The Gender Parity Gap in Three Areas of the Arts: An Overview

The idea of this post is to see how women are faring in three areas of cultural endeavour: writing, popular music, and TV and film. Much more extensive research would have to be undertaken in each area to get a real picture, but even at a glance it's easy to see that women haven't achieved parity in any of these areas of either sales or prestige.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I absorbed the idea that feminism had already happened, in my childhood. Nothing and no one around me suggested that a husband and children were mandatory, or that working wasn't. By the time I was in my mid-teens, in the early 90s, I had become aware that feminism was still around, and inequality was, too, but I assumed that the latter was left over from before I was born and would soon be gone. Certainly, it would be gone well before I reached middle age.

As I discovered, growing up, that I had a fondness and talent for writing, I had no reason to think that it was something men did. Through early adolescence, female writers came my way with a much greater frequency than male writers. My favourite author of what are now called “chapter books” was Lois Lowry; my 5^th grade teacher assigned me a novel by Agatha Christie, whereupon I read almost her complete works; in the 6^th grade, a female friend introduced me to V. C. Andrews; as a young adolescent I adored Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, a postcolonial, feminist, and slash fiction-y retelling of Arthurian legend from the POV of Morgan Le Fay, and the (also slash fiction-y) vampire novels of Anne Rice. 

Even when I was reading novelizations of sci-fi series, even though I'd encountered the notion that "women didn't write sci fi," I couldn't get away from female writers – like Star Trek novels writer Vonda N. McIntyre and 'V' novels writer A. C. Crispin – an “Ann,” I was surprised and pleased to eventually find out. Later I understood that prior to the 20^th century, the female writers who were taken seriously could be enumerated using one hand: Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. As frightening a blow as that was, however, there was no reason at all, glancing at the Fiction section in bookstores or libraries, to think that women weren't as successful as men as writers now.  

Whatever good or bad can be said about it, it's internet feminism that, by calling attention to things like the underrepresentation of female contributors in the elite literary journals and the lack of good roles for women in Hollywood movies, has made me aware, in the past decade, that even if it seems like there are powerful female celebrities everywhere, all may not be equal. And it's the internet that makes basic research into this area unprecedentedly easy, providing us with information on everything from album sales to prize winners to the names of the writers and directors of TV shows, all just a google away.

Writing

Part 1: Awards

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (formerly The Novel), 1917-2014:

1920s: 5/9 (women/total)

1930s: 6/10

1940s: 1/8

1950s: 0/8

1960s: 3/9

1970s: 2/7

1980s: 4/10

1990s: 3/10

2000s: 3/10

2010s: 2/4

31/87=35.6%

1980s-present: 12/34=35.2%

First female PP winner for the Novel, Edith Wharton

Most recent female Pulitzer winner for Fiction, Donna Tartt

Man Booker Prize, 1969-2014:

1970s: 5/11

1980s: 3/10

1990s: 2/11

2000s: 4/10

2010-2014: 2/5

Total: 17/48=35.4%

1980s-present: 11/36=30.5%

Governor General's Award for English-Language Fiction, 1936-2014:

1940s: 2/10

1950s: 3/10

1960s: 2/8

1970s: 3/10

1980s: 3/10

1990s: 3/10

2000s: 3/10

2010-2014: 3/5

Total: 24/75=32%

1980s-present: 12/35=34.2%

GG Award for English-Language Drama, 1981-2014:

Total: 12/34=35.2%

GG Award for E-L Poetry, 1981-2014:

Total: 16/34=47%

Part 2: Sales

Publishers' Weekly, Novels (US):

(No. of female authors out of total no. of authors per decade)

1895: all men

1896: 2/10

1897: 1/10

1898: 2/12

1899: all men

Total: 5/42=11.9%

1900: 2/10

1901: 2/10

1902: 2/10

1903: 3/10

1904: 5/10

1905: 7/11

1906: 4/10

1907: 4/10

1908: 2/10

1909: 2/10

Total: 33/101=32.6%

1910: 7/11

1911: 4/10

1912: 3/10

1913: 3/10

1914: 3/10

1915: 2/10

1916: 5/10

1917: 3/10

1918: 4/10

1919: 4/10

Total: 37/100=37%

1920: 3/10

1921: 5/10

1922: 3/10

1923: 4/10

1924: 3/10

1925: 3/10

1926: 4/10

1927: 4/10

1928: 3/10

1929: 3/10

Total: 35/100=35%

1930: 3/10

1931: 7/10

1932: 3/10

1933: 2/10

1934: 5/10

1935: 3/10

1936: 3/11

1937: 2/10

1938: 4/10

1939: 5/10

Total: 37/101=36.6%

1940: 2/10

1941: 4/10

1942: 5/10

1943: 3/10

1944: 4/10

1945: 3/10

1946: 4/10

1947: 2/10

1948: 4/10

1949: 1/10

Total: 32/100=32%

1950: 4/10

1951: 0/10

1952: 4/10

1953: 1/10

1954: 3/10

1955: 1/10

1956: 4/10

1957: 5/10

1958: 4/10

1959: 1/10

Total: 27/100=27%

1960: 3/10

1961: 0/10

1962: 2/11

1963: 4/10

1964: 1/12

1965: 0/10

1966: 3/10

1967: 2/10

1968: 3/10

1969: 4/10

Total: 21.5/102=22%

1970: 3/10

1971: 1/10

1972: 2/10

1973: 2/10

1974: 1/10

1975: 2/10

1976: 3/10

1977: 3/11

1978: 2/10

1979: 1/10

Total: 20/101=19.8%

1980: 2/12

1981: 2/10

1982: 2/10

1983: 2/10

1984: 3/11

1985: 4/10

1986: 3/11

1987: 2/10

1988: 3/10

1989: 3/10

Total: 26/104=25%

1990: 5/10

1991: 5/10

1992: 5/10

1993: 3/10

1994: 4/10

1995: 3/10

1996: 3/10

1997: 6/10

1998: 6/10

1999: 2/12

Total: 42/102=41%

[Note: 2000 and 2005 Harry Potter novel excluded from this decade; Twilight books excluded: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008]

2000: 3/12

2001: 1/12

2002: 4/12

2003: 3/11

2004: 1/12

2005: 5/10

2006: 2/12

2007: 5/12

2008: 4/10

2009: 4/10

Total: 32/10=32%

[Note: Adult Fiction and Children's Fiction tallied separately as of 2012; but women also dominated AF with 8/10]

2010: 3/10

2011: 3/11

2012: 8/10

Total: 14/31=45%

The Publishers' Weekly lists are a bit weird. Seemingly they concentrated on adult fiction up until the YA boom of the 1990s, with some exceptions for anomalous runaway bestsellers – like the Eloise children's books in the 1950s. The Harry Potter books were excluded from the lists during the 90s; a couple get into the Wikipedia lists in the 2000s, but the Twilight books are excluded (but Meyer's adult fiction novel is included). The 2012 list above, however, is drawn (as the Wikipedia reference link reveals) from both the adult fiction and children's fiction lists, which I guess is how it's going to be for as long as YA and children's fiction are selling like crazy (or – which may be more accurate – are the categories that still sell print copies).

Nevertheless, the rough picture that emerges is this: Jonathan Franzen was talking complete crap when he complained that in America, reading is considered an activity for women, and therefore books “for men” (and, presumably, by men) don't sell. With a sudden jump in numbers at the turn of the 20^th century, female novelists hold steady at 30-40% until a bad dip in the 1950s, from which they do not recover until the 1990s. God knows why, but suddenly in the 1990s female authors are at near-parity even without taking J. K. Rowling into account. With Rowling, they are probably at parity. And Rowling changed everything, paving the way for the Twilight series (which paved the way for the 50 Shades of Grey series) and the Hunger Games series. In the 2000s numbers dip down again, but would probably be higher than pre-1950s numbers if all of Rowling's Harry Potter novels plus the Twilight series were included. And in the 2010s, so far women are at near-parity.

But Franzen's vision of women's petticoats sweeping away serious men's fiction was clearly always a fantasy. Decade by decade, there have never been as many novels by female authors among the Top 10 bestsellers as there have been books by men, and I assume that the Top 10 is roughly representative of what's going on below. It hasn't been 50/50 – and, just sticking to the 20^th century, often it wasn't even close. And sure as hell female novelists weren't crowding male novelists – whether serious or frivolous – out of the market.  

Part 3: Literary Journals

The London Review of Books and New York Review of Books have already been called to task by feminists in recent years (as in, 2013) for their extremely low numbers of female contributors. Did anything change in 2014?

Well, if the numbers from last year are an improvement, they're still a joke. The number of female contributors per issue in the NYRB didn't once reach as high as one third, and only three times (out of 18!) reached as high as a quarter. That would be pretty good, if this were the 18^th century. LRB did mildly better: out of the 24 issues in 2014, the number of female contributors got as high as a third twice and as high as a quarter six times.  

But these offenders pale in comparison to The Paris Review. Check out the dismal gender numbers for their author interviews:

1950s: 3/25=12%

1960s: 5/37=13.5%

1970s: 8/39=20.5%

1980s: 15/75=20%

1990s: 18/88=20.4%

2000s: 26/66=39%

2010s: 10/43=23%

Holding steady at 20% since the decade of second-wave feminism, TPR only got into the game, in the previous decade. So far in this decade, however, they've fallen back into old habits. And yet somehow we find ourselves talking about a past Dark Age for female writers. Fucking pathetic.  

It's one thing when dinosaurs like the LRB, NWRB, or Paris Review offend. What's really irksome is when sexist attitudes are carried over into a new medium, and perpetuated by young people. This is the case with Scott Esposito's The Quarterly Conversation, an online journal devoted to international modernist literature in translation that I'd like to love, if only it weren't for the distinct odour of machismo presiding over the proceedings. As proof, here are the stats from the past 10 issues, nos. 29 (Fall 2012) to 38 (Winter 2014). These are the number of articles about women out of total articles about a woman or a man (usually an author, but sometimes a filmmaker); so themed articles are excluded. (I also excluded translators as contributors, which is ironic given the nature of the publication, but less confusing.)

Issue 29, articles about women: 5/20

Issue 29, female contributors: 4/21

Issue 30, articles about women: 3/25

Issue 30, female contributors: 11/27

Issue 31, articles about women: 11/31

Issue 31, female contributors: 12/31

Issue 32, articles about women: 2/18

Issue 32, female contributors: 9/21

Issue 33, articles about women: 3/19

Issue 33, female contributors: 4/19

Issue 34, articles about women: 4/21

Issue 34, female contributors: 6/25

Issue 35, articles about women: 11/22

Issue 35, female contributors: 7/23

Issue 36, articles about women: 1/10

Issue 36, female contributors: 4/10

Issue 37, articles about women: 3/16

Issue 37, female contributors: 5/16

Issue 38, articles about women: 3/12

Issue 38, female contributors: 7/14

Total articles about women: 46/194=23.7%

Total female contributors: 69/207=33.3%

So, about a quarter of the articles over the last 10 issues are about women, and a third of the contributors are female. What are we to make of this? Are women, internationally, not writing experimental fiction and poetry? Are they not being published? Are they writing and being published but not being taken seriously enough to be translated? Are they writing and being published and translated but not being taken seriously by TQC?

The links along the right side of the QC website, to articles on the site's contemporary heroes (two of them dead at a young age), McCarthy, DFW, Murakami, and Bolano, so no women, were what made me first start pondering the place of women in serious contemporary fiction. I knew that the traditional heroes of modernism and postmodernism were men: all of the High Modernists except for Woolf, and especially Joyce and Kafka; Faulkner, Beckett, Pynchon. But that was in the past. Surely no one would perpetuate such preposterous hero-worship now that so many more women were writing, and we were all alert to, and on the same page (SO TO SPEAK) about, the injustice of gender bias.

Or then again....

There are of course other, more female-friendly places one can go on the internet to read about serious new writing, such as Jessa Crispin's Bookslut. My quarrel with TQC is not that there are no alternatives to its modernist machismo, but that that machismo is unnecessary and antiquated, and especially disappointing in an online-only publication, which should break with the biases of the past.

Popular Music

Part 1: Village Voice Pazz & Jop Reader's Poll

For me, the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Reader's Poll is the only bright spot out of all of this research, revealing as it does how the number of women in rock has risen, and the profile of women in rock with it, while the profile of women in pop has also risen, and with it, the prestige of pop. Still, as we get to the most recent poll, only 34% of the top 100 albums have female artists attached to them – and I counted cases where there was even one woman, not necessarily the singer, in the band.

1970s: The website only lists 10 albums up until 2008. In the inaugural year, albums by female artists creep into the 9^th and 10^th spots: Joni Mitchell's Blue and Carole King's Tapestry. In 1975, Mitchell's Court and Spark tops the list, but there are no other albums by female artists on it, or any women in the bands on the list. In 1974, Patti Smith is the only female artist to get on the list, with Horses, in the second spot. There is obviously already goodwill toward women who are serious songwriters – but not many around. In 1976, Kate & Anne McGarrigle take the 5^th spot, with Joni two spots behind. In 1977, only Fleetwood Mac, in the 4^th spot with Rumours, features women. In 1978 there are finally none at all, and in 1979 we're back to the initial situation, with Donna Summer's Bad Girls sneaking into the 10^th spot, and the B-52s at no. 7.

1980s: Things remain pretty much the same in the 80s. There are no women to be found on the list in 1980, but in 1981, X (whom I confess I've never heard of before) is in the 2^nd spot, Rickie Lee Jones in the 5^th spot, and The Go-Gos in the 10^th spot. In 1982, Richard & Linda Thompson are in the 2^nd  spot; X sneaks into the 10^th. In 1983 – X again, this time in the 4^th spot... and that's it. In 1984, Tina Turner is in the 5^th spot; in 1985, Aretha Franklin's at no. 9; in 1986... nothing. In 1987: nothing. In 1988, we're in business again: Sonic Youth at no. 2, Tracy Chapman at no. 3, Michelle Shocked at no. 5. In 1989, Neneh Cherry is at no. 5, and The Mekons and Soul II Soul have women in them, as do The Pixies, at no. 10.

1990s: This is where things change. All of a sudden, a lot of women are being taken seriously across the board, in rock, in punk, in electronica, in country, and in hip-hop, and there are a lot more all-female or female-led bands around. Sinead O'Connor takes the second spot in 1990; Sonic Youth is at no. 4; and Roseanne Cash is at no. 8. In 1991 (the year of Nevermind), there's only The Mekons, squeezing into the last spot. The following year, P. J. Harvey appears for the first time; the next year Liz Phair takes the no. 1 spot (beating out In Utero), Harvey is in the 3^rd spot, and The Breeders are in the fourth. Hole take the no. 1 spot in 1994, with Liz Phair in the 6^th spot. In 1995, top spot to P. J. Harvey (third year in the row for a woman or female-led band), Elastica is at no. 4, and Bjork at no. 7. In 1996, the Fugees are at no. 2, Sleater-Kinney at no. 3, and Amy Rigby at no. 8. The following year it's Sleater-Kinney at no. 4, Missy Elliott at no. 6, Erykah Badu at no. 7, and Bjork at no. 9. In 1998, it's Lucinda Williams at no. 1, Lauryn Hill in the second spot, and P. J. Harvey at no. 7. The decade closes on a slow year for women, with only Fiona Apple, at no. 7, and Beth Orton, at no. 9; and there's a woman in The Magnetic Fields.

2000s: The 2000s start strong. Year 1: P. J. Harvey (2), Shelby Lynne (4), Jill Scott (9), and Sleater-Kinney (10). 2001: Bjork (3) and Lucinda Williams (9). 2002: Sleater-Kinney (5) and Missy Elliott (10) – but where are the new artists? There are some in 2003: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs (5), led by Karen O; and The New Pornographers (7), featuring Neko Case. But in 2004, there's only Loretta Lynn, at no. 3. 2005 is a good year, with a new artist, M.I.A. bursting onto the scene at no. 2, Sleater-Kinney and Fiona Apple at 4 and 5, and The New Pornographers at 9. In 2006, a Neko Case solo album gets into the 8^th spot, with Joanna Newsom right behind it. M.I.A. takes third position the following year, with Amy Winehouse's Back to Black right behind her. 2008: Portishead in the 3^rd spot, Erykah Badu in the 5^th spot, and Santogold at no. 7. 2009: Neko Case at no. 3, Yeah Yeah Yeahs at no. 4, Dirty Projectors at no. 5., and The xx at no. 7.

Only including bands with significant female content, then, the 2000s hold strong, with female artists making up about 25% of the Top 10s in both the 1990s and the 2000s. That's compared to about 15% in the 80s and around 10% in the 70s. The importance of the 1990s to women in popular music can't be underestimated. But what about the current decade – and the Top 100 albums?

The wondrous Janelle Monae emerges in 2010, taking the 4^th spot. There are women in Arcade Fire, and Beach House and Sleigh Bells are male-female duos. Merrill Garbus's tUnE-yArDs take the no. 1 spot in 2011, with P. J. Harvey back in the second spot, Wild Flag in the 4th spot, and Adele in the 6th spot. In 2012 there's Fiona Apple at no. 3, Grimes at no. 9, and Beach House at 10; in 2013, Beyonce's at no. 4, My Bloody Valentine at 6, Haim at 7, Janelle Monae at 8, and Kacey Musgraves at 10. Finally, in 2014, St. Vincent took the no.4 spot, with FKA Twigs (a producer!) at 5, Taylor Swift at 7, and Angel Olsen at 8. For the decade so far, content by (cis) women is at 35.6%; in the Top 10, 40%, a big leap again from the 2000s. 

2008: 3/10; 25/100

2009: 4/10; 42/100

2010: 4/10; 32/100

2011: 4/10; 39/100

2012: 3/10; 39/100

2013: 5/10; 34/100

2014: 4/10; 34/100

Verdict: The 90s were the breakthrough decade for serious female artists in popular music, following in the wake of pioneers like Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith. But although there were suddenly a few dozen female artists and bands of major reputation, the mass of buzzy bands and rappers out there, most of whom will only appear on these lists once, are still overwhelmingly male. Women hover at 35-40% of the total content, but only if you include a lot of bands with only one female members, who is not the lead singer or main songwriter; or a couple of female members, if it's a large collective. If you stick to girl bands, female-led bands, male-female duos, and female solo artists, it would probably be more like 30-35%.   

Part 2: Best-Sellers

In commercial popular music, women have also gained successes in recent years without attaining full parity – as sellers; who knows how well they're paid. If the music industry is anything like the movie industry, which it probably is, there's probably even less parity there, but probably also some gains in recent decades.

I didn't bother to look at prizes for the music section because my time is limited and I'm way more interested in which albums Village Voice readers like than in which albums win Grammys. Whereas although I don't give any more credence to the Pulitzer Prize than to the Grammys, I was more interested in finding out how women had fared with the former than in tracking down decades of year-end best-books lists. So basically, the research I did for this post reflects partly what I happened to want to know about a particular topic and partly what information was (readily) available on that topic.

To get a rough idea of how women in popular music sell, I looked at this Tsort site, which has compiled chart info from worldwide sources.

Out of the 50 biggest chart acts, worldwide, by decade:

1960s: Barbra Streisand (22); The Supremes (23); Aretha Franklin (29); Peter, Paul, and Mary (33); Petula Clark (35); Joan Baez (42)

1970s: ABBA (4); Donna Summer (23); Fleetwood Mac (27); The Carpenters (28); Carole King (42)

1980s: Madonna (2); The Eurythmics (12); Whitney Houston (15); Tina Turner (31); Diana Ross (35); Pat Benatar (42); ABBA (46)

1990s: Mariah Carey (1); Madonna (2); Celine Dion (3); Whitney Houston (7); Janet Jackson (17); Alanis Morisette (20); Spice Girls (21); Roxette (24); Ace of Base (34); TLC (36); The Cranberries (37); Cher (47); Sheryl Crow (48); Shania Twain (49)

2000s: Madonna (2); Britney Spears (3); Beyonce (7); The Black Eyed Peas (8); Pink (10); Avril Lavigne (11); Alicia Keyes (14); Norah Jones (15); Jennifer Lopez (20); Rihanna (21); Mariah Carey (25); Shakira (28); Celine Dion (30); Christina Aguilera (31); Destiny's Child (35); Kelley Clarkson (36); Kylie Minogue (38); Nelly Furtado (39); The White Stripes (40); Evanescence (43); Taylor Swift (46)

In the 1960s, the women who chart highest, making up only 12% of the Top 50, have nothing to do with rock. In fact there are no women in rock, at all, at this point, and the only women on the list that have anything to do with modern pop are The Supremes. In the 1970s, the supreme decade of the rock group, it's worse. ABBA, the epitome of modern pop, get into the Top 10 with two women, and Donna Summer, the queen of disco, is the first female solo artist on the list. There's also Fleetwood Mac, another 70s supergroup of married couples, and, of course, The Carpenters.

Madonna leads the way to the light in the 1980s, showing what a female pop superstar really looks like. Annie Lennox and Whitney Houston are other pioneers, and Streisand comes back strong, but other than Madonna in the no. 2 spot, women haven't made that much advancement.

But wait! We were just warming up. In the 1990s, female solo artists occupy the first three spots, and female acts or acts featuring women make up 28% of the Top 50. It seems as though the 1990s are a breakthrough for women in music commercially, as it was for women in music being taken seriously. Second-wave feminism may have failed to produced any theorists that I wanted to read, but I can't argue with its effects on music. The seeds were sown, however, in the era of first-wave feminism. Patti Smith showed us what a female rock star looked like, and even if The Runaways were manufactured and exploitative, afterwards it was possible to envision a female rock band. By the 1990s there are a lot more women in bands, even if they're usually in bands as vocalists, and Madonna has provided the model of a female pop star who's obviously and unapologetically in control of her image and career. But few post-Madonna female pop stars will give us the impression of control over their careers and personas from beginning to end, and few – certainly none of the white ones – will be allowed to not be girls-next-door, however crossed-with-porn-star their image may be.

And the improvement holds during the following decade, with female acts/female-featuring acts getting up to 42%. This has little to do with women in bands and a lot to do with remaking pop, after the example of Madonna and the decline of Michael Jackson, as exclusively female. No need to fight the perception that the role played by women in popular music is as vocalists and, with few exceptions, eye candy. The exceptions are the true legends, but the standards of appearance for people in the public eye seem to get higher all the time, especially for women, that it's hard to think of Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand becoming superstars now – and it was implausible enough at the time. Reality TV let an ordinary young woman, Kelly Clarkson, become a star, and the internet allowed Adele, a plus-size woman, to become a megastar, and those seem to be the only means. A different, “edgier” style of attractiveness is favoured in the indie rock world, and being too conventionally attractive, like Lana Del Rey, can get you kicked out of the cool kids' club, but the ornamental function of the frontwoman still has few and usually partial exceptions – which is why someone like Merrill Garbus is such a delightful surprise.

Merrill Garbus

Now women seem to be stuck – and men too. Once it was considered acceptable for men to be crooners – neither songwriters nor musicians. Elvis wielded a guitar but didn't write his songs, and was primarily known as a voice, face, and set of hips. A decade on, it had become necessary to be “authentic” and write your own material. But women had a harder time making the shift, and have continued to have a hard time going behind the scenes in other ways – notoriously, as producers and engineers. For one thing, women were going into popular music as vocalists rather than forming bands, so writing their own songs wasn't a natural step. For another, there was no shame for women in being ornamental – at least not yet. Ultimately, this situation – where “authentic” rock or indie musicians wrote their own material but “manufactured” pop singers had their songs written for them – led to an unfair devaluation of the role of vocalist. But perhaps this was also partly because it was so easy to sell a pretty white girl with a pleasant voice.

Despite the huge success of Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill (1995), somehow the notion of marketing female rock singer-songwriters didn't take off, whereas the solo female pop star after the Madonna model became a juggernaut. But then if you look at the albums that are selling in the US in this decade, there are no performers that one would call “rock,” either male or female, while “rap” is only one category among many (and there are even some top-selling female rappers). The favoured categories are male solo performers, female solo performers, and bands, in about equal numbers, and rock and roll might never have happened (whereas the favouring of country acts is an American eccentricity). The female percentage suffers because the all-male band continues to be the norm while the all-female band continues to be an eccentricity.

The idea that there should be more women in rock or rap has nothing to do with women's success in popular music – at least not at this stage. Women are doing great as solo vocalists, probably much better than they did in the pre-rock era, although they'd do better still if there were more women in bands, which appear to be the only legacy from the rock era in the charts. Only hipsters (such as the Village Voice readers) keep rock alive, and increasingly rap as well, it seems. 

No, the main reason to care about women getting into rock or rap has to do with the prestige accorded these genres as originally male genres. Of course women have great reasons to rebel and be angry, and no doubt it's helpful to the cause of feminism for women to show that they can project aggression, intimidation, and power, so it's easy to see why the idea of women in these genres appeals – to women, and to fans of the genres – and why the idea of these genres appeals to women. Still, encouraging women who want to try non-traditional (i.e., “masculine”) things easily turns into denigrating “feminine” things, since our culture is already eager to encourage the latter. And we should be wary of this as feminists, even as we're aware that asserting the awesomeness of Disney princesses is not a sufficient kind of feminism.

(As one example: you still hear well-meaning people bemoan the fact that there has never been a queen of late-night TV. But why is this such a terrible thing when women clean up as day-time hosts? Ellen DeGeneres already out-earns David Letterman. Just because an area is female-dominated doesn't always make it pink-collar. Of course the domination of the daytime talk show by female hosts depends on a lot of women being at home with the kids, at least temporarily. But that's another story.)

Film and TV

Hollywood's problems with women seem to get endless attention without anything ever changing. And I'm just talking about its problems developing movies with female leads or even non-perfunctory supporting female characters, and, when it happens, paying the actresses as much as the actors. Let alone with getting women into a directing role.

I'm sure that many more women are directing now than in my early 20s, when I took it for granted that film directing just wasn't something that women did. (Since I like movies a lot and admire many directors, that thought did bug me a little, but not that much, since I had no interest in directing movies myself.) Even now, though, there's usually only one fashionable female director at a time, and without the help of the internet, I know the names of less than half a dozen that are currently working.

The gender parity gap in the US entertainment industry has been well-covered, so I'm not going to add new information here. I'll just restate some of the points and discoveries that have been made:

• Jennifer Lawrence was the top-grossing actor in Hollywood in 2014, yet she was paid less than her male co-stars on American Hustle. 
• In 2014, the combined spoils of the top 10 highest-earning Hollywood actresses was a little over half that of the top 10 actors
• In 2013, according to a study by San Diego State's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, women represented 15 percent of protagonists in the 100 top-grossing films, 29 percent of major characters, and 30 percent of speaking characters  

Now that TV series creators are starting to emerge as auteurs, it also bugs me that the problem from film seems to belong to the entertainment industry in general. And it's not just the entertainment industry. The problem is also a culture of fandom, criticism, and its overlap – as with cinephiles and auteurists in film criticism/fandom and modernist machismo in literary culture – that perpetuates the idea of the hero-worship of men by men (and sometimes by women) as culture. Hence the hilariously solemn celebration of Matthew Weiner and Vince Gilligan, or, in geekier corners, the giddier fandom directed toward Dan Harmon (and Joss Whedon and Gene Roddenberry before him). (In fact I'm pretty sure that TV auteurism emerged in sci-fi corners first – didn't it? Not counting British comedian comedy.)

The only high-profile female tele-teurs to date have been Lena Dunham, who also gets a spectacular amount of hate, and Jenji Kohan, who is generally considered to be extremely uneven as a showrunner based on her first series, Weeds. (Which really does suck after the second season.) Among the series creators that one hears less about because they make popular television, the phenomenal Shonda Rhimes had two TV shows among the Top 50 broadcast TV shows of 2013/2014, both near the top; 2 Broke Girls was co-created by Whitney Cummings; Maurissa Tancharoen co-created Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. with the Whedon brothers; Gemma Baker co-created Mom with Chuck Lorre and Eddie Gorodetsky; Elizabeth Meriwether created New Girl; Elise Doganieri co-created The Amazing Race; The Middle was, amazingly, co-created by two women, DeAnn Heline and Eileen Heisler; the now-cancelled (after one season) Super Fun Night was created by star Rebel Wilson; and that, of the 53 non-football shows on the list, sometimes with up to four male co-creators, is it.  

Shonda Rhimes

The one area where we can trace improvement for women, both commercially and in terms of prestige, is popular music. In the mainstream, there hasn't been much challenging of gender norms by women, but in the 80s, the solo pop star regained the ground lost to bands, and female pop stars became a charts fixture, ever-increasing in numbers and stature. Nor should it be forgotten that Madonna's projection of both financial and sexual power as a global superstar was its own kind of challenge of gender roles, and allowed women in pop to have more assertive personas – although that, of course, has now become simply a box to tick (not unlike male rock “attitude”). Among music lovers, the prestige of female artists has steadily grown, and although the 90s burst of all-female rock bands didn't keep up, it's now more common in indie to see female-led bands (but not that common).

Film is still going through a Dark Ages as far as gender parity goes, and TV isn't much better. Presumably women have had trouble breaking into film directing for the same reasons they've had trouble breaking into music production: because it requires combating stereotypes about women and leadership and women and technology. But we notice this more in the area of film, because the director is the auteur, whereas in music, the artist is usually assumed to the be the auteur. Music journalists and critics pay some attention to producers, but overwhelmingly their attention, and the attention of the public, is directed toward the artist. In mainstream music, often producers have more creative control than the artists, but that is precisely the area that receives less attention from music journalists and critics. Only in the area of club music are producers considered auteurs by aficionados.

In literature and fiction, the position of women as either prize winners or sellers hasn't substantially improved since the beginning of the 20^th century, and it is notably vulnerable and subject to setbacks. For the past couple of decades women's writing has had a commercial boom, I think largely due to the phenomenon of female fandom, which saw adult women reading YA genre lit and teenage girls reading online erotica, as well as vice versa, and the YA lit becoming online erotica and then becoming a best-selling print erotica series. This boom relies on marketing literature by women to women, but then so did the successful marketing of commercial fiction by men to men for so many decades. In this moribund time for books, publishers have found a way to tap into a thriving market of female readers.

In the area of literary prizes, there's no clear rhyme or reason at all to the fate of women. In recent decades women have won the Pulitzer for Fiction more often than in the 40s and 50s, but less often than in the 20s and 30s. Overall, female writers have won the Pulitzer 35% of the time, which is the same percentage as female winners of the Man Booker Prize – but since the 1980s, which is to say, in the era of modern feminism, women have won the Man Booker only 30% of the time.

Meanwhile, in the Canadian poetry scene, women would appear to be at parity. Now how did they manage that? Was there such an abundance of female poets, or such a dearth of male ones, that women got in control of the prize-giving? And if parity can be achieved in this area, why not in all of them? While it's easy to see how having children could interfere with the career of a TV writer or a Hollywood director, it's less easy to see how it could interfere with the career of the majority of novelists, poets, playwrights, musicians, or indie directors, who make very little money and, accordingly, have low stakes attached to starting late or taking long breaks. I could see the low income of being part of the arts community making a woman put off having children more easily than I can see the choice to have children being a blow to her career. Is institutional sexism the biggest obstacle to women's advancement in the arts, or do most women, whatever else they want to do with their lives, simply prefer to put motherhood first? I don't know, but I don't think we can deny that the combination of the two, and the way they reinforce each other, is the reason that parity seems to be so difficult.

In cinema, not only are things slow to improve behind the camera; in front of it, things may have actually gotten worse. Conventional wisdom attributes this to a combination of late capitalism and competition from TV, which made the marketers panic and decide that they should only make movies for teenage boys. Lo and behold, those teenage boys grew up and became middle-aged men, and still wanted to see the same kind of movies: even better for Hollywood, but worse for women who like movies, and worst of all for actresses. And since corporate filmmaking has no investment in diversity, only in making money, no one wants to make the effort of making action blockbusters with female protagonists, even though at least once a decade someone comes along and proves that they can make money.

I think some blame also has to go to the auteurs and auteurists, though. American independent filmmaking has always been a macho enterprise, led by the Kubricks, Scorseses, Coppolas, and Altmans, and their fanboys. Whatever the virtues of these filmmakers, it is rare for American auteurs to be interested in telling stories about women (the alternative tradition is represented by De Palma, Cassavetes, and Lynch); whereas in Europe, as Molly Haskell has pointed out (with a lot more savageness than I would use, especially with regard to the heroines of Dreyer – and yet I take her point), directors kept using women, but as symbols more than as characters. In any case, in recent years it's hard to find a female protagonist whether you're in the mood for a blockbuster or for arthouse fare.

But what do the execs of publishing houses, movies studios, and TV networks think that women are doing? They don't think we're going to movies; they've only recently found out that we read; and they can't think we're watching TV, since few shows with female main characters can be found there. Of course there are exceptions on network TV: Grey's Anatomy is a soapy monster; Modern Family features upper-middle-class men and women who are in completely traditional gender roles, for which the “clueless,” yet understandably smug, men are endlessly beaten down by the “assertive,” yet economically dependent, women; the female characters on The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother are almost as important as the male characters; there are lots of genre shows with female sidekicks, like Elementary, Bones, and now Sleepy Hollow. It does look like things are a little better for women in front of the camera in TV than in movies, though not great.

Modern Family, a convincing argument for the extreme horror of traditional gender roles (the gay couple included), where no one wins

I'd like to know, however, if female stars ever had the box-office draw that male stars did, and if “woman's pictures” were ever made in greater numbers than they are now. That genre is remembered primarily because the memory the great female stars of Hollywood was kept alive by gay men (definitely not by auteurists), which allowed young women of later generations a point of entry into film history. So as much as I admire Stephanie Zacharek's Kael-influenced critical voice, I can't share her bewilderment and seeming distaste (in an interview on the podcast The Cinephiliacs) at the fact that well-known female film bloggers like Kim Morgan and Farran Smith Nehme have come to share the gay male admiration of these actresses. Men worship men all the time, and women worship men, too, because there aren't enough celebrated women to worship – so we can always do with finding more. 

Presumably the parity gap that remains in these and other areas is the result of a combination of unconscious sexism on the part of men; women being less interested in these areas than men; and the difficulty of combining motherhood and career. Although the basis of one kind of classic feminism is to argue that women would be exactly like men if the obstacles to it were removed, it is also possible to argue that biology predisposes men and women differently and that they should not be forced to be the same or exact parity expected in everything. The evidence, however, is that the number of women in areas once thought reserved for men climb as attitudes toward what women can do change over generations.  

How do attitudes change? Through the actions of pioneering women (and the men who welcome them and even champion them) and through men and women calling attention to sexism. The best way to prevent calling attention to sexism from descending into petty bullying and harassment of men is, I think, to have a movement that's centered on women's achievement: on what women can do, not what is done to them. But that's for a future post. Others think we have to take action, such as by creating special classes or camps for girls to combat the societal message that there are certain things they can't do. Should change happen organically, over time, or should it be pushed along by directing girls into male-dominated areas? I don't have the answers, but I think we should all keep asking questions. 

Reactions to Girls and Breaking Bad: Auteur TV, White Privilege, and Gender

After the most recent episode of Girls, “Beach House,” I've started to wonder if I'm watching the show wrong. I knew that there was a lot of hate for the show, but this season more than ever I wonder if the show itself wants me to hate its characters and, by extension, only enjoy the show when other characters are criticizing the girls or they're lighting into each other, in both cases as proxies for “the audience.”

Even though with every season, and this season with every episode, I'm less sure how to respond to the show, I'll say this for it: it's a radical experiment in tone. It's common for sitcoms to feature protagonists that you love to hate, from the lowbrow Archie Bunker to the highbrow Frasier Crane and from the cast of Seinfeld to innumerable British sitcom examples. The way it works is that you know the character or characters are loathsome but you enjoy watching them out of what's basically sadism (play is the only thing that distinguishes comedy from sadism, as Northrop Frye put it): you enjoy watching them make themselves and others suffer, and often enjoy their outrageousness while they do it. This is not the same trope, by the way, as the socially incorrect character in a group comedy, who wins the audience's love, without any hate, by doing and saying things you aren't supposed to do and say, even though the creators may intend him (it's usually him) as a criticism of what they're portraying: Alex P. Keaton, Barney Stinson, and, of course, the greatest of them all, Bender on Futurama. Sheldon Cooper is this type as well, although he's not a criticism of anything but rather a representation of a popular idea of autism.

The first thing that makes Girls different is that it doesn't seem to have won any love-hate for its characters: as one can plainly see all over the internet, a vocal portion of its audience just hates them, period, as if those viewers are watching a reality TV show where they can't find any characters to root for (except the men a little, sometimes). The second thing that makes it different is that Dunham and co. then ask us to sympathize with the characters anyway in their trials with relationships, jobs, their friendships, body image, mental health, etc., making far more soap operatic (and dramatic) demands on the viewer's emotions than most sitcoms. When sitcoms go into dramatic territory they usually change their tone to do it, and become sentimental, but Girls is never sentimental, and when it goes dramatic it just goes even darker than the comedy.

I continue to basically sympathize with the main characters, Hannah and Marnie, because I can identify with them as social types, and as the show goes on it starts to seem like they are two sides of one woman (their creator presumably). Shosh and Jessa are the “zanies”: Jessa is The Bender, the straight-up sociopath who's easy to love because, being rich, she gets away with everything and doesn't call for a complicated reaction; Shosh is The Phoebe, who seems like a ditz from another dimension most of the time but has a harder edge than any other member of the group and is the only one who'll let them know what morons they are. What's interesting about Jessa is that she's not, as she so easily could be, just a portrayal of a rich bitch who takes people's lives apart because of her own boredom, emptiness, unhappiness, and immunity to consequences. The show allows her to be that but also to be occasionally wise, although as with its other resident wise character, Adam, it's hard to know where the wisdom stops and the bullshit begins.

Girls, Awkward Black Girl, and Women's Fiction

Ray, we learned last week, thought he was “too wise for grad school,” definitely an example of bullshit masquerading as wisdom. Neither wise nor sociopathic, Ray has transformed from his humble beginnings as Charlie's bitches-hating homeboy into the show's heart, and a lot of credit for that must surely go to the marvellous Alex Karpovsky, who manages to make the most assholish things his character has to say seem to come from a place of sensitivity and pain. The show's writing needs more actors like this, who can bring the sense of a whole human being to the often one-note meanness of the dialogue.

In Season 3, more than ever, it feels like the two remaining main male characters are emotional ballasts for Hannah and Marnie, now that Adam's post-Hannah tailspin is in the past. Early in the first season, Hannah fantasized out loud about wanting to have AIDS; this was a fantasy about having no responsibility, so that no one could ask or expect anything from you and could only take care of you. In the second season she had a new version of that fantasy, with Patrick Wilson as her rich and handsome caregiver. By the end of the season she was living it out in a different way by becoming very, very ill, and although Adam coming to her rescue (she shuts out Marnie and she's abandoned by Jessa) seemed, at the beginning of Season 3, like only a momentary solution after all, the fantasy continues beneath the surface. I get that Dunham wants to make the point that female friendships aren't always like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, just like she wants to make the point that everyone doesn't have a Victoria's Secret body, but instead of counselling self-reliance as the alternative to placing destructive expectations on your friendships, she seems to counsel reliance on men (or, at least, on romantic relationships). Make no mistake, the climactic line of the big “Beach House” argument, Hannah's “I miss my boyfriend,” wasn't just a slap in Marnie's face, it was an Oedipal knife in the heart of Mama Feminism.

In my last post I talked about how the kind of privileged white girlness shown on Girls and its simultaneous celebration and critique can be traced back at least to Jane Austen's Emma, and Anne Helen Peterson LA Review of Books piece on Marnie, subtitled “Pretty Girl Privilege,” backs up my point while failing to recognize that “The Marnie” is not a type of real person but rather a trope of fiction. And it's fascinating, and a little disheartening, to see the extent to which cutting-edge women's fiction of the early 21^st century relies on tropes that were used by Austen in the early 19^th century. The Austenian core of Girls is the reason that the male love interests are more mature, older-acting (remember Adam's “Kid” nickname for Hannah) or actually older than the girls, and often take a tutelary stance towards them, which includes speaking criticism to privilege. This does not preclude sometimes siding with the “unruly” girls and finding the “grown-up” men tedious, as I suggested that you could when watching the “Dead Inside” episode. I also, however, tried to make a comparison between the men's finger-wagging attitude in that episode and Skyler's relationship with Walter in Breaking Bad, but that was a really big stretch. Fans of Breaking Bad will let you know that when women call men on their bullshit, it's “nagging” and “being a bitch,” while the hate-watchers of Girls (who can be found, for example, in the comments section of The AV Club, under the thoughtful and sensitive weekly reviews of Todd VanDerWerff) will let you know that when men criticize women, it's calling them on their bullshit.

Hannah dreams of a Mr. Darcy that looks like Patrick Wilson, but gets a sort of Heathcliff/Mr. Rochester brooding Gothic weirdo/soul mate, who, in Season 2, stalks her like Caspar Goodwood. But Marnie, who's way more of an Emma than Hannah is an Elizabeth, gets a proper Mr. Knightley in Ray. I mean, surely today Mr. Knightley would be a Classics Ph.D. drop-out-turned-coffee shop manager. And this young-ditzy-woman/older-wise-man love relationship ideal may even be conscious on the part of Dunham, who's namechecked Clueless as being among her influences.

The tropes of Austen, or perhaps one should just say women's fiction as it has been since at least the 19^th century, also seem to haunt Issa Rae's addictive web series The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl. When the show begins, the heroine, J, has two problems that most of us have experienced: she's single and she hates her job. In the first season, she's coached by her best friend to find love, which results in a whole season where she must try to choose between two men, Jay White, whom she nicknames “White Jay” for obvious reasons, and her black co-worker Fred. At the end of the first season, she realizes which man she really wants in an Elizabeth Bennet-style epiphany. But there are no real obstacles to the eventual relationship, not even J's own psychology. The who-will-she-choose suspense is generated entirely by the serial format: as befitting the microscopic storytelling of the webisode, the tropes of Awkward Black Girl are in their simplest and most basic form (the inventiveness and originality come into play with the comedy and the POV). What fascinates me is how compelling they are in that form.

George Eliot's Pretty Girls Issues

More even than Emma Woodhouse, in “Pretty Girl Privilege” Petersen is describing a Gwendolen Harleth:

There are Marnies all over the contemporary media, they just get everything that we've been conditioned to expect their looks, class, and education level meriting: outrageous success, perfect happiness.... The implicit message of these Marnies? If you work hard - if you have great hair – you will get the things to which you are entitled. The job, the boy, the body, all yours, simply through the force of your American will. You don't have to have charisma, per se, or even superlative, well, anything – you just have to let things happen.... You're a pretty, skinny, moderately intelligent girl, and every piece of media you've consumed has told you that your life would go one way.

Seriously, did Petersen have the heroine of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda in the back of her mind when she wrote this? And was she thinking of Harold Bloom's “Heroines of the Protestant Will,” a banner under which he includes Gwendolen as well as Emma and Elizabeth, when she wrote the phrase “your American will”? Eliot, who was beauty, had some deep-seated pretty girl issues that she took out on Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch, whose vapid social climbing and overspending ruin the idealistic genius husband with whom she's grievously mismatched, and on Gwendolen, who learns, in Petersen's words about Marnie:

Only WAIT A SECOND, that's all bullshit, because American is neither a meritocracy nor a prettitocracy: it's all about connections, and no one in New York cares if you went to Oberlin and your mom has a solid upper middle class job as a real estate agent in New Jersey. Marnie spent so much of her life thinking that things would work out when she graduated that she forgot to actually become something.

To translate this into the terms of Eliot's Victorian novel: in ways that Simone de Beauvoir would understand perfectly, Gwendolen has been warped into a pathological narcissist (and neurotic) by being treated all of her life as perfect because she's, precisely, “pretty, skinny, moderately intelligent,” oh and rich, and she has been given her way in everything. She has been celebrated for who she is, immanently, without ever having to become anything, since it was never expected that she would have to be anything other than a socialite. When she learns that she's no longer rich, she at first thinks that she can support herself and her mother using one of her minor accomplishments, singing, and asks for the appraisal of an expert, who informs her that she has neither skill nor talent – a little like Marnie's YouTube video experience.

Girls is dealing with the echoes of these privileged white girl tropes from 19^th century fiction even though, as I suggested in my last post, the circumstances that created the tropes have changed. Marnie has not been brought up to think that she will never have to earn a living, but she has, more vaguely and insidiously, been brought up to think, as Petersen says, that she will be a success. Because it can be deduced from her whiteness, prettiness, skinniness, and economic privilege that she will be a success, she has never had to work hard at developing any particular skill, including singing. And now she has to face the fact – if any of the girls were able to face any facts – that she is ordinary. Yet surely it's that sense of entitlement, that indomitable, irrational sense that she is better than all of this, better than her circumstances, that makes her attractive to Ray? 

It's interesting to compare the ways in which white girls feel entitled to the ways in white guys feel entitled, and the different reactions their privilege receives. Todd VanDerWerff wrote a piece for Salon on white male privilege in Breaking Bad in which his description of Walter White's entitlement sounds a lot like Petersen's description of Marnie's:

Walt's justifications for why he should have what he wants stem almost entirely from believing that he's owed in some way, that the universe has screwed him over. Yet when the series begins, he has a pretty good life. He has a beautiful wife, a loving son, a baby on the way, and a house with a swimming pool. Maybe he doesn't like either of his jobs, but who does? And when he gets cancer, old friends who feel a debt to him offer to pay for the treatments. Yet all Walt needs is the slightest provocation to look around himself, reach out for anything within reach, and cry out, "I want that!" like a spoiled toddler. 

Since writing my last post it occurred to me that a white girl defending white girls (“We're not all upper middle class! And even those who are have problems too!”) was as hypocritical and ludicrous as the white guys who whine about the bad name they seem to have with women and non-whites. And yet although it should be the same thing, in the context of premium cable TV viewing, bizarrely, it's not, because no one is hate-watching Breaking Bad, or any other TV show, in order to seethe and rail at the examples of white male privilege on display and to wait for those moments when the women call the men on their bullshit. On the contrary, the seething and railing going on are against any criticism of the show, or not the show (because VanDerWerff thinks it's self-aware), but rather Walter White himself, by fans, as one can see in the comments on the piece. It's hysterical hero-worship of Kurt Cobain intensity – and every Cobain, or stricken king, needs a Courtney/Yoko/Skyler. The show may be self-aware, but at the mythic level it's structurally misogynous.

White male privilege, as Walter White shows, involves thinking you're owed a fortune for your super-competence, while white female privilege (as we'd call it if we weren't stuck on that quasi-reclaimed pejorative “girl”), as demonstrated by Marnie, involves thinking you're owed the perfect life for your attractive appearance. Hannah Horvath (yay for TV protagonists with same-consonant-initials!), on the other hand, does think she's potentially a genius, but of course that's just more privilege and “self-absorption.” White women also, one notes, do not, as a trope, react to not getting what they think they're owed in life with a rage rampage, presumably because until recently, women had to get what they wanted in life through a husband or lovers. In noir, the trope is that if she couldn't get what she wants through her husband, she has to use her lover to get rid of the husband for her. She can't act directly but must always act by proxy. Even Scarlett O'Hara, the most direct and action-oriented of all the privileged white girls of fiction (she even get to shoot a man to protect her household), is forced to marry her sister's beau in order to save Tara since she can't just go into business for herself.

Up to this point, most TV, like most European and American fiction, has been about white privilege. Auteur TV seems to be calling attention to this in a new way, maybe because educated people are taking it seriously enough to analyze it, and maybe because it reflects the fantasies of a mostly affluent viewership more directly and visibly/audibly (through vivid cultural discussion and colourful internet commentary) than contemporary fiction does. These fantasies at the moment revolve around the idea of a broken-down economy and the sun setting on America and the American promise: the heirs and heiresses of all the ages growing up to discover that the fortune they thought would be theirs has been lost. And yet, somehow, we only get mad at the girls for their expectations. I do understand that this hatred of “bratty” white girls is the flip side of our purely symbolic overvaluation of them, which has been critically investigated, and simultaneously promulgated, in Anglo-American literature, movies, and TV from Clarissa Harlowe to Daisy Buchanan to Melanie Daniels to Laura Palmer.

Girls is a more subtle a show than it sometimes seems, and “Beach House” was very much the answer to “One Man's Trash” from last season, this time focused on Marnie and her fantasies instead of Hannah and hers. In both cases, a beautiful house that does not belong to the Girls, whose material splendour is emotionally reassuring (like the manor houses in Austen), plays a central role in the episode. But while Hannah gets her perfect couple of days, isolated from the rest of the world and her concerns, with one perfect man entirely focused on her, and only punctures the fantasy towards the end, Marnie isn't allowed the private “healing time” that she wants to her friends, largely due to Hannah's resistance. Hannah's fantasy is to be taken care of, even to the point, in the words of Jane Bowles, where “everything is taken off your hands and you flop around like a baby.” Marnie's fantasy is to be surrounded by friends who love her, or, failing that, to convey the image of it on Instagram. Although I wouldn't go as far as Chuck Bowen, who, in a lovely review on the Slant blog, calls Marnie “the center of Girls's empathetic imagination,” there's no doubt that the episode imbues her with a certain pathos: she's a latter-day Mrs. Dalloway whose recalcitrantly real friends (in a strain of Dunham's imagination that's been with the show from the beginning) just won't get on board with her aesthetic vision of the perfect moment.

I suggested in my V. C. Andrews post that very young women who are still in the process of forming their own opinions pick up the cultural signals that tell them to devalue women and obey them with the ferocity of zealots. I hear that same voice in comments and on blog posts in which female viewers criticize the characters on Girls for their narcissism, self-absorption, selfishness, privilege, and so on and so forth. Again, I just don't see young men watching shows about young men who do not live up to the cultural ideal of what men should be in order to berate the characters for their non-compliance, although maybe that's happening in some corner of popular culture that I'm not aware of. If Marnie and Hannah are two sides of one woman, they're Superego and Id, or the woman you're supposed to be and the woman who rebels (to the point of spending an entire episode/day in a green bikini that exhibits her ample cellulite to the world) against being that woman. And here's one genuine point of connection between Breaking Bad and Girls besides all of the white privilege: they're locked in a love-hate combat as brutal as Walt and Jesse's. 

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Vogue-Jezebel Lena Dunham Dust Up

So we all know by now that the popular feminist site Jezebel offered $10, 000 for the unretouched photos from Lena Dunham's shoot for this month's issue of Vogue. If you cared about that, you will also have learned that Jezebel's readership did not take kindly to what they interpreted as mean-girling, concern-trolling, anti-woman click bait. It may have been a sad day for pop feminism when Jezebel posted that article, but it became a happy day when the readership decided they wouldn't put up with it. And surely it's the least we can ask from feminism that it not do anything that can be interpreted as bullying and shaming a woman who's in the public eye. Or at any rate, isn't it kind of sweet that we develop these protective feelings towards female celebrities when we think they've taken too much shit – from men and women, critics and internet trolls? It almost seems like there's a wave of girl-bashing every few months, followed by the backlash. And I've jumped to the defense of them all over the years: Courtney, Britney, Amy, Lana, Miley. I even watched The Simple Life, and thought it was pretty funny.

There's always an “it” girl, someone we can't stop talking about, that we're obsessed with as a culture. We ogle, we nitpick, attack her appearance, laugh at her if she's supposed to be dumb, dismiss her as a “hipster” if she's smart. She's not the girl that everyone can agree to like, who's often presented as her opposite, like Lorde and Miley Cyrus, as if all women come in contrasting pairs, a Good Example and a Bad Example. The “it” girl phenomenon is perhaps partly the result of pop culture being pretty much wall-to-wall men (with eye candy hanging on the walls*), so that we can only think about one woman at a time, and partly the result of the general public (or mostly women?) projecting soap opera narratives onto the private lives and psyches of female celebrities in a way we just don't for men. The backlash is the result of men and women needing to decide on what represents acceptable femininity. If I say “I like this girl” or “I don't like this girl,” it is momentous, because I'm deciding on the kind of woman I want to be; and whatever side I choose, you can be sure I think I'm righteous, because of how, you know, civilization itself is at stake.

This is sort of a companion piece to my post on the David Gilmour PR fiasco. Anyway, I've pulled out the numbered list again. 

“I'm Thinking of a Woman Called Jezebel, Who Did Evil in the Sight of God...”

1. Lena Dunham is an ordinary-looking woman, say some. Or, is she a hideous beast? According to others. Or is she in fact a better-than-average-looking woman? Which, I'd contend (like Bette Davis before her – or is Judy Garland the better comparison?), in some ways she is. She has celebrity charisma and an appealing clown face, excellent (as well as her slumped clown body) for comedy, that reminds me above all of Giulietta Masina.

2. Jezebel was trying to humiliate her by scrutinizing the appearance flaws in her unretouched photos. Or – Jezebel didn't think they're flaws. They thought that Vogue thought they were flaws. Jezebel thinks she looks fine without retouching! Only none of the commenters believe that. But does that mean that they think Dunham is a hideous beast, or that they think that Jezebel thinks that, whereas they think that Dunham looks fine? Is it possible for anybody to come out of this without admitting that they don't think Dunham looks fine?

3. Is it different to compare before-and-after photos of models or sex symbols and to do it with Dunham? Is is ever valiant to educate the public by showing the unrealistic standards to which the media holds women's appearance? Relatedly, in the episode of Girls where Hannah finds out her e-book editor died, I got the fullest view of Dunham's body in a while, standing up in nothing but panties, with nothing obscuring it, and I was surprised to see that she's bigger than I remembered, or thought she was from viewing her clothed figure. BUT. Take a look at Catherine Deneueve in Belle de Jour (1967), when she was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world. By today's toned, retouched, and implanted standards, she's chunky and small-breasted. THEN AGAIN. Check out Cary Grant in his shirtless scene in North by Northwest (1959). Half a century ago, that was fan service for the ladies, but by today's cruel standards, he looks skinny, saggy-breasted, and undefined. (He's also got a real Dunhamesque case of slope-shoulders.)

Not good enough!

4. Also, please note, people, that even the greatest beauties in history have facial flaws that were removed from sight so that their beauty could enter the realm of art and fantasy, where it rightfully belonged. Did you want to see Vivien Leigh play Scarlett O'Hara with a moustache? Even if it would make you feel better about your own femmestache? (Saw the before and afters in a book on Gone With the Wind. Also removed: eyebags. That was a long and stressful shoot.)

5. Why this idea by both Jezebel and some of Dunham's defenders in the comments that the unretouched photos show what she “really” looks like? There's no “really looks like” to a photo. A photo can be flattering or unflattering, depending on lighting and angles. On top of which some people are photogenic and some are not despite being attractive in person. I sure hope my worst “somebody tagged you” Facebook photos aren't what I “really look like.” On the other hand, there is such a thing as retouching beyond recognition, or to the point of inhuman flawlessness.

6. It's not exactly that male celebrities are allowed to be more flawed. Things like wrinkles aren't considered flaws on men; they lend gravitas, which is considered attractive in men, whereas women are supposed to always look like they did at peak baby-making time. I'm sure that nevertheless magazines retouch the hell out of pictures of male celebrities, they just get to leave certain things in. And we're used to seeing a greater variety in men's appearance in the media, from exceptionally handsome to average to sloppy, because the role of women in the media is still largely to be eye candy for men, and if they are also actors, or singer-songwriters, or comedians, they are still expected to be eye candy on top of that.

7. Is Dunham a hypocrite? Is she's all for body positivity, why appear in evil Vogue, which conspires to hold women to an impossible ideal? Well, I hope it's because Lena Dunham loves Vogue. I certainly did as a teenager and in my early 20s, back when I emulated current high fashion on a budget by shopping in thrift stores. After I stopped expressing my creativity through my clothing, I also stopped buying fashion magazines; the Dunham cover is the first time I've picked one up in maybe a decade. I was more interested in the clothes than in the models, although I loved Kate Moss like everyone else. But there's nothing wrong with beauty. And while it would be great to see Vogue expand its notion of beauty a little (beyond “anorexic 19-year-old”), photo retouching has not become oppressive for women because of the fashion magazines, but because everywhere in the media women are held to that standard.

8. Speaking of Kate Moss, unleashed photo retouching has allowed supermodels to have careers that go on forever and ever. This is good for the models, but not so good for women in general, since the effect is that, more than ever, we're not allowed to age.

9. The effect of all of this is that we have actually forgotten what real women look like. And I don't mean some ideal “real woman,” who is somehow more “essentially womanly” because she's heavier-set, say. I mean “real woman” as opposed to a made-up media ideal. And a lot of the Dunham hate coming from men on the internet is because men, too, have been brainwashed into thinking that women ought to look like women on TV, in movies, in magazines, and in ads... oh and porn. And yes, that has to stop, and on her show, Dunham is trying to help put a stop to it. We, men and women, have to be able to look at a physically imperfect woman in the media without freaking out and thinking she's a monster.

10. Carol Burnett was a funny-looking comedian. Did she take this much crap, or was there a time when women didn't have to be hawt to be on TV? What about Mayim Bialik over on The Big Bang Theory? My impression is that she's a very popular character, and while the show sometimes calls attention to the fact that she's less hawt than the two other main female characters, it never makes her the butt of jokes based on her looks, and she is definitely presented as sexually viable (albeit also frustrated because she's dating the asexual Sheldon). Why does she get away with playing a female nerd, and Dunham doesn't? Conversely, why don't we hear about everything that Bialik is doing for female body image?

Rocking the cardie for comedy

11. I understand that by confronting us with her naked body a lot on Girls, Dunham is desensitizing us to what a real woman's body looks like, and that's a good thing. That said, I don't necessarily want to see imperfect naked male bodies on TV, either. For example, I have a big crush on Jason Schwartzman which I'm pretty sure would only be negatively impacted by constantly seeing him undressed on a TV show. Yes, we're used to seeing a lot of average-looking men on TV, but then again, George Costanza kept his clothes on**. Well, mostly.

Ilu, and because ilu, I will try to forget I saw this

Naked for comedy. I can never forget I saw this

12. This idea we have, by the way, that you can't say or imply that a woman is less than lovely without causing irreparable psychological damage and being a brute – where does that come from? It seems to have been behind the irate reaction of Dunham's producers to a reporter who questioned her about her nudity on Girls, another Dunham story that was all over the internet recently. Dunham goes out of her way to look awful on Girls, while cleaning up nicely in her (public) private life and making an effort to look pretty, because, some women (obviously not Hannah Horvath) like to do that sometimes. It's a sad day for a comedian when your fans and even your producers feel that they have to jump in and reassure you that you're beautiful all of the time. Pretty sure Jason Alexander does not inspire, or require, this reaction, or Woody Allen. And all it does is reinforce the idea that appearance and desirability are a woman's most important attributes.

13. Likewise, every time someone reacts to criticism of Dunham's appearance by objecting, “But Lena Dunham isn't ugly – she's cute!” or “But Lena Dunham isn't fat – she's average!”, my immediate thought is, “Well then, what about the women who are ugly and are fat. Do they not deserve to be represented in the media? And would they deserve the hateful attacks that you are saying Dunham does not because she's not?” The media is always going to be a place where pretty people thrive, but when a female entertainer isn't permitted to look any other way, even if the departure is as minor as it is in the case of “Hollywood Homely” Dunham, that's a problem.

Internalization and Defiance

Incessant criticism of one's appearance can be psychologically damaging to a female celebrity, however. Look at Judy Garland. Look at Courtney Love, although her examination of cultural expectations of female beauty was so intense and personal that her plastic surgery just seems like an extension of it. Look at Amy Winehouse. Bette Davis weathered it out and took advantage of the acting opportunities it gave her, and the opportunity to be taken seriously as an actor, but she so frequently made herself appear grotesque that you know she took it to heart. Katharine Hepburn, however, an actress criticized by the Hollywood moguls for her “sexlessness” and the general public for her privilege and the confidence and eccentricity that went with it, came equipped with enough narcissism that she seemed impervious to the first kind of criticism, at least. I strongly advise any Hepburn fans to check out the fascinating, prickly Dick Cavett interview, where, early on, the elderly Hepburn repeatedly insists that he check out a picture of her taken for a play as a half-naked teenage hottie, a picture so smouldering that, she claims, it launched her in Hollywood.

I assume it's this one.

However, Hepburn did seem to internalize the public's criticism of her personality, to the extent that she commissioned a play from Philip Barry that would humble her persona and therefore, she hoped, finally make her a popular actress. The self-abasement worked, but this aspect of The Philadelphia Story still makes fans of the original, uncompromised Hepburn cringe. To judge by the new season of Girls, Dunham seems to be internalizing the criticism directed at her in a different way: instead of trying to appease her critics, she defiantly keeps making Hannah Horvath more and more unlikable. Which I find a bit of a shame, because I never understood why Hannah was supposed to be unlikable in the first place. In her cadences, her irony, her articulate, paragraph-long observations and reports on her inner life, Hannah reminded me of girls I knew in university, fellow English students – the kind of girl I'd want to be friends with the moment I heard her and took in her wonderful, awful fashion sense. The kind of girl I was. 

I'm so predisposed to empathize with this character type that Hannah's flashes of unmistakable sociopathy still feel OOC to me, and when the other characters gang up on her, as in "Dead Inside," and try to browbeat her into conforming to social norms, I side with her the way I used to side with Oscar the Grouch against the sanctimonious adults on Sesame Street when I was three. "Adults" on this show are often the regular male characters, Adam and Ray (who is in fact significantly older than the girls); they, in any case, see themselves as adults, and talk like adults, although Ray can't pull his own life together and Adam is capable of egregious interpersonal misjudgments, to say the least. In that respect they serve a killjoy role a little bit like the Skyler one (a very little bit) on Breaking Bad, scolding the girls for their bad behaviour; as men, however, they also represent the norm that the girls are passively-aggressively rebelling against. 

"Very Little to Distress or Vex Her"

Dunham's not just any other “it” girl, or controversial, Courtney-like hate-magnet. Her genealogy traces back through Hepburn to Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse, the seminal privileged white girl of Anglo-American fiction, who irritates readers because of the confidence and narcissism that her sheltered life has given her. That confidence, however, is the reason that, to use Lionel Trilling's sexist phrasing, she is one of the rare heroines of fiction who “has a moral life like a man”; which is to say that she sees herself as the protagonist of her life, and she has enough power that her morally incorrect decisions have consequences for others. Dunham, however, isn't pretty enough to be an Emma – but she'd make a great Elizabeth Bennet, who's not supposed to have much going for her in the looks department except “a fine pair of eyes.” Maybe Patrick Wilson would like to play Darcy?

Bizarrely, some of the hatred directed at Girls by some media commentators seems to derive from the archaic idea that privileged white girls are the most useless human beings on the planet, parasites (because this idea was born in a world where women could do nothing with their lives except marry) who nevertheless think of themselves as the height of human perfection because they've been raised to believe that the world revolves around them. It can't possibly be that the girls of Girls are self-absorbed, petty sitcom characters like any other self- absorbed, petty sitcom characters – like the Seinfeld characters, say, or the central characters on any number of British sitcoms, like Peep Show, or for that matter, Absolutely Fabulous. (Joanna Lumley's Patsy is surely what Jessa is going to grow up to be.) 

No, because they're young girls from privileged upbringings, they must be “princesses,” towards whom we must direct a special hatred to compensate for all of the undeserved love we think they must have been given. Including all of that undeserved love from critics, since depending who you ask, Girls is either the most hated or the most overrated show on television.

Besides, if shows that ask the viewer to sympathize with the trials of privileged white people are the problem, go complain about Downton Abbey. Seriously.

* The argument can also be made that the relative lack of celebration of male beauty and the male body in our male-gaze-assuming, heteronormative culture is bad for men in all kinds of ways, while "metrosexuality" is in some ways a gain for men. Of course it can, and if you want to see how it can, check out the fascinating writings of my friend Mark Simpson. 

**On the other hand, if you want to know what male privilege was like in the bad old days, when it was assumed without question that the only value a woman had was her desirability to men, a while back on the Facebook Film Forum, someone posted a link to some "off the record" interviews with Orson Welles from which the press had pulled his remark about Bette Davis that he couldn't watch her movies because he couldn't stand to look at her. To which I replied, "I wonder how she felt about looking at Orson Welles."