M
Masculist
Guest
Courtesy of Greg Anderson of the ms-discussion list at yahoogroups:
http://www.salon. com/ent/tv/ feature/2007/ 09/12/gender_ tv/
Women are the new men on TV
Broads are the cops and lawyers and masters of the business universe
on the new shows. So what happened to the men?
By Rebecca Traister
Sep. 12, 2007 |
Here's the good news: When you turn on your television this fall,
you'll be watching more women kick more ass than you can possibly
imagine -- physically, economically and sexually. Hard-bodied and
smart, rich and aggressive, confident and independent, the chicks who
populate the prime-time lineup are being cast in roles that once
belonged almost exclusively to men. These broads are cops and lawyers
and masters of the business universe. Hollywood doyennes like Kyra
Sedgwick, Mary-Louise Parker and Holly Hunter have already found
midlife career solace (and good writing) on cable. This year, Julianna
Margulies will star as a nasty Nancy Grace knockoff, Angie Harmon as a
police lieutenant, Lucy Liu as a publishing executive, and Patricia
Heaton as a news anchor; there's a new "Bionic Woman" and a whole show
about the world's leading incubator of the future, "The Terminator's"
Sarah Connor. The flinty Cagneys, Laceys, Murphys and Buffys of yore
aren't the exceptions in the new TV season; they rule.
So what happened to the men? Nothing good, that's for sure. Here, for
instance, is what happens when Lucy Liu's character, Mia, on ABC's
"Cashmere Mafia," wins a work contest, and big promotion, over her
boyfriend and colleague Richard: He breaks up with her, tail between
his legs. "I thought I'd win and buy us a place and take care of you,"
he explains. "And now that it's reversed I just can't see us ... I'm
40 next month. I want someone to come home to. I'm going to want kids,
and we're just going in opposite directions."
Yup. Welcome to the new world on television, where the women are
strong, and the men are cavemen. Literally. ABC's "Cavemen," based on
the Geico ad campaign character, is about a trio of Cro-Magnons with
low self-esteem and a little hair-growth problem. Small-screen heroes
who aren't actually dragging their knuckles behave even worse. In the
face of professional and sexual equality between the televised sexes,
these fictional guys are cowed, angry and generally emasculated by the
successes of their female counterparts.
It can't all be coincidence that this season is coming at the end of a
summer in which the biggest movie hits have featured dopey, ill-
groomed, irresponsible boys who score beautiful high-achieving women
and then have no idea what to do once they land them. That's right,
we're in Apatowland, baby, where the idea of a male romantic lead now
begins with a water bong and ends with a fart joke. This isn't an
isolated trend; it seems to be a broad cultural response that speaks
to enough people to keep it floating. The shows this fall are not
clones of each other: They're written by men and by women; they're
geared toward teens and adults; they're comedies and dramas and
dramedies. And they all seem to be expressing an anxiety about what on
earth is going to happen to American men now that their women are not
simply competing at work, sex, friendship, money and politics, but
sometimes winning.
Among the degradations about to be heaped on television's men? There
are guys whose wives cheat on them, whose girlfriends get promoted
over them, whose mates make more money than they do; guys who get left
out of baby-making, who date women with penises and at least one who
gets anally raped by a monkey.
Seriously.
It's tough to know where to start in explaining how bad these boys
have it, but the monkey rape seems as good a place as any. It takes
place in the debut episode of the Farrelly brothers' half-hour comedy
"The Rules for Starting Over," which premieres on Fox in spring 2008,
about Gator (Craig Bierko), a menschy guy tossed back into the dating
market after his wife leaves him for a Cirque de Soleil performer.
Gator, who hasn't been on a date since his 20s, is mystified by women,
and startled to be invited up to the apartment of an attractive
naturalist who shows him tapes of the gorillas she's studied. She
informs him that "in the world of primates, the female always
initiates," pulling him onto the floor on top of her to demonstrate.
That's when the woman's pet baboon takes Gator from behind.
Gator's buddies do nickname the monkey "bi-curious George" -- the only
funny line of the episode -- but otherwise are a lamentable bunch.
They include a heavily accented Indian doctor, also recently divorced,
and so lonely and stupid that he invites an escort to his birthday
dinner (at "Thank God It Is Friday's" -- think of how hilarious that
is in an Indian accent!) and proposes to her. As if getting ditched
for a circus acrobat isn't emblematic enough of the clownish
powerlessness of modern man, the show's lone female star is dating a
short man who works for the Celtics -- as the team's bouncy mascot,
Lucky the Leprechaun!
At least the guys on "The Secrets of Starting Over" have met women.
Geeky schlubs Sheldon and Leonard (Jim Parsons and Johnny Galecki) on
CBS' "Big Bang Theory" are socially hobbled physicists whose only
sexual activity involves donating to a high-IQ sperm bank, so that
woman can get pregnant by them without actually having to touch them!
The guys meet a cute neighbor and by the end of the half-hour have had
their pants removed by her brawny ex. "It wasn't my first pantsing,
and it won't be my last," says a defeated Sheldon.
Going pantsless is one of the weirdly repeated themes of the new
season, turning up again in ABC's bone-chillingly bad comedy
"Carpoolers."
The idea behind "Carpoolers," voiced several times during its pilot,
is that daily trips to and from work are the only escape for these
four miserable men, who have nothing in common except a barely
disguised antipathy for the women in their lives. Aubrey's wife has
him by the balls: He waits on her, cooks and cares for the kids while
she watches television and takes his money. Laird (Jerry O'Connell),
the carpool's founder, has been dumped by his wife, who cheated and
left him with nothing but an ass-print on the sliding glass door.
Gracen (Fred Goss) is married to Leila (Faith Ford), a woman he seems
to care for, but whose real estate "hobby" has recently become
lucrative. The pilot revolves around the carpool's suspicion that
Leila is making more money than her husband. The decline of
masculinity is further embodied by Gracen and Leila's subliterate
adult son Marmaduke, who inexplicably prances around the house without
trousers and miraculously lands a job at which he, too, will be making
more money than his father.
The fury and confusion about shifting gender roles as expressed on
"Carpoolers" is scary in its nakedness. At one point, Laird suggests
to Gracen that he talk to his wife about how she's spending his money.
"My money? Ha ha, no," says Gracen. "All the money I make is our
money; it always has been. The money she's making now is her money."
Aubrey chimes in, "Well at least you have your money. My wife gets my
checks; I don't even know how much I make!" To which Laird says, "My
wife and I have it all worked out out. She gets everything. Her lawyer
saw to that."
Ha ha ha ha!
Later Laird stokes Gracen's fear by explaining that "men go off to
war; women shop; if we don't provide for our women, do they really
need us?" Part of the horror of this show is how it -- and not the
specter of the high-earning wife -- is actually stripping its heroes
of anything resembling self-respect or masculine dignity. Gracen
squirms around about Leila's income like a spineless nelly; he curls
in a fetal position when he hears how much she has in her account; he
can only have sex with her after he realizes it's all been a
misunderstanding -- of course she's not wealthier than he is!
"Carpoolers" does more to impugn the American male than any high-
earning spouse could ever do. But if this sitcom is any measure -- and
god willing it is not -- the American female is ****ed. There is no
mode of femininity that satisfies these guys: The wife who is too
successful makes her husband feel unmanly; the wife who doesn't work
makes her husband bake; the wife who leaves is a bitch who takes the
furniture.
Even on far better shows, like Fox's Kelsey Grammer-Patricia Heaton
vehicle "Back to You," the malevolence toward professional women is
ill-disguised. Grammer plays Chuck Darling, a Los Angeles newscaster
demoted to his old station in Pittsburgh after he's caught on camera
railing about a ditzy colleague. "I didn't freeze my ass off in
Minnesota and ****ing Pittsburgh to end up working with some dipshit
who only has her job because she's ****ing the general manager!" Chuck
shouts before he realizes he's on air and calmly reports, "It was
bring your daughter to work day today!" -- a funny transition that
highlights the disjuncture between enforced political correctness and
his actual animosity toward his young female co-worker.
Back in Pittsburgh, Chuck is reunited with his former co-anchor, Kelly
Carr (Heaton), with whom he had a brief sexual relationship before his
career took off. During Chuck's decade-long absence, Kelly has raised
a child on her own, whom newsroom gossips speculate she conceived with
the help of a sperm donor -- a child whom Heaton protects with such
fierceness that Chuck is moved to comment, "Your daughter could
benefit from a strong masculine figure in her life, but I can see she
already has one."
Grammer is not a loser in the mold of Gator or Gracen, but he has been
professionally humiliated and forced to slink back to a woman whom he
thought he'd surpassed, only to realize that she'd been just fine
without him. The theme of female self-sufficiency is echoed in Fox's
"The Return of Jezebel James," slated to run midseason, in which
Parker Posey's single, ambitious book editor character is informed she
cannot get pregnant, and so turns to her sister for help in the uterus
department, no baby-daddy in sight.
These shows smell only faintly of a lighthearted desire to punish or
dominate their high-achieving female leads, perhaps make them lonely,
a little desperate, a touch shrill, infertile. But the punishment
mechanism positively reeks on ABC's "Samantha Who?" a sitcom ripped
off from "Thirteen Going on Thirty," in which psychiatrist Sam
(Christina Applegate) wakes up from a coma with amnesia, and must be
taught in a thousand belittling ways that pre-accident she was a mean,
ambitious, cheating, slutty harridan who was so hated by her
boyfriend's friends that they called to congratulate him when she got
hit by a car. As an amnesiac, Sam is much nicer, especially when she
confesses to her man that she feels "so needy [and] unarmed." A
collective fantasy: If only we could knock out those ball-busting
brats and bring them back with no memories and much more amenable
dispositions!
At least the barely sublimated aggression is played for laughs in the
sitcoms. When it comes to the dramas, the female triumphs are that
much more potent, and the resulting arrested machismo of the men is
that much more ... not potent. On ABC's "Women's Murder Club," Angie
Harmon is police Lt. Lindsay Boxer -- recently promoted over her older
male colleague -- who solves murders with the support of her best
female confidants, a reporter, a medical examiner and a D.A. (brunet,
blond, African-American, natch). They're such a successful clique that
they even have a wannabe (Asian!) member, who begs to become a part of
their club, which she sees as "women teaming up to level the playing
field in a man's world."
The only area in which these women show any weakness is their love
lives, but it's made clear that that has a lot to do with male
discomfort with their power. As Lindsay says about her failed
marriage, "Before he left, I kept promising that I would change. That
I would put him over the job and that I would be at home more.
Eventually he just stopped believing me, and he was right." But even
without the husband, she shows no interest in changing. When it's
pointed out that Lindsay hasn't had sex in two years, she says
defensively, "I'm picky. And busy." Medical examiner Claire (Paula
Newsome) has a more successful relationship. When she goes home to
cuddle with her husband, we understand him to be a man comfortable
with his wife's power as soon as she sits in his lap ... in his
wheelchair.
Set on an opposite coast and a professional world apart, ABC's
"Cashmere Mafia" strikes amazingly similar notes to "Women's Murder
Club." "Mafia" is Darren Starr's attempt to plunder the "Sex and the
City" audience, before the mid-season debut of NBC's "Lipstick
Jungle," based on a book by the original Carrie, Candace Bushnell.
"Mafia" begins with a shot of New York amazons (brunet, blond, red-
headed, Asian!) striding down a Gotham street. "This is a story about
four friends who were taught from childhood that through hard work and
smart choices they could have it all," the efficient voice-over tells
us. Zoe (Frances O'Connor) is a Wall Street macher with a great family
and stay-at-home- dad husband so devoted that he turns down a play-
group mom's offer for strings-free sex. Juliet (Miranda Otto) is a
hotel chain executive; Caitlin (Bonnie Somerville) is a marketing
executive for a cosmetics company who, according to the intro, "says
she lives for work because work never tells her that he's just not
that into her." But her imperviousness to men may not be simply
attitudinal; she's also a budding lesbian. After her first kiss with a
woman, the pilot's soundtrack plays "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural
Woman." That's right, boys. Want to know what makes this beautiful
woman feel like a woman? A woman! Suck it!
Like the Murder Club ladies, these women are utterly self-sufficient
professionally, except insomuch as they rely on each other for
detailed four-way-phone- call advice. Listen to Zoe make like Gordon-
ette Gekko, telling a young colleague: "Profit doesn't care if you
have kids or cats or a penis or a vagina; profit only cares if you
have the hot hand, and through hard work and a little bit of luck,
mine's been hot more often than not." Even in romantic weakness, they
are steely. When Juliet learns that her husband has been cheating, she
barely flinches; what's more, she quickly begins to pity him. "Look at
what a man gives up to be with one of us," she tells her girlfriends.
"We make more money. We rise higher. We take up more space. We are as
far from the idea of a wife he grew up with as it's possible to be and
still wear his ring and go by his last name."
It's excellently diabolical, this logic: Even at their macho cheating
caddish hurtful worst, men are the weak ones. He's only cheating
because he's so enfeebled by his junior role in the marriage.
On "Big Shots," "Cashmere Mafia's" corollary about a bunch of
classically red-blooded businessmen, the four friends sit around a
swimming pool taking a schvitz like the girls on "Sisters" used to do.
"Look at us," says Brody, played by Christopher Titus, as a man so
devoted to his wife that he spends the whole episode micromanaging the
catering for her birthday party, "We're supposed to be these alpha
males, right? But now James' wife is sleeping around on him and Karl
can't control his crazy mistress and I'm so whipped that I can't tell
my wife that the delivery company can't seem to find her shipment of
Napoleans." Duncan (Dylan McDermott) replies flatly, "Men, we're the
new women," just before Brody gets a phone call that he answers, "Oh,
what fresh hell ... What do you mean the pastry filling won't clear
customs?"
"Big Shots" is one of the two -- two! -- new dramas so befuddled by
gender arrangements that in their pilots, they have their muscular
male leads -- McDermott on "Big Shots" and William Baldwin on ABC's
"Dirty Sexy Money" -- engaging in sex with transvestites. What better
symbol could there be of the emasculation of television's men and the
chicks-with- dicks attitude toward its women? As "Dirty Sexy Money"
lead Peter Krause taunts Baldwin's character: "Is she more of a man
than you are?"
Yes. She is more of a man than he is. All of television's women are,
apparently. You know you're in trouble when Julianna Margulies' tough
lawyer character on Fox's "Canterbury's Law," which premieres
midseason, walks in on her male junior colleague in the pisser, and
when he asks her to leave, she merely turns on the water to hurry
things along.
Rather than seeing their opportunities for interaction with women
expand, these men have instead curled into fetal positions like Gracen
on "Carpoolers." Is it simply impossible for the televised heroes of
yesteryear to go gracefully into their new world order?
It's understandable and honest to express some befuddlement with
shifting expectations. But these are characters whose discomfort makes
them unattractive, or silly-looking. They are whipped, flummoxed and
helpless without the power to make the calls -- in the bedroom or the
boardroom. They can't just be normal nice guys who are no longer
entirely in control, who do childcare or play a subordinate role at
work but who do so in a way that is still sexy, still powerful,
instead of in a way that is marked as submissive, beaten down or pansy-
assed. Nope, they must be buffoons, caricatures, dopes or just angry,
neutered bastards.
It's discomfiting for women, too, to see television's idea of what a
feminized man is, since it is a reflection of what television
considers feminine to begin with. If these men are "the new women,"
then what does that say about what they take women for? Do they think
we have hissy fits when we discover how much our husbands have in
their bank accounts? That we flip out when a man comes on to us? That
when we get passed over for promotions we walk out of relationships in
defeat? If these are supposed to be girly-men, then the notion of what
girly looks like is simply ghastly, an insult not only to the men, but
to the women whose habits they are supposedly aping.
Little wonder that many of these programs include plotlines in which
women and men turn in on their own gender to fulfill their social,
professional and sexual needs. Many of us who rather enjoy the upturn
in women's professional, political, sexual and social fortunes might
think that it could only help our relationships with the men we love
and respect, and with whom we come ever closer to being considered
equal. But if television is any measure, and this summer it appears to
be measuring something palpable in our collective consciousness, then
it seems that as our field gets closer to level, men and women are
simply not playing well together.
http://www.salon. com/ent/tv/ feature/2007/ 09/12/gender_ tv/
Women are the new men on TV
Broads are the cops and lawyers and masters of the business universe
on the new shows. So what happened to the men?
By Rebecca Traister
Sep. 12, 2007 |
Here's the good news: When you turn on your television this fall,
you'll be watching more women kick more ass than you can possibly
imagine -- physically, economically and sexually. Hard-bodied and
smart, rich and aggressive, confident and independent, the chicks who
populate the prime-time lineup are being cast in roles that once
belonged almost exclusively to men. These broads are cops and lawyers
and masters of the business universe. Hollywood doyennes like Kyra
Sedgwick, Mary-Louise Parker and Holly Hunter have already found
midlife career solace (and good writing) on cable. This year, Julianna
Margulies will star as a nasty Nancy Grace knockoff, Angie Harmon as a
police lieutenant, Lucy Liu as a publishing executive, and Patricia
Heaton as a news anchor; there's a new "Bionic Woman" and a whole show
about the world's leading incubator of the future, "The Terminator's"
Sarah Connor. The flinty Cagneys, Laceys, Murphys and Buffys of yore
aren't the exceptions in the new TV season; they rule.
So what happened to the men? Nothing good, that's for sure. Here, for
instance, is what happens when Lucy Liu's character, Mia, on ABC's
"Cashmere Mafia," wins a work contest, and big promotion, over her
boyfriend and colleague Richard: He breaks up with her, tail between
his legs. "I thought I'd win and buy us a place and take care of you,"
he explains. "And now that it's reversed I just can't see us ... I'm
40 next month. I want someone to come home to. I'm going to want kids,
and we're just going in opposite directions."
Yup. Welcome to the new world on television, where the women are
strong, and the men are cavemen. Literally. ABC's "Cavemen," based on
the Geico ad campaign character, is about a trio of Cro-Magnons with
low self-esteem and a little hair-growth problem. Small-screen heroes
who aren't actually dragging their knuckles behave even worse. In the
face of professional and sexual equality between the televised sexes,
these fictional guys are cowed, angry and generally emasculated by the
successes of their female counterparts.
It can't all be coincidence that this season is coming at the end of a
summer in which the biggest movie hits have featured dopey, ill-
groomed, irresponsible boys who score beautiful high-achieving women
and then have no idea what to do once they land them. That's right,
we're in Apatowland, baby, where the idea of a male romantic lead now
begins with a water bong and ends with a fart joke. This isn't an
isolated trend; it seems to be a broad cultural response that speaks
to enough people to keep it floating. The shows this fall are not
clones of each other: They're written by men and by women; they're
geared toward teens and adults; they're comedies and dramas and
dramedies. And they all seem to be expressing an anxiety about what on
earth is going to happen to American men now that their women are not
simply competing at work, sex, friendship, money and politics, but
sometimes winning.
Among the degradations about to be heaped on television's men? There
are guys whose wives cheat on them, whose girlfriends get promoted
over them, whose mates make more money than they do; guys who get left
out of baby-making, who date women with penises and at least one who
gets anally raped by a monkey.
Seriously.
It's tough to know where to start in explaining how bad these boys
have it, but the monkey rape seems as good a place as any. It takes
place in the debut episode of the Farrelly brothers' half-hour comedy
"The Rules for Starting Over," which premieres on Fox in spring 2008,
about Gator (Craig Bierko), a menschy guy tossed back into the dating
market after his wife leaves him for a Cirque de Soleil performer.
Gator, who hasn't been on a date since his 20s, is mystified by women,
and startled to be invited up to the apartment of an attractive
naturalist who shows him tapes of the gorillas she's studied. She
informs him that "in the world of primates, the female always
initiates," pulling him onto the floor on top of her to demonstrate.
That's when the woman's pet baboon takes Gator from behind.
Gator's buddies do nickname the monkey "bi-curious George" -- the only
funny line of the episode -- but otherwise are a lamentable bunch.
They include a heavily accented Indian doctor, also recently divorced,
and so lonely and stupid that he invites an escort to his birthday
dinner (at "Thank God It Is Friday's" -- think of how hilarious that
is in an Indian accent!) and proposes to her. As if getting ditched
for a circus acrobat isn't emblematic enough of the clownish
powerlessness of modern man, the show's lone female star is dating a
short man who works for the Celtics -- as the team's bouncy mascot,
Lucky the Leprechaun!
At least the guys on "The Secrets of Starting Over" have met women.
Geeky schlubs Sheldon and Leonard (Jim Parsons and Johnny Galecki) on
CBS' "Big Bang Theory" are socially hobbled physicists whose only
sexual activity involves donating to a high-IQ sperm bank, so that
woman can get pregnant by them without actually having to touch them!
The guys meet a cute neighbor and by the end of the half-hour have had
their pants removed by her brawny ex. "It wasn't my first pantsing,
and it won't be my last," says a defeated Sheldon.
Going pantsless is one of the weirdly repeated themes of the new
season, turning up again in ABC's bone-chillingly bad comedy
"Carpoolers."
The idea behind "Carpoolers," voiced several times during its pilot,
is that daily trips to and from work are the only escape for these
four miserable men, who have nothing in common except a barely
disguised antipathy for the women in their lives. Aubrey's wife has
him by the balls: He waits on her, cooks and cares for the kids while
she watches television and takes his money. Laird (Jerry O'Connell),
the carpool's founder, has been dumped by his wife, who cheated and
left him with nothing but an ass-print on the sliding glass door.
Gracen (Fred Goss) is married to Leila (Faith Ford), a woman he seems
to care for, but whose real estate "hobby" has recently become
lucrative. The pilot revolves around the carpool's suspicion that
Leila is making more money than her husband. The decline of
masculinity is further embodied by Gracen and Leila's subliterate
adult son Marmaduke, who inexplicably prances around the house without
trousers and miraculously lands a job at which he, too, will be making
more money than his father.
The fury and confusion about shifting gender roles as expressed on
"Carpoolers" is scary in its nakedness. At one point, Laird suggests
to Gracen that he talk to his wife about how she's spending his money.
"My money? Ha ha, no," says Gracen. "All the money I make is our
money; it always has been. The money she's making now is her money."
Aubrey chimes in, "Well at least you have your money. My wife gets my
checks; I don't even know how much I make!" To which Laird says, "My
wife and I have it all worked out out. She gets everything. Her lawyer
saw to that."
Ha ha ha ha!
Later Laird stokes Gracen's fear by explaining that "men go off to
war; women shop; if we don't provide for our women, do they really
need us?" Part of the horror of this show is how it -- and not the
specter of the high-earning wife -- is actually stripping its heroes
of anything resembling self-respect or masculine dignity. Gracen
squirms around about Leila's income like a spineless nelly; he curls
in a fetal position when he hears how much she has in her account; he
can only have sex with her after he realizes it's all been a
misunderstanding -- of course she's not wealthier than he is!
"Carpoolers" does more to impugn the American male than any high-
earning spouse could ever do. But if this sitcom is any measure -- and
god willing it is not -- the American female is ****ed. There is no
mode of femininity that satisfies these guys: The wife who is too
successful makes her husband feel unmanly; the wife who doesn't work
makes her husband bake; the wife who leaves is a bitch who takes the
furniture.
Even on far better shows, like Fox's Kelsey Grammer-Patricia Heaton
vehicle "Back to You," the malevolence toward professional women is
ill-disguised. Grammer plays Chuck Darling, a Los Angeles newscaster
demoted to his old station in Pittsburgh after he's caught on camera
railing about a ditzy colleague. "I didn't freeze my ass off in
Minnesota and ****ing Pittsburgh to end up working with some dipshit
who only has her job because she's ****ing the general manager!" Chuck
shouts before he realizes he's on air and calmly reports, "It was
bring your daughter to work day today!" -- a funny transition that
highlights the disjuncture between enforced political correctness and
his actual animosity toward his young female co-worker.
Back in Pittsburgh, Chuck is reunited with his former co-anchor, Kelly
Carr (Heaton), with whom he had a brief sexual relationship before his
career took off. During Chuck's decade-long absence, Kelly has raised
a child on her own, whom newsroom gossips speculate she conceived with
the help of a sperm donor -- a child whom Heaton protects with such
fierceness that Chuck is moved to comment, "Your daughter could
benefit from a strong masculine figure in her life, but I can see she
already has one."
Grammer is not a loser in the mold of Gator or Gracen, but he has been
professionally humiliated and forced to slink back to a woman whom he
thought he'd surpassed, only to realize that she'd been just fine
without him. The theme of female self-sufficiency is echoed in Fox's
"The Return of Jezebel James," slated to run midseason, in which
Parker Posey's single, ambitious book editor character is informed she
cannot get pregnant, and so turns to her sister for help in the uterus
department, no baby-daddy in sight.
These shows smell only faintly of a lighthearted desire to punish or
dominate their high-achieving female leads, perhaps make them lonely,
a little desperate, a touch shrill, infertile. But the punishment
mechanism positively reeks on ABC's "Samantha Who?" a sitcom ripped
off from "Thirteen Going on Thirty," in which psychiatrist Sam
(Christina Applegate) wakes up from a coma with amnesia, and must be
taught in a thousand belittling ways that pre-accident she was a mean,
ambitious, cheating, slutty harridan who was so hated by her
boyfriend's friends that they called to congratulate him when she got
hit by a car. As an amnesiac, Sam is much nicer, especially when she
confesses to her man that she feels "so needy [and] unarmed." A
collective fantasy: If only we could knock out those ball-busting
brats and bring them back with no memories and much more amenable
dispositions!
At least the barely sublimated aggression is played for laughs in the
sitcoms. When it comes to the dramas, the female triumphs are that
much more potent, and the resulting arrested machismo of the men is
that much more ... not potent. On ABC's "Women's Murder Club," Angie
Harmon is police Lt. Lindsay Boxer -- recently promoted over her older
male colleague -- who solves murders with the support of her best
female confidants, a reporter, a medical examiner and a D.A. (brunet,
blond, African-American, natch). They're such a successful clique that
they even have a wannabe (Asian!) member, who begs to become a part of
their club, which she sees as "women teaming up to level the playing
field in a man's world."
The only area in which these women show any weakness is their love
lives, but it's made clear that that has a lot to do with male
discomfort with their power. As Lindsay says about her failed
marriage, "Before he left, I kept promising that I would change. That
I would put him over the job and that I would be at home more.
Eventually he just stopped believing me, and he was right." But even
without the husband, she shows no interest in changing. When it's
pointed out that Lindsay hasn't had sex in two years, she says
defensively, "I'm picky. And busy." Medical examiner Claire (Paula
Newsome) has a more successful relationship. When she goes home to
cuddle with her husband, we understand him to be a man comfortable
with his wife's power as soon as she sits in his lap ... in his
wheelchair.
Set on an opposite coast and a professional world apart, ABC's
"Cashmere Mafia" strikes amazingly similar notes to "Women's Murder
Club." "Mafia" is Darren Starr's attempt to plunder the "Sex and the
City" audience, before the mid-season debut of NBC's "Lipstick
Jungle," based on a book by the original Carrie, Candace Bushnell.
"Mafia" begins with a shot of New York amazons (brunet, blond, red-
headed, Asian!) striding down a Gotham street. "This is a story about
four friends who were taught from childhood that through hard work and
smart choices they could have it all," the efficient voice-over tells
us. Zoe (Frances O'Connor) is a Wall Street macher with a great family
and stay-at-home- dad husband so devoted that he turns down a play-
group mom's offer for strings-free sex. Juliet (Miranda Otto) is a
hotel chain executive; Caitlin (Bonnie Somerville) is a marketing
executive for a cosmetics company who, according to the intro, "says
she lives for work because work never tells her that he's just not
that into her." But her imperviousness to men may not be simply
attitudinal; she's also a budding lesbian. After her first kiss with a
woman, the pilot's soundtrack plays "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural
Woman." That's right, boys. Want to know what makes this beautiful
woman feel like a woman? A woman! Suck it!
Like the Murder Club ladies, these women are utterly self-sufficient
professionally, except insomuch as they rely on each other for
detailed four-way-phone- call advice. Listen to Zoe make like Gordon-
ette Gekko, telling a young colleague: "Profit doesn't care if you
have kids or cats or a penis or a vagina; profit only cares if you
have the hot hand, and through hard work and a little bit of luck,
mine's been hot more often than not." Even in romantic weakness, they
are steely. When Juliet learns that her husband has been cheating, she
barely flinches; what's more, she quickly begins to pity him. "Look at
what a man gives up to be with one of us," she tells her girlfriends.
"We make more money. We rise higher. We take up more space. We are as
far from the idea of a wife he grew up with as it's possible to be and
still wear his ring and go by his last name."
It's excellently diabolical, this logic: Even at their macho cheating
caddish hurtful worst, men are the weak ones. He's only cheating
because he's so enfeebled by his junior role in the marriage.
On "Big Shots," "Cashmere Mafia's" corollary about a bunch of
classically red-blooded businessmen, the four friends sit around a
swimming pool taking a schvitz like the girls on "Sisters" used to do.
"Look at us," says Brody, played by Christopher Titus, as a man so
devoted to his wife that he spends the whole episode micromanaging the
catering for her birthday party, "We're supposed to be these alpha
males, right? But now James' wife is sleeping around on him and Karl
can't control his crazy mistress and I'm so whipped that I can't tell
my wife that the delivery company can't seem to find her shipment of
Napoleans." Duncan (Dylan McDermott) replies flatly, "Men, we're the
new women," just before Brody gets a phone call that he answers, "Oh,
what fresh hell ... What do you mean the pastry filling won't clear
customs?"
"Big Shots" is one of the two -- two! -- new dramas so befuddled by
gender arrangements that in their pilots, they have their muscular
male leads -- McDermott on "Big Shots" and William Baldwin on ABC's
"Dirty Sexy Money" -- engaging in sex with transvestites. What better
symbol could there be of the emasculation of television's men and the
chicks-with- dicks attitude toward its women? As "Dirty Sexy Money"
lead Peter Krause taunts Baldwin's character: "Is she more of a man
than you are?"
Yes. She is more of a man than he is. All of television's women are,
apparently. You know you're in trouble when Julianna Margulies' tough
lawyer character on Fox's "Canterbury's Law," which premieres
midseason, walks in on her male junior colleague in the pisser, and
when he asks her to leave, she merely turns on the water to hurry
things along.
Rather than seeing their opportunities for interaction with women
expand, these men have instead curled into fetal positions like Gracen
on "Carpoolers." Is it simply impossible for the televised heroes of
yesteryear to go gracefully into their new world order?
It's understandable and honest to express some befuddlement with
shifting expectations. But these are characters whose discomfort makes
them unattractive, or silly-looking. They are whipped, flummoxed and
helpless without the power to make the calls -- in the bedroom or the
boardroom. They can't just be normal nice guys who are no longer
entirely in control, who do childcare or play a subordinate role at
work but who do so in a way that is still sexy, still powerful,
instead of in a way that is marked as submissive, beaten down or pansy-
assed. Nope, they must be buffoons, caricatures, dopes or just angry,
neutered bastards.
It's discomfiting for women, too, to see television's idea of what a
feminized man is, since it is a reflection of what television
considers feminine to begin with. If these men are "the new women,"
then what does that say about what they take women for? Do they think
we have hissy fits when we discover how much our husbands have in
their bank accounts? That we flip out when a man comes on to us? That
when we get passed over for promotions we walk out of relationships in
defeat? If these are supposed to be girly-men, then the notion of what
girly looks like is simply ghastly, an insult not only to the men, but
to the women whose habits they are supposedly aping.
Little wonder that many of these programs include plotlines in which
women and men turn in on their own gender to fulfill their social,
professional and sexual needs. Many of us who rather enjoy the upturn
in women's professional, political, sexual and social fortunes might
think that it could only help our relationships with the men we love
and respect, and with whom we come ever closer to being considered
equal. But if television is any measure, and this summer it appears to
be measuring something palpable in our collective consciousness, then
it seems that as our field gets closer to level, men and women are
simply not playing well together.
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