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?

Yeah yeah I eavesdrop...

So I got to hang out with my cousin for pretty much the first time ever over this break. We went to this cute little grill for lunch and spent her dad's money on some really awesome food. I felt like a pig because I pretty much inhaled my food. But it was all good, her dad didn't really feed me much while I was there. Anyway we talked politics and stuff. She was glad both of the vote no's we voted no and all the good stuff.

After we finished that conversation there was a pause while we were both eating and I heard the people at the next table having a heated discussion on gay people on TV. The complaint was that sure gay people were fine and everything but they don't need to be in every TV show. And they definitely don't need to be shown making out more than straight people.

So. Much. Anger. So much was wrong with that statement first of all. For one thing, nowhere near every TV show has a gay character. If that was actually the case I would be the happiest person ever. But no. I have to actively seek out my gay people. I watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on huluplus and Pretty Little Liars, and Glee. These are my shows that I watch for the gay characters. I watch Revolution, Big Bang Theory, Legend of Korra and Once Upon a Time for the show itself, and let me tell you, no gays in those shows. And back to the fact that the gays in TV shows do not kiss with the same frequency as straight couples. Back when Brittany and Santana were together on Glee I waited for episodes and episodes for them to kiss. And then they finally did. But it was no where near as frequently occurring as say Finn and Rachel. (Maybe this is bad of me because I don't really pay attention to gay men, only gay women in TV, but still I think my point holds.)

So wrong and wrong on account of gay people not being in every show and not making out more than straight people. But really, for me the biggest thing is that these people don't understand why having gay people on TV is important. For me that is huge. I grew up watching TV, not all the time, not the way I do now... but it was a part of my childhood and a part of my early teenage years. And for me, being represented on TV is something that everyone wants. It validates you as a person in certain ways. I used to watch Friends for Ross's ex-wife and her wife. The fact that they were doing the whole gay-married thing validated me, even if they were minor characters who very rarely if ever kissed they made me feel like being with a woman was acceptable.

Also stray thought, there aren't gay people in advertisements yet. Gay people are still polarizing and don't sell products well. This is interesting to me. I think that advertisements are the ultimate acceptance. Most races are represented even if it is not proportional. However there are very few, if any, muslims in advertisements, just like gay people. I believe this is because these two groups of people are still polarizing to the public and therefore they don't sell products effectively.

Anyway, back to the uninformed TV watchers in the restaurant. The fact that they were even having the conversation helps my case more than theirs. By this I mean that, the fact that they think an increasing number of gay characters equates to at least one in every show shows that they are not yet comfortable with seeing gay people. They are seeing one and taking it to be way more. Also the way that they are assuming that because gays are now ok to kiss on TV that equates to making out or more in their heads, just proves that they need more exposure to this stuff. It makes me happy that kids will grow up being exposed to this stuff on a far larger scale than I was. Even if I do believe there is still a long way to go.