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Sex, Love and Television
By Judith Halberstam
On Sunday evenings in George W. Bush’s American, a place where more than half of the population does not believe in evolution, where many of those same people go to church regularly, where abortion may soon be outlawed and where gay marriage is unthinkable, millions of god-fearing viewers pull up a chair on Sunday nights to tune into the latest episode of Desperate Housewives. What, we might ask, draws the average American viewer--someone likely to have a strong sense of the sanctity of marriage, an abiding belief in the importance of pre-marital abstinence and a rigid moral outlook--to a show about infidelity, teenage promiscuity, scandal, secrecy, murder and deceit? Indeed, as a new season dawns on Desperate Housewives and as the suburban ladies brace themselves for the new scandals that will rock their unusually violent and perverse suburban world, it is perhaps good to take a moment to ask: what is the appeal of this most American of soap operas both in the US and internationally? What does Desperate Housewives have to offer Western European communities and hard working, high earning, politically aware but socially conservative Swiss audiences in particular? Why, finally, would Laura Bush announce that she is not only a fan of the show but a desperate housewife herself!?
Following in the footsteps of other wildly popular primetime soaps like Melrose Place and Knots Landing, Dallas and Dynasty and building upon the more recent legacy of Sex in the City, Desperate Housewives offers viewers a combination of sex, family secrets, murder mystery and romance. Like Knots Landing, it builds its drama around a tight-knit community in a mythic suburban setting, and like Melrose Place and Dallas, the otherwise ordinary characters manage to embroil themselves in an unusually high number of extremely unlikely events ranging from murder to suicide to kidnappings, double-crossings, prostitution, money-laundering, conspiracies, intrigues and mad, passionate, illicit affairs. Like Sex in the City, Desperate Housewives offers viewers not one or two protagonists but four female leads and their male counterparts, and like Sex in the City, the show casts each of the women in some archetypal—the career woman, the vixen, the cynic, the romantic--role. The conceit of Sex in the City was that these women—smart, professional, urbane—did not need men in order to feel complete and instead chose to take their chances in the world of dating. This conceit wears thin quickly since the entire show is about the women’s relationships with men and it becomes obvious by about Season Three that everyone of them will end up married and pregnant.
And when they do…they may turn into desperate housewives. Like the ladies looking for love and sex in the city, the women of Wisteria Lane are all smart, all self-motivated and all wise to the not-so-mysterious ways of men. Like the Sex in the City women, they are also represent a range of rather predictable heterosexual femininities: the desperate housewives range from Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher), the creative type and single mom to Bree Van Der Kamp, the uptight, Republican stay at home mom, and on to Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman), the imperfect, often harried and always out of control mom, and finally, to Gabrielle Solis, the gorgeous trophy wife with no kids and no desire for kids. The cast is rounded out by Mary Alice Young, the original “perfect but desperate” housewife who kills herself in the show’s opening minutes and Edie Britt (Nicolette Sheridan) the voluptuous and predatory real estate maven. All the action happens on an almost claustrophobic studio set, and the four women, their variously messed up children and their long-suffering husbands, play dramatic set pieces about the exasperation of motherhood, the undependable nature of men, the neuroses of single women and the dangers of female promiscuity. Audiences, presumably, watch the show in part because the choreography of these crises is familiar to them: they recognize the thrust and parry of lovers’ threats and promises, the give and take of husbands and wives balancing the quota of household labor, the daily drama of parents and children battling for domestic control. And if the more mundane aspects of life in the suburbs come tied to the high drama of unsolved mysteries, slowly simmering romances and perverse sexual practices, well perhaps this just satisfies a basic human urge to believe that underneath every serene and possibly dull surface lies a dark, disturbing and deeply intriguing well of secrets.
Presumably 24 million viewers in the US, and millions of others elsewhere are not drawn to Desperate Housewives for its political messages, and yet, a wholly unexpected but extremely welcome aspect of Desperate Housewives has to do with the quite overt commitment it makes to some version of TV feminism. In Sex in The City, of course, Carrie and her urban friends also delivered smart speeches about female autonomy but the feminism of Desperate Housewives is a little different since it has to cover topics like housework, divisions of labor, custody battles and pre-nuptial agreements. The most feminist narrative line in Desperate Housewives probably involves Felicity Huffman’s character Lynette, a reluctant stay at home mother who has given up a high powered corporate career to satisfy her husband’s desire for a large family. The show’s creator Marc Cherry claims that he based this character on his mother, who told him later in life how difficult it had been for her to raise three children. In the show, Lynette gets addicted to her children’s attention-deficit-disorder medication, loses control of her kids and struggles to stay afloat. She, more than any other character, with the possible exception of Susan, the single mom, regularly accuses the men in her life of being sexist and she gives viewers regular doses of liberal feminist ideas about equality and sexual objectification. Of course, the show makes sure that these feminist outbursts are rendered as individual responses to domesticity rather than as part of any collective enterprise to transform heterosexual life! Furthermore, many of the feminist moments on the show are also saturated with moral outrage, reminding us that this is the version of feminism that finds fellowship with the Christian right rather than the version that advocates the complete dismantling of the nuclear family. And so, for example, one of the more feminist scenes in the first season involved the openly Republican, devoutly Christian Bree Van Der Kamp and it manages to link feminism to the denunciation of pornography. Bree follows her wayward son one night to a strip club and then berates him for objectifying women saying: “Andrew, I’m curious. When you fantasize about this woman, do you ever stop to think how she came to be on this runway? That’s someone’s little girl. And that someone probably had a lot of dreams for her. Dreams that did not include a thong... and a pole...”
The somewhat camp rendition of Bree’s anti-porn speech reminds us that the show’s feminism, like the feminism on Sex in the City, is far from the radical feminism of bra-burning, international sisterhood and it is both consistent with certain religious anti-porn positions and actually filtered through not a female consciousness but a gay male lens: the creator of Sex in the City, Darren Starr, and the creator of Desperate Housewives, Marc Cherry, are both openly gay men. And it is this gay male influence more than anything that must be credited for both the inclusion of a low-level but fairly hard hitting feminist discourse and the limiting of that feminist point of view by camp and ironic punch lines which take the edge off the seriousness of the critique. In other words, audiences don’t mind a bit of feminism as long as it comes with a lot of irony, camp humor and no real commitment to female bonding. Camp feminism, in the end, advocates for freedom alright but, as we see in the show, it is the freedom to shop, the freedom to hire a maid, the freedom to sleep around that is paramount…here, freedom’s just another word for one more pair of shoes…
Many critics of Desperate Housewives have blamed the show’s licentiousness and unsavory nature upon the “gay agenda” of Marc Cherry, and this despite the fact that according to some reports, Cherry is a conservative Republican. In fact, Cherry’s framing of many of the perverse themes of the shows within a rigidly moral framework may well be one reason for the show’s popularity across the political spectrum. American audiences in particular seem comfortable with themes of sex and violence as long as they come packaged as a morality play within which bad people get punished and good people get rich. But most Republican and Christian critics of the show do not find common ground with gay male Hollywood types and so while they may secretly enjoy following the dramatic developments on Wisteria Lane, in public they will cast the show as part of some gay conspiracy to corrupt, seduce and convert its audiences. If only!! While we are still waiting for the fabulous popular TV show that is capable of converting mass audiences to radical politics and unconventional genders and sexualities (Desperate Queer Revolutionaries anyone?), we can still acknowledge that the right wing identification of gay male influence in Desperate Housewives may be accurate.
Even if queer politics are not at the forefront of the series, a gay male aesthetic indeed is discernible in the show: Edie Britt, for example, resembles a drag queen with her excessive femininity and femme fatale demeanor, and many of the male characters are drawn along the lines of certain macho stereotypes that one might find in gay porn. But the dialogue of the series is also extremely camp, often to the point of parody. In many exchanges, the women trade lines like drag queens at a beauty contest: for example, Gabrielle asks her husband in the middle of one of their fights: “Why are all rich men such jerks?” Right on cue, he answers: “the same reason all beautiful women are bitches.” Or when Susan asks Edie if she believes in evil, Edie quips back: “of course I believe in evil, I work in real estate.” And when Gabrielle runs out of credit on her teenage boyfriend’s credit card and he tells her she better take back the shoes she just bought, she warns him: “Return the shoes? I can’t talk to you when you’re hysterical.” The camp tone, obviously, enhances the appeal of the show, it leavens the dark themes of murder and infidelity and it livens up the interactions between the women. But, again, it also distracts attention away from any real radical feminist potential and it deflects all possibilities of genuine intimacy between the women.
Interestingly, then, especially given its interest in all kinds of so-called sexual perversity from male homosexuality to sado-masochism, there is one topic that the show, despite its supposedly gay agenda, never approaches – namely, lesbianism. Perhaps because the intimate relationships between the housewives are so central to the show’s success, and therefore must never even hint at desire between the women, but also because the overt feminism must not ever tip into a devastating critique of heterosexuality itself, the L word is simply never mentioned.
But if the desperate housewives did decide that heterosexuality, like motherhood, domesticity and marriage, was not all it was cracked up to be, then perhaps they would be guest stars on Showtime’s breakout hit, the internationally acclaimed The L Word, created by Eileen Chaikin. Like Desperate Housewives, The L Word has had tremendous international success, especially in Western Europe, and like Desperate Housewives, The L Word has spawned numerous viewing parties: enthusiastic lesbian viewers in particular gather to watch every new episode in bars and pubs and at house parties. The L Word has even inspired parody skits including a full-length film titled The D Word (referring in English to “dyke”). In fact, as the parody film implies, The L Word may well have more in common with Desperate Housewives than it does with other queer texts given its commitment to the soap opera format and the appeal that it makes to the broadest possible audience. While Desperate Housewives lures in male viewers with sexually naughty themes (it is apparently extremely popular in Australia among men), The L Word panders to the male viewer by constantly triangulating romantic and sexual scenes between women with a male viewer, often explicitly a voyeuristic male viewer. In one story line, one of the women’s male room mates sets up a web cam to watch what happens in her bedroom; and in another, a bisexual character’s boyfriend is present during her interactions with women. In a really memorable scene, a lesbian couple, Tina and Bette, who are trying to get pregnant, pick up a lucky stud who thinks he is walking into the fantasy of his life but quickly realizes that the lovely ladies who have brought him home only want his sperm. This precipitates a ludicrous scene of recriminations in which the stud feels used and delivers one of the more political speeches of the series about sexual integrity! The L Word in Season One, in fact, gave up far too much time to this kind of male rage and in its deliberate bid for the hearts and minds of the 16-25 male viewership, it ignored its own queer spectators.
Some queer viewers have also critiqued The L Word for its heterosexualization of the characters. Very few of the women, in other words, actually look like lesbians (within a fairly broad range of expectations for what a “lesbian” might look like), none of them have a masculine appearance, and most of them would not look out of place on Desperate Housewives! In fact, lesbian comedienne, Marga Gomez famously wrote that the predominance of “hot” and feminine women on The L Word is not an aesthetic problem—they look good and are fun to watch—it is more, for her, a question of “dyke feng shui.” As she puts it, “you only see plain dykes in the background when the hotties go to a dance.” In other words, queer audiences want a bit of balance – a hot lady with her plain, butch/androgynous/slightly less feminine but equally hot counter-part. On heterosexual soaps like Desperate Housewives, after all, you get bitches, virgins, ingénues, adulterers, cads, nice guys, sensitive men, assertive women…you get a range of characters, in a range of gender roles, hooking up in a variety of combinations. The L Word, in its rather blatant attempt to give the stereotype of the dowdy dyke a very wide berth, tries to give us one airbrushed and properly feminine look and in the process it underestimates its very sophisticated and, by now, very committed queer fans.
As Desperate Housewives enters a new season, even the most avid fans can see trouble on the horizon. Any show that has several characters in comas at the same time, for example, has clearly run into a few narrative dead ends. And as time passes, the homely voice-overs by the very dead Mary Alice cease to provide a clever frame for the show’s multiple mysteries and congeal instead into a rather moralistic, pious and smug soundtrack for the all too familiar parade of soap opera themes that the show will now trot out. And yet, it must be said that the international appeal of shows like Sex in the City, Desperate Housewives and The L Word, obviously, can be chalked up to many factors including intelligent dialogues, interesting story lines made more interesting by totally unlikely scenarios involving murder and betrayal, and much credit can be given to the warm and vigorous acting skills that all the women bring to their roles. At a time when Hollywood has very little use for women of a certain age, perhaps television is where women over 40 go to find roles beyond the bitter mother-in-law, the predatory divorcee or the lonely spinster. You will find all three of these roles in the soap operas too but at least in shows like Desperate Housewives and The L Word, women and queers get to win sometimes, and when they do we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves in a topsy turvy moral universe where sin lies in playing it safe and virtue comes from daring to be desperate.
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