Stewardesses line up for a weigh-in on ABC's Pan Am. (Photo from ABC.com)
Views » October 13, 2011
If Only Sexism Could Be Cancelled
New shows try to capitalize on Mad Men’s popularity—and avoid what prompted the women’s movement.
Pan Am and The Playboy Club promote the seductive but preposterous notion that women's power comes from their sexuality.
Do the women of America really want to go back to 1963? Or the men, for that matter? Riding on, and imbibing, the contrails of Mad Men, two new TV shows, Pan Am and The Playboy Club, seem to think so. That we can even have a show based on, and nostalgic for, Playboy Clubs speaks volumes about how acceptable it is these days to traffic in, and even celebrate, sexist depictions of women in the media.
Both shows are set in the early 1960s and, as a devoted fan of Mad Men, I can say, “I know Mad Men, and you are NO Mad Men.” For Matthew Weiner, the deeply admired creator of the show, one main purpose was to expose all of the inequities and frailties of white male patriarchy circa 1963: the sexism, racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism. While it is true that the show evinces a fondness for the period, Weiner has always deftly walked a tightrope between nostalgia and condemnation of the prejudices and oafish (or worse) male behavior that dominated the era. Indeed, the most interesting characters on the show are the women, poised just on the brink of a women’s movement that they are consciously or unconsciously helping to forge.
Pan Am and The Playboy Club–both dreadful, by the way, even without the sexism–seem to long for the days when women could be freely and openly objectified. Yet at the same time, those responsible for the shows do know that it is 2011, so they inject completely ahistorical elements to make it more palatable to depict women in bunny outfits or getting their asses slapped in stewardess uniforms. Playboy Clubs, it turns out, were actually liberating, providing a haven for strong-willed women who wanted to make something of themselves. In a voice-over from none other than Hugh Hefner himself, we are told that “bunnies were some of the only females in the world who could be anyone they wanted to be.” Gee, that’s just what Gloria Steinem asserted in her path-breaking exposé of working as a bunny!
In the second episode, when the bunnies wait anxiously to see who is going to be chosen for the magazine’s cover, we learn that the criteria include “brains and selflessness.” Right. The men in the show–well, the good ones–are avowedly anti-sexist and hate the exploitation of women. In the show’s premiere, a new bunny is harassed and then assaulted in a back room by a creepy patron. As she fights him off (and, in a really believable way, stabs him to death in the neck with her spike heel), she’s aided by another male patron meant to represent the alleged chivalry and anti-sexism of most men back then. Fortunately, and in possible testimony to the sensibilities of the American public, the show’s first episode came in third behind its other network rivals (Castle and Hawaii Five-O, both featuring strong women as cops or detectives) and blessedly, was cancelled after just three episodes.
Like The Playboy Club, Pan Am also romanticizes the past, suggesting that being a stewardess was a stepping stone to more weighty jobs. To excuse the show’s longing for the supposedly less complicated gender roles of the past, the women are secretly involved in politics of one sort or the other. One of the flight attendants reads Marx and Hegel on the side (and knows the difference between the two). Another works undercover for the CIA, and in an especially preposterous moment, the Pan Am crew helps rescue survivors of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Unfortunately, this show–with its Desperate Housewives lead-in–opened to strong ratings.
Why care about either of these programs? In addition to romanticizing the sexism of yore, they contribute to the ongoing amnesia about the discrimination that prompted the women’s movement in the first place. They suggest that sexist institutions like Playboy Clubs were the source of female empowerment and strength, when in fact they were exactly what women rebelled against as exemplars of female confinement and exploitation. And they further promote the seductive but preposterous notion that a woman’s real power comes from her sexuality.
When the media gloss over, or deliberately misremember, women’s history and what it was like before the massive changes of the 1970s and beyond, they nurture the notion that feminism is unnecessary. The Playboy Club’s cancellation shows how far we’ve come; the fact that network executives green-lit it reminds us how far we still have to go.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Susan J. Douglas is a professor of communications at the University of Michigan and an In These Times columnist. Her latest book is Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work is Done (2010).
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Reader Comments
Sure, you can use the Lloyd Bentsen / Jack Kennedy reference, but really? Mad Men has been on the air for 4 SEASONS. I watched the first couple episodes of Mad Men 4 years ago and I was disgusted. Pan Am has aired only 3 episodes - and you think you know where the producers/writers are going wirh the characters? After only three episodes? Pan Am is never going be as dark as Mad Men or contain the intense drama. I look forward to seeing how the four female leads in this show grow and learn to deal with the sexism they will undoubtedly encounter.
As far as the “especially preposterous moment, the Pan Am crew helps rescue survivors of the Bay of Pigs fiasco.” Look it up - December 24, 1962 - near Havana. Pan Am boarded the first 107 prisoners onto a DC-6 and flew them to Miami. Flights continued into the next day until over 1,000 prisoners were flown to freedom.
One last issue - have you ever interviewed any of the Pan Am stewardesses who flew during the early ‘60s and asked them how they felt during that time? Why don’t you ask them face to face if THEIR decision to become a stew made them feel powerless and weak? I doubt it.
Posted by Tamara Keeton on Oct 13, 2011 at 9:53 AM
Ms. Douglas - I really would hope that you would either correct or pull your erroneous statement about Pan Am and the Bay of Pigs. I know you did not purposefully put out this untruth ... but revisionist history runs rampant these days. Thank you.
Posted by Tamara Keeton on Oct 13, 2011 at 10:28 AM
“Playboy Clubs, it turns out, were actually liberating, providing a haven for strong-willed women who wanted to make something of themselves.”
Typical misogynist hogwash. The mainstream media (99.9% male leadership) is bringing out the heavy guns, folks. The Dark Ages are upon us. Next fall on ABC: Barefoot & Pregnant! (And not in an ironic way, either!)
Any program, network, etc. that references (or even acknowledges) Hugh Hefner - one of the most noxious pigs ever to walk the planet - should be boycotted post-haste.
The corporations have three (and only three), job openings for women: 1/ breeding machine, 2/ sex object, 3/ any other employment which specifically serves the male. The corporations are the enemies of real women. Always have been. Always will be.
Would that more start to do what some of us are doing - drop the cable, stop watching TV, start visiting alternative media (like ITT for instance) on the web and in print. And maybe even read a book! Not a Kindle - A BOOK!
Posted by Hermies Purrbuckets on Oct 13, 2011 at 3:40 PM
I find it interesting that some women who call themselves feminists are so elitist and so quick to judge other women for their personal choices. Wasn’t the point of feminism for women to make their OWN choices? Ok so women can now be doctors, lawyers and engineers, but what if we don’t want to? What if a woman WANTS to work in a Playboy Club, or as a stewardess/flight attendant, be a teacher, a waitress, a receptionist or *heaven forbid* get married and be a stay at home wife and mother, for that matter? Why do some women feel so threatened by that? Also, since when is watching a simple TV show mean a person wants to go back to any past time. Can’t you trust adults to BE adults and have some common sense and watch a TV show with some perspective? People watch history shows all the time about wars, doesn’t mean they want to go out and BE in a war, does it? If a Black person watches a program about the Civil War or Gone With The Wind does that mean that person somehow wants a return to slavery days? Hardly. Quite frankly as a woman who did want to be a stewardess as a girl and is a feminist and receptionist today, I deeply resent the judgmental attitudes represented in this article. I LIKE this show and hope it stays on the air for a long time. It’s not a return to sexism. If anything Pan Am is about showing women who made different choices and choosing adventure and then changing the world in their own way! If you did your homework, you’d realize it was the stewardesses who were on the front lines in the labor movement fighting the rules that discriminated against them and other women re: age, weight, marital status. It was people like retired flight attendant Iris Peterson (who worked for United from 1946 to 2007) who took the cases to court and WON, and not the uptight radical feminists who actually mocked and belittled them at the women’s rallies in the 70s! I would suggest you read the book “Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants” by Kathleen Barry and you’ll see that a number of stewardesses were feminists such as former NOW President Patricia Ireland.
Posted by Sabrina Messenger on Oct 13, 2011 at 8:38 PM
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