Seeing Yourself on Television
C J Cregg got me through my break up.
C J Cregg, if you weren’t aware, is the Press Secretary to the White House in Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. She is bad ass. She’s a strong, single, female character who unashamedly puts her job first. She loves what she does and goddammit she’s good at it.
So. My break up. In August 2013 my boyfriend-of-3-years and I went our separate ways. To say I was heartbroken doesn’t really describe it. My very sense of self was shattered. My self-confidence was in pieces. I lost all ability to comprehend why anyone would like me, or find me attractive, or how I could be good at anything. I found it hard to believe that I could ever be happy again.
I turned to The West Wing to escape the miserable and desperate thoughts swirling in my head. And there was C J Cregg: a woman in her thirties (ish) who was single and successful and happy. It was possible!
Maybe this sounds stupid to you. Of course my self-worth wasn’t tied to my relationship – I’m an independent girl, a feminist, an honours law student! But I found myself thinking, if CJ Cregg is alright, I can be alright too. And talking to friends who have also been through breakups of long-term relationships, I’m not alone in thinking like that.
Why am I telling you this? Why is it important? Because it illustrated for me just how important it is to be able to see yourself on television and in movies.
Women make up just over half of cinema audiences (51%), but in 2012 only one third of characters in the 100 top-grossing movies were female. When you start looking at main characters, the picture is dire – only 11% of protagonists were female. Things are much the same on television.
And that’s only the starting point. Two other things are really important when considering female representation in popular media.
The first is diversity. In the same way as it’s important to have female characters on TV and in the movies, it’s important that women of colour and queer women and other minorities are also represented.
The second is strength of character. By that I mean that the female character isn’t a cookie-cutter stereotype who ultimately lives to please her man. Female characters should be just as likeable and unlikeable as male characters. They should have a multitude of motivations driving them.
It’s that second concern which sparked cartoonist Alison Bechdel to come up with what is now known as the Bechdel Test: does the show feature at least two women who have a conversation that isn’t about a man? Films that fail this seemingly simple test include the final Harry Potter movie, Anchorman 2, Avatar, The Wolf of Wall Street, the Star Wars original trilogy and ALL of Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Of course, the Bechdel Test is an imprecise and incomplete measure of a film’s feminist kudos. But it goes to show that Hollywood has a long way to go when it comes to accurately representing the lives of women. Who only make up a paltry 51% of the population.
Why do I care whether or not I get to see a variety of well-developed female characters in the media I consume? Because being able to see yourself on television, in the movies, is so important to developing a real sense of your potential.
This ties back to what I was saying about C J Cregg helping me through my break up. Being able to see a single woman happily lead a career-oriented life helped me believe that it was possible, even though I knew she was a fictional character.
Another good example of the power that fictional characters can have is Mr Tibbs in the movie In the Heat of the Night. Virgil Tibbs is an educated black detective working in a bigoted part of the South. When people ask him what people call him where he comes from, he responds: “They call me Mister Tibbs!” A black man in the South was standing up and demanding the respect which would automatically be accorded a white man in his position. That famous line was both a push back at racial oppression and an affirmation that black men could occupy positions of authority and demand the same respect as white men. The line has since inspired a programme aimed at supporting teachers of colour, called “They call me MISTER!”.
Demands for female and minority representation in films and on TV is not simply an academic exercise. It is a demand that we be able to envisage ourselves as the Press Secretary to the White House, as police detectives and lawyers, as astronauts and scientists and parents and doctors and professors. That we be able to imagine ourselves happy, whether they be single at thirty or divorced with two kids or living in a civil partnership with someone of whatever gender.
It’s not just a numbers exercise. It’s about being able to see realistic, relatable characters. But sadly too much popular culture falls back on easy popular constructions of females and minorities.▼
