September 2011
Fictionalizing Gender: The Woman of Modern Television
This Washington Post article by Hank Stuever, ”Bunnies, babies and broads,” about the modern female role in television in the Washington Post is currently making the rounds of the internet. And for good reason: it calls out, in some very well-spoken terms the ridiculous ways in which women (and actually, also men) are portrayed on television. People are mostly circulating the quote about how ridiculously airheaded and stereotypically adorkable Zooey Deschanel’s new character is, but I like this quote even better:
Whether fictional or quasi-real, TV’s women occupy a world of placation and sublimation through cupcakes and extreme couponing and physically impossible jujitsu. It’s Bravo’s “Housewives” threatening to ruin one another, egged on by fans. It’s a false sense of outspoken independence, shackled by beauty myths and the pretend liberation of promiscuity.
It says so much about the false nature of the message of some of these shows, which is that the gender roles they portray are progressive. Indeed, women’s TV roles now aren’t the same as the ones in pop culture fifty years ago, but just because they have sex and careers doesn’t mean they aren’t also falling into depressingly caricatured stereotypes of the ultra-gendered cupcake-eating bargain-hunter whose desperation for heteronormative male attention is the drive behind the entire plot of their lives. It also says something about the nature of the “chick flick” genre of modern pop culture, where it’s assumed that the standard to which women aspire and relate as a demographic is a straight, privileged white woman seeking love in the big city. It sterilizes and mocks the actuality of the so-called “female experience” and also the male experience, which is also portrayed in a privileged caricature that rigidly defines manliness. Hank Stuever also points out 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.”
And do not even let me begin to talk about the miserable idea that is NBC’s new show The Playboy Club.
“The greatest danger is not the wrong ideas but rigidly held ideas.”
—
Stephen A. Mitchell
“All people dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind, Wake in the morning to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, For they dream their dreams with open eyes, And make them come true.”
—D.H. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1922
“Art reaches its greatest peak when devoid of self-consciousness. Freedom discovers man the moment he loses concern over what impression he is making or about to make.”
Bruce Lee
"And I had always had a great fascination with the desert. Because the desert is at once everything and nothing. So that when you are between sky and sand you are truly in infinity. Outside of time … you understand the desert is much more listening than anything else."
Edmond Jabès, excerpted from conversations with Jason Weiss in September 1982, from Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris with Uncommon Writers
This quote reminds me of Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field installation:
The piece doesn’t provoke introspection but rather external reflection. With the brutally affecting conditions of altitude, temperature, and sun combined with the sleeplessness of excitement and an intention to stay awake for sunrise, sunset, and as many hours of the night as possible
“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.”
—Salvador Dalí
“What a revelation it is to be insulted, to be scorned in public. We become familiar with certain words that up to that point had only been heard in classical tragedies, but that now become our own accouterments, our own burdens. We are no longer what we thought ourselves to be. We are no longer the person we knew, but the one others think they know, the ones others take to be this or that. If someone could think that of me, then in some it must be true. At first we pretend that it is not true, that this is only a mask, a costume for a play in which someone has clothed us, and that we could take off. But no. These garments adhere so tightly that they have already become your face, your flesh. To take them off would be to rend your own being. The insult lets me know that I am not like others, not normal. I am queer: strange, bizarre, sick, abnormal.”
—Excerpt by Marcel Jouhandeau, On Abjection, 1939. Cited in Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, written by Dider Eribon
