OPED-Housewife meets Homwrecker: The Shifting Narrative of Women in Television
I remember vividly my mother speaking to me about the films and television she watched in her day. She spoke of watching Good Times on weekday afternoons after school, growing up in Louisville’s Newburg area as a child. Then in her tweenhood she turned to 227. She adored Regina King and thought when she was old enough her looks would morph straight into Brenda Jenkins, you know, just normal Regina King stan behavior. Once in her maturity and better understanding of the world, the shows Girlfriends and Living Single were on-air, apparently those programs helped welcome her into femininity.
Her name is Rita, she’s a stunning 52-year-old mother of four, a proud Louisvillian, and most importantly a Black woman. Although I’m a few days late for International Women’s Day, my mother's apologue of her favorite tv shows and the staple it left on her development resonated with me, and a female oriented analysis began to brew. After watching some of the reruns she recommended, I noticed the difference in the female representation (in television) of my mom’s time and that of representation now. While men and masculine presenting people have been conveyed as two dimensional, complex, and always evolving, their feminine counterpart stayed dormant in arc, only allowed like three emotions, female hysteria, motherly love, or promiscuous sex appeal. But that is changing. Recently, television has highlighted women/female presenting characters to kind of be lazy, sexy, free-thinking jerks, I’m aware this sounds wild, but I promise it is a great thing for womankind entirely.
In an age of streaming, there has been a boom in the amount of female driven shows, diverse in thought. When my mother was my age, she was shackled to look up to housewife narratives and women having to juggle womanhood and work. Now, there are characters such as Fleabag played by Phoebe Waller Bridges, a nameless woman (only referred by characters as Flebag) sailing through life with a high sex drive, bad family relationships, and chaotically changing moods in modern day London. Flebag is an example of an actual woman, not a cut copy of the women on tv before her. She is multiplexed and her progress ebbs and flows.
Another example of dynamic lady characters on screen is Euphoria; some are good people who make dumb decisions based on circumstance, some make dumb decisions because they are just dumb, and a lot of them are just down right not the best people. That’s okay. It is a reflection of the women we surround ourselves with today, not so much focusing on the negative, but representing that women are not the monolith. We can be stressed, and with the weight of an oppressing world we have to bear, this is not a fortuitous reaction. We can have feelings for more than one partner, and when the lady intuition short circuits, at times, wrong choices seem like the best options.
Making the case that rough around the edge ladies of the screen are great for women of today to watch is not a hard topic to grapple with. Whether it’s said or not, (JSTOR and the many theses written by others prove this to be quite the discussion) television is and has always served as a bridge for us to understand and relay what humanity looks like and how to path one’s narrative. Constant images displaying women as light voiced dolls who wait upon the arrival of men in order to live their life damages a world view on the sex. Not only does it cater to the distribution of the male fantasy/gaze, it cripples female ideas and voices, leaving them to accept the glass ceiling built from disdain. When images of women being independent in their personalities, scaling morally gray areas with decisions, and warding off inconveniences in their own way are shown on television, it’s a visual showcase that there’s room for error in femininity. It’s an aid for the girls watching to know that you aren’t perfect, and there will be times where life and the fortune that comes may not be in your favor, and there’s no correct response to such.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good demonstration of basic feminal activities on screen. Those scenes where the girls throw a slumber party and there’s always one person’s feelings hurt, or scenes where after all the hard work of getting dolled up and playing the part actually pay off... even in their harm... I can relate to these scenes, I’ve been that girl. Yet, even though I relate, I am actually not that girl, at least not fully. I am more than that girl, I’m a girl who has road rage, a girl who picks the wrong guy while the red flags are tattooed on my eyelids, a girl who uses astrology to pick debates with people, I am of several tones. And so is my mother. And so are all women. The shifting face of women on our screens, from good to bad or bad to worse, whether on cable or streaming, creates spaces where we can be seen, where we can breathe unapologetically. I’m glad my mom has aged with this shift, I’m glad I grew up on the shift. One day I hope I get to tell my kids about the shows that carried me along as a woman. I'll quiz them and make them binge it every Women’s History Month. So... basically all the time.
Happy belated International Women’s Day.