Apart from #womanforaweek and the odd bit of fiction, this blog rarely ventures out of the confines of climate science.
But, after years of trying, I was finally forced to sit down and watch the show, Glee.
I make no apologies for missing what was apparently a cultural tour de force that seems to have defined a generation of television watchers. Looking back on these defining cultural moments is always more interesting than living through them. Not that I realised Glee was that kind of phenomena at the time. It’s only now while googling reviews and recaps that I realise how much of an impact this show was having while it was on the air.
When I envisaged what the show was like, I imagined standard highschool tropes and cardboard characters singing randomly about their feelings. So the first thing that struck me when I watched the initial 13 episodes was the satire. Totally unexpected and (I now realise) short lived.
The second thing that struck me was how awfully sexist its representation of female characters was. Was the show really saying that the world consisted of binary gender roles and that those roles were ‘submissive, manipulative and bitchy woman’ and ‘weak, aggressive man with masculinity issues’?
Was I supposed to be shipping Rachel Berry with the giant man-child Finn or the meek and submissive Emma with the giant man-child Shue? Was I supposed to see Kurt’s homosexuality as ‘real’ but Santana and Brittany’s obvious lesbianism as somehow being entirely about male desire – which is how it was framed? Was I supposed to see Artie’s gross misogynism and penis obsession as somehow endearing because of his chair?
More importantly, was I supposed to not notice that Quinn’s terrifying teen pregnancy – in a strict religious family in a society portrayed as being almost archaic in its dislike of female sexuality – was being portrayed as somehow all about Finn? Or that the show was implying that women fake pregnancies and lie about paternity frequently to manipulate men?
Or was the show’s satirical bent designed to make me think these horrible stereotypes were being subverted in some way? And did things like Brittany’s random ‘gay shark’ comments make up for it? Or was her idealistic, head in the clouds randomness just another example of a female character who needed to be protected? Often from reality, as it turns out in later seasons.
By the end of the bizarrely awful Season 6 – that I’m still not entirely sure wasn’t a drug-induced hallucination of Jane Lynch’s Coach Sue – I had swung my personal pendulum on the issue in several different directions but had to finally come down in favour of one obvious conclusion.
This show was not just sexist, it was misogynistic. And its framing of itself around the underdog, the underprivileged and the ‘misfits’ of the world made its obvious sexism and misogynism that much worse.
I could – somewhere around the end of season 2 – have put some of the narrative problems down to Ryan Murphy’s clear masculinity issues and his obsession with ‘traditional’ (read 1950s) gender roles – especially in relationships. But it seemed at times, with characters such as Lauren Zizes, Coach Bieste and even with the character development of the aforementioned Quinn that perhaps my criticism was unfounded or even harsh.
Then Lauren decided she was desperate to be Prom Queen, Coach Bieste came out as transgender (because women who like sport and don’t fit gender roles secretly all want to be men), Quinn had lesbian sex despite never showing a single hint of same-sex attraction before – did I mention that female sexuality is entirely about male desire and not the women themselves – and Rachel had to decide between love and her career because a woman in a relationship couldn’t be more successful than her man. The poor darlings couldn’t cope.
Even Mercedes, for much of the show a unique, strong, moral character with a tendency to bouts of vicious divahood, suddenly decided she wanted the perfect Prom fantasy as well. All women, we were told repeatedly, just want to be pretty and passively adored. If they don’t, it’s because they really want to be men anyway.
Even Rachel Berry, we soon discovered, wanted to be Prom Queen and a Lima housewife. More than she wanted to be a successful Broadway star apparently.
Between the existence of the “Celibacy Club” and the fact that almost every female character in a heterosexual relationship had an entire plotline devoted to the loss of her “precious flower”, women were portrayed constantly as seeing sex only as a currency in their relationships with men.
The epitome of this, for me, was the awful Finchel scene where Rachel uses her virginity to reassure Finn about his manhood. The endless, ongoing message that a woman’s sexuality is entirely about and for men is re-enforced constantly.
Coach Bieste, a woman so awesome she would have been fending them off by the droves in her late teens, had the awfully offensive ‘never been kissed’ episode where we discovered no man had ever been interested because she didn’t fit “the mould”.
There is no mould, people. Not outside a highschool movie, anyway, and none that applies to mature, confident, athletic women who are also kind, compassionate and generous. And then, of course, we get the transgender issue, which I’ve now mentioned three times so won’t mention again.
I could write an essay on the show’s deification of Mr Schue; a character so awful his screentime by the end of Season 3 was literally painful to watch. But the internet has plenty. Just google.
And then there’s the music. The show is basically one long musical so the choice and use of music becomes even more important than in usual TV shows.
After Season 4, the show only really makes sense if we think that every episode consists of a PSA YouTube video made by New Directions rather than actual episodes of a television show.
I don’t know how many over-produced pieces of trash I had to listen to during the eternity it took to finish this show. I only know most of the songs have blended into each other in a giant autotune stew. For every ‘Happy Days/Get Happy’, ‘My Man’ and ‘As if We Never Said Goodbye’, there was [insert theme week here].
But some of them were worse than just bad: they were so inappropriate for the episode that I’m still stunned someone thought it was a good idea at the time.
And no, I’m not just talking about the weird episode where Blaine kept singing random love songs to his brother.
I’m not sure which musical moment stands out to me as the worst. There was a long line that destroyed Glee’s claim to any kind of progressiveness.
Was it when Santana’s coming out was defined by the song ‘I Kissed a Girl’, which is about a straight woman engaging in lesbian acts to titillate her straight boyfriend?
Was it when Brittany campaigned for President using ‘Run the World’, which is about how women don’t need real power because they can use sex and manipulation to get what they want from men?
Was it when Jake cheated on Marley because she wouldn’t sleep with him and then she sang Wrecking Ball because apparently the breakup was her fault. (Marley, you might remember, developed an eating disorder at one point. And instead of dealing with this as the mental health issue it is, the show had her do an apology tour for her ‘selfishness’).
Or was it when Tina sang “I Don’t Know How to Love Him’ to Blaine in the appalling ‘Sadie Hawkins’ dance episode. This episode not only set up her character for her impending ‘hagdom’ (a shockingly sexist term) but failed to notice that Sadie Hawkins’ dances are a direct product of sexist notions of strict gender roles implicit in school rituals like the Prom.
It seems obvious that Blaine’s problem as a gay man with a Sadie Hawkins dance would be that it further emphasises the heteronormative male/female dichotomy in these school rituals that specifically excludes him. But to acknowledge that would mean the writers had to realise this themselves. Instead they chose to use a gay character to re-enforce those gender roles, which seems amazingly tone deaf.
Glee gave us several quality gay characters who, for all their flaws and foibles almost saved my impression of the show. Ryan Murphy clearly has a disturbing obsession about 1950s gender roles and this extended to his gay characters in a way that did somewhat undermine those relationships.
Nonetheless, Glee is one of the few popular vehicles that managed to rise above tokenism and make people invest in those relationships – even if somewhere around mid-season 4 someone decided to portray Blaine as an insane clown and began literally dressing him as such.
So, I’m almost willing to give the show a pass for its misogynism because it gave us characters like Kurt and that’s something.
Almost. But after having to watch six seasons of the show, I’m afraid I only have one conclusion. The show is inherently sexist and misogynist and its other positive qualities are not sufficient to overcome it.
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