The Pop Tart's 3 Things From 2012

When the thought struck me that I ought to do an end-of-the-year list, I dismissed it at first. I don't really see much point in compiling a "Best of" list (or a "Worst of" list, for that matter), since film, television, books, and pretty much every other medium through which we partake of pop culture are not things with true objective scales by which to measure them. What's a good film or book to me won't be to someone else, and that's fine--it's one of the things that makes life more interesting.

So, I present to you, in no particular order, Three Things in 2012 That I Thought Were Pretty Neat.

* Female-led Successes in Television and Film

I mentioned this in part in my post about Action Women. Film studio Lionsgate this year had two films make over $125 million, and, guess what--both of these films starred female leads (the films are, if you're wondering, The Hunger Games, starring Jennifer Lawrence, and Twilight:Breaking Dawn, Part 2, starring Kristen Stewart). Female led comedies like Pitch Perfect have opened doors for women to lead in movies outside of the typical RomComs. Those things would be great on their own, but let's look also at television: Lena Dunham's Girls has been making news, good and bad, all over the place; Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are set to host the Golden Globes later this month; Pixar gave us Brave, its first film with a female protagonist; we finally got to see Legend of Korra, the female-led sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender. These are the sorts of things I can get behind.

*Ensemble Cast Shows

I don't think my love for NBC's Community is any secret, but Community alone isn't why I chose to include this topic.  Let's face it, a larger cast means there's more opportunity for more types of people to appear on television. Shows like Community, Warehouse 13, Alphas, Glee and others show us that casts don't have to include exclusively men or exclusively white people. There are plenty of ensemble-cast shows that are guilty of only showing us more white people, and some of these shows are better at providing the viewer with a diverse cast than others, but the aforementioned shows have seen critical success, if not necessarily commercial success. Which is a step in the right direction, certainly.

*Some Pretty Awesome Talks at TEDx Events

 I've talked about Anita Sarkeesian once or twice before. In case you were unaware, this woman found herself the target of some pretty intense abuse for asking people who were interested--just people who were interested, mind you--to support her attempt to create a series of videos on YouTube to show the types of tropes that female characters fall into in video games. At one of the TEDx events, she discussed her experience.

FOX and Friends anchor Brian Kilmeade said some pretty insulting things about how the female anchors at the conservative news station were hired (it's all in the linked article, but the short of it is he said they just tried to find Victoria's Secret models who were capable of speech). Maybe if he had heard Cameron Russell's TEDx talk about the power of image, he would realize that beautiful women can easily be smart women also.

These were a few of the things that caught my attention in 2012. Use the comments section to share some of yours.

Action Girl

I love a good action series. Sometimes I love a bad action series.

Even the most gentle among us wants to see a good ass-kicking now and then. Part of the draw, I think, is getting to see people like us--people that we can relate to--doing crazy, amazing things and taking charge. It's part of why characters like John McClane and Batman and Hercules are so lasting in pop culture as a whole and American pop culture, specifically.

There's no shortage of male action heroes. They're plentiful and varied--though, admittedly, over time many of them start looking the same (compare video game heroes--the same scarred, angry, bald white guy shows up over and over, but that's a post for another day). The female version of this character type, The Action Girl, while it's being seen more and more in various media, does not saturate the market in the same way.

There are a lot of reasons for this--maybe you remember Warner Brothers making waves in 2007 by saying they would no longer produce films with female leads? -- and this year, editor Frank Parlato, Jr. of the Niagara Falls Reporter made it pretty clear what he thinks of female-led movies when he was approached by a writer who had reviewed Snow White and the Huntsman and, in spite of the eyebrow-raising content of his response to the reviewer, it's depressingly not hard to image that there are plenty who share his views.

Then there's the perception that action films that star women can't succeed; people tend to back this up by citing films like Catwoman and Suckerpunch (which, if we're being honest here, are indeed lousy films, and both, incidentally, are great examples of Male Gaze in effect), and that's sort of like judging every Sean Connery film by League of Extraordinary Gentlemen--which is to say that it's unfair and only provides a narrow view of the subject,only looking at one not-so-great example, and it doesn't take into account things like the marketing the movies get, the writing, the star-power behind the film, and other factors in what makes a movie sell.

But sometimes, action movies that star women as the hero and not the victim in need of rescuing do get made. And they do sell.


Consider two of the twenty highest-grossing female-led action films: 1979's Alien starring Sigourney Weaver as Ripley and 2010's Salt starring Angelina Jolie as the title character. Ripley and Evelyn Salt are two very different and interesting characters that share an unusual trait: neither character was written for a woman.

When Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett wrote the early drafts of the script for Alien, the characters that comprised the crew were to be "unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women. Ripley's gender wasn't decided until Sigourney Weaver was cast in the role.

Gender is not a factor in Ripley's actions at all--even in scenes in which she's clad only in underwear and a t-shirt, Ripley's not played for sexuality. Issues of femininity never come up. The actions demanded by the situation are the beginning and end of Ripley's motivation.

And then there's Evelyn Salt.

As the story goes, Tom Cruise was approached to play the title role in Salt--Edwin W. Salt. Cruise, not wanting to play a role so similar to the one he played in the Mission: Impossible films, declined the part, and Edwin became Evelyn, a vehicle for Angeline Jolie, who had already seen some success with the Tomb Raider franchise. Rather than trying to rewrite the script with a female in mind, the minds behind the film changed the character's name and left almost everything else untouched. In fact, the only major change was removing the children that Edwin was written to have (which does give the message that a woman can be an action woman or a mom, but not both, and that's kind of crappy any way you look at it).

But a female action hero doesn't have to be portrayed with masculinity or without gender at all to be successful.

The top-earning female-led action film came out earlier this year, and set sales records for movies with a spring release.

The Hunger Games, the first movie in a trilogy based on the books by Suzanne Collins, was wildly successful. The second film in the series, Catching Fire, is already in production and looking towards a November 2013 release. Judging from the buzz about the movie online and the success of the book series, the second film will be just as popular. And this is with a female character that was written to be female. Katniss's gender, while never a focal point in the story, is not ignored. She dresses up (though, granted, it's not because she wants to), she thinks about boys--at least, when she's not focused on surviving, which isn't often, but her understanding of her more romantic emotions does play a part in her character development--she's a girl. She just happens to be a girl who can fight.

There are plenty of examples from other media--Buffy, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, the Abhorsen trilogy, Charmed, Warehouse 13, Lost Girl, and tons of female-led anime.

One of the most shining examples of strong, action women on television has been Avatar: The Last Airbender and it's follow-up/sister series, The Legend of Korra. Both of these series are among the most popular animated shows of all time, with fans of all ages and all genders. And these two shows have some of the greatest female characters on television.

 Okay, Pema may not actually fight much, but she's definitely a tough lady.

(And these are just the good guys.)

So, what's the secret, then? How can we get more characters like these?

It's in the writing, really, when all is said and done. In his essay "Why I Write 'Strong Female Characters,'" novelist and comic book writer Greg Rucka, says this about writing strong women:

Writers don't write Men or Women or Dogs or Salmon. Writers write characters, and at our best, if we do it well and with care and with thought, we invest in those characters a spark of life, a realism and nuance that makes them believable and relatable. We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy, characters our audience will care for, and as a result, will care about what happens to them, and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey. No character - no well-created character, at least - is defined by only one trait, by one aspect.

 That's why characters like Ripley, Katniss, Salt, Katara, Buffy, and so many others are so popular--it's the same reason why so many male characters are popular.

They're characters. They have flaws, passions, motives, and interests that make viewers and readers care about them.

So, how do you write a great female action character? It's like Greg Rucka says.

"The Quick Answer goes like this:
Q: How do you write such strong/well-realized/positively portrayed women?
A: I don't. I write characters. Some of those characters are women."

TV Moms, Part Six: Aunt Bee: Wholesome and Homecooked Mom-In-Effect

If there's one thing that can be learned from television, it's that there is more than one way to portray a family.

And sometimes, in these television families, the mother is absent.

Single dads aren't rare on TV. Phillip Drummond from Diff'rent Strokes, Russell Lawrence from Gidget, and even Full House's Danny Tanner and Arrested Development's Michael Bluth have been part of the television single-father tradition.

But one of the most famous TV single dads, who appeared on CBS from October of 1960 to April of 1968, was the sheriff of a a small town called Mayberry and still runs in syndication over fifty years after its cancellation.

Widower Andy Taylor and his son, Opie, though they had lost their wife and mother respectively, were not without a mother figure, even before the series began.

 The first episode of The Andy Griffith Show had Andy's housekeeper, Rose, moving out to get married and Opie being reluctant to accept a new mother figure into their house and his life.

And the woman that is brought in (brought back in, in Andy's case) into the Taylor boys' lives is Beatrice Taylor, or, as Mayberry and American came to know her, Aunt Bee.

Frances Bavier's Aunt Bee was the never-married sister of Andy's father. Though it's never explored very deeply in the series, it is stated flat out that Bee raised Andy and implied that she had raised a few other Taylors, also, though she never married or had children of her own (another tidbit that is never really explored in the show).

Aunt Bee is a very interesting character to me, especially when considered through the scope of her time and in the context of the modern audiences exposed to the show.

When The Andy Griffith Show first aired in the early sixties, the social stigma for unmarried women and the fact that the Feminist Movement of the 1960s was still in its infancy limited what they could do--working as housekeepers and in other "pink-collar" (or traditionally female) jobs such as teaching and nursing. And a woman never having been married was rare enough (check this pdf if you're interested in detailed 1960s marriage statistics). Even though Aunt Bee was established as an unmarried woman, her romantic life played a fairly large part in her storylines in the show. Though her actual life track is unusual for a woman on television in that time, Aunt Bee is very much like the other television mothers of her time--working inside the home and in the community by way of her church and being responsible for the care and upbringing of a child. The only differences Aunt Bee and mothers like June Cleaver are that Bee isn't married, and she didn't give birth to Opie.

There's something very encouraging, I think, in the fact that even in what was a considerably more conservative time, the idea that there are many different kinds of mothers-- Aunt Bee didn't physically carry or give birth to Opie, but there's no denying that she is a mother to Opie. Today, more people are considering adoption that in the 1960s, and it's interesting to me that, even fifty years ago, there was a postivie role model for people that are parents that didn't give birth themselves.

Though there are many ways in which Aunt Bee is relatable to modern audiences, there are, of course, things about the character that date her. While Bee lives with her nephew Andy during the series and, after Andy marries Helen Crump at the end of the series, with another widowed father, Sam Jones as part of the exposition for the spin-off series, Mayberry, R.F.D, in 2012, more single women are choosing to live alone than ever before. And, while Aunt Bee worked mostly in the home (though later in the series she did open a restaurant and record a cooking show), more women are working outside the home now than then, juggling work and parenthood.


Mayberry may have been a simpler time and place on the whole, and The Andy Griffith Show certainly portrayed more conservative values than many television shows today, it's interesting to see the modern thinking that got slipped into the narrative by way of Aunt Bee's unique representation of motherhood.

In the coming weeks, we'll start taking a look at single mothers and blended families with Brett Butler's Grace Under Fire and one of television's most famous mother, Florence Henderson's Carol Brady.


Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

Video Follow-Up

I imagine everyone's busy voting today (or, at least, I hope everyone is), so instead of a content-heavy post, I'm just going to share this follow-up to the costumes discussion from my Halloween post.

You can also find a link to this video in the comments section of that post.

In this video, we see how people react to a (staged) argument between a parent and child--first a mom and son and then a mom and daughter--about costume choices. In both cases, the child wants to wear a costume that is "gender inappropriate."

For me, watching this video was pretty frustrating at first, but there was a nice turnaround in the end. Though I still wish that at least one person had been on the boy's side.

Thanks to Mandy for sending me the link to the video.

More on Gender

There'll be a Halloween post up on Tuesday, but in the meantime, here are a couple of videos that related to the gendered products we looked at earlier this week.

It's interesting to me that the overwhelming majority of videos on gender stereotyping focus more on women than men--making perceptions of feminine more broad, but not broadening the scope for masculinity. To me, this reinforces the idea that masculinity is more strictly enforced than femininity-there's a lot of societal pressure on boys and men to succeed, provide, and be strong. Whatever that means.
 

Today in "Wait, What?": Pointlessly Gendered Products

It's old news by this point, but back in August pen-making company BIC released a new type of pen.

A pen for women.

Aren't they pretty.

The reaction to these pens was about what you'd expect--a hardy "Wait, what? Seriously?" and plenty of snark. Just look at the reviews of the product on Amazon.com.

My favorite, though, was Ellen Degeneres's take on it on her show.

We can pretty much all agree that the notion of pens for a specific gender is a pretty ridiculous one--I mean, we all know that women can write whatever they want, and that a pen is a pen whether its pink, black, or whatever.

The thing that gets me, though, is that this sort of dismissal hasn't been applied to other products.

There's a whole host of products that are pointlessly marketed to a specific gender.

Look at Dr. Pepper 10.

I'm not supposed to want a lower-calorie soda because I'm a woman? And Men aren't supposed to want to drink anything that has "Diet" in the name because "that means it's for ladies"?

There are gendered calamine lotions, gendered ear plugs, gendered face masks--the list goes on and on. There are so many, in fact, that the sociologists behind the blog Sociological Images created a board on Pinterest specifically to catalog instances of products that are needlessly being gendered.

The media love to pit men against women--we see it in television shows, in advertising, all over the place. We've learned to deal with it and, in many cases, to expect it. It creates a sort of "us against them' mentality that, I think, is a pretty significant part of the problems we as a society have with issues of gender performance and sexuality. It forges an environment in which a person who doesn't perform his or her gender in the way that's considered appropriate--a guy who likes the color pink or a girl who wants to play football--gets ostracized.

And I'd say it's men who suffer more from this. Women can usuallly get away with not conforming with all aspects of their gender more easily than men can. People may roll their eyes at a girl who plays in the mud and dresses in boys' clothes, but she won't receive the immediate censure that a boy who plays with dolls or dresses girls' clothes. Masculinity is more intensely enforced than femininity in most cases, and it does a disservice to people who are different.

So, yes, we can all agree that "pens for women" are stupid. But maybe we ought to take a closer look at the thinking behind products like this--because that's pretty crazy, too.

TV Moms, Part Five: "Now, What Would You Like In Your Coffee?"

While Roseanne and The Golden Girls both saw a great deal of success in the '80s and early '90s, one 1980s sitcom seems to outshine them all.

You can probably guess which show I'm talking about.

 

In the eight seasons The Cosby Show spent on NBC from 1984 to 1992, it's Nielsen ratings never fell out of the top twenty shows, and it spent five of those seasons in the number one spot. It's often given credit for paving the way for shows like In Living Color and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

The Cosby Show was unique in many ways: the show was filmed in New York instead of Los Angeles, Bill Cosby had an unusual amount of creative control over the show, and, in spite of its predominantly African American cast, it very rarely dealt with the subject of race (though it did promote African and African American music and culture, and it did spawn a spin off that dealt with race issues more frequently). The show is also both praised for breaking stereotypes in portrayals of African Americans--both parents of the Huxtable clan are professionals with college degrees and prestigious jobs--and criticized for only representing a certain portion of the African American community.

But aside from its significance in the context of NBC's sitcom history and in the context of shows with predominantly African American casts, The Cosby Show is remembered for one more contribution to television history.

Clair Huxtable is arguably the most memorable mother that's ever been on television. She consistently makes the top ten in lists of greatest television mothers, and understandably so: she's the "power woman": five kids, a full-time job as an attorney.

Where June Cleaver may be the ideal for the stay-at-home mother, Clair Huxtable is the working mom that has it all together.  She not only had a job, she had a job that was equal in prestige to her husband's--something that, even today, when there is no shortage of working women and even working mothers on television, is rare (the only other example I can think of off the top of my head is NBC's current sitcom Up All Night, which is not enjoying anywhere near the same level of success). She was undeniably present in her children's lives--who remembers the episode where she catches son Theo trying to cut corners on studying MacBeth? She wrote her own test for him! She got her kids to school and made dinner, even making a scrambled eggs supper for Rudy's friend who had just been to the dentist in one episode. And, while she varied from the pearls-and-heels ensembles of Mrs. Cleaver, Clair was always stylish and professional.

It's interesting to note, also, that, while early television mothers like June Cleaver and Harriet Nelson seem dated to modern audiences, Clair remains relatable. This could, certainly, be because 1984 is not nearly so removed from 2012 as 1957 is, but with more women going to college than ever and more women in the workforce, it's likely that viewers in 2012 are more able to see themselves in Clair Huxtable than 1984 viewers.

And, in a time where women's issues are making news, Clair is as relatable as ever.

Yeah, Clair's enduring popularity makes sense. She serves as a great model of a strong woman and is one of the most positive portrayals of working mothers television has seen.

In the coming weeks, we'll take a look some non-traditional mothers, including single mothers like Grace Kelly from Grace Under Fire and non-mother maternal figures like The Andy Griffith Show's Aunt Bee.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Prime-Time's Glass Ceiling

For those that don't know, I currently work in production at a television station. I'm one of nine people with the same job title and, of that nine, one of three women. And, while I've never been "harassed" per se and the people I work with directly don't find my gender to be relevant to the work that I do or the quality with which I do it, I do get treated very differently from my male colleagues by people in other departments: the guys will be asked a question before I am, if something technical needs doing I'm either not asked or am instructed in a manner that can only be described as condescending--and it's not just the men that do these things.

There's more than one reason for this, I think: a combination of the station not bothering to seek out women interested in the position and women not being interested in the position and women, in general, are thought to be less informed and/or less abled when it comes to dealing with technology (which are pretty significant problemd in and of themselves, but that's a post for another day). Frankly, though, men make up the vast majority of people working behind the camera in television and movies (though the number of female creators, producers, and writers has been steadily on the rise).

I get it, though. Television and film, like pretty much all other industries has been traditionally dominated by men, and it takes time to turn that around (sixtyish years seems like a bit too long to me, but my perspective is admittedly skewed).

Though, there was something this week that caught my attention.

It's appeared in a few places (I caught the story on The Mary Sue, but I've since tracked it to this site), and it was certainly jarring to me--I recognize that there are relatively few women in television and film that get the recognition that their male counterparts do, but it's not something that I focus on while I'm working.

But this was just too much.

Director Barbara Stepansky (Fugue, Girls! Girls! Girls! and others) shared the tale of a male acquaintance from film school's winning the Student Emmy. The award was presented by the producer/director of a prime-time drama that runs on Fox, and that producer invited the male acquaintance to shadow the show's director on the set. After this, the acquaintance was invited to direct an episode himself.

This is not a problem. This is a director getting noticed for his good work and gaining opportunities because he's apparently good at what he does. That's a cool thing.

Here's the problem:

A few years ago, I won the same exact award for my own thesis film, the Student Emmy for Best Drama and Best Director. At the awards ceremony, I was approached by an equally heavy-hitting producer of an equally popular prime-time TV drama on Fox (alas, a different one). He was impressed with my thesis film, which had garnered the two top awards of the night. He also graciously invited me to come and visit the set of the show he was producing. I was allowed to shadow an episode he himself was directing for a day. During that visit, I asked about the opportunity to direct.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “The lead actor hates female directors. We only had one in the first season, and she was never invited back.  He just doesn’t like them.”

Yikes.

It's not so shocking that there's an actor who is a jerk--in fact, that's probably more the rule than the exception. What gets me is that no one fought against this. TV is a business, and I understand that it's necessary to hire actors that are marketable, even though I don't necessarily agree with the accepted definition of "marketable" (I mean, I can't watch an episode of Friends without being faced with the overwhelming desire to buy everyone in the cast a cheeseburger and watching to make sure they eat it), but seriously. It doesn't matter if you're limiting the show's potential by nixing female directors before you even try working with them so long as you're popular and your show gets high enough ratings?

I agree with Ms. Stepansky on this one.

I’d like to live in a world where people are ashamed to say things like that, but for some reason it’s still OK.  Take out the word “female” in that quote and substitute it with “black,” “Jewish,” or “gay.  You may tolerate your grandpa spouting misogynist rhetoric at Thanksgiving with a roll of your eyes, but it’s simply not acceptable coming from people who hold the keys to prestigious and lucrative jobs.

This experience transcends personal feelings, and it is endemic in the Hollywood culture.  I mentioned to somebody with a connection to a current popular TV show that I would travel across the globe at my own expense for the opportunity to shadow. They told me that unfortunately it would be pointless because I would have to be a white, ideally British guy. How can I hope to direct episodic TV if one of the main criteria is that I’m male?

 I've said it before; I'll say it again: This is not okay.

TV Moms, Part Four: "Thank You For Being a Friend"

Just before ABC brought Roseanne to the screen, NBC gave us insight in to the lives of four older women living in Miami. This 1985 to 1992 sitcom, like others of its time, took on social issues in addition to showing the viewership the characters' shenanigans, and touched on groups that were otherwise largely ignored by television-- particularly the elderly and the LGBT community. The Golden Girls was immediately a hit, raking in 11 Emmy Awards and staying in the top 10 of Nielsen rankings for six of its seven seasons.

But wait, you're thinking, the women on The Golden Girls weren't moms. There were no kids in the main cast.

Plenty of sitcoms showcased the traditional nuclear family--Mom, Dad, school-aged children with maybe an aunt or grandparent thrown in to spice things up. The Golden Girls, though, took a look at a different and generally ignored demographic: women "of a certain age," whose husbands were either dead or otherwise out of the picture, and whose children were grown.

Blanche Devereaux, Rose Nylund, Sophia Petrillo, and Dorothy Zbornak may not have lived with their children, but parent-child interaction was a pretty significant theme of the show.

Rose deals with the her boyfriend's grown daughter telling her stay away, and we see Rose's oldest daughter struggling with accepting the other three women as her mother's chosen family. Blanche's daughter deals with extreme weight gain, a verbally abusive partner, artificial insemination (which turns out to be more of an issue for Blanche than the daughter), and being a mother on her own. We also learn about Blanche's regrets: on more than one occasion, she mentions wishing that she had been more involved in the lives of her children, citing that even in their twenties, her kids felt more attached to their nanny than they did to her; in fact, Blanche spends most of the series trying to make amends with her children.

While the stories about Rose's and Blanche's relationships with their children are told with care and deal with some interesting issues that are specific to mothers with adult children, there's one mother-daughter pair that gets more attention on the show than any other.

In the pilot episode, Blanche, Rose, and Dorothy are already living together in Blanche's house in Miami (with a not-unstereotypical gay cook character who vanishes by the time the second episode rolls around), when Sophia, Dorothy's mother, shows up at their door saying that Shady Pines, the rest home she'd been living in, had burned down. Because it's television (and because Sophia's pretty much the most entertaining character in the show--or maybe that's just my opinion), Dorothy's other housemates immediately welcome Sophia and invite her to live with them.

Dorothy and Sophia have a relationship that is not often seen in sitcoms. Mothers of adults are rarely seen outside of the bothersome mother-in-law role in television comedies, but in The Golden Girls, Sophia broke that archetype.

Through the show's seven seasons, we see how Sophia and Dorothy's relationship has changed now that Dorothy is an adult and Sophia is elderly. Role-reversal is frequently apparent: we see the traditional "My roof, my rules" discussion with Sophia on the receiving end, Dorothy enforces a curfew for Sophia and worries about her when she goes out with her friends--even following her out after Sophia has a fight with her friend at the beach, and Sophia is constantly asking Dorothy about her allowance and to borrow the car or some money. And it's done with banter, outrageous stories ( Sophia's stories always begin in basically the same way: "Picture it. Sicily--1920"), and no small amount of snark.

But more than just showing this reversal, Dorothy reacts to it. "When did I become my parents' age?" she wonders in one episode. More than once, Dorothy is forced to face Sophia's mortality and has to confront the idea that she will be an orphan--even though Dorothy is over sixty.

Dorothy and Sophia, though they fight and call each other names ("deceitful Sicilian gecko" is one of my personal favorites), manage to cope with the transition from parent and child to friends.

What's most interesting about this to me is that it almost didn't happen. Sophia fits the trope of the Ascended Extra: the creators had intended her to be only a recurring guest on the show, but because of the overwhelmingly positive response to her first appearance, she was written into the main cast, allowing a world of viewers who, perhaps, hadn't given much though to women in their fifties and sixties--much less to the mothers of women in their fifties and sixties--insight into the relationships between mothers and the adults they raised.

Adding in Sophia officially was a great call. Aside from being widely acknowledged as the show's breakout star and becoming one-half of a fantastic comedy duo, as Dorothy's actress Bea Arthur said of Estelle Getty's Sophia following Getty's death in 2008, Sophia opened the door for a different type of mother-daughter relationship to be explored on the small screen.

Check back in the coming weeks. We'll be taking a look at Phylicia Rashad's Claire Huxtable from The Cosby Show and at Brett Butler's Grace Kelly from Grace Under Fire.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

TV Moms, Part Three: "What Doesn't Kill Us is Making Us Stronger."

In the late 1980s, the United States experienced a stock collapse even greater than the famous one of 1929 that is recognized as the spark of The Great Depression. Families in the middle and lower classes found it harder and harder to make ends meet.

There was, in this time, no place in the world for the likes of June Cleaver.  She and the Cleavers were no longer representations of the average American family, and their quaint life was viewed less as the striven-for ideal.

Many American TV viewers of this time sought a fictional family that reflected their lives; they wanted to see people like themselves, struggling to make ends meet, dealing with rowdy kids and a dirty house, and trying to keep the delicate balance between busy lives and loving families.

And so, in October of 1988, ABC introduced Americans to the Conners.

Roseanne, which premiered on October 18, 1988, was arguably the first time that a blue-collar family was the focus of a sitcom. And, while the Conners themselves may have had less money to burn and more mess and chaos in their home than the Cleavers did, they saw far more success in terms of ratings, hitting number one on the Nielsen rankings, and staying in the top twenty for eight of nine seasons (and anyone familiar with the show can probably guess which season didn't do so well).

While Roseanne wasn't the first sitcom presented from a female's perspective, but it's safe to say that no television family has had a matriarch quite like Roseanne Conner.

In the tradition of comedians who are given sitcoms, Roseanne (Barr Pentland Arnold Thomas) herself played the title character.

Roseanne Conner was as flawed as June Cleaver was perfect. She was loud and bossy; she wasn't a traditional beauty, and, though she kept her house running, it was almost constantly a mess and the Conner children got up to shenanigans that would astonish even Wally Cleaver's friend Eddie Haskell.

In spite of her imperfection, Roseanne was strong. Until the last season (oh, that last season), Roseanne worked outside the home in a number of less-than glamorous jobs. In eight seasons, she worked as a line worker in a plastics factory, selling magazines over the phone, a secretary for her husband's boss, a bartender, a cashier at a fast food restaurant, a floor sweeper/shampoo girl at a hair salon, a waitress at a restaurant in a department store, part-time worker at the Conner's bike shop, and as a waitress and co-owner of the the Lanford Lunchbox. She struggled to make time to get to parent-teacher conferences--and there were a lot of them, between younger daughter Darlene barking in class, older daughter Becky allegedly flipping the bird during class pictures, and son DJ bringing "obscene reading material" to school.  She provided emotional, and sometimes financial, support to her sister, Jackie.

And Roseanne struggled with her and Dan's relationships to their parents--both of them promising to provide their kids with a more loving home than either of them grew up in.

Though it often seemed that Roseanne held the reigns in the Conner family, and, in fact, Dan is sometimes shown to rail against Roseanne's apparent authority, at the heart of their relationship, Dan and Roseanne are partners. Their combined income keeps the family afloat, true, but more than that, they are shown to share parenting duties and take equal part in the lives of their children.

Roseanne and the Conners, over-the-top as they often were, worked through problems that their viewers were able to relate to, which is probably no small part of why Roseanne was, and still is, such a popular show. While Roseanne may not have perfectly reflected the life of the average mother in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ins and outs of her daily life were something to which everyday American families could relate in a way that they no longer could with the Cleavers. Shows like Roseanne provided not the escapism that Leave It To Beaver offered, but a reflection of life in art.

Roseanne, of course, was hardly the only major television mother in the 1980s and 90s. In the next several posts, we'll take a look at other television families of this time and their particular representations of motherhood.

Part One
Part Two

TV Moms, Part Two: "You Look Lovely, Mrs. Cleaver"

The period of American history that followed World War II is rife with images that, even now, Americans associate with ideal family life: white picket fences, cookie-cutter houses with neat green lawns, Mom and Dad with two kids (two-point-five, if you want to go with the statistics, but I sorta find the notion of half a child to be disconcerting).

These images of idealized life were reflected in the television families of the time. They were reflected through the fictional families of Donna Reed and Harriet Nelson.

But perhaps the most lasting ideal family of the time was the Cleavers.

Leave it to Beaver first aired on CBS in October of 1957 before moving to ABC in its second season and running until its cancellation in 1963. The show was moderately successful, never achieving number-one ratings or winning big awards, but never being in danger of cancellation due to low numbers once it made it to ABC. Ward, June, Wally, and Theodore (or "the Beaver"), in spite of experiencing only middle-of-the-road success, became one of the most memorable families on television--to the point that viewers even fifty-five years after the first episode aired know the show, the characters, and the style.

And even in 2012, women are still pointed to the prim and coiffed Mrs.Cleaver as an example of motherly perfection. She cooked, she cleaned, she catered to her husband and children, and she looked great doing it.

It's understandable, from a certain perspective. June Cleaver is beautiful. Her clothes are stylish; her house is spotless. Her children are, for the most part, well-behaved, and when they're not, it only takes a stern look from her husband to put them back on track. June keeps the Cleaver home running smoothly and does it all wearing perfect makeup, kitten heels, and a string of pearls. She's the portrait of a successful woman.

June, like most mothers in the 1950s and early 60s, didn't work outside of the home, but she was forever busy. The pristine Cleaver home, after all, didn't become that way of its own accord. And someone had to make sure that Ward, Wally, and The Beaver were fed, clothed, and seen off to school and work.

While, admittedly, June Cleaver was never shown to have any kind of final authority in the home and she didn't seem to have a true place outside the Cleaver house, June is never played insignificant.

It's impossible to imagine June being absent from the Cleaver family.

June is a shining example of the functionality of the stay-at-home mother. She glamorized, yes, and far too perfect to ever be possible. But she is what keeps the Cleaver home running. In the days when she graced the televisions of America, she was an idealized version of the normal. Women lived lives like June Cleaver's all over the country, and they saw in her themselves perfected.

Between the Feminist Movement of the sixties, the economic changes in American society, and the changes in the availability and stigma of divorce, its easy to see why it's harder to relate to Mrs. Cleaver. Many women want to pursue a career in addition to motherhood, and the women who do want to be stay-at-home mothers frequently find it difficult to manage financially on one income. The definition of a successful woman doesn't necessarily jive with June Cleaver and the way of life she's come to represent.

June Cleaver may no longer reflect the majority of women--and whether that's good or bad could be debated until the end of time without a definitive answer ever being reached--but she did capture the essence of the post-War era and embody that time's ideal of female perfection. Her example of motherhood is a traditional one; her life and identity revolved around her family, leaving little time for her to pursue the outside activities that later television mothers, and real women, too, were able to explore.

Feminism and the working woman may have ended June Cleaver's era as a prime example of American motherhood, but they opened the door to a slew of different types of mother. Next week, we'll take a look at a television mom that's about as different from June Cleaver as it gets: the blue collar mother of the 1990s, Roseanne Conner.

Part One
Part Three

A Break in Our Scheduled Programming

I know I said that today's post would be about June Cleaver and the traditional family, but there's been a lot on my mind lately, so I'm afraid television's classic mom will have to wait a few days.

Also, as a warning, this post is going to be a downer. And there'll be some potential trigger words and situations and a fair bit of NSFW language--both in the body of the post and in the links. If you'd rather avoid these things, skip this post. Come back on Tuesday when I'll be talking about television again.

Those of you who keep up with the comic world, comics creators, and comic bloggers on Twitter may have heard this past week about a campaign to ban a guy who was using, among others, the Twitter ID @JonVeee (this and his other IDs have, to my knowledge, been suspended, thanks to the flood of people marking his tweets as offensive) to verbally attack women who write and women who write about comics. His tirades eventually started turning towards men in the comics industry, but the main focus of his rage was women.

And we're not talking a little ribbing here. We're not even talking about some jackass who trolls you until you block him and then moves on to torment someone else. If you want to know what exactly was going on with this guy, take a look at this piece by Heidi MacDonald at The Beat. Or this one by Sue over at DC Women Kicking Ass where she details how she spent well over a year dealing with this guy.

But I warn you, these are both rough reads that include this man's threats of rape and stalking, not to mention one charming incident in which he goes after a woman's children. Seriously.

This is an extreme case. Most people aren't trolls, and even most trolls don't do go this far--creating multiple IDs and using proxy servers to get back to sites that have banned or blocked him.

But he's hardly the only one out there giving women who talk about traditionally male dominated media a hard time. Remember Anita Sarkeesain from Feminist Frequency? Earlier this year, when she announced a Kickstarter for a video series exploring tropes and female characters in video games, she was met with a reaction that... well, just click here to look through some of the comments that got left on the video for the project.

And that's aside from the vandalism to her Wikipedia page and the creation of an online game in which the player punches Sarkeesian in the face, complete with visible bruising effects after each swing.

So, yeah, trolls are out there. They don't always attack women, and they don't always attack the well-known, but they're out there, and they target anyone that they feel is encroaching on their territory. They're just a fact of the Internet.

Something in the DCWKA post, though, caught my eye, and pretty much captures a cruel reality of the Internet.

Frankly if you are a woman on the internet you might as well have a sign on your back that says, “Troll me”.  If you have an opinion or focus on commenting in a male dominated field, you probably double your chances.

It's horrible, isn't it? It's also true.

Worse than that, it happens to women who are just trying to enjoy things.

In a conversation with one of my female gamer friends, she told me the story of when she explained her gamertag to some guys she with whom she was playing a game. She had recently changed her tag. When they asked her why, she explained that the one she had been using was feminine--it was pretty obviously the tag of either a female or gay man--and she didn't want to put up with the harassment that a feminine tag invites.

Or, as she put it to me, "I didn't want to be called 'cunt' or 'faggot' every time I played."

This happens, guys. This is a thing that happens to people. All the time.

I have been very fortunate--in my experience, the men I've met in the geek community have been great. Aside from a couple of jerky exceptions, I've never been made to feel unwelcome or treated like a lesser member of the community. 

But I'm an exception.

And the fact that is the case really sucks.

I'm not saying that I think all guys in geek culture treat women in their interests as though they don't belong. I don't even think that most men in geek culture are that way--I think the majority of guys in the geek world think it's cool when women develop enthusiasm of the stuff that they like.

The problem isn't the number of guys who are jerks. The problem is that they're louder than the ones who aren't. And that's something to think about.

So, I'm sorry for the serious and depressing post. But this sort of verbal assault and these threats being tossed around are a troubling thing to me, and it didn't seem right for me to ignore what's been going on.

I just wanted to join the people who are spreading news like this in saying, "This is not okay."

I Ain't Sayin' She's a Gold Digger, But She Might Be "Allergic to Algebra"

Even the sports-ambivalent like myself know that the Olympics are a Big Deal with capital letters, not to mention a serious moneymaker for television networks, sporting goods companies and even fast food chains (I know that Gabby Douglas admitted to it, but I have a hard time believing that Olympians stop to pick up McDonald's on their way home after competing).

         

   It’s not surprising, then, that a company like Nike would want to cash in on the hype and profit from the national pride that swept even the generally lethargic following the closing ceremonies last week. And, with the U.S. ladies taking home 29 of the 46 gold medals the U.S. earned, and, in fact, winning more medals than all but four other countries, making and marketing products specifically to women makes a lot of sense.

         

   So someone or a group of someones at Nike put their heads together and came up with this.

   

   According to the description: We aren’t saying they’re gold diggers – we’re just saying they’re out for the gold! What’s wrong with that?

   This caused a bit of a stink, ending with Nike pulling the shirt from Nike.com.

   There are a lot of ways to look at this. Nike's said the shirt is ironic, taking a term that's generally recognized as a put down and tying it to something positive in sort of a nod-and-a-wink way; others are saying that the design reeks of sexism, saying that even the best of women, which is what female Olympians are meant to represent, are just out for bling.

  Both parties have a point. "Gold digger" implies a dependence on a sugar daddy (or some equivalent), when our Olympian ladies did all their own work and earned their gold themselves, so the shirt is ironic. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine any woman being totally okay with being called a gold digger, even in jest.  And the shirt was only available in women's sizes--because men are never gold diggers, I guess? or maybe because men don't care as much that women won a bunch of Olympic medals--and that is sexist, when you come right down to it.

   
 It's pretty easy to see both sides of the argument, but I'll be perfectly honest: I'm not wild about this design (in part because no one could come up with something more clever than "gold digger" when there's a world of gold-related puns out there--c'mon, people), but this shirt design in particular doesn't offend me, at least, not in the way that other t-shirt designs have.

  Maybe you remember similar outcries about sexist t-shirts that didn't have the justification--or excuse, depending on your personal opinion--of being ironic?

  Around this time last year, both Forever 21 and JCPenney's were on the receiving end of a sizable amount of consumer outrage when they both began selling t-shirts saying that the young girls to whom the shirts were marketed were "Allergic to Algebra" (as the Forever 21 shirt says) or "Too Pretty To Do Homework" (according to the JCPenney's tee). These shirts were, for lack of a better phrase, totally terrible ideas.

  Both companies took a lot of flack from customers and news sources, and, in the end, both shirts were pulled from the stores' shelves and websites due to the negative reactions from both male and female shoppers.

  So, what can be gathered from these three episodes? Well, for one thing, that women, and a number of men, don't like designers (or advertisers, or anyone, really) profiting from the idea that women aren't smart, dislike learning, or aren't willing to work for themselves to get what they want. 

  But the bigger takeaway, I think, is that sexism--even implied or ironic sexism--doesn't sell. Literally.

  So, if you want to make fun of or point out sexism in your product designs or your advertising, be sure it's clear what you're trying to do. And even then, be prepared for the backlash.