I Love When Marketing Practicality Lines Up with Busting Up Sexist Social Mores

Madonna, Glee and Critical Thinking

A big reason a lot of what I talk about here on the Guide involves elements of pop culture is that, as I may have said before, pop culture is far and away the dominant formative paradigm for most Americans under the age of, say, thirty-five. For both the Gen-Yers (me and my friends) and the children of the Gen-Xers, who are now reaching adolescence, popular movies, TV, pop fiction and, most fervently, the internet, which aggregates and ties it all together, effect a level of seminal influence that—again, this is my opinion—outshines ‘traditional’ institutions like school, church and even the family dynamic.

Yes, yes, this is a generalization. Not every person I or you know is a walking-talking cultural compendium. I’m not talking about day-to-day pop culture references. You know, the ‘we’re brainwashed by corporations into feeling a specific kind of emptiness that can only be filled by certain consumer products’ angle. That’s tired, and it’s just not that true. I’m not talking about that, ever.

Early in the life of this blog, I wrote about Sarah Connor and feminist iconicity in action films with strong female leads. What I like most about that piece—and the method of argument in it—is its insistence on critical thinking. Now, before you start the eye rolling, please indulge me by stripping ‘critical thinking’ of its pretentious subtext and take it as a simple descriptive term. I’m not putting anything on a pedestal here. I want to compare the critical thinking done in the Sarah Connor piece against the feminist didacticism oozing throughout in the now famous “The Power of Madonna” episode of Glee that aired last month.*

Glee’s writers have, during the show’s first season, made a habit of tackling a variety of issues facing American teens, pregnancy, divorce, ostracism, homosexuality, etc. So it’s really not all that surprising that the show decided to discuss feminism. Like most forward-thinking viewers, I will admit that it was—at first—nice to hear these choice sound bites on one of today’s most popular hour-long network dramas:

Tina: “We just have to accept that guys don’t like our feelings.”

Quinn: “The fact is a woman earns 70 cents to every dollar a man earns for doing the same job. That attitude starts in high school.”

Will: “What this is really about is teenage girls feeling like they have no power.”

Tina: “And my growing feminism will cut you in half like a righteous blade of equality.”

Nearly thirteen million viewers watched this episode. That’s a hell of a lot of people exposed to progressive feminist language and sentiment. Misogynist, insensitive, objectification, equality—all of these dropped at one point or another, all in the name of empowering young adult women. And the episode was soundtrack’d and inspired by the music of the most popular American feminist icon of the last quarter century, Madonna (sorry, Oprah). There’s really no downside to this, right?

This is where things get tough—this where the whole act of critical thinking becomes vital.

A large portion of Glee’s audience consists of young children and teens. Even in the media, buzzword saturated world we live in, I think it’s safe to assume that “The Power of Madonna” episode was the first time many young females and males heard the word feminism. I’m not implying that this was the first time these young viewers had experienced instances of gender inequality—I know young girls feel the pangs of gender inequality as early as the pre-school playground—but rather that this was the first time these kids heard and understood feminism in a kind of institutionalized sense. Feminism means X (“because that’s what they said on Glee”).

Pop culture is instructive in this way; it always has been. Here, one of the most popular forms of American teenage entertainment introduces and teaches its viewers—and I’ll put all viewers in this pot now, not just the young ones—about the vital and important topic of feminism. If I stop right there, nothing appears wrong. In fact, Glee seems almost noble, like it assumed a great responsibility to make a positive influence on its young audience.

But it’s wrong to stop there. Why? Because there is absolutely no critical thinking involved. Feminism, like all issues that really matter, cannot simply be absorbed. This is not a soapbox statement, this is a fact that too often gets forgotten because of the effectiveness of popular forms of entertainment and reference: TV shows, cable news, Wikipedia, etc. There is a value to all of these forms of media, one of which is ease. The answer is always there for a person to absorb in an almost instantaneous fashion. Consumption and absorption, though, are not the same thing as thinking. The first two are easy, passive; the latter is hard. Feminism is hard.

So what comes next when thinking of “The Power of Madonna”’s depiction of feminism? One simple question, really: In the episode, what is the version of feminism defined by the writers of Glee used in the service of? For the sake of length, I’ll refrain from a full analysis of the episode. Suffice it to say, the one thing feminism does not serve in the episode is credible character development. Feminism is introduced conceptually to the show’s characters and is reduced to sound bites like those mentioned above. And while sound bites can be seductive, they’re empty without a meaningful context. The concept of feminism does not change the show’s characters in any meaningful way. Feminist sentiment directs them to say certain things and act certain ways at various points during the episode, but, again, it in no way changes them. Bluntly put, feminism is a mere plot device used to forward the action, nothing more.

The cynical part of me would go farther and say that feminism in Glee works purely in the service of selling iTunes singles and copies of Madonna’s Celebration record. But even if that is true, I’m not going to damn Glee for doing so. After all, it is not Glee’s—or pop culture’s—responsibility to teach its audience about vital social issues. It is the audience that endows pop culture with this responsibility. In other words, it’s the audience that allows passive consumption to overtake active thinking.

In my Sarah Connor piece, I took a film character that I always admired and asked myself, simply, why is Sarah so goddamn awesome? Why do I think of her when I envision a power feminist icon? And I thought, rigorously and critically, and formed an answer.

This isn’t about patting myself on the back. This is about a method. Am I’m happy that more young people know about the word feminism now than did before “The Power of Madonna” aired? Yes and no—mostly no. I’ll be happy when these same young people begin asking questions about the gender inequities around them and think themselves to an answer.

*Let me go on record by saying that Glee has kind of lost me. I still watch each new episode, but my enthusiasm for the show is gone and, honestly, Glee is just really bad now. This of course is a discussion for another day, but given that I wrote pretty glowingly about the show on this blog last fall, I feel it best to make my current feelings clear.

Sex and the City and "Relationshipism"

As most of you have probably noticed, the arrival of 2010 has brought with it heaps of obligatory retrospectives on the decade that was. The best of these pieces have offered up insight into specific cultural nuggets or trends that don’t necessarily “define” the 00s but rather crystallize some of the prevalent anxieties or preoccupations of the 00s in a way that looking at a decade’s worth of material can provide (Alessandra Stanley’s “Men with a Message: Help Wanted” in The New York Times is a perfect example). Even in a culture that seems to be moving a mile a minute, we’re in no way far enough removed from the past decade to think we can define it. I think the true benefit of these retrospective projects—and I mean everything from essays to simple “Top 10” lists—is the potential value they add to our own experiences of watching, listening, reading, etc. different forms of contemporary media right now.

So I want to talk about Sex and the City –which you’ve probably seen on many 00s retrospectives—and Lee Siegel’s 2002 essay “Relationshipism” (first published in The New Republic and later in Siegel’s 2006 collection Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination). I stumbled upon the piece while reading Troy Patterson’s decade retrospective in which he characterizes Siegel’s essay as “a hall-of-fame takedown.” And he’s exactly right. Siegel does his best to eviscerate Sex and the City, invoking gay-male conspiracy theories and misogynistic misapprehensions about women’s feelings towards sex in order to do so. Siegel’s main problem revolves around the “Relationshipism” alluded to in the essay’s title:

Just as an attitude toward labor only hardened into an ideology called Marxism when the worker got cut off from the product of his labor, so erotic bonds only hardened into Relationshipism when people started, for a million familiar reasons, getting cut off from each other. A "relationship" is not to be confused with a union. It is an ongoing argument between two stubbornly sovereign selves about the possibility of a union.

I’m not sure what to make about his choice of analogy, but soon thereafter Siegel makes clear his disapproval of Sex and the City’s depiction of Relationshipism:

Instead of plunging into all the strange new present-day configurations of sex and emotion, the series has proceeded to divide sex from emotion. There is an abundance of fucking in Sex and the City, but it is the sort of fucking you did years ago, when you were very young, lying on the bed and cavorting in the head. As the series rolled along, you became aware of a damning artifice, an un-mimetic quality startling in a series that was supposed to be a candid look at urban life: none of these women is hurt by sex.

…

What is startling is that for these smart, canny, emotionally alive women, pretty much every relationship comes down to the quest for sex--for perfect sex--as an end in itself.

It goes without saying that Siegel’s assessment is far from definitive, and I’ll spare you the point-by-point refutation.

What’s great about reading the essay now is that, when examining his conclusions, I think Siegel inadvertently shows just how much Sex and the City got right—and continues to get right—in its depictions of the actions and temperaments of modern American women. As a television series, Sex and the City was (to use critic-speak) charmingly uneven. The show’s dramatic narrative was unmistakably adult, touching on issues as varied as marriage, divorce, money-management and, of course, sex.

Michael Patrick King, the show-runner for almost the entire series (and who remains the brain behind the films), and the writing team used the benefits of HBO and premium television wisely, presenting each story arc in a way they saw as both unfiltered and true as well as properly comedic to sensibilities and concerns of modern American adults. But what is “properly comedic” anyway? For Sex and the City, this meant a mixture of high and low comedy; this meant a group of four adult women enduring and discussing events as mannered as coupling and dating alongside incidents as raunchy as tasting a guy’s “funky spunk.”

For those of you who do or who have attempted to write comedy know, balance is everything: balance not just between high and low but also between the comedy itself and the dramatic arc it supports. Sex and the City, like all television comedies, never managed this balance perfectly. Just take the voice of the show, Carrie Bradshaw. She was not a good writer, and I often find myself laughing at her cheesy, pseudo-profound narration. But this type of writing failure never seemed to dissuade critical or audience opinion. In fact, the narration becomes endearing after awhile, especially when you remember that this is a women using a newspaper column to write about sex and relationships in what I can only describe as a post-liberation way.

I hate to use academic jargon like ‘post-liberation’, but I really can’t think of a better way to describe Carrie’s column writing and what it represents. Carrie Bradshaw is both a product of and an active participant in feminism. She writes about sex and relationships openly, frankly and (this is key) apolitically. The plots and story arcs of Sex and the City follow this same precedent. Samantha, Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda are not women who realize that it’s okay to talk about the size of a guy’s cock or how awful his spunk tastes. They are women who actually do talk about these things and don’t think one way or the other about it.

This is what Lee Siegel just doesn’t get. The gals of Sex and City, like most modern American adults between the ages of 18 and 35, often just want to get laid. Siegel’s view that the women on the show aren’t necessarily hurt by sex is thus misguided because he’s attaching a value to sex that is not necessarily archaic but is most certainly inaccurate. Fucking is an end to itself for many American adults, just as “ending up with the nice guy” is really not the most palatable option for most young adult women. In his “hall of fame takedown,” all Siegel really does is make Sex and the City a scapegoat for what he feels is mass-cultural devaluing of sex and courtship rituals. It appears that Siegel pines for the days when a woman was supposed to feel that having a man (preferably a husband) stick his cock inside of her was a priceless gift. And how dare a show make light of that way of thinking.

So I’ll use my own economic analogy now: I prefer a world where all participants—women and men—set the cultural value on sex. Knowing that Sex and the City is a big ‘fuck you’ to “traditional” forms of Relationshipism only makes me like watching the show more.

A Quick Note on The Real Housewives

While none of us actually takes reality tv for reality, what's with The Real Housewives series? The women all get paid for being on the show: they have jobs.

How do they count as housewives once they're on the show?