I love television. When I was 6, I snuck into my parents’ room to watch “The X-Files” through the gap between my index and middle fingers. When I was 10, my family moved to a new house big enough for my sister and I to have our own rooms, but the first change I noticed was that we now had cable. When I was 12, I started with “Lost,” the first show that I would watch from its airdate until the day of its finale. When I was 17, I live-tweeted an episode of TV for the first time (it was “Glee,” which I steadfastly followed until I was 20). At 21, I decided, with as much certainty as a 21-year-old can summon, I don’t want to go to Washington, D.C. after graduation like most of my public policy peers, but to L.A. to fight for a seat in a writers’ room.
I love television, but I also hate it, and not only because I’ve invested far too much time and emotional energy on fictional people. My love-hate relationship with television stems from the ongoing battle between my identities as both a TV lover and a feminist.
When I told a friend that “The Mindy Project” makes me uncomfortable, she prodded.
“I thought you loved Mindy Kaling,” she said.
I do. But my love for Kaling can’t trump the show’s oft-problematic storylines (including an episode in which guest star James Franco’s character Dr. L is raped, yet none of the other characters call it that) and racist, sexist jokes. I told my friend all this and more, breathless by the end of my crescendoing soliloquy. She blinked.
“Can’t you just enjoy the show? It’s funny. Do you have to always be in Critic Mode?”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard something along these lines. I’ve been called “too sensitive,” “too harsh,” even “too feminist” and all the other usual epithets hurled at most feminist critics I know. Multiple people have asked me if I’m ever going to write a TV column that doesn’t make some mention of race or gender. Well, no. I sincerely doubt it.
I have a professor who often talks about the burden of consciousness. “Consciousness is a curse,” she tells us.
Being a feminist requires a constant vigilance that’s exhausting. Sometimes I wish I could just walk away after hearing a sexist or racist remark, and there are times when I do. But when I don’t engage, I end up thinking about it for the rest of the day, sometimes longer, frustrated with my own inaction, wishing I could just close my eyes and blindly go on.
Consciousness is a curse, and I can’t ever escape it, even when I’m watching TV. Just enjoying a show isn’t a concept I can wrap my head around. Recently, the conflict between my TV-love and my feminist consciousness triggers every time someone asks what I think of “American Horror Story: Coven.” On the one hand, I love the theme. Witches are the new black in my book, and the show also provides space for very talented women who would usually be considered “too old” for TV (legends Angela Bassett, Patti Lupone, Jessica Lange and Kathy Bates join forces as the season’s baddest witches). But the racial themes “Coven” attempts to tackle are steeped in paradoxically racist images (the white witches’ magic is very flashy and modern, while the Black witches’ magic more closely resembles “voodoo” and paganistic rituals). And the way the premiere uses rape as a plot device disgusts me.
Simply put, I can’t take off my feminist hat and replace it with my slightly pointier hat that represents my love for all things witchy. There’s no switch I can flip, because my identity as a feminist is as significant and indelible to who I am as my identity as a woman, as mixed-race.
Even the shows nearest and dearest to me aren’t exempt. “Scandal” is one of my favorite dramas right now, but I hate that Olivia Pope’s fatal flaw is a man. There are a million things I love about “The Vampire Diaries,” but its refusal to talk about race isn’t one of them (nor is Elena Gilbert’s lack of agency). Even “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — which I often credit as my favorite show of all time — sends confusing, sexist messages about sex (Buffy is literally punished when she has sex with Angel for the first time).
Like many feminists, I can’t precisely pinpoint my realization of consciousness. It happened through a complicated process of examining and reexamining my own experiences, understanding the experiences of others and looking at my life and surroundings in radically new ways. During the days when I rushed home from the bus stop to catch an episode of “Digimon,” I wasn’t thinking about gender roles or stereotypes or social constructs. It’s always somewhat jarring to re-visit shows from my childhood and see things I didn’t fully understand the first time around: the heteronormativity of “Lost,” the voyeurism and racism of “Charmed” and the sex-negative dogma of “Boy Meets World.”
It’s not “just TV.” I refuse to accept that, and not because plenty of social research studies indicate media has a profound impact on the ways we interact with each other and see the world, but because when someone tells me not to care too much, that it’s just TV, they’re telling me that the things I care about aren’t worth caring about. They’re telling me my worldview is invalid.
My “Mindy Project”-loving friend thinks it’s unreasonable to hold all shows to feminist standards, to want all shows to be “feminist” shows. Is it really all that unreasonable to want to watch television that doesn’t tokenize or decontextualize people of color? That both represents and speaks to the diverse lived experiences of humans with a whole range of social identities? That’s written and made by more than just white dudes? That I can relate to beyond just an emotional or story standpoint?
Lucy Liu said it best during her acceptance speech at the New York Women in Film and Television’s Muse Awards in 2012: “I remember when I was younger, what did I want more than anything? I wanted so much to belong. I wanted to be the things that I saw around me in my environment, the things on television, the people on television.”
Ultimately, the idea of a “feminist show” is kind of a myth. Critics love to force feminism into spaces where it doesn’t exist. The Washington Post called “Mad Men” TV’s most feminist show, and ever since its pilot, critics have tried to make the case that “Game of Thrones” is a champion of feminism.
The back-and-forth discussion about whether these shows are feminist series or not, while interesting, usually misses the point. When it comes to feminism, most television shows exist on a spectrum. We can’t make the overly simplified case that “GoT” is a feminist show when its female characters are brutalized, raped and objectified, and when Daenerys’s entire story arc overflows with racism and white saviorism. But we can acknowledge the show’s pockets of feminist thought and action, seen through the way the different female characters wield power and resist the patriarchal structures of their fantastical realm. The same can be said of “Mad Men,” which features some of the best female characters on television (and one of the most female-dominated writers’ rooms), but also downplays the experiences of people of color in the 1960s.
You might be annoyed by my constant criticisms and seeming lack of satisfaction, but I’m not exactly thrilled about it either. They say “ignorance is bliss” for a reason. The curse of consciousness is exhausting, and a part of me wishes I could just watch TV, smile and go about my day. But then, I wouldn’t be me.
I love television, but that love isn’t blind. I love television so much that I want to constantly challenge it and demand progress. If that makes me an angry feminist, then I’m OK with that. As long as sexism and racism persist, I’m always going to be mad about something, even if those “somethings” exist in fictional worlds.