Women are Desperate

I’m not sure why it’s taken me so much time to work up the energy to write this one, but I first started mulling it somewhere in the midst of the Fall 2015 shows.  It hasn’t improved since then: as it's been marinating in my mind, the shows typifying it have been piling up.  There are really quite a few of them, now. 

I’m struck by how frequently prominent female character seemed to be driven by a sense of desperation, and how in contrast, prominent male characters seemed to be driven by something different.  A sense of honor, or pride, or greed, or loyalty, or the like.  Women’s needs are unbounded, unpredictable.  Men’s needs are more measured, less wild.  I don’t mean to say that this applies to every character.  Not all female characters are desperate; some male characters are.  But on average, it seems to me that TV women are more likely than TV men to be cornered into a no-win situation or driven to the edge of a moral precipice by utter desperation for whatever makes them feel secure.  Desperation to be popular.  Desperation for the well-being of their children.  Desperation for male attention.  [add others]. 

Who cares?  Desperation makes for good drama.  But what bothers me about this is the subtle underlying implication that women’s moral compasses are more flexible, more susceptible to risk-induced alteration.  Or that women are just needier.  This has been a prevailing narrative for eons—that men can take care of themselves (although they may need to learn “how to be good” at formative moments from nurturing women), but that women need safety, care, and support, preferably from a man, at all stages of their lives, and they’ll do anything to get it.  This is at the root of the golddigger paradigm, the idea that men will seek out beauty/health in a woman while women will seek out safety/security in a man because of some sort of evolutionary imperative.  Of course this isn’t wholly unrealistic; it does sometimes play out in real life.  But as a storytelling pattern, it’s insidious.  This “will do anything to get it” desperation makes women inherently dangerous creatures, unworthy of trust.

The worst part is that I think in at least some of these situations, the creators think they’re making a “strong” woman—one who can fight any obstacle like a mama bear, or whose adrenaline makes her strong enough to lift a car to rescue a baby pinned underneath.  But this pattern doesn’t look strong to me, it looks unreliable.  That unreliability is, I think, at the root of a great deal of misogynistic assumptions.  If a man is bad, we know he’s bad.  If a woman is good…she may at any time turn bad out of sheer desperation. 

Maybe I’m taking this too far.  But the desperate woman thing is so common—and so different from what I’m seeing in men—that it’s at least worth noting.  Here are a few. (And I’m not even counting The Magicians, which I’ve already reviewed):

Scream Queens (Fox, Fall 2015.  Thriller.)

Watched:  First 2 or3 episodes

Premise:  A slasher stalks an intensely image-conscious sorority

Promise:  Most of the characters in this are all desperate for something—status, acceptance, popularity—and most of them are terrible specimens of humanity.  It’s all very stylized, and I get the sense that the show thinks it’s condemning these terrible people for their terribleness, and celebrating the show’s misfits as superior people (which they no doubt are).  But when push comes to shove, it embodies much of what it might be critiquing.  For example, the only joke about the hearing impaired character is that she can’t hear.  The joke about the militant lesbian is that she’s a militant lesbian.  The show is slightly kinder to its men, but only slightly so.  I could go on and on, but I decided to stop watching early enough that I don’t really know how bad it got, or how much it may have improved.

Verdict:  This has been renewed for Fall 2016, but if you want a slasher-thriller, I’d say watch Scream in the summer instead.

                                                           

Wicked City (ABC, Fall 2015.  Crime Drama.)

Watched: first 2 episodes

Premise:  Serial killer in 1980s Los Angeles.

Promise:  The underlying conceit here—that a charming serial killer is so charming that he not only charms women into being his victims, but also charms a woman into being his accomplice—is what got me thinking about this theme in the first place.  It’s a period piece, and maybe it’s supposed to be about a particular kind of Hollywood neediness at a particular time and place, but what I see at the heart of this show is a vast generalization about how desperately women want to be loved and accepted, and how vulnerable that makes them to being deceived.  Tell them what they want to hear, and they’ll go home with you.  Dedicate a song to them, and they’ll go down on you.  Tell them you have a “real connection” and they’ll murder for you.  Everything in this show relies on pulling the wool over women’s eyes. Even the detective is carrying on an extramarital affair with a hot colleague.

Verdict:  Yuck.

Flesh & Bone (Starz, Winter 2015-16 limited series.  Drama.)

Watched: First two episodes

Premise:  A brilliant ballet dancer finds her way in a big New York company.

Promise:  There are a lot of really cool and interesting things here.  Gorgeous dancing.  The looming threat of the main character’s difficult background.  The different ways in which the dancers find their individual strengths in a punishing world.  But this is indeed a punishing world, often gratuitously ugly, and the show doesn’t pull many punches.  That can make for great drama, but it can also be hard to watch.  And there are a few things running underneath the surface of this show that I find insidious, even as they may make for compelling stories.  First, our main character is a woman who’s attractive because she doubts herself.  (Ugh.)  Second, she’s very much at the mercy of her world.  Her strength comes when she’s cornered, desperate to survive, to retain her sense of self in the face of abuse.  This is an admirable kind of “strong,” but it’s a kind of strong we see too often, because it subtly perpetuates the idea that abuse is “good” for women because it makes women strong.  (That’s a whole ‘nother post, there.)  Finally, it embodies the trope that when you put a bunch of women together, they’ll snipe and compete with each other.  That’s baked into the ballet system, I gather, which makes this true to life, but it’s a story I’ve seen play out more often than I want.  

Verdict:  I would have kept watching, pushing through the tough parts, because there really was a lot of good there.  But I ran out of DVR space. 

Shades of Blue (NBC, new.  Crime drama.)

Watched:  Pilot

Premise:  A dirty cop is trapped into becoming an FBI informant.

Promise:  This series’ protagonists are police officers who abuse their authority by running protection scams, covering up murders, taking bribes, and generally considering themselves above the law.  The lead (played by Jennifer Lopez, in a convincing performance) is at least somewhat well-meaning, but her ethics are crap, driven by her desperation to “protect” and support her daughter.  And I think we’re supposed to like not only her, but also her fellow dirty cops, or at least we’re supposed to think there’s something admirable about them; in particular, I think we’re supposed to think that Lopez’s character has integrity because she resists becoming a “rat” on the rest of her dirty-cop crew.  And so maybe this is me, but even if there’s good drama, I just can’t abide this premise:  the idea that loyalty is more important than law, that corruption that “keeps the peace” can be good for the community—it’s fundamentally repugnant.  

Verdict: Nope                                                                                       

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  I’m catching up a tiny bit, I think, but I’m still too ashamed to list all 22 (?) shows.