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Just last year, I bemoaned the fact
that no female character has had an abortion on network TV since Bea
Arthur's Maude had one back in 1972, even though it is one of the most
common surgical procedures in the country. That's about to change: A teen character has an abortion on Friday Night Lights,
which is currently only on DirecTV, but will air on NBC again shortly.
Warning: if you haven't seen last night's episode, spoilers ahead ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Jess, I was honestly shocked yesterday morning when I opened my paper copy of the New York Times and saw Bea Arthur referred to—in print!!—as a "Battle-Ax." Who the heck was on the copy desk, and how is it possible he hasn't yet retired? I hadn't even heard that term for decades; didn't it go out with "spinster?" Here's a better view of Bea to cheer us all up.
Dayo, Emily, how do you think Regnerus would feel about young women marrying other young women? As I think I've mentioned here before, I've long thought there should be a two-year waiting period when two women apply for a marriage license; if they can make it past the U-Haul months, let 'em get hitched. (Note: this is a joke. This is only a joke.) I want my girls to Slow. It. Down. But for those who aren't gonna wait—or who've already been together a lifetime, or a decade, and can at long last make it legal in the cornbelt, here's a map (updated hourly) showing which Iowa counties have been issued licenses to same-sex pairs. Mazel tov to this week's Iowa newlyweds!
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Jess, Bea Arthur's death makes me think about another thing, besides abortion, that's missing from network television: grown ups. I was a kid when The Golden Girls aired, but it was a favorite show of my grandmother's and I watched some of it at her house in Florida, on a set of coral sheets, a few miles from where the Girls supposedly lived. Dorothy, the character Arthur played, was the commanding, scathing, tall one—the straight woman in a house full of lovable wackadoos. Dorothy was extremely, continuously, witheringly judgmental. And though this word has come to be used as an insult ("Don't be so judgey!"), it was this quality, one Arthur oozed, and one that Dorothy shared with Maude, that made those two characters both indelible and admirable, if more than occasionally insufferable.
Maude and Dorothy had opinions. They had opinions about everything. If society, or one's roommates, was behaving badly, it was a person's duty to tell them so even if they didn't want to hear it. Perhaps it wasn't a person's duty to dispatch friends and neighbors quite as scathingly as Maude and Dorothy often did, but then, being right, doing right, was more important than being nice. Niceness was not one of their major concerns. They cared too much to be nice. They cared too much to modulate their judgment.
Looking over the TV landscape, it's hard to find a character, male or female, with this kind of conviction, and certainly not in a comedy. (It's hard to find anyone who even looks like Arthur, who got to be famous when she was already gray, a trick since pulled off by George Clooney and Anderson Cooper, but not by another woman). The socially conscious Norman Lear sitcoms that dominated the 1970s (Maude, All in The Family, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and more) by grappling with racism, sexism, class and most other -isms have disappeared and, with them, the fully engaged bleeding hearts, bigots and pioneers they starred. Since Golden Girls went off the air, there have been few shows about middle aged people, almost none about senior citizens. Sex and The City, the series that spawned a thousand copycats (SATC with black women, SATC with dudes, SATC for network TV, SATC with three), is really just a copy of Golden Girls (sexually adventurous Blanche is Samantha, sweet naive Rose is Charlotte, etc. etc.) i.e. Golden Girls with 30-somethings. On TV right now, there's nowhere Maude or Dorothy would fit in.
That's not to say either Maude or the Golden Girls is perfect television. Certain old movies momentarily make me feel like the space-time continuum has collapsed. Any notion that we have advanced, become smarter, more modern, more knowing, evaporates upon watching Casablanca—the only thing we know now that we didn't know then is how to film in color. Neither Maude nor the Golden Girls gives me that sense. They're dated, they're earnest, they're not always funny (though, sometimes, happily, they are), the laugh track grates. Yet in both of these shows there's at least person I'd really like to see more of—and maybe not just on TV. She's smart, she's imperious, she doesn't suffer fools, she's engaged with the larger world, she's engaged with her friends, she has opinions she will share, that she will advocate for, that she believes in, and if you banged your head and ended up in the hospital you'd be happy if she was the person they called. She's an adult. She's Bea Arthur.
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Bea Arthur, the irrepressible star of classic sitcoms Golden Girls and Maude, died on Saturday at the age of 86. The New York Times coverage of Arthur's death was notable for two reasons. First, when the Times initially put up the obituary, the headline was "Bea Arthur, TV Battle-ax, Dies at 86." Certainly the characters Arthur played—the titular Maude and Dorothy Zbornack on Golden Girls—were outspoken women, but to paint them with the "battle-ax" brush seems unwarranted and sexist. No wonder the headline was switched to "Bea Arthur, Star of Two TV Comedies, Dies at 86"
And speaking of Maude's outspokenness, the Times also focused on the controversy surrounding the character's choice to have an abortion:
The two-part episode was broadcast in November 1972, two months before Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal nationwide, was decided. By the episode’s conclusion, Maude, who lived in Westchester County in New York, where abortion was already permitted, had chosen to end the pregnancy. Two CBS affiliates refused to broadcast the program, and Ms. Arthur received a shower of angry mail.
“The reaction really knocked me for a loop,” she recalled in a 1978 interview in The New York Times. “I really hadn’t thought about the abortion issue one way or the other. The only thing we concerned ourselves with was: Was the show good? We thought we did it brilliantly; we were so very proud of not copping out with it.”
What's remarkable to me is that since this very special episode of Maude aired, the incidence of abortion on TV has been nearly nonexistent. The only semi-realistic abortion I can remember on TV happened on HBO's Six Feet Under. I have started referring to this phenomenon as "reverse-quicksand." You see movie and television characters get stuck in quicksand all the damn time, though death by quicksand is nearly impossible. Abortion, however, is something that 35 percent of American women will experience before the age of 45, and yet it is almost absent from our popular culture. Why has Hollywood, that bastion of supposed liberalism, kowtowed so completely to the far right on depicting this issue in fiction?