Friday, January 18, 2013

And then there was television

Hello again world. Welcome to 2013. We made it. I resolved to watch less television. When I go back to college. I am very thankful for the addendum about college to my original resolution since I watched two full seasons of Lost Girl and a lot of Bones and a shameful amount of other shows mostly of the Joss Whedon variety all within the new year. Oh and I almost forgot my Heroes obsession. Except I quit Heroes when it got to complicated. So anyway I wanna talk about Lost Girl. More specifically the first episode of the third season. *disclaimer* this is not a recap. I don't have the time or patience to recap at the moment. Maybe this summer... Anyway this is a response to a recap I read that was written by someone who has as much respect for the show as I do but clearly comes from a different part of society than me. Which is interesting. I am pretty sure she was also a feminist. However she was straight so her recap forced me to look at the show in an entirely different way. Which I did not appreciate. She should have let me ship Lauren and Bo quietly and in peace. Because damn, they're hot.

But before we jump into that I want to discuss the fact  that I recommended Lost Girl to a friend of mine who is totally the most annoying film geek/enthusiast that I know and she had the nerve to tell me that I promised her banter and it wasn't there and that the acting was bad. Can we take a moment of silence for the fact that my best friend insulted my favorite show at the moment? I might not enjoy Donwton Abbey or Sherlock but I know better than to tell her. I may have enjoyed Mama Mia but I don't need her telling me everything that is wrong with it. I think that television is meant to be a reflection of society in some way. It is meant to show us what we could do if we wanted, and to give us a bit of an escape from the totally insanity that is our everyday lives. I think if you can relate to a character then the actor is doing their job. Television is all about being relatable.

Anyway I have a couple points that I would like to discuss in my not a recap of Lost Girl 3.1.

1) Objectification of women in prison for the sexual pleasure of the viewing audience.

The recap I read complained a lot about the fact that this episode took a step away from the former sex positivity associated with the show. However I don't think that accurately portraying the brutality of a women's prison is objectification. I can't speak for male viewers, but as a lesbian viewer I was not sexually pleased by any of the compromising positions that Bo was forced into. I wasn't checking her out when they showed her from the neck up in decontamination. She's been more naked in happier scenes, so why would I cling to that one? There is also another scene in which she is hosed down as punishment and then felt up by the warden. I think we can just all agree that the warden is creepy and is objectifying the prisoners. Perhaps this is some of the corruption that Bo and Lauren are trying to expose. I think the objectification isn't actually objectification by the audience. It is objectification by the other characters in the show and therefore I feel that it is still a societal comment on our own problems without saying that objectification of women is ok.

The original recap that I read discussed the second time that Bo is hosed down and compared it to a scene in an earlier episode in which Bo hosed down Dyson and his old Pack friend to break up a fight. I really want to say that neither of these were objectification. The original author discusses the objectification of the men but I must admit I didn't notice it at all. I thought they were just two soaked guys because they were fighting and Bo didn't know that it was friendly. I fail to see how that is bad. Although the original author seemed to think the scene with the two men was acceptable. Because it was fun. I want to argue that she thought it was ok because she likes men. And so she was able to appreciate the way that the characters looked while drenched in water while the water scene did still manage to advance the plot so viewers like me, of the uninterested in men variety, would continue to watch the show as though that was just a scene that happened and not think anything of it. The original writer therefore is objectifying the men just as much as the tv show is if not more. I also think that my view point as a gay woman allows me to not take the Bo drenching scene in the most recent episode as sexual is because I recognize how uncomfortable Bo is. And I personally am incapable of separating that kind of discomfort from a scene to subjectively see it as hot. It is all or nothing for me and something degrading to women is not a source of my sexual pleasure. I felt accused of enjoying this scene for sexual reasons... Clearly I am a little defensive at the moment.

2) The idea that the man is better for the bisexual heroine than the girl.

My next complaint about the recap that I read was the enthusiasm that was evident in her personal assertion that Dyson was of better stock than Lauren. I know within every fan base there is this contention. But I want to take a moment to discuss both Lauren and Dyson from my point of view. The issues of sexual orientation will be discussed in bullet point 3. Anyway I always found Dyson annoying. And I must admit that this is in part because he is named after a vacuum cleaner. But it is more because he was jealous and possessive of Bo and incredibly mean to Lauren after he had told Bo that he didn't want to be monogamous. If you say see other people than you have to be willing to let your partner do that too. Additionally he was keeping secrets from Bo, secrets about her mom and I think it's acceptable to keep some secrets from your partner but not that ones that you know she is killing herself over. The argument against Lauren is of course that she slept with Bo because the Ash commanded it and then she didn't tell Bo about her random girlfriend who had been in a coma for five years. But I have a response to these. Yes it sucks that the Ash commanded it, but because the Ash commanded it the act of refusing him would probably have been kind of deathly or at least locked in a cellar-y. Self-preservation anyone? And the latter I equate to the case of the MIA partner or spouse. The person is essentially dead to you except you still have a glimmer of hope for them. I think that through that lens it is reasonable for Lauren to not tell Bo about Nadia. Nadia is essentially MIA due to the coma.


3) Fragmentation of the fan base. And future fan bases. And Gay vs. Straight in the shipping of couples.

So building of my previous points the splintering of any fan base comes down to OTPs a lot. Or at least to who ships whom. In my opinion the trouble with the bisexual heroine, is of course not actually trouble, because I am all for more accurate representation of all orientations on tv, but the trouble none the less is the division of fans along lines of orientation. the straight female viewers root for Bo and Dyson. The gay female viewers root for Bo and Lauren. I am sure there are exceptions, because there always are, but it does become an interesting fractioning. And I find it problematic on both ends because I am obviously rooting for Lauren both because she is hot and because I like seeing queer people represented on tv but also because I just don't relate to straight couples as much, I don't enjoy their scenes, and I become bored when a show becomes too much about heterosexual romance. That isn't to say that I don't have some favorite boy-girl couples from tv history. For example Willow and Oz from Buffy are one of my all time favorite couples. Because I love the characters as individuals and because Oz was so so good for Willow and I appreciated that. So I do think that straight people can root for queer couples too but I do see the trend of the angry lesbian faction when the girl chooses boy in the end, for the long run, because we simply don't have the long term happy relationships besides some of the classics like Willow and Tara (despite Tara's untimely demise) and yeah, that's about it. Brittney and Santana barely get a mention given all the flaws in glee but that is another rant. All the classic romances are Boy gets Girl. Titanic. The Notebook. Even Les Mis. It is how it was. So it's hard now to root for the boy girl couple when I see a glimmer of hope for a girl girl classic. And yet I wonder how the bi girls feel? the pan girls? the other kinds of queer? Why is TV so complicated?

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