I had my feminist EUREKA moment when I was 17 and read Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media by Susan J. Douglas. Her expert detailing of how women are depicted in TV and film rendered me incapable of watching either without taking a close look at how women are portrayed. As such, I practically fainted with joy when I first say Mary-Louise Parker’s character on The West Wing, Amy Gardner. I’ve written before about why Amy kicks ass; unlike the stereotypical professional woman/ice queen in romantic comedies, Amy is successful in her job as well as in love. When her character is introduced, she’s dating a powerful Congressman before moving on to the White House Deputy Chief of Staff. Even after she breaks up with Josh Lyman, she is depicted going on a variety of dates (without devolving into a needy control freak). Also, how badass is this?:
Mary-Louise Parker is not only talented (she’s won several awards for her current show, Weeds, as well as her performance as Harper in Angels in America) but has also spoken out on racism and sexism. Which is why I had a bit of a *headdesk* moment when I saw her nude spread in Esquire.
Now, posing nude or partially nude is obviously not an inherently un-feminist thing to do. It’s artistic, it can be liberating for the woman involved, and really, the most important thing is that the woman in question is in control of her own image – which Parker undoubtedly is, as noted in Double X. It wasn’t the naked pictures that made me die a little inside, nor was it Esquire‘s letter, which praised Parker’s acting and “smart” writing. It was the accompanying letter from Parker to Esquire in praise of gender stereotypes:
“…you can fix my front door, my sink, and open most jars; you, who lose a cuff link and have to settle for a safety pin, you have promised to slay unfortunate interlopers and dragons with your Phillips head or Montblanc; to you, because you will notice a woman with a healthy chunk of years or pounds on her and let out a wolf whistle under your breath and mean it; because you think either rug will be fine, really it will; you seem to walk down the street a little taller than me, a little more aware but with a purpose still; to you who codifies, conjugates, slams a puck, baits a hook, builds a decent cabinet or the perfect sandwich…”
(emphasis mine)
That, plus the pictures of her as a mostly-nude housewife holding a pie, was a little jarring after watching her fight drug dealers on Weeds and take on the United Nations for an end to sex trafficking in The West Wing. If watching men do things for her around the house turns her on (whatever floats her boat!), Parker nonetheless laid out her preferences in explicitly sexist terms: women are passive, men are aggressive, and this is as it should be. Even her praise of men who appreciate older or full-figured is couched in “women are objects for men to ogle” language.
The fact that Parker is, ironically, in control of her own passivity makes it hard to point at her and say “you bad feminist, you!” I can see the feminist underpinnings in her actions, though I can still be a little disappointed that she held up fixing cabinets versus being ogled as an example of what men and women should be when she’s in such a position of influence. Ah, well. Time to go watch season 3 of The West Wing again…
