Bunnies, Babies and Broads: What is TV Trying to Tell Us About Women

7/28/2019 Bunnies, Babies and Broads: What is TV Trying to Tell Us About Women

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Bunnies, babies and broads: What is

TV trying to tell us about women?

By Hank Stuever, Published: September 15

The possibly immortal Gloria Steinem, now 77, sat on a stage at a Beverly Hills,Calif., hotel one afternoon this summer and took questions from TV critics abouta range of random topics. The occasion was a biographical HBO documentaryabout Steinems life as a feminist, but also her life in a particular brand of showbusiness public intellectual in which she makes herself available to once

again point out how badly the media and entertainment industries portraywomen.

Naturally, someone had to know: Gloria, what do you think ofThe PlayboyClub, the new show on NBC, set in 1963?

Shed heard of it being as her writing career took off when she wentundercover as a bunny in one of Hugh Hefners Playboy Clubs and wrote aboutthe deplorable working conditions. Steinem was reserving judgment until shesaw it. Are they aggrandizing the past in a nostalgic way, or are they reallyshowing the problems of the past in order to show we have come forward? she

wondered, correctly surmising the former. In tough times (tough economies), shesaid, people tend to seek solace in glossy paeans to yesteryear.

Later, Steinem apparently watched The Playboy Club pilot, which, among itsother throwback (and throw-up) moments that aggrandize that place and thattime, includes a line in which a male character tells another: Youre the onlyman I know who puts his hand up a girls skirt looking for a dictionary.

Steinem issued this raspberry via an interview with Reuters: Clearly ThePlayboy Club is not going to be accurate. It was the tackiest place on Earth. It

was not glamorous at all. ... I hope people boycott [the show]. Its just nottelling the truth about the era.

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Lasting heartbreak awaits anyone who looks to TV shows to tell the truth about much, but God blessSteinem for believing it can.

Truth, of course, is the opposite of the reason most of us watch TV. Digesting 27 of this falls new dramasand comedies over a few days of marathon watching has had the strange effect of turning me into evenmore of a sideline feminist, although I dont know what to do with that or how to articulate it in a way that
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doesnt quickly make me sound like Im doing Steinem drag.

On the plus side, women write and produce and star in more TV than ever. But if the only women you evesaw were those on these shows, you would have a hard time believing that a liberation movement had everoccurred.

Its all bunnies, baby dolls and broads and bridezillas and bimbos, if you get into reality TV. Its stillgiggles and jiggles.

My, the jiggles. This seasons uncalled-for retread ofCharlies Angels (co-produced by DrewBarrymore yet entirely absent the ironic panache of her 2000 big-screen version) brings the word jiggleback into play, though with the 21st centurys predilection for gymnastics and martial arts. This has theeffect of making the jiggle seem more lithe and elegant, but its not the curves that have gone jello-esque its the brain stem. How is it possible that a Charlies Angels in 2011 would make the Charlies Angelsof 1976 look like Jane Austens Persuasion?

Whether fictional or quasi-real, TVs women occupy a world of placation and sublimation through cupcakand extreme couponing and physically impossible jujitsu. Its Bravos Housewives threatening to ruin onanother, egged on by fans. Its a false sense of outspoken independence, shackled by beauty myths and thepretend liberation of promiscuity.

Many nights save for those in which you encounter the rare sort of character seen in The Good Wife 30 Rock, or in Claire Daness role in Showtimes new espionage thriller Homeland you watch TVand sense that Steinems stone has rolled all the way back downhill. There is but one Alicia Florrick andone Liz Lemon and one Carrie Mathison (Daness character) unfairly burdened with the task of rolling therock back up.

To be clear: This is a vastly mediocre fall TV season in every way, even after I graded it on a curve. Itdoesnt do much for men or women (or dinosaurs). Its a season filled with some zippy ideas that fizzle ouwithin minutes of the first episodes. I expect a lot of quick cancellations.

But what is most striking about it what critics and pop-culture observers have picked up on is thesurfeit of new shows about women. Others have dubbed it a victory, yet why do the women we meetdepress me so? As I watched, the overriding question Ive written in my notes is, often in exasperated all-caps, is simply this:

WHAT THE [EXPLETIVE] HAPPENED TO WOMEN?

To go with NBCs bunnies, we have yesterdays stewardesses in ABCs attentively detailed but sorelymediocre Pan Am. Both shows clumsily reach for Mad Mens coolly calibrated regard for the past,presenting themselves as tales of covert proto-feminism: By time-traveling backward, the premise seeks toupend the idea that women were ever truly oppressed. By serving cocktails for Hefner, women were in fac

seizing their destinies. By serving cocktails for Pan Am, they were charting a course for tomorrows careerwomen. Their hardships girdle checks for the stewardesses in Pan Am, the squeeze of tighter, wire-framed bunny suits in The Playboy Club are seen as so much light hazing in an endless initiation intomans world.

As Steinem noted, those shows are less about women and more about this era of nonstop nostalgia that welive in. Retro is an addiction that rages out of control in a recession; the more we drink it in the moretimes we remake Charlies Angels or wish for a return of stewardesses and other clear-cut visual cues ogender rigidity the less able we are to move forward and come up with our own ideas.
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In related news, the laugh-getter this season is for a character to inform a man that hes being so unmanlythat he has acquired female genitalia. Im not the only critic out there who received copies of the comedypilots this summer and couldnt resist counting the many jokes that use the word vagina; I quit after eighI dont know how much credit playwright Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues) can take for this, or ifshed want to.

Whitney, a much-promoted Thursday sitcom on NBC created by and starring 29-year-old Whitney

Cummings, who grew up in the Washington area and made her reputation with vicious comedy roastappearances struggles to present us with a likeable loudmouth and mostly fails to endear us to thecharacter. Like comedian Sarah Silverman before her, Cummings tantalizes us with the notion of fearlessand bawdy humor, free of the usual rhetoric of gender. It seeks to make obnoxiousness part of the cliche.Dragged to a wedding in the first episode (where she eventually consoles herself with that modern girlsbest friend, the gourmet cupcake), Whitney gains a fuller awareness that she and her long-term boyfriendremain proudly unmarried but nevertheless bored with one another in the bedroom, and so on.

On todays sitcoms, the undercurrent of an imaginary gender war has broken banks and become a flood,dismantling social norms only to reconstruct them more rigidly in the last few moments of an episode. Tofurther blur the role reversals, one of Whitneys equally brash friends must mount a defense for wearing

pants to the wedding, which goes like this: Get off my [testicles], she says, which is ironic/funny becaushe has none.

One show, apparently, cannot quite contain all of the vagina-related humor Cummings has to offer, which why she co-created 2 Broke Girls, which will air on CBS. Here, a disgraced debutante and an angryhipster become unlikely friends while working at a Brooklyn diner. Both shows act as a sort of epilogue tothe mid-century women suffered in the era of The Playboy Club and Pan Am: Whitney and the twobroke girls could be the granddaughters of the bunnies and stewardesses, but I doubt the older generationwould be all that impressed with what they call progress.

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But Ill take all of them over Zooey Deschanel. Mere days after Steinem sat alone on that Beverly Hillshotel stage and assured confused scribes that she is fine with any young woman who is fine with herself anlooks forward instead of looking back, Deschanel and the co-stars and creators of her migraine-making neFox sitcom New Girl sat in the same spot and took softball questions. When did you first realize youwere adorable? one reporter asked.

Adorkable is actually the word being proffered by Fox publicists. Deschanel plays the same character thathas endeared her to a specific kind of mainstream/alternative market. She capitalizes on a lot of tee-hee anemotional fragility, with eyes as big as a kitsch painting of wildlife. Its that whole flowery sundress, nerdyhorn-rims, bicycle basket, put-a-bird-on-it tweeness of the forever child. Also, she records indie rockalbums and makes a point of singing a lot in the new show tra-la-la- la which only makes it moreawful.

When her character, Jess, answers an ad seeking a roommate in a houseful of bachelors, I started looking uthe ages of the actors playing the characters: Although they are bestowed with lives and situationsresembling 23-year-olds, their average age tops 30.

Zooey Deschanel is 32. Shes too old to act like this, in a show that calls her a girl. Once again, I scribble imy notes a variation on a theme: Whatever happened to women?
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Documents

Bunnies, Babies and Broads: What is TV Trying to Tell Us About Women