The Big Phallus Theory: The Big Bang Theory, Nerd Culture, and Women

(While I tried to avoid them, you may find some SPOILERS for The Big Bang Theory in this post.)

 

One of my favorite sitcoms is The Big Bang Theory. While the show is not always strong on plot and rarely portrays life in academia accurately, its likeable characters and nearly unending stream of insider gags for nerds make it an entertaining means of spending half an hour. I love Leonard, the everyman. I enjoy Sheldon’s elevated dialogue. And I can both sympathize with and laugh at Howard and Raj’s awkwardness. I also appreciate that it features a smart, sensible heroine, Penny, who isn’t afraid to assert herself and can talk back to the guys.

What I can’t stand is that, like most of nerd culture and the wider culture, the show often reeks of sexism. Some of it, like Howard’s frequent lewd comments that reduce women to sex objects, I can ignore. Indeed, if I restricted myself only to popular culture that presents women as nothing less than fully realized human beings, I’d probably never be able to watch another movie or television show again. I’ve become so used to explicit sexism, in the form of derogatory comments about women, in my media diet that, I confess, I often recognize it and then choose to ignore it. It’s one of the patriarchal bargains I make as a feminist and a woman living in a culture that recognizes my gender’s worth only in so far as it meets certain standards of sexiness, attractiveness, and compliance. What does bother me about the show that I haven’t been able to ignore so easily is the implicit sexism in the lack of female nerd characters.

Seriously, where are the women nerds? I see them everywhere in real life. They attend conventions, they go to the movies, they cosplay, they talk about Star Wars and Star Trek  and play Skyrim and Dungeons & Dragons. They consist of the majority of people that I know and I’d say nearly all of my female friends are nerds. I know women who can code websites, quote Lord of the Rings, act out scenes from Doctor Who, recite the noble gases and their atomic weights, and kick your ass in Call of Duty. Why are these women not represented, or even acknowledged, in The Big Bang Theory? I’m not even asking why they aren’t main characters–though a show about four female nerdy friends would be awesome and so much more entertaining than Sex and the City–so much as I’m wondering why, in the show’s universe, they don’t even seem to exist.

Well, one might point out, what about Amy and Bernadette? Perhaps, in the strictest sense of the term “nerd,” someone who is brilliantly smart and obsessives over even the tiniest minutiae of something, Amy and Bernadette are nerds. They’re both smart, they’re both biologists, and they both have Ph.D.s. To give credit where credit is due, just a few decades ago it would have been unthinkable to have not one, but two women characters in the S.T.E.M. fields on a television show. However, Amy and Bernadette are still ultimately defined in the show by their relationships with their male significant others. They are judged, and often found wanting, by their ability or inability to meet cultural standards of attractiveness, and they do no participate in what has come to be the domains of nerd culture–things like comic books, science fiction shows and movies, and video games. There are no women regularly featured in the show who enjoy these pursuits, even though such women exist in real life.

In real life, however, nerd culture often has just as much, if not more, of a problem with sexism than The Big Bang Theory does. While The Big Bang Theory ignores nerd women and pretends that they don’t exist, real life nerd culture can be downright hostile toward women attempting to claim the identity of “nerd.”  Whether its people accusing women of only pretending to be nerds in order to hook up with guys or creating the “Idiot Nerd Girl” meme that I’ve attempted to reclaim in this post, a lot of guys seem to want women out of their conventions, their role playing games, and their Internet spaces. But why? The most obvious answer is sexism, but it would be too simple to leave it at that, so I’m going to dig a little deeper.

Though the cultural perception of nerds is changing, it is still largely a negative one, as evidenced by the male main characters on The Big Bang Theory. All of them, in some way, have failed to live up to to our culture’s unrealistic and burdensome ideals of masculinity. None of them are physically strong. Neither are they particularly attractive. They know little of sports. They aren’t charismatic or suave or charming. They aren’t physically or emotionally tough. They prefer the comforts of their apartments to the outdoors. Nerdy men are, as the show and the wider culture seem to suggest, not masculine. The show has frequently paired short, wimpy Leonard with Penny’s tall, dark and handsome beaus to make this point. Leonard, Sheldon, Howard, and Raj could often be better described as “feminine” than masculine. There is, however, one group that is lower than nerds on the social hierarchy: women. Whatever male nerds are, they are still more masculine (and thus higher on the hierarchy of patriarchal culture) than women. But when women start entering nerd spaces–and demanding an equal right to be there and be recognized as nerds–they challenge the modicum of masculinity that nerd culture has been able to salvage for itself. They also challenge the perception of women, within both nerd culture and the wider culture, as nothing more than accessories that convey masculinity, and thus worth, on a man. (Think about how, when Howard was first dating Bernadette, he worried that she wasn’t good-looking enough. An attractive girl conveys to society that there is something “manly” or “masculine” about the man she is dating, thus increasing his worth in the eyes of patriarchal culture.)

I think there is a place for women in nerd culture, and I’m sure that women will continue to attend cons, play video games, and go to special screenings of Star Wars. Just as women have fought, and are still fighting, for their right to inhabit the biology labs and physics departments where Bernadette and Amy have managed to reside, I suspect that women will continue to exist in nerd spaces and gradually gain acceptance there. I also suspect that, as nerd culture continues to grow within the mainstream, the stereotype of nerd men as less than masculine will diminish.

However, just because the stereotype of nerds as feminine may disappear does not mean that sexism within nerd culture will necessarily end. Though I would be very glad to see our culture expand its definitions of masculinity beyond its currently narrow confines, I suspect that this will do very little to challenge the standards of beauty to which women, even nerdy women, are held, both inside and outside of nerd culture. Maleness, I still sadly suspect, will still be privileged within nerd culture, in part because nerd culture is inherently exclusionary. To be a nerd, it helps to be male. It also helps to be white, cisgender, and educated. I suspect being able-bodied helps too, though I have seen a broader spectrum of ability represented in nerd culture than I have in mainstream culture. It is required that one be at least middle class, as I doubt the working class has the time and money that are necessary to indulge in nerdy pursuits. Gaming systems can be incredibly expensive, as are books, DVDs, and high-speed Internet connections. One must also have the leisure time to master the games and fantasy worlds present in nerd media. Sadly, in many ways, nerds are often primarily defined by what they consume.

I would like to think that nerd culture is smart enough to look at its own privilege and try to include a wider range of people. After all, many of us nerds define ourselves by our inability to fit in, our difference from mainstream society, and our stories of bullying and rejection. Perhaps we could use those experiences to sympathize with those whom society bullies and rejects. Until more nerds are willing to make this effort and look beyond their own privilege, however, I suspect that nerd culture will largely remain another old boys club.

Women Warriors Alone: Kill Bill vol. 1, Lady Gaga, Hyper-Irony, and Feminism

The desert air hangs heavy and hot over the highway asphalt. An enormous, bright yellow truck roars toward the horizon. In the blur of its speed, its only identification comes from two words, painted in pink, on the back of the truck: “Pussy Wagon.”

This description could easily fit either Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill film or Lady Gaga’s music video for the song “Telephone,” which references the film. Put the two together and you have a delightful mess of hyper-irony, a meta-pop culture. Gaga is referencing Tarantino, and Tarantino references, well, a little bit of everything.

In a way, when I watched Kill Bill, I felt as though I was seeing it backwards, and not just because the plot is non-linear. My first introduction to the movie had come through watching the “Telephone” music video, in which Lady Gaga and Beyoncé escape prison, a(n) (presumably) abusive lover, a murder scene in which they are the perpetrators, and the police, all from the cab of a yellow truck with “Pussy Wagon” painted on the back. The critical readings of the “Telephone” video were all quick to point out that the video was referencing Kill Bill, not only with its Pussy Wagon but also with its jumpy narrative about vengeful, powerful women.

So, when I finally watched Kill Bill, I knew, obviously, that the movie had come first. Still, in the chronology of my own life, “Telephone” had come first, so while watching Kill Bill, I’d see something—a yellow truck, subtitles, unusual camera angles—and think, “That’s just like in ‘Telephone’!” Such is the state of our popular culture, which builds reference upon reference to itself. I’d seen the reference before I’d seen the original. Then again, if Walter Benjamin and the postmodern critics are to be believed, we now live in a culture in which the original is so easily copied that it no longer has any meaning, and we are constantly surrounded by references that do not really refer back to an original. Gaga referenced Tarantino, who references classic cinema, comic books, and anime, among a whole host of other media, within Kill Bill. These forms of media regularly reference novels, myths, and plays. To trace their origins back might be interesting but isn’t the purpose of this post.

Having viewed Kill Bill backwards from the lens of “Telephone,” however, I wonder if the music video served, in some way, as a rewrite of the movie. While I can certainly find feminist undertones in Kill Bill—a strong, independent female protagonist who is not overly sexualized; an emphasis on the sexualized nature of the violence women are, regrettably, all too often subjected to; a cast of female characters who exert their own agency and skills to obtain power instead of relying on men or their sexual allure—I don’t feel confident declaring it a feminist film. (Though I think it does pass the Bechdel test.)

I found several aspects of Kill Bill problematic, but my greatest source of discomfort with the movie came from its presentation of women as natural enemies and especially how the conflict between the female characters was racialized. I also want to point out that I’ve only seen volume one of the series so far, and I realize that many of my current problems with the film may be addressed in subsequent volumes. My biggest problem with volume one was that the female characters, while all strong and independent, were set against each other as adversaries. Within the movie itself this isn’t a problem, but the movie exists within the entire cannon of popular culture (and, in fact, frequently makes clear through its references that it exists within popular culture), and within much of that popular culture exists a stereotype that women are naturally catty and suspicious of each other. The movie does nothing to challenge this stereotype.

The struggles between the women are also racialized, as Uma Thurman’s character’s two adversaries are African-American and Asian. Well, I didn’t find the conflict between Thurman’s character and Copperhead too problematic. While race is present in the scene in which they dual, it isn’t a central part of their conflict, and I found their recognition of their shared identity as mothers interesting. However, in Thurman’s character’s dual with O-Ren Ishii, ethnicity is centralized. O-Ren Ishii mocks Thurman’s character as a white girl with a samurai sword, only to be bested by her in the end. The dual perpetuates the tired trope, found in films like Dances with Wolves and Avatar, of white people taking on an exotic, foreign culture and mastering it better than its own natives. Again, within the context of the film itself, this might not be problematic, but the film exists within the wider scope of popular culture and it does little to challenge the racial/ethnic stereotypes of that popular culture.

I found the animosity between the women almost surprising, in a way, because I could have easily seen them all coming to realize that they’d been manipulated by the mysterious Bill and joining together to take him down. In fact, I almost expected Thurman’s character and Copperhead to team up, bonded together by their motherhood. The film easily could have presented a sisterhood of women fighting together against their shared manipulation. Instead, they fight each other. The Pussy Wagon could have lived up to its reclaimed title as a vehicle full of women out to take back what’s theirs.

In the “Telephone” music video, however, the Pussy Wagon lives up to its reclaimed name. Of course, the “Telephone” video doesn’t just reference Kill Bill. It also pays homage to Thelma and Louise, a film I confess I have not seen. (I know, I know! For someone who loves analyzing pop culture, I’m so far behind!) However, I have seen the classic scene where Thelma and Louise drive their truck off the edge of the cliff, and though I hadn’t seen the entire film, at the end of the “Telephone” video, when Gaga and Beyoncé drive the Pussy Wagon off the cliff, I knew enough to think of Thelma and Louise.

By referencing both Kill Bill and Thelma and Louise, the “Telephone” video blends the independence of both movies’ heroines, the cinematography of Tarantino, and the sisterhood of Thelma and Louise. It presents Gaga and Beyoncé as partners in crime who help each other achieve their goal of revenge against the men who’ve hurt them and then help each other escape. It also presents Gaga and Beyoncé as equals, irregardless of their races. It is, in a sense, what Kill Bill might have been.

I’m not trying to say that Kill Bill isn’t a good movie. I loved finally seeing Tarantino’s renowned cinematography for myself and I very much want more. As an action film, it was excellent. Its protagonist was also a refreshing break from the usual role of women in action films, in which they are usually toys or temptations for the male characters. However, the film exists within the larger field of popular culture, a field to which it itself makes frequent references. The film places itself within pop culture as a whole, and so I, as a view, must do the same. While I found its heroine to be strong, independent and compelling, it did little to challenge stereotypes about women’s relationships with each other and racial tropes about white people being better at non-Western cultures than the non-Westerners. However, the beauty of a referential pop culture is that it invites rewrites and critiques from other forms of pop culture. By combining the strength of Kill Bill with the sisterhood of Thelma and Louise, the “Telephone” music video provides such a corrective while tipping its cap to Tarantino’s signature style.

 

A Cuban…Something: Race and Gender in I Love Lucy

(Not my best post ever, but I made a commitment to blog more regularly, so I figured I should try to come up with something.)

Recently, I’ve been watching a lot of I Love Lucy reruns on TVLand’s website.  The last time I watched I Love Lucy, I was a young child, so I think I was more amused by the slapstick than anything else. The show’s stance on gender roles and race went right over my head. Now, while I find myself amused by the show, I also feel a little…guilty for enjoying it.

I could write extensively on the show’s portrayal of women. On the one hand, it’s extremely sexist. However, there is certainly an element of subversion in Lucy and Ethel’s pranks. The show panders to patriarchal stereotypes about women while also knowingly winking at them. At the same time, Lucille Ball is an outstanding comedian, and in an age where we still have male comedians and other personalities claiming that women just aren’t funny, Ball is resounding proof that women can and do have a sense of humor. However, the sexism and subversion of sexism in I Love Lucy is a topic that, if I recall correctly, Susan Douglas deals with in her excellent book Where the Girls Are, an examination of the popular culture surrounding Second Wave Feminism. Suffice to say, the show is by and large very sexist, but this didn’t surprise me.

What did surprise me was the racism. As a child watching I Love Lucy, I don’t think I ever realized that Ricky was Cuban. Watching the show now, I can’t forget. In nearly every episode, Ricky is referred to as a Cuban at least once, and it’s usually in a remark about his faults. If he won’t buy Lucy something she wants, he’s a “stingy Cuban.” If he’s angry about something, he’s a “hot-tempered Cuban.” If he holds his ground or won’t change his mind, he’s a “stubborn Cuban.” If he’s doing something that Lucy and the rest of the cast like, he’s Ricky. If he’s displeased one of them in some way, it’s because he’s Cuban. He is heavily marked by his ethnicity throughout the show.

Much like the ambiguity of the sexism in the show, however, Ricky’s “Cuban-ness” isn’t entirely negative. Seeing the show in 2012, I’m struck by just how much Ricky is portrayed as a (more or less) complete human being and not a Latino stereotype. Granted, in the 1950s, when the show was made, the ethnic stereotypes were probably different. Today, however, Latinos are often (regrettably) portrayed as poor and/or lazy, a view that, I would argue, has more to do with unfairly scapegoating them for a lot of the U.S.’s labor and immigration problems than it has to do with Latinos themselves. Ricky, though he might complain about how much money Lucy spends, is not poor. Nor is he lazy. In fact, his character is something of a workaholic.

Some of this portrayal might have to do with the fact that he is portrayed as thoroughly assimilated into American culure. He might slip into Spanish every once in a while and speak English with a slight accent, but he espouses the same values expressed by American television patriarchs such as Andy Griffith and Ward Cleaver—work hard and earnestly, don’t be frivolous or wasteful, and people get what they deserve. In some sense, he is an example of the “good” or “deserving” immigrant—the immigrant who accepts American culture and knows (or learns) the language. He finds success through his assimilation. I find this dichotomy of “good” versus “bad” immigrants problematic in many ways, as it allows us to blame individuals and not social inequalities for the failures of many people who come to this country. However, assimilation is something that many immigrants experience and many might not see it as an inherently bad thing.

Ultimately, watching I Love Lucy has made me aware of just how little I know about Cuba’s history between Spanish colonization and Castro’s rise to power. I also know almost nothing about U.S.-Cuban relations before the Cold War. It’s also made me realize that I don’t know a lot about the history of the portrayal of Latin Americans in U.S. popular culture. Clearly, there is something of a gaping hole in my knowledge that needs to be filled. If nothing else, watching I Love Lucy has made me realize how much I don’t know, which is a great way to start learning new things.