I’m done!! Okay, Grammar Police, do your worst! Ha!

Part 1 of 5

When referring to anything as a “smallpox” one is left with the impression of something that blisters our minds and scars us for life. TV seems to have that affect on many people. The news reports, as Ms. Douglas writes, seem to work from a perspective of rehashing old stories or focusing on surface events of little consequence to our real lives (271) leaving gaping holes in our need for escapism due to the high pressures of family, work, and other areas of daily life. Ms. Douglas takes on a feminist perspective with her article. Like Alessandra Stanley, writing in the New York Times about Grey’s Anatomy, she finds the men to be hyper-sensitized and the women to be stereotyped in their presentations. Ms Stanley writes that “today’s heroines have to be weak, needy and oversexed to be liked by women and desired by men” (”The New Modern Woman, Ambitious and Feeble”, The New York Times, para. 6). However, this is opposite the criticism leveled by Ms. Douglas. She finds them to be overly masculine in demeanor and stereotyped in all the wrong ways (273). Both women, however, find these “over-the-top escapist” shows, as Ms. Stanley calls them, to fill a need. Ms. Douglas finds them to be a poor but acceptable vaccination against the “ideological smallpox” (271) rendered to the public by the media only out to infect others with their sense of bland news and irrelevant storylines. Ms. Stanley finds them to be indicative of the demeaning aspect of women in the media. Regardless of which perspective one takes, the attitude toward the media is the same: that is, “real life” media is force-feeding us this “make-believe” reality while we run off to watch “make-believe” to feel better about our “real life”.

Part 2 of 5

Susan Douglas in her essay, “Signs of Intelligent Life on TV,” seems to believe that professional women are attracted to gutsy, hard edged, drama shows because they show a side of women the news media seems to overlook on a regular basis (274). Ms. Douglas, however, seems to find herself attracted to the men in these types of dramas that, interestingly enough as an observation, also seem to be some of the same types of men portrayed — however abrupt or minimal in context — on the nightly news. Police officers, firemen, doctors; all of these are the kinds of “real life” individuals the news media reports about on a regular basis. The difference seems to be in Ms. Douglas’ view of how she relates to these kinds of men and women in her obsession with dominant women and her ideas of “real men”. In her haste to de-objectify women as helpless or merely “bitches” (272), she has no hesitation in objectifying men, even if only one man in NYPD Blue, by quite overtly suggesting that one of the draws to these types of shows was “male nudity” (271). Even her descriptions of the music for these shows as “supported by the driving, phallic backbeat” (271) just salivates all over her ability to differentiate between the demeaning of women’s roles in society and her desire to objectify her ideals of men.

Part 3 of 5

Ms. Douglas claims in her essay that the overt roles of women are changing through such dramas as ER and NYPD Blue. Using the former as an example, she claims that women appear to be “smart, efficient, and successful” (272). She then launches into a diatribe about the roles of women as they are actually played through the scenes as either buffoons or backseat riders to the men they support (272). She provides evidence of her claims through the roles of mistress, mother, or victim in many of the relationships that are held by the leading men in these dramas. However, Ms. Douglas says the hidden message about gender roles in these shows is that women are still second fiddle to men, home-wreckers, and — even after all these years of advances in feminism —”the weaker sex” (272). Through several of her examples she mentions how helpless or evil the heroine seems in her role against, or at least in contrast to, a man whom she describes more as a stalker than a broken or tragic hero (273). There is an undertone in her hidden message that says heroines in these dramas exemplify a single, childless, “upper-middle class” (273) woman with few responsibilities therefore few struggles in life. It is the healthy, handsome and headstrong myth that is so very nineties — as is this essay.

Part 4 of 5

Non-Caucasian women, to Ms. Douglas in her essay on TV, are depicted in ways that are demeaning at best and inadequate at worst. She seems to have an inadequate understanding of actor “billing” when it comes to TV shows but finds that the “black women” in ER “don’t get top billing” (273). Furthermore, she finds that Oriental and Latin American woman are rarely seen in these shows and African-American woman are usually cast in more degrading roles such as prostitutes (273). Her opinion seems to be that this kind of “ideological sludge” (273) is taking over what should be strong female role models in these shows. While Ms. Douglas does not back up her statements with any kind of research or validation model, she seems to assume these are caricatures of bad people rather than attempts by the show’s creators at a true-to-live mockup of the locations being depicted. In many ways it is interesting to read her projections onto the women she views in these shows. She claims to be a “sucker for the men” (273) while exclaiming that she is looking for strong female role models in these shows that are merely surface level characters at best. She doesn’t really ever present a strong case for the men she wants while she tears apart the women she wants to admire.

Part 5 of 5

Somehow, in her essay “Signs of Intelligent Life on TV,” Susan Douglas manages to equate police brutality and ignorance of the Fourth Amendment as some kind of “new conservatism” (273). In one of her examples, police “frequently” threaten and beat suspects under the guise of “it’s O.K. because they all turn out guilty” (273). She lumps all women into two classes of privileged — single, childless, independent, financially secure — and everyone else. She characterizes these latter as “adoptive [moms] who desert their kids, abusive [moms] who burn their kids, and hooker [moms] (ipso facto bad)” (273). She neglects, for instance, moms in the show ER who are not married, not upper-middle class, not childless and who see their share of struggles with ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends, and the trauma of their own jobs in a hospital. And these are actresses with good billing and the characters have names and important roles in the show itself. Ms. Douglas say that TV has not “achieved everyday homosexual couples on TV” (272), but we find that not only is the primarily gay character in ER a woman, but a successful doctor with a healthy relationship and a child with her partner. We should not hold it against her that she is Caucasian, but see that TV provides a radius of characters from all different walks of life. These particular dramas, filled with their strong women and equally strong men, are just a selection of possibilities that Ms. Douglas could have picked. But she seems to be working from some kind of “new liberalism” that paints women as victims no matter what they do — even when what they do is merely an illusion of real life on a TV show.