General Life Updates: New Gig Blogging at Shameless

Stark and I have recently been taken on as volunteer bloggers for the Shameless blog, the website for Shameless Magazine. We’ve been tasked with ranting ceaselessly and in clever ways about the many ways that pop culture offends our feminist sensibilities. I’m excited about the prospect, as I was really burning to start a feminist ad-busting blog after the Canadian Club incident, but never could put together enough time to get it going. This promises to be equally as fun.

This weekend I wrote up my first post for Shameless. Y’all are free to head on over and leave comments so that we can trick my new editor into thinking I am really, really popular.

What follows under the cut is the unedited version of my post. I have a problem with being concise and have a hard time letting go of my long held belief that longwindedness is the soul of wit. So this is the much longer version that didn’t make it to print.

The Case of the Amazing Invisible Homosexual on Reality TV

I have recently been sucked into the vortex that is the So You Think You Can Dance franchise. The newest entry, So You Think You Can Dance Canada premiered a few weeks ago, and it’s mostly been a fun time, although I have the same issues with it that I have had with the American version. Among them, there is the mystery I like to call “The Case of the Amazing Invisible Homosexual.” In the SYTYCD franchise, this mystery reveals itself in two ways. First of all, despite the number of gay male dancers that have appeared on the show, none of them are ever referred to explicitly as such. Not that I’m asking for it to be made into a big deal that there are gay men in the arts, but it would be nice if, instead of cutting to their moms in the audience, just once the cameras could show their happy boyfriends celebrating. It would also be nice if the show wasn’t so rigid in its gender stereotypes and heteronormativity. Male dancers who stray too far from the show’s idea of maleness are regularly told to “butch it up” and act more like “men,” not, it is implied, like prancing, delicate women.

This is a common issue in reality TV. I first noticed it on season 5 of America’s Next Top Model, when a contestant on the show, Kim Stolz, an out lesbian, was often berated for being too butch or too manly or for not being girly enough. Wearing a designer women’s polo shirt and sporting a short hair style was apparently enough to rile up the judges’ ideas about femininity. And this was coming out of the mouths of two men, J. Manuel and J. Alexander, who have decided that they know what it is to be womanly. In an interview with The Advocate, Kim Stolz discussed this treatment:

As far as Miss J., I like him, but he was the first and the harshest to criticize my gender-identity expression. And that really confused me. Because of all people, I think he should be the one to understand. I thought perhaps he felt like, “It’s so easy for me to be feminine, why can’t she be?” I guess I could see where he was coming from, but that was really offensive to me, that he would constantly harp on my gender. After a while, it was like, enough is enough. At one point, you’re telling me to be myself, then you’re telling me to be someone else. If I did that to you, Miss J., you’d have a hard time with that.

That was 2005. This is 2008 and things have not changed one bit. If the male dancers on SYTYCD are expected to play along with the show’s concept of manliness, then the opposite is true of the female contestants on American Gladiators. Once again, I don’t think North Americans would be particularly scandalized to find out that their are shhhh… lesbians in the worlds of professional sports, the armed forces, or law enforcement, the professions from which a good number of gladiators originate, but apparently the producers have decided that everyone on the show is straight, and not just straight, but a particularly staid Fifties sitcom version of straight, y’know, when women were women and men were men. Maybe because the show’s content is so intensely homoerotic (hell, that’s the only reason I’m watching), the networks felt it best to force the text into subtext by forcing a Susy Q. Homemaker storyline onto all the women and a Manly McJones narrative onto all the men. When one of the male contestants strays too far from the show’s male ideal, he is treated with a mixture of condescension and revulsion. “Wow, Bob,” the show’s announcers spit out, “he’s a dancer! Have you ever seen a dancer take on a gladiator? Who would have thought a dancer would be able to best our gladiators” as if the words “male dancer” carried the same meaning as “weak, limp-wristed, lady-man.”

And when it comes to the female contestants, the only women the show spends any time on are aggressively heterosexual, aggressively post-feminist ladies. The type of women who give squealingly enthusiastic interviews in which they extol the virtues of their husbands and their children and how they certainly could never have climbed a wall made of rope without the help of a good fine man. The contestants wave from the arena and the camera lovingly pans over their happy smiling nuclear family. Women who don’t meet this feminine ideal are shunted to the sidelines. They are interviewed about their job or their parents and never mention any relationship that does not meet the show’s “family friendly” standards. I find it strange to think that no one on that show has EVER even mentioned their same-sex partners as their inspiration. Do they give the interviews which are then never aired, or does the show operate on a strict don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy?

What I would like to see on this coming Fall season on reality TV is one or two same sex partners actually identified in the audience, a few less male judges deciding what it is to be a woman, and maybe just once, an interview in which a gay man or woman is allowed to say “Hey, I dedicated this dance/run through The Eliminator/walk down the runway to my partner.”