Hollywood inspiration! (image via smallanimalchannel.com)
Among the shows filling out the fall television lineup are “The Playboy Club” and the returning “Vampire Diaries.” With this in mind, here’s my pitch: “The Bunnicula Brigade.” Blood-sucking, scantily clad Playboy bunnies lounge poolside at Hef’s mansion and discourage overeager suitors by draining the life from their bodies.
No? Well, then let’s take a look at what people who (ostensibly) know what they’re talking about are saying about the newest entries to primetime.
The New York Times obviously wants to find something nice to say about the fall season, but its writers tie themselves in knots trying to also find something morally redeeming about it. “Guilty pleasure” is not a term the Times is familiar with; its reporters would never sink so low as to watch a program like “Charlie’s Angels” simply because their brains are fried and they want to veg out on the couch. But if you’re going to watch women fight crime in skimpy, cleavage-baring outfits, isn’t it better not to pretend you’ve tuned in to appreciate the artistic cinematography? Instead, reviewer Alessandra Stanley puts a new post-feminist twist on that hoary male claim about Playboy: “I read it for the articles.”
I’ll be the first to admit that sexism can be humorous. I may be laughing despite myself at the stereotyped womanizers of “The Hangover,” but I’m still laughing. Politically incorrect can be funny, even if in real life you would never make a serious connection between blond hair and stupidity or New Jersey and meatheads. What gets me is that some people, Times reporters included, feel compelled to explain away their laughter by finding some deeper cultural meaning or redeeming value in the crap they enjoy. The movie “Bridesmaids” is full of gross-out humor and crass situations, yet critics won’t admit that such humor plays to the lowest common denominator or demeans women. No, “Bridesmaids” is billed as a breakthrough for women, because it allows them to be as gross, rude and Neanderthalish as men. No longer is feminism about putting men and women on the same, hopefully elevated, level — it’s about the “right” to drag women down to the basest male standards, so that the crude jokes about sexuality that men have long trafficked in now become available to women as well. And this is progress?
Some people certainly see it as progress. Dave Itzkoff of the Times notes that today’s actresses want to play “independent, un-self-conscious, occasionally foul-mouthed characters once reserved exclusively for male performers.” It’s this “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude that has turned traditional penis jokes into . . . yes, vagina jokes. At the Washington Post, Hank Stuever writes that he “couldn’t resist counting the many jokes that use the word ‘vagina’; I quit after eight.” Apparently the folks in Hollywood find this to be empowering. Kat Dennings, who stars in the CBS comedy “2 Broke Girls,” is quoted by the Times as saying that “women are supposed to be mysterious, and there’s a veil you don’t cross, but vagina jokes are just gold, man.” Ignoring for the moment Dennings’ mixed metaphors (crossing veils? huh?), one is forced to wonder whether making cracks about female anatomy instead of male is really a step up. I’m inclined to think it isn’t, especially when Stuever informs us that “the laugh-getter this season is for a character to inform a man that he’s being so unmanly that he has acquired female genitalia.” Far from breaking down gender stereotypes, these sort of jokes actually reinforce them. Did no one in the TV industry have a second grade teacher who lectured about the inappropriateness of calling someone a sissy? Were there no gym teachers in L.A. to explain why it’s not OK to yell, “you throw like a girl!”?
Stanley believes that the new fall shows feature strong female characters, not mindless bimbos. “Mad Men” imitators like “Pan Am” or “The Playboy Club” hark back to a simpler time; they are “period dramas [that] instead showcase heroines at the dawn of the women’s movement. ” She writes that “[t]here is horror in seeing how dismissively many men treated women back then, but also a kind of pleasure in revisiting — with hindsight — a noble cause played out in a simpler time.” Yeah, keep telling yourself that.
Just as “Bridesmaids” is a gross-out comedy for women, what used to be “Band of Brothers” is now, as Stanley puts it, a “Band of Bunnies.” But while HBO’s “Band of Brothers” was undoubtedly aimed at men, it also spoke to genderless values of camaraderie, courage and morality. Stanley thinks she sees similarly redeeming values in “The Playboy Club,” as women find “freedom” in opportunities and wages beyond what they could find in the sheltered domestic world. These women may be playing to men’s baser desires, Stanley hints, but they do it with a wink to the audience: they know who is really in charge. But does the mere acknowledgement of the Bunnies’ agency make actresses in satin catsuits an exploration of femininity and cultural values? Women could watch “Band of Brothers” and find something universal and compelling in a serious story about a serious war. The same can hardly be said for “Playboy.” Men aren’t watching it to glean insight into the noble sacrifices working mothers made to keep clothes on their kids’ backs. They’re watching it to see those fluffy tails wag side to side. The comparison between Tom Hanks’ World War II epic and “Playboy” only holds if American GIs went to war dressed as Chippendales dancers.
“Bunnies supposedly cater to male fantasies, yet on this show the men are almost beside the point,” Stanley writes. It’s really a story about women’s friendships and female empowerment. She expects that men who tune in wanting to see sexy bunnies will be turned off by the existence of an actual plot, and flip over to the real Playboy channel instead. So who does she expect to watch the show, if not men? Why set a drama about female relationships in a setting as degrading — though post-feminists might call it liberating — as the Playboy mansion? Stanley’s theory that men will not watch a show about strong women only encourages the ghettoization of shows for women. Following this logic, we could just relegate it all to Lifetime, where the estrogen and bad hair days won’t turn men away in the first place. If a show about scantily clad women isn’t aimed at men, I’m not sure who it is aimed at. Maybe I’m missing something, but a lad magazine seems an odd choice of setting for a show that ostensibly celebrates sister power.
Entertainment writers notoriously use TV shows to diagnose the cultural malaise du jour. Anything with vampires and magic is escapist fantasy, anything set in the future is channeling our ambiguous feelings about technology. And, naturally, anything set in the past reflects a longing for lost innocence. “These shows traffic in nostalgia for a past that was flawed but fixable, and above all familiar,” Stanley writes. “Particularly when our own epoch seems so uncertain and diminished, it’s all the more gratifying to look back at a more navigable time.” It’s easy, perhaps, to see the 1950s and 60s as a “more navigable time,” but one thing that these shows seem to prove is that, for the people who lived these decades, things were not more navigable at all. The Bunnies become Bunnies because they cannot be CEOs; true, they have escaped from kitchen drudgery, but it can hardly be said that their choice to become sex symbols was made from a wide menu of options. Suggesting that those times were “flawed but fixable” intimates that they have been fixed, as Stanley undoubtedly believes they have been. In many ways, she’s right. But TV shows like Charlie’s Angels that are 1970s retreads — albeit retreads with even fewer clothes and more bouncing bosoms than the originals — make me wonder how far these fixes have really come. The Post’s Stuever is infinitely more cynical than Stanley, writing that producers seem to think they’re engaging in “covert proto-feminism,” when in reality they’re doing just the opposite. He continues: “By time-traveling backward, the premise seeks to upend the idea that women were ever truly oppressed. By serving cocktails for Hefner, women were in fact seizing their destinies.”
Even the fall shows that aren’t blatant throwbacks to the pre-women’s-lib days break little new ground, gender-wise. Stanley marvels at the sheer number of series with female leads, positing that “most of network television nowadays is for women and about women.” This is not what you would call a cutting-edge development; “nowadays” reaches back to “Sex and the City,” “Friends,” and any number of family-focused sitcoms that play off the contrast between the gorgeous, put-upon wife and her slacker, pot-bellied husband. Nevertheless, Stanley insists that Fall 2011 is some sort of watershed moment for women in Hollywood: “The power shift is most obvious in a new wave of sitcoms about young single women. Fox’s ‘New Girl,’ which stars Zooey Deschanel, was created by Liz Meriwether, a member of a posse of high-powered Hollywood writers known as ‘the Fempire.'” Perhaps the power in Hollywood has shifted, but the power on the screen is still in the hands of the same old characters. Young single women are not an invention of the aughts; Mary Tyler Moore was around long before Liz Lemon or Rachel Green. Is it really progress if women, upon taking over the corner offices of Hollywood, produce the same old misogynist, stereotypical crap that men have churned out for years? Just because a comedy that reduces men to bumbling sex drives and women to cute, jerk-tolerating innocents is written by a woman does not automatically make it enlightened. Women can tell blond jokes with the best of them. It’s a sad reflection of our society if the only way to get to the top in Hollywood is to keep selling what’s already been sold. The “Fempire” is not reinventing the wheel; it’s just opening another safe, tried-and-true Taco Bell franchise. Having women behind the scenes in Hollywood shouldn’t just be a sop to gender equity; it should enable the television industry to tell different stories, stories that wouldn’t or couldn’t be told by a writing room filled solely with testosterone. It’s not that women can only tell women’s stories, or that women’s stories can only be told by women, but people with different backgrounds and different experiences will naturally create different narratives. The push for greater ethnic diversity in Hollywood stems from a similar desire. There is untapped well of unique experiences, and women aren’t doing the audience any favors by reviving ideas from 30 years ago.
One of the stars of “Playboy,” Amber Heard, swears to the Times that she is a liberated woman of 2011 who can choose between “combat boots and an apron.” She says that “denying a woman’s sexuality is just as chauvinistic, if not worse,” than the overt sexism of decades past. Sure, but who is to say that donning a leotard and bunny ears is an expression of a woman’s sexuality? The whole bunny persona is a male version of a woman’s sexuality. Women don’t get turned on by breast-baring outfits or fishnet stockings; those are accoutrements designed to satisfy the male gaze. A show that embraced women’s sexuality would look different; maybe it would even feature that army of Chippendales. Female sexuality is not necessarily any more enlightened than male sexuality, but it is different, and that is what shows like “Playboy” do not acknowledge. They claim to be expressing women’s sexuality, but that sexuality has been conditioned by male desire and patriarchal rules. The 1960s required women to express their sexuality through the tired trope of the flirty waitress serving men. Refusing to idealize that era is not some denial of a woman’s sexuality, as Heard suggests. It’s a recognition that dressing up as a Bunny was not an accurate or all-encompassing expression of female sexuality in the first place.
Despite all of this, I probably wouldn’t hate these shows, if I tuned in. But I also would call a spade a spade. It’s OK to laugh at gender stereotypes, even when we know we technically shouldn’t find them funny. What’s not OK is to pretend what we’re watching has some high cultural value — because it doesn’t.
. . . So Well Read. . . 