q-sputnik

Do feminists not watch the 10 o’clock news at BBC? It certainly seems so because, according to the the BBC spokesman (and not spokeswoman),

“The Ten” has not had any viewer complaints on this as far as we are aware.’

and that is complaints for the absence of women journalists on the program. The BBC seems to overstate the importance of audience complaints at the expense of complaints made internally, which it nevertheless refuses as well. I am particularly drawn to the statement

‘Because of the intensive nature of TV news, there are fewer senior female correspondents’

made by a senior executive, obviously male, and the word ‘happen’ in the following one

‘The BBC’s Ten O’Clock News is a showcase for our subject-specialist editors, most of who happen to be men’

(more…)

Watching the episodes where the heterosexual women and family audience meet lesbians for the first time, it is hard not to notice that in both series the lesbian/s are middle aged, respectable women. The plot is built around a lie or the covering of the whole truth.

-In the Golden Girls, the character enters the plot to create disturbance, as expected in a sitcom genre, returns to equilibrium when she symbolically and actually leaves the house. While staying there she spends much time with one of the ‘girls’ with whom she shares a lot in common, like the death of their previous partners or the circumstances of their childhood. But the lesbian falls in love whereas the straight woman does not. The terror in her face when the lesbian talks to her about the way she feels is the comic element of the episode, where the audience is supposed to distance themselves from the lesbian by means of laughter. It is the decisive point when the lesbian becomes ‘the other’. Laughter here saves her from identifying with homosexual desire and is also a covered homophobic comment. But the scene does not cut there, we actually see the lesbian lie down on the sofa, a scene that assures us that she is a descent person like the rest of us. This is a moment of guilt, when the ‘live’ audience will go ‘aagh’. Equilibrium will come when the lesbian will in fact find it enough that they can just be friends. She threatens the family home audience no more, in fact she does not even need to leave, she can be family.

-In Kate and Allie the de-escalation starts from the peak of the lesbian couple being the unspeakable to the moral lesson for the whole family that friendship is above all. There is a rhetoric about difference, when Kate and Allie, after it has been exposed that they are not a lesbian couple, claim that family is a flexible notion and the ‘you above all people should know better’. Here the lesbian couple are desperate to be around kids, the one herself deprived of her kids, the other never in need of kids at all-she is the real lesbian after all. Their need to care for children that are not theirs de-eroticises them even more while showing them incomplete. Motherhood is the element that makes a real woman and family. The straight women have a notion of family that includes children, the landlady calls partnership family. The striking difference between their understanding of family makes an issue of what homosexuality connotes:deprivation of the right and joy of reproduction. it all comes down to that.

After all however, the landlady and her friend, the lesbian guest (who has been to college) are above all
like the rest of the heterosexual world, they are nice and tidy, kind and caring, the loyal friends that will be there for you who, as Andy Medhurst explains (in ‘One Queen and His Screen:Lesbian and Gay Television’, 1994), they ‘just happen to be gay’.