Pop Culture and Empowerment

I've been watching a lot of television and movies lately--probably more than is good for me. The sheer fact that I've seen that damned comcast commercial twice tonight indicates a fair amount about my blood pressure and my viewing habits. As I was watching Cashmere Mafia this evening and getting my cheap thrills out of the developing lesbian relationship, I started thinking about visibility. I wrote an entire thesis bitching about the mainstream lgbtq movement's championing of visibility of the homo/transnormative, but Willow's relationship with Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer still got me through the summers at my parent's house in rural uber-red state as a kid. And now in a new rural place, I'm enjoying the lesbian plot line far more than it deserves. What is that? It's not like when I was a younger and Buffy gave me hope. The only answers I'm coming up with verge on psychoanalytic theory, which in all honesty I don't really understand and certainly can't articulate lucidly. Perhaps I'm learning how to better balance enjoyment with critical thinking--which brings me to the most interesting moment in the episode I watched tonight: "Dangerous Liasons."

As publisher, Mia (Lucy Liu) approves her magazine's, Modern Man's, cover. She struggles because the cover of this particular issue seems to violate her feminist code. It contains the picture of a woman's cleavage with a man on a plate before her. She sits fork in hand about to eat him, while he, in his business suit, seems to be squirming and very uncomfortable. His hand happens to fall exactly at her cleavage--making it appear as if he is either dangling from the v of her collar or pulling it down. The copy reads, "The New Dog-Eat-Dog World! Women Chow Down on Men!" This magazine cover storyline is backed by a storyline in which a man (business executive) fucks a woman (sales associate) and then calls off the relationship and the job privileges he'd been giving her as a result of their sexual liason. She threatens to sue and is painted as the unreasonable one--another perspective on the threat of the man-eating woman. For those of you who want to check it out, the best view of the cover is about 10 minutes into the episode and can be watched on ABC's free player.

Mia decides to keep the cover, while including a letter that tells modern men they have to get used to modern women who can and will do things as well as men and even be their bosses sometimes. While a feel good moment, the sub-texts continue to be rather concerned about those man-eating women. The cover image perpetuates stereotypes even if the copy is countered. A woman who is nothing but cleavage and power hungry? The man who somehow manages to grab hold of the cleavage despite his lunchable status? And the narrative holds with the men-visual, women-verbal dichotomy, which to the degree that is true, means that Mia's letter will have little readership. Now ya'll know I love Lucy Liu, and I thought Mia's letter and her decision to run the cover because it is what many men think good. The show is certainly taking feminist issues beyond Sex in the City to which it is constantly being compared. Like the lesbian visibility question, I'm glad that there's a show in the mainstream that's representing feminist questions, but like with the lesbians, I have to ask, what cultural values are they challenging, and which ones are they reifying? Why do the sub-texts all indicate men are actually at risk? For instance why are the most powerful women in NYC almost exclusively white? And why is the token Asian American woman the one most likely to be viewed as a ball buster? White hetero masculinity is on the defensive in our country right now, and that's playing out--even in shows currently claimed as feminist godsends.