Television: Women Live.

I watch a lot of TV, as many people have told me; even people who thought they watch a lot of TV have been surprised at how much TV I watch. Watching this much TV can mean it becomes quite predictable; you begin to spot the tropes, the set ups & it can get quite dull. But worse than that these tropes mean I have to watch the same sexist stuff over & over & over & over. The same boring plots, the same ridiculous lines & the same clichés again & again. I’m sure there is a giant book somewhere that script writers consult that explains perfectly how to do the same thing to your characters as everyone else does, especially when they’re women. Oh if they’re women then you have a handful of roles to shove them into – as well as the same uncomfortable outfits to force them into too, a small number of things can happen to them, and they all ultimately revolve around the men in their life.

As much as each woman is born in part thanks to a man, she may have a brother or a boyfriend, and she may even live with one or two but at the end of the day she still has a whole life independent of men. She still has thoughts, feelings, hobbies; she may have a job, or kids, or a hundred and one other things that writers are happy to understand of men. But women? Being genuinely multi-faceted, complicated, human? Fuck no. That is very often one step too far. Considering the majority of TV (and film) writers are men, to say nothing of directors, it’s surprising that they often fail to use their apparent brilliance, their un-paralleled imagination, and their sheer complexity to think of female characters who do as much as their male characters do.

Now I don’t just watch one genre of TV or only watch shows done by one showrunner these are problems I see across television spanning years, channels, and styles. It’s a weirdly perpetual insistence of ignoring reality because biases won’t let them see the world for what it is. Considering the work that goes into writing & making television shows it has always baffled me that no one along the months that it takes to get a show from script so screen points out how dull it is, how predictable, how clichéd, and how bad it is.

I mean was anyone present during season 2 of The Strain? When *spoilers* Del Toro used a ridiculous myth that pineapple changes how people taste (if you know what I mean, *shudder*) to bring a female character down a peg or two. The character Dutch was incredibly smart & talented, if not a bit criminally inclined, and in the end she was still degraded like every female character is. She was on the verge of being sexually assaulted after being abducted & as she’s rescued she quite literally jumps in the arms of the big hulking man who saves her. I won’t even get into the fact that the relationship with her girlfriend was thrown to the side or how it reflects how television writes lesbians or bisexual women. It was just awful watching & knowing that I am ten times more likely to see this happen to her than to the show’s main character Eph. Half naked, bent forward Corey Stoll anyone?

This then leads me on to two things that happened in The Strain in its finale that became the straw that broke the camel’s back. Once again, spoilers. Firstly, let’s start with Coco, a young, smart, beautiful woman who falls for a very old, rich, horrible man & after the rich, old man does Something Wrong the villain then decides not to punish him, for that would be ridiculous – punish a man for his own crime?! What a world that would be – they decide to murder Coco instead. I was furious, I didn’t care all that much about either character or indeed a lot of that side of the story, no, I was angry because it once again took a whole character away because of something a man did; she was punished for who she fell in love with and for utterly no reason. As much as it seems like it will lead into a storyline where he cuts out her heart & keeps it, alive, in a jar forever so what? Why couldn’t he die? Why can’t she learn how to cut out his heart & keep it alive in a jar? Or is it only women’s hearts that this works for?

Then in the same episode it gets worse. My partner who has read the book the TV show is based off was explaining to me how weird Eph & Nora’s relationship is in the TV show; he described how it’s so much more complicated, serious & how the show reduced it to a simple will they won’t they. Then came the looks, the throwaway lines, all the signs that Something Bad was going to happen, and so it did. In what was completely pointless we get a fight between her & Eph’s vampire ex-wife, I know right, and in it Nora gets infected. She is badass, can fight as good as the rest of them, is extremely smart but no she gets fucked & decides to kill herself. Leaving the fact that I can’t watch a woman fight a woman on TV without hearing the line ‘love a bit of girl on girl, eh?’ from Hot Fuzz (a satire of these scenes, for those who didn’t get it) aside. I was just so angry that in the same episode another female character pointlessly had to die. Moreover, her death was spectacular, there were flashing lights, slow motion & everything because hey a woman dying must be pretty.

I wouldn’t be able to write a list of female characters who I’ve watched die, not even just because I’ve watched so many shows over the years but because it’s just so constant. It’s often without care, without consequence or without compassion. It’s not that they’re fictional & deserve respect it’s that watching television comes with a backdrop of dead women. It means children, men, women have watched many, many women die; in lots of ways, with little care, often at the hands of men, and often done in ways purely for entertainment. I’ve written a lot on violence in this blog, on how it’s often male violence but no one ever mentions the word male in that sentence, and how it is often pointless. But I at least understand that it is a plot that can be used for TV, though it is often over used. But when you’re constantly watching women be killed and men killing women it can make you feel, as a woman, pretty worthless.

As I said to my partner when watching The Strain, and Fear the Walking Dead in which a woman is shot in the arm to punish her father for his actions, I am more than someone who exists in relation to him. I am more than a thing to be hurt or killed for the things he does. I am so much more than someone whose pain & death only happen so he can be sad and cry. I can’t even believe I’d even have to explain this, to anyone at all that women are more than things. There are plenty of male characters who are discarded, I don’t deny it, but they exist on shows where the majority of the main characters are also men, where they all have depth, names and plot lines that happen independent of the women in their lives. It’s disappointing, it’s infuriating, but worst of all it’s just really shit writing.

I always say to my partner that if you can’t write women then you can’t write. We’re half the population not a rare gem that is hard to translate to the page. In a world where men actively discriminate against women in the television & film industry to keep them from directing & writing I would just like to say can you please fuck off so people who can actually write can give us the television we deserve? Thanks.