The Celluloid Fate of Female Masculinity
Keely Savoie / BITCHfest 2006
A WHILE AGO, MY GIRLFRIEND, A., GOT A CALL FROM A FRODUCER looking for butch women to audition for
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
The Fab Five were looking to transform a butch in an upcoming show.
“Like, transform
how
?” A. asked, imagining, I suppose, how she might compare to Janet Reno in a skirt.
The producer assured her that her butch identity would not be compromised, and they booked her for an interview later that week. I squealed like a girl when she told me and immediately pulled out a notepad to start listing proposed improvements to our apartment. We talked about what colors we would suggest for the living room, how we could replace our catscratched sofa with a spankin’-new sectional, and, of course, where a flat-screen TV would look really good. But as the interview drew nearer, it hit me that the show was primarily about
her
, not our co-op. And then the real excitement dawned: My girlfriend could be one of the only butches seen on television since
The Facts of Life’
s Jo Polniaczek.
Don’t get me wrong—the fact that TV these days is all about queer has not passed me by. Gays have sprung up everywhere from the obvious L
Word
,
Will & Grace
, and, of course,
Queer As Folk
, to the not-so-obvious queer characters on otherwise-straight shows like
The O.C., The Wire,
and
ER.
Even the straightest shows have occasional gay appearances:
Law and Order: SVU
,
CSI
,
Wife Swap, Survivor,
even
American Idol
. But while television is
teeming with queers, the roles women play seem to have gotten straighter. It seems that prime time has flung the doors open (“ladies first!”) to the whole rainbow spectrum of gender-bending men, but women on TV occupy a very narrow band—from kinda femme to ultrafemme. Girl-on-girl sexuality has no doubt evolved—girls have made out with other girls on everything
from Six Feet Under
to
Gilmore Girls
—but our gender expression is stuck in Stepford. Even true lesbian couplings, like those on
The L Word
,
Queer As Folk
, and the dearly departed
Buffy,
are overwhelmingly femme-on-femme.
After A. was interviewed for
Queer Eye,
I set out on a little quest to find butches on TV, just to see where we really stood. I immediately ran into trouble.
In the real world, it’s not difficult to suss out how someone identifies. Butchness is an overall presence, a melding of character, presentation, mannerisms, and personal identity. Clothes often offer clues, but they’re only part of the story. A. never wears skirts and lip gloss, but if she did, it wouldn’t make her any more feminine—it would just look weird. When I asked A. to describe the essence of butchness, she called it a gravitational pull toward typically masculine things. “I was always playing football with my brother instead of doing feminine things with other girls,” she said. “Butches are who they are before the environment comes along and screws with them and says, ‘You are a woman, you are supposed to do x, y, and z because that’s what girls do.’”
But with television being what it is, I was reduced to ferreting out butches by relying on the less-than-scientific “has short hair, wears pants” stereotype. By that definition, even I could be a butch, so I figured I was giving the TV world every benefit where there was a doubt. Even so, I quickly found there wasn’t even much to doubt. Shane,
The L Word’
s resident ladykiller, could be seen as butch, given her swagger and voracious libido, but her goth-caliber eyeliner addiction undermines any substantial butchy pretense. Sandy, Dr. Kerry Weaver’s firefighting girlfriend on
ER,
has a certain butch appeal, as does lesbian detective Kima Greggs from
The Wire
, but they both have long hair and are pretty in typically feminine ways—not an automatic disqualification for being butch, but I wish they were more obvious.
More blatant butches do exist, but they’re easy to miss. There are the
“wait, I blinked” butches, who occasionally pop up on the
The L Word,
but they tend to be on and off the set so fast you think they may have just tripped over it on their way to lunch—or they may actually be errant sound dudes. Then we have the straight butches, those poor women who are frequently tricked, cajoled, or corralled into appearing on the ubiquitous makeover shows like
What Not to Wear
that have piled up on TV like poo in the dog run and purport to teach women how to become “real” women for the edification of the audience and their beleaguered (and almost always unattractive) husbands. A recent episode of
Maury Povich
featured women in “manly” jobs—a firefighter, a zookeeper, and a mechanic among them. Povich chided their indifference to typical feminine frills: “Don’t you want to feel sexy? Don’t you want to feel like a woman?” And after shoehorning them into dresses, blowing out their hair, and slapping on some makeup, he applauded their new look: “You were really women under there!” By the looks of many of them, they were not nearly as happy as Maury to see their feminine sides.
In short, it’s pretty sorry pickings out there, butchwise. Oddly, the dearth of butch representation seems to have gotten worse. Characters like the aforementioned Jo, Carla from
Cheers
, even Roseanne challenged gender-typical roles more than almost any character on contemporary shows, where their kind of butch appears only for a minute, to serve as a “before” picture for a newly feminized version waiting to emerge. A. remembers what a revelation it was to see her own aesthetic mirrored on
The Facts of Life:
“It was like seeing a family member.” There is one spot of hope on the horizon; perhaps not surprisingly, it comes from
The L Word.
Many of the show’s lesbian viewers complained that the show’s glossy-haired, Pradaclad waifs, while scoring high on the eye-candy scale, left a lot to be desired in the dyke-versity department, so the show responded: For its third season,
The L Word
promises a new,
improved
butch. I am standing back with cautious hope that Daniela Sea will better the butch benchmark set by Nancy McKeon, with nicer hair and clothes, of course.
Big-screen butches are in a different predicament from their TV counterparts. They manage to score a tad more screen time, but when they do elbow their way through the sea of slender feminine sidekicks, it’s only so they can die horribly in the end.
Only two movies in the last three years have featured butches in a leading
role. There was Clint Eastwood’s
Million Dollar Baby
, in which Hilary Swank plays Maggie Fitzgerald, a boxer who ultimately chooses assisted suicide after an injury leaves her paralyzed from the neck down. And there was
Monster
, the filmic portrait of serial killer Aileen Wuornos that starred Charlize Theron, her extra twenty-five pounds, and the dental prosthetics that miraculously transformed her flawless features into Wuornos’s exaggerated grimace of poverty and despair.
Both movies were the subject of unstinting critical acclaim upon release. Swank and Theron, of course, both won Oscars for their “powerful” performances as butch women, but it was undoubtedly more about the daring it took for gorgeous women to debase themselves by gaining weight and looking unforgivably torn up than about any special consideration the Academy gives to breaking down gender barriers. If anything, the subtext is that crossing gender lines is such an enormous feat that accomplishing it at all is worthy of an Oscar: No ordinary woman could do such a thing.
The characters of Maggie and Aileen embody most of our cultural stereotypes about butches: the predatory, man-hating dyke butch (Aileen); the asexual butch (Maggie); the poor white trash butch (both); the emotionally disturbed butch (Aileen); and that all-time favorite, the dead butch (both).
This is where the huge disconnect is: In the real world, butches are everywhere. There are a lot of butches among urban lesbians, yes, and there are the stereotypical butches pumping gas, teaching gym, and running drills in the army. But they’re also in suburban malls, in corporate offices, and in SUVs with their broods of children.
The problem is that women who take on masculinity as part of their identity violate two key rules of pop culture: They don’t play to the male-friendly aesthetic of sexy, and, in taking on masculine characteristics, they assume more power than our culture is willing to give them. They are not fuckable in either sense of the term. Nelly men, on the other hand, don’t violate that standard. They both play to the male eye and, in feminizing themselves, relinquish the social power that they, as men, naturally possess. For men, the punishment for crossing gender lines is inherent in the act of feminization.
I don’t pretend that pop culture is a democracy: I don’t expect proportional representation. But the total absence of images of butch women—and the erasure of them when they do appear (whether it’s in the form of a
makeover or a murder)—speaks to a disturbing inability among television and movie producers to deal with women who don’t fit neatly into their gender boxes. What does this mean for us as a culture? Sure, we’re going through a spasm of social and political regression, but have we actually devolved from the days of Jo?
It may be just a matter of time. TV and film will inevitably grow to reflect the culture as a whole, if a buffer, better-looking version. My hope is that progress made cannot be unmade, even if it’s forced underground for a time. As I write this, there are four cable channels exclusively geared toward gay audiences, and although they, too, do their share of stereotyping, they push the gender envelope. A new series called
Transgeneration
on the gay network Logo follows four transgendered college students as they wrestle with the slippery concepts of gender, identity, and biology. I can see some of A.’s struggle as a butch in the faces of the female-to-male transsexuals whose lives have been suspended between cultural expectations and their own inescapable yearnings to break free. It will be a long time before a show like
Transgeneration
crosses over to a mainstream outlet, but it might be a beginning—a place where questions of gender are earnestly asked, and the humanity and drama inherent in them are allowed to unfold.
The producers for
Queer
Eye never did call us back. Maybe they pulled the plug when they saw that A. really would not be made over in some more feminine version of her butch self—or maybe, as she prefers to believe, she was “just too hip” to change. Whatever the case, I’m sure that one day I will see a butch on TV—a butch who is not going to be stuffed into a skirt or stuck in a coffin by the end of the show. Until then, I will continue bravely patrolling pop culture to the upper end of cable channels in search of butch characters. Unfortunately, it won’t be from that new flat-screen TV I wanted so badly.
Masculinity’s Troubling Persistence
Brendan O’Sullivan / BITCHfest 2006
MASCULINITY IS DEAD. MORIBUND, WITHOUT A PULSE, SEEING the white light. But don’t be fooled; it’s not gone yet. As the 1989 classic
Weekend at Bernie’s
demonstrates, sometimes death doesn’t matter—sometimes a carcass suffices.
Sociology and pop culture have taught us that the features we attribute to men are just a rough assemblage of daily rituals. Folks born (or declared by doctors to be) XY are furnished with a slew of cultural prompts on how to dress, act, and interact to best imitate the character of Man. But the traditional construct of masculinity is facing a fatal crisis: Where once there was relative certainty about what it meant to “be a man,” there is now an explosion of different—often conflicting—possibilities.
We’
ve got
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’
s posse of how-to homos showing the straight men of New York how to be men, even spreading the gospel to the most hetero corners of culture with their recent makeovers of both Red Sox and rodeo stars. Then there’s Jonathan Antin, the unquestionably straight male hairstylist (don’t call him a barber), whose reality show
Blow Out
is propelled by equal parts aggressive posturing (when he doesn’t get his way) and emotionally charged weeping (when his new hair product line succeeds). And don’t forget those bumbling leading men and beta males populating the television and movie screens, from the drunken antiheroes of
Sideways
to the dim-bulb slobs of prime-time sitcoms like
The King of
Queens
and
According to Jim.
Just what do these guys think they are doing with masculinity? And how did they get on my TV?
Traditionally understood masculinity is still readily identifiable in pop culture, of course. To be a man, you’re expected to be a skosh insensitive, especially about things like Valentine’s Day and wedding plans. A taste for sports is important. Definitely no crying, you big sissy. Ditto for wearing dresses, barrettes, and mascara. You shouldn’t frighten easily. And if at all possible, be the breadwinner in your überhetero relationship—emphasis on the hetero.
This is but a small sampling of the rules—or rather, “instincts,” because masculinity is supposed to come naturally. Recall that the rules of
Fight Club
didn’t include the requirement of being a dude. It was simply referenced in the fourth and fifth rules: Only two guys to a fight; only one fight at a time, fellas. The club itself was predicated on masculinity—a men-only rule would’ve been redundant.
But despite this pompous certitude, mainstream rule violations like those mentioned above are exposing the myth behind this rulebook. There’s a growing recognition that anyone can perform traditionally male traits; the if-it-looks-smells-walks-and-talks-like test doesn’t work for men anymore. We’ve got butch women, drag kings, genderqueers, and trannies hijacking masculinity, and conversely, men who are far from hitting the target. It seems that we aren’t satisfied with what’s “natural,” and we’re stretching the concept to suit our needs.
Witness former baseball star and steroid poster boy José Canseco enthusiastically modeling women’s lingerie on VH1’s train-wreck reality series
The Surreal Life
. Clinging to relevancy, masculinity has been reduced to caricaturing itself.
He’s a Lady,
another recent “reality” catastrophe, was devoted entirely to a fake drag queen competition among a dozen men. Not surprisingly, there was no subversive intent behind the show; it was an analysis-free exercise in reinforcing traditional masculinity by using it as a frame of reference. The show generates a reaction similar to watching a dog open a jar of peanut butter on
America’s Funniest Home Videos
: Dogs are dumb! They aren’t supposed to open jars! Ha-ha! Our laughter could come from a radical understanding (Dogs aren’t dumb! We’re silly for thinking they aren’t supposed to open jars! Ha-ha!), but most of us, still taking Bob Saget’s cue, are laughing because men aren’t supposed to shave their legs, not because we’re foolish for believing they shouldn’t.
There are many different folks encompassed in this “we” and “us,” however, and we don’t all share the same vision for the dead dude’s place in our culture. Some hope to give masculinity its proper eulogy: a complete reorganization of society where the man/woman distinction no longer wields its power. Others recognize masculinity’s end but fear the hijinks that would ensue if manliness lost its significance as a societal organizer. You can hear their lamentations: How would people know whom to pick for kickball? Or ask to the prom? What if the only way to tell the boys from the girls was to peek at their private bits (and, geez, even that gets complicated)? Sex before marriage would become the eleventh commandment—just to be sure. If people can’t tell boys from girls, our whole society would come to a screeching halt.
Our reaction to this vision of social chaos has not been to stage a proper funeral, but to hold on tighter to the dead concept. Even the “we” who are calling for the funeral are not RSVPing. Masculinity is enjoying a vibrant posthumous influence as we cling to its “necessity.” We’re setting the table for our dead father, making sure dinner’s ready by six. But why are we keeping a place for him?
It could be suggested that, once people believe strongly enough in something, they are inclined to ignore any evidence that contradicts it. The plot of
Weekend at Bernie’s
is organized around this level of confusion: Since everyone expects Bernie to be alive, the protagonists’ game of reanimating the corpse is never uncovered. But that doesn’t quite work because, unlike the duped supporting cast of
Bernie’s,
we are already aware of masculinity’s ruse.
But there’s another explanation: While masculinity is obviously still performed earnestly and dutifully by men every day (even by those who stray from the most well-worn areas along its path), those of us aware of the game are still playing along. We just add a spoonful of irony to make it go down easier. With a wink and a nudge, men can perform their masculine duties, making it clear they are aware it’s all an act. Irony allows us to admit, or at least refer to, masculinity’s passing and yet sustain the deceased concept (perhaps cryogenically freezing it, like Stallone in
Demolition Man
, in case we need it down the road). A man might open the door for a woman, but with one meaningful glance can communicate, “I know this is silly, but I want to do it anyway.” The woman, in turn, can silently reply, “I’m glad you’re smart enough to realize what you are doing, but I’m still glad you’re doing
it.” And thus, masculinity is sustained despite, and by the very reference to, its death.
To think about it another way, imagine that a script for a family TV show from the 1970s was produced today. Though it was written with perfect seriousness at the time, it would literally be impossible for the show to be anything but kitsch to us. The father figure could only be seen as ironic, mocking fatherhood. His masculine gestures would be overdone and hilarious because they are perfectly sincere. Expecting a laugh track, we’d hear only silence. One need look no farther than
That ‘70s Show
, which uses this historical shift for its comedic edge; its best humor emanates from the zealous masculine gestures of patriarch Red Forman—but with the anticipated laugh track accompaniment. We view sincere masculinity as either a sign of earnest youthfulness (“he’s so cute”) or aged backwardness (“he’s so old-fashioned”); both invite condescension. But our ironic assaults on masculinity aren’t as clever as they seem. Masculinity still has the last laugh, as we go on structuring our reality around its remains. And so we’ve resurrected the plot of
Weekend at Bernie’s,
toting around a dead guy so that our world doesn’t fall apart. Masculinity’s symbolic death won’t be complete until we’ve stopped organizing our society around it—until we’ve closed the casket. But we’re still holding up his arms and gesturing for him.
It’s obvious that the artistic failure of
Weekend at Bernie’s
could’ve been avoided if the status of masculinity had actually been rendered in the body of Bernie. What a movie it would have been if, instead of pretending that Bernie’s limp corpse was alive, the protagonists had simply “pretended” he was dead, cracking jokes about how pallid and subdued he seemed—perhaps even enlisting the other characters in this masquerade. Bernie could “live” on forever—undead—just as masculinity is doing. After all, once everyone is joking about his lack of vitality, who would dare declare it for real? And what would it matter, anyway? Their assertion would just be absorbed by the joke. If everyone is already joking about the emperor’s “skimpy” new clothes, the boy who observes that he’s wearing nothing no longer matters. If only the cast of
Bernie’s
had the refined sense of irony that we do, it would’ve reached trilogy status.
Our charade is, of course, functioning alongside the continued faithful performances of masculinity’s true believers. But masculinity’s death is now appearing in the very pop culture that helped build and sustain it for
so long. It’s not a coincidence that reality TV has been the biggest source of this instability. Without scripts and multiple takes, people’s “complexities” (i.e., genders) are bound to break out.
This gives those of us who want to bury the masculine corpse an unprecedented opportunity. And what are we doing with this opportunity we’ve said we want? We’re lounging around cracking jokes, pleased with our command of irony. It makes you wonder if we really desire what we’re demanding. It’s so much safer to make demands you never expect to be fulfilled.
One problem, it seems, is our failure to recognize that gender is not synonymous with masculinity. Although masculinity couldn’t exist without gender—since the first is just one expression of the second—gender itself can survive masculinity’s demise. Failing to grasp this, we’re left thinking that if masculinity dies, then gender is buried with it. And because gender is leading a rather sprightly existence at this historical moment—gender identities are hatching everywhere—we mistakenly think that masculinity must also be a spring chicken. If we don’t want to kill off gender, we resign ourselves to masculinity.
But if masculinity is like Bernie, gender is like
Melrose Place.
Almost the entire cast changed from beginning to end—yet the show kept on running.
Melrose
didn’t need any particular character (well, except maybe that evil Michael Mancini guy) to continue year after year. Gender can flourish without Billy or Allison, but masculinity doesn’t exist without
Melrose Place.
Conflating the characters with the show stops us from seeing this situation clearly. There can and will be other genders if masculinity is buried. The show will go on. In fact, it is inconceivable that gender, which essentially has its hands in the entire jar of human behaviors, appearances, and preferences, could disappear. But it
can
give way to a multiplicity of gender expressions, to a million ways of being a recognizable human—instead of just two.
Of course, all the same could be said for femininity. But I wouldn’t know anything about that … being a guy and all.