooklyn, featured no people of color in either leading or secondary roles. It was definitely an important criticism for a show whose selling point was its verisimilitude—but it also brought up the question of why a young, female creator was being taken to task for something that had never been publicly voiced to male creators of How I Met Your Mother, Bored to Death, True Detective, and many other contemporary shows with the same level of whiteness.
Scandal, the first network drama since 1974’s Get Christie Love! to feature a black female lead, faced a similarly overwhelming set of expectations when it premiered, and has become TV’s version of Beyoncé in the way it is alternately worshipped and contested for its feminist readings. Can Olivia Pope be feminist given her emotionally abusive relationship with the white, Republican President of the United States who jealously keeps her under secret surveillance? Like UnREAL’s Rachel, Pope’s career success depends on her facility with lying, cheating, and head-gaming others—can that ever be truly progressive? Scandal can be read as showrunner Shonda Rhimes’s retort to the much-loved male antiheroes of prestige dramas, pointing out that the latitude afforded portrayals of white male (and female) foibles is categorically different when applied to a drama centered on a black woman. Now that Olivia Pope has been joined by a small number of other black female lead characters in dramatic TV—Annalise Keating of How to Get Away with Murder, Mary Jane Paul of Being Mary Jane, and the mighty Cookie Lyon of Empire—the pressure on her has lessened somewhat, but the fact that all antiheroines are not received the same still remains.
The rise of marketplace feminism makes discussing television—or movies, or fashion, or celebrities—an often frustratingly binary affair. One of my most frequent experiences at social gatherings involves people sidling up to admit their love for a particular TV show and how guilty they feel because they know they “shouldn’t.” In a time of feminism taken into account, there’s a sense that if one’s choices—even in something as minor as a favorite chill-out show—can’t be rationalized, they should probably be kept quiet. As with most-feminist movies and most-feminist underpants, this suggests that feminism is a unvarying entity, a stamp of approval or gold star, rather than a living ethic at the foundation of a larger system. It suggests that feminism is something that either is or is not okay to consume, rather than a lens through which creators and audiences see stories, characters, and communication. Rejecting or embracing it based on static values isn’t the goal; the goal is to value the vision and perspective of an increasingly larger, varied group of creators, writers, directors, editors, and DPs as much as we’ve always valued the industry status quo of white boy wonders.
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures when it comes to television. But I understand the impulse to disclose those shameful favorites. For TV-loving feminists, the stakes are high because television is one area of pop culture where we’ve seen demonstrable change in a fairly short time. It’s kind of a chicken-or-egg situation: Has TV come to seem more potentially progressive because viewers engage more with it than ever before, or have we started to engage more because we see new faces and more fascinating and inclusive narratives? Regardless, that change is all
the more reason to keep watching; after all, we already know that even a small amount of female-driven content looks to the powers that be like a small screen crawling with women. The Golden Age of Feminist TV is a descriptor that implies it might someday be a cherished memory, but if feminism can change the industry itself, we might be happy to see it go.
CHAPTER 5
Our Beyoncés, Ourselves: Celebrity Feminism
“You’re a feminist if you go to a Jay Z and Beyoncé concert and you’re not, like, ‘I feel like Beyoncé should get 23 percent less money than Jay Z. Also, I don’t think Beyoncé should have the right to vote and why is Beyoncé singing and dancing?’” —Aziz Ansari
Over the past eight years, as I’ve spent time on various college and university campuses around the country, I have seen the emergence of a phenomenon I now think of as Yoncé’s Law. Basically, it’s this: get a group of mostly white women between the ages of eighteen and fifty together for a panel discussion or seminar or discussion group that’s broadly about young women, feminism, and American culture, and within the space of an hour, whatever the initial topic, you will find yourself in the midst of a heated discussion about Beyoncé. There are many, many questions to parse, and you will hear them over and over: Is she good for feminism? Is she bad for feminism? Do you think she’s a feminist? But if she is a feminist, why did she call her 2013 world tour “The Mrs. Carter Show”? If she’s so feminist, what’s with all those crazy-skimpy stage costumes? What about her adoption of a seemingly Caucasian beauty standard with those blonde weaves? What about that “Eat the cake, Anna Mae” line in “Drunk in Love” that references Ike Turner’s abuse of Tina? What about Jay Z’s misogynistic lyrics? Is she really a feminist? And if she’s not, is it okay that I love her?
And so on. The questions themselves echo more than a decade’s worth of headlines parsing Beyoncé’s lyrics, marriage, clothing, and hairstyles, and revealing profound anxiety among (again, mostly white) feminists about a world-famous black woman as an icon of modern liberation. “Beyoncé: Being Photographed in Your Underwear Doesn’t Help Feminism,” tsked a 2013 Guardian headline. “Don’t Call Beyoncé’s Sexual Empowerment Feminism,” warned another. There was musical icon-on-icon sniping from Annie Lennox, who name-checked Beyoncé in a 2014 NPR interview when proclaiming that “twerking is not feminism.” And even bell hooks, who literally wrote a book called Feminism is for Everybody, recently reconsidered whether “everybody” means, well, everybody. As part of a 2014 panel discussion about how black women’s bodies are represented in media, hooks had damning words for Mrs. Carter, saying, “I see a part of Beyoncé that is, in fact, anti-feminist—that is a terrorist—especially in terms of the impact on young girls,” and noting that when the megastar agrees to things like posing in her underwear on magazine covers, she is “colluding in the construction of herself as a slave.” The condemnation of Bey’s bona fides, though by that time a predictable media talking point, seemed especially harsh precisely because it came from someone who believes in feminism’s populist potential.
Of course, the number of self-described feminists who have appointed themselves to an unofficial Beyoncé feminist-approval task force is easily balanced by the number who have long observed feminism in the singer’s lyrics, interviews, and persona, and were just waiting for her to confirm it: the Destiny’s Child fans who threw their hands up at Bey as they sang along to “Independent Women Part 1,” the ones who noted key passages from her 2014 contribution to The Shriver Report on their Tumblrs, the ones who cited the entirety of her 2013 solo album as the sound of a fully grown, sexually confident woman. (There’s also a third group, one that would worship Beyoncé even if she came out as a Juggalo, which arguably could still happen.)
The fascination with Beyoncé’s feminism, the urge to either claim her in sisterhood or discount her eligibility for it, speaks to the way that a focus on individuals and their choices quickly obscures the larger role that systems of sexism, racism, and capitalism play in defining and constraining those choices. The columnists who wrung their hands over what Beyoncé wore to perform at the Super Bowl or on the cover of GQ, after all, didn’t also take those institutions themselves to task for aesthetic traditions whereby women in general are treated as little more than eye candy. The people who pursed their lips over Beyoncé taking her husband’s name may not have considered a larger context wherein black families—and black single mothers in particular—have long been held responsible for a host of social problems rooted in systemic racism. (“A tangle of pathology,” was how then–Assistant Labor Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan described often default urban matriarchies in his 1965 report “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action.”) If these circumstances were taken into account, it definitely wasn’t evident in stories like “Beyoncé’s New Album Is Not as Feminist as the Media Is Making It Out to Be.”
Tamara Winfrey Harris, author of 2015’s The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America, has noted that many self-described feminists, usually careful to look under surfaces to systems and contexts, seemed willfully sloppy when it came to Beyoncé—“hating the player and ignoring the game.”1 Whatever Beyoncé is or isn’t, she’s not acting (or singing, or dancing) in a vacuum, but as both a product and a symptom of ongoing inequalities that she had no part in creating.
In making the writing of Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie and the word “feminist” the final statement of her 2014 MTV Video Music Awards performance, Beyoncé acquainted young girls around the world with the concept of feminism completely free from more than a century of baggage. It’s hard to overstate how important that is when you consider how many of us learned about feminism through media and pop culture stereotypes of angry, sexless harpies. What does the dictionary definition of feminism look like when it’s loosed from all its sour history and negative associations? Well, it looks like Beyoncé herself: confident, compelling, powerful, beautiful, loud. It looks like something you want to be. What Bey staked her claim to that night, for better or worse, was feminism as part of a host of other aspirational products already associated with the Beyoncé brand.
Friends in High Places
In 1978, an eight-year-old girl named Melissa Rich noticed that the many kinds of trading cards she collected featured no women. She brought this to the attention of her mother, Lois, who in turn discussed it with her sister, Barbara Egerman. The sisters realized just how invisible successful women were when they asked Melissa and her friends to each list five women they admired and everyone came up short: according to Lois Rich, girls and boys in her daughter’s peer group were unaware of any woman who wasn’t either a First Lady or a television personality. So the women came up with their own list of five hundred accomplished women, wrote five hundred letters asking the women for a small favor, and the following year Supersisters became the first trading card set to highlight women’s achievements in sports, politics, science, the arts, and more. The initial run, produced with a grant from the New York State Education Department, was distributed to local schools; teachers seemed thrilled to have examples of contemporary heroines to share with their students, and the ten thousand sets that were printed sold fast.
Supersisters were great (and still are: they’re archived in the Drawings and Prints department of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the full set my husband scored on eBay is one of my prized possessions) in that they not only introduced kids to an array of women—from Margaret Mead and Shirley Chisholm to Ntozake Shange and Rosie Casals—but they showed how easy it was to make feminism visible by putting recognizable faces on it.
Celebrities have always been crucial to raising the profile of social movements: Harry Belafonte and Josephine Baker stood for Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March on Washington. Marlon Brando had Sacheen Littlefeather decline his Godfather Oscar and use the broadcast platform to decry Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans. Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna, and Elton John ramped up AIDS awareness with fund
raisers and danceathons. You might not have known that Tibet needed freeing until the Beastie Boys threw a concert for it. Sad but true: it’s much easier to pay attention to a famous person talking about a current event or social issue than it is to listen to someone who may have far more knowledge and experience in the area, but might also have the charisma of dry toast. Feminism, as a political movement that has never been widely popular, has in some ways been needier than most, and the celebrities who have offered their voices, images, and pocketbooks over the years have done so less as spokes-people or heads-for-hire than as strategic partners. The classic children’s album Free to Be You and Me, conceived by TV actress Marlo Thomas, wouldn’t have been half as beloved had it not featured the voices and personalities of TV and movie stars of the era. Thomas’s husband, talk-show host Phil Donahue, used his platform to showcase activists and experts to translate the political tenets of the movement into everyday language. The movie, TV, and pop icons who have been cover stars for magazines like Ms. and BUST may be fascinating in themselves, but they also serve to reassure newer readers that feminism is not the fringe identity they’ve heard about.