It’s A Woman’s World.

I guess at some point I was in titled to write something about how women are depicted in shows and movies, whether it is supposed to be a feminist program or not really. So here I am, let’s give it a go.

I’m going to start with a review of Sex And The City, which originally aired from 1998 to 2004 and then with two more movies and a sort of reboot or however it is labelled called And Just Like That, which is supposed to pick up the same characters and put them in a more updated world. I’m not going to try to go for the prequel.

Honestly this show was groundbreaking at the time. It depicted a more raw and free version of women, more empowered and feminist. Four single women, in New York, in their thirties and on. The idea worked very well as they tried to show they needed no men to be successful, and also tried to break moulds of the patriarchy like you can either be successful or a mother, etc.

Unfortunately the idea went soft the more the show went on, and except for Samantha, the rest end up being just what society expects women to be. By this I mean a men ruled society. As I already wrote on SATC vs AJLT, they close the series and even go further in the movies with a non so progressive idea. Miranda gets pregnant by accident, keeps the baby, gets married to the father since she didn’t manage to have a single mother life, and they end up moving together out of Manhattan. Charlotte finds the love of her life but has to change religion in order to marry him. He doesn’t do anything towards her, again a woman has to do all the work to be married. Both characters did it for love. Which is the excuse always used for sacrifying their onw personas. As for Carrie, after spending 6 seasons coming back and forth around Big, after proving he was not a good man and he was mistreating her by now accepting her as she was, they end up together and getting married. Not with the good guy Aidan, by the way she cheats on him with Big, like I wrote on Bad Boys. So a show about women power ends up by showing us it is all good but a good woman hs to be married no matter how and with whom.

Let’s go back in time a bit now. Xena, Warrior Princess. Originally aired from 1995 to 2001. Although it came as a cheap spin off of Hercules, it became soon more popular to the point where it has become some kind of cult. Not only for showing a pair of strong women who need no men to make justice in a time when all warriors and heroes where masculine, but also for depicting a friendship between them that could be read as something more gay. The fact they never openly said anything about being lovers and letting it for the audience to decide, remember it’s the nineties, was a great idea, and gave us lgtbq teens some kind of reference.

Xena’s journey is great, she comes from being evil to be the mother of all good, kinda, but the best one is her sidekick Gabrielle. She was just a farm girl in episode 1 and (spoiler) she becomes the warrior princess herself in the last one. She goes from being just a bard to become queen of amazons, peace representant to great fighter, until she really becomes an equal to the main character. All this with no men around to propel them to their goals.

One of my favourite shows is Charmed. This one aired from 1998 until 2006. It tells the story of three sisters that discover they are witches. This is the important part, the base of all the show is their relationship, the magic is secondary. Although there was a changing on the dynamics after season 3 with the departure of one actress and the arrival of another, they were the ones saving the world, or the city, in a weekly basis.

This was a real powerful women show. Even if they had to fight demons, and other male enemies, they always found the way to succeed and vanquish them. The main plot was always how they would make their lifes go as normal as possible as they were fighting evil. Of course the love search was very present, first it was a bit like the guy of the week thing. Which back then was a bit too much for certain audiences, but if you can have a bad guy of the week, why not also a good one ? With the passing of time it obviously evolved to get more intense. So they got married and divorced and married again, and they got children eventually. Maybe this part is the most classic one and it could have tried to get more modern, still it wasn’t its aim when the show started. Considering that Spelling was behind it, I can say it was pretty bold for its time.

They tried to make a reboot around 2018 because they thought it was not feminist enough. Three women saving the world on a weekly basis on their own was, apparently, not enough girl power, and they were looking for something more recent. The only thing in which they improved was making one of the sisters lesbian and that’s it. I tried to watch it but got bored of seeing something that looked like a rip off from the original show.

Speaking of bold, we have 2 Broke Girls. It aired from 2011 to 2017, so we get to more recent times. Even if almost half of the cast is male, the main characters are Max and Caroline, two waitresses, one comes from a low income background whilst the other has to accept this job because she just lost all her money because of some bad businesses her father did. In this show, the treatment of girl power is as strong and raw as it can be. They talk about tampons, self pleasure, and basically treaten men as they treat women. I would say it went further than SATC but without the obvious nudity and too much emphasis on the sex. Although they treat the subject a lot, sometimes you don’t need to actually show it to make your point. Not everything needs to be Game Of Thrones and the free nudity just for the sake of it.

Probably the fact that it is a comedy show,  made it easier to make fun of some topics and go through them without being too polemic. Although the critics didn’t appreciate so much controversy and boldness and after 6 seasons, the show got cancelled. The racial jokes and the too much sexual and drug humor was something the American audience didn’t like. I must say that in Europe it worked pretty well.

Two women can manage to find their way from broke to less poor all the way by working together and helping each other. Talk about girl power. OK they wanted to sell cupcakes and worked in a Diner, but the main storyline about how they get their dreams, which for once don’t involve getting married and having children, and how they kind of managed to make them come true. With no men around. The fact the show got pull off the stations leaves us with not a real ending.

Another show that got taken off the air for being too bold was Cybill. Aired from 1995 to 1998. It treats the topic of ageism in Hollywood and how women are definitely not treated equally by the industry as men. Christine Baranski plays the sidekick of the actress who is looking to remain relevant in her fifties in a business that only want young people, and where men have to deal with way less issues than their female counterparts. As with the previous show, the depiction of women sexuality and the main character bold feminist leaning was too much for the audience. Despise having some nineties vibes throughout the show, I must reckon that it is one of those that did age well, and most of the basic story lines about feminism are still, unfortunately, real.

The harsh way of showing to their faces that Hollywood is misogynistic is something most didn’t appreciate. Everytime I watch the show I feel some real life inspired topics from the two main characters, which is probably why in the end they got cancelled. Some men, show-business men, don’t like to be told the truth about their condition.

On the brighter side there are also two other shows that didn’t make it through despite, or maybe because of, having single business women as main characters. One is Suddenly Susan, with Brooke Shields, where she plays a magazine writer that is new to being single, and the other one is Veronica’s Closet, where the late Kirstie Alley is the owner of a successful lingerie company, but needs to deal with the world of fashion when you are not 20 anymore. More ageism in this last one, she had to confront a world where youth and being blonde is more important than actual skills. It aired from 1997 to 2000. Whilst the first one from 1996 to 2000 too. Those comedies used, as the previous ones, the humor to get to the topics that hurt, and show how feminism is never done. Teaching the men in power how different the world is from the other side of gender, which they don’t appreciate.

This is why strong women are always going to be hated and they will try to destroy them. They did it back them with the witch trials, inventing false evidences against those ones that were not docile. Even nowadays you can see how the media try to trash whatever woman that speaks freely and points out the flaws of our patriarchal society. Madonna is one of them, without whom many singers wouldn’t be as famous as they are. She paved the path for them to become stars, as many others did beforsy, but by being bold and behave like men normally do, she is one of the most hated women on earth. She does whatever she wants, she earned it, and still so much hatred goes in her direction, basically because part of the society does want women to be equal to men.

Patriarchy is something that has been printed very deep within our minds since the dawn of time. The fact that for the Bible women were created from a rib, proves this point. We live in a world ruled by men, up until very recently, and they don’t want to lose their power, but confronting half of the population may not be the best idea. Besides women rights don’t take men’s off, on the contrary they implement them. Rights sum up, never the opposite.

March 2023

PS. I will come to write about female superheroes another day. I know some of you expected me to write about the DCU or the Marvels but they deserve a whole entry on their own.