It’s hard for me to know what to say about Girls. I like it tremendously; yet I think the critiques of its racial politics are valid. I want to give Lena Dunham a lecture (perhaps the lecture I delivered at grad school about being conscious of the blindness of privilege as we write) and I want to give her a hug.
Even more than that, the women in these stories have transcended being “good female characters” who subvert stereotyps into just being good characters, period; real ones, ones whose journeys we are, sometimes to a desperate extent, obsessed with.
The “heart” of Big Love has been in the question of how women survive in patriarchy, zooming in on the three wives struggling with the fundamental inequality of their relationships. But the show has lost its way.
The biggest surprise about last night’s series premiere of Sister Wives, TLC’s new reality series about fundamentalist Mormon polygamist Kody Brown and his three—wait, now, four?!!—wives was that it got rave reviews from critics.
Women’s groups recognize NBC for its honest, compelling and realistic portrayal of a young woman facing an unintended pregnancy and her decision to chose abortion.
Favorite romantic works of art as of late? Two old-fashioned, British costume dramas: "Emma" on TV and "Bright Star" in theaters. Some say these represent
a backlash against sexual liberation but both achieve the goal of being enrapturing and romantic while subtly
critiquing conventional conceptions of love.
The folks at NBC’s long-running legal franchise Law & Order must have thought they’d garner praise for their episode on abortion. The show, however, was anything but balanced.
I did find Accidentally on Purpose on CBS, the story of Billie, (Jenna Elfman) a movie critic who has a fling with the young, handsome, unstable Zach (Jon Foster). She quickly becomes pregnant.
Even as we anticipate watching the women who work at Sterling Cooper struggle with changing gender roles, we are watching that struggle take place in a privileged world.
“Mad Men” is all about the hard truths, and the hard truth is that being a woman forging her own path in the early 60s was very lonely indeed.
