ARE YOU A BITCH?

TV Show UnREAL, Episode 8, “Two”

The TV show UnREAL is my new favorite show on TV.  The season ended recently, but it will be back.  The show takes place on the film-set of a fictional reality-TVshow called Everlasting, which is essentially the same as The Bachelor.  In fact, the two women who created the show (and who are the producers and sometimes the writers) used to work on the show The Bachelor. UnREAL is a behind-the-scenes look at what really goes on in the making of “reality” TV, and this show focuses on the real reality:  people hooking up on set, the power plays among producers and underlings, the scheming for outcomes and scenarios, drug habits or other secrets, etc.

OK, so far so good.

The really cool thing about this show is the strength of the two female lead characters, Quinn and Rachel. They are real female characters, not contrived the way most portrayals of women are.  These are not “fabricated women” but rather an example of women who might be real people, behaving like real women do. They are human, in good and bad ways, and the actresses do an extraordinary job of bringing these very human characters to life.

Ok, still so far so good.  Now we come to the beef:

I was watching episode 8 (I had only been watching the show for a week or two prior), and a black male, gay producer (a character on the show) referred to one of the nicer, sweeter contestants on the Everlasting show that he works on as a ‘bitch.’  He had no reason to make that comment. He was looking at a video playback monitor, reviewing some of the dailies of the day in the editing room, and there was nothing bitchy going on whatsoever.

I thought to myself, “Hmm... we can’t call this guy the 'n-word' or a gay slur on TV, though he is clearly black and gay.  Why can he call a nice, sweet, pretty blonde contestant on the show a bitch?”  If THAT isn’t a double standard, what is?

So Ok, I let that go and kept watching the show.  Well, toward the end of the episode there is a big soul-searching conversation between Quinn and Rachel, where Rachel (the underling producer) says to Quinn, “You know, maybe I am just getting tired of being a manipulative bitch.” And Quinn responds by saying, “Oh, get over it.  It’s what we are and it’s what we do.”

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when women complained incessantly about how there are no good roles for women and how all the scripts are written by men, for men and about male fantasies.  The obvious answer then was that we needed more women writing and producing for film and TV.

Well, now we are in a time of unprecedented numbers of women writers and producers working in all forms of media.  And yet, TV continues to confirm and maintain prevailing attitudes of misogyny, making it “just the norm” as opposed to something that is wrong. It’s wrong to have hatred and contempt for women just because we are female.  Bitch is a word of contempt and hatred.  And yet, TV continually spreads the notion that boys will be boys and women are bitches.

I understand that it’s kind of the trend these days for girls and women to “own” the word bitch, so that it becomes a form of empowerment rather than a derogative put-down that kills our self-esteem, but the fact is, that’s exactly what that word does.  It puts women down, and on a societal level it continually reminds our delicate self-esteem that we are still regarded as less than human, and less than men.  Because, after all, bitch is a female dog. Something you can disrespect and kick around if you want, because it’s less than human.

So, as much as I do love the show UnREAL, I think it’s really important that girls and women come to recognize how women are portrayed in media, en masse. We need to pay attention to the cumulative messages about women that are continually broadcast on TV. Why are girls bitches? Are you a bitch? It’s not only that we are called bitches all the time, but it’s also all the makeup and beauty focus (i.e., defining the way women are supposed to "look"), the women in their underwear commercials, the razors to make our “bushes” look pretty so we can “hail to the V,” the TONS of female nudity making it onto our TV sets, even in ‘mainstream’ TV viewing, all that crap. The only "real women" we see on TV are usually all fake! From head to toe.

There are some exceptions, some great female characters on TV.  Like the Rayna James character on Nashville who is an awesome representation of how we can be incredible women without being “bitches," and Quinn and Rachel on UnREAL, who aren’t bitches either... they are complicated, real women in the real world.

Women and girls need to recognize how the many sexualized and bitchified conceptualizations of young women and girls that are on TV have influence over the development of attitudes about women. Especially among boys and men, but even among girls themselves. How can we expect boys to respect girls and women when all they see on TV are bitches bitching, women being called bitches, men calling women bitches, and scheming scantily clad women who often end up either being strippers, hookers and/or murdered?

Even shows like Dancing with the Stars make women look like skanks, hos and ignorants.  This is a lot of what is on TV. And in EVERY show on TV that is rated TV-14 or above (which is the vast majority of programming, in any day part), women are referred to as bitches.  The fact that now women characters are calling other women characters “bitch” is serving to normalize the reality that women are, simply and in fact, bitches.

Ironically, the writer of that episode of UnREAL is a woman.  She didn’t have to write the dialog into the script of that black character referring to the nice female contestant as a bitch.  And she didn’t have to have the two strong female characters calling themselves bitches, either, but she did.  This is how misogyny works on TV, it is taught. Through endless repetition and few alternative options. Until women start recognizing this, we will always be second class citizens.  Men will actually respect us much more if we stand up to this onslaught, rather than always just being complacent, or worse, complicit, about it.