“Perhaps unsurprisingly, LGB people considered LGB portrayal in broadcast media to be important”

I love the BBC. Sometimes, when I survey the UK TV listings and find only gardening and cookery shows on primetime, or when everything on iPlayer makes me want to cry with boredom, or when University Challenge is canceled so the Ryder Cup highlights can be shown, I forget that.

But the Beeb really is a terrific institution. If you can look past the endless anodyne costume dramas and the gigantic embarrassment that is BBC Three, there’s an awful lot to like. These are the people that bring us news coverage of a neutrality envied the world over, web content unmatched by other traditional broadcasters, and a wealth of radio talent to cater to all tastes (my personal favorite being Mark Kermode, whose show I’ll be seeing live in London this week).

One of the best things about the BBC, however, is its willingness to regulate itself. It has its own governing body in the form of BBC Trust, which tries to make sure (in its own words) that “the BBC has the right standards and that its programmes live up to those standards”. If there are investigations going on into BBC content, you can bet your boots it will be reported impartially on the BBC news website.

Auntie, bless her wee cotton socks, has a whole list of editorial guidelines, covering not only the expected areas of accuracy, impartiality, and privacy, but also things like “War, Terror & Emergencies” or “Interacting with our Audiences”. On top of this, when criticized she conducts research into the relevant area with a view to changing her conduct.

I refer specifically, of course, to Stonewall’s Unseen on Screen report (which can be found here) about gay people on youth TV, and the BBC’s response to its finding that “BBC1 transmitted just 44 seconds of positive and realistic [LGB] portrayal out of a total 39 hours and 30 minutes of programming.” Auntie conducted a survey and a public consultation, in which I quite happily took part.

Now the BBC has published the results, in a report entitled Portrayal of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual People on the BBC (which you can read here). It makes for pretty interesting reading, even if some of the findings are on a par with investigations into the Pope’s preferred brand of Christianity for duh-factor (I love the dry “Perhaps unsurprisingly” in the quote I’ve pulled for my title).

My two favorite factoids are:

(i) “LGB people were also particularly conscious that there should be more portrayal of other groups, such as disabled and black and minority ethnic audiences, as well as their own.” (p11)

(ii) “More heterosexual women thought the portrayal of LGB people to be important than did heterosexual men.” (p13)

That first one makes sense, since often queer people tend to be more aware of things like majority privilege and the representation of minority groups in the media – I know I mentioned other minority groups in my answer to the survey, including trans people, who are almost completely ignored by both the BBC report and of course Stonewall generally.

The second ties into a phenomenon I find fascinating: that of straight women who are major queer allies. I don’t know why straight women should be more interested in queer people than straight men, but the facts here seem to bear out the presentation in a lot of fiction of straight women with gay male best friends, à la Will & Grace, Sex & the City, and so on.

A lot of people have a lot of opinions about this trend, so I won’t add mine. I’ll just point out that I, as a gay woman with a lot of straight male friends, rarely if ever see a representation of a life like mine in film or TV.

Of course, one rarely sees gay women represented on TV at all, particularly on the BBC – as most people questioned for the report seem to agree. It’s very heartening to see dear old Auntie taking notice of this problem and looking toward doing something about it, starting with hotly anticipated new drama Lip Service. Maybe we’ll finally see some realistic and relatable lesbian representation on the BBC.

– Though, on a second look, I find that Lip Service will be on BBC Three. Maybe next year, eh, Auntie?

Women in entertainment

In the past year, I’ve read 85 books (give or take academic books and rereads). Ten were to do with Christianity; six were secular non-fiction; the rest were novels. Twenty-four of the books were written by women.

This is actually an improvement on the previous year, where the count was nine out of 60. The improvement is partly to do with a conscious effort on my part to read some classic female and feminist authors like Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Ursula Le Guin, though the fact that it wasn’t a very noteworthy effort is clear. For the most part, I just read books I’m interested in, and often that means sci-fi or fantasy (at least 37 of the 69 novels, though genre categorization is frequently debatable). Twenty-five of the 69 had a female protagonist or (if there was no clear protagonist) a female character among the major ensemble players. Seventeen had major queer characters or queer themes, as did five of the non-fiction books.

These statistics may not be terribly meaningful on their own, but I think they’re interesting. Compare the 41 films I’ve seen at the cinema over the same time period. Exactly four were directed by women. Those four and two others had female protagonists, with a further four featuring a female as one of two or three main characters. Half of these 10 were from outside the US, and only one – Alice in Wonderland, whose popularity probably stemmed from its special effects, ensemble, and director – made it to every multiplex. That’s poor, even for Hollywood.

It’s absolutely astonishing that women – who constitute more than 50% of the population – should be so absurdly underrepresented in entertainment. The absence of queer people and non-white people is frustrating, but the lack of women is really astounding because women are literally more than half your potential audience.

On an individual basis, I love good books and films regardless of the main characters’ genders. I don’t read books thinking, “This is great, but it sure would be better if the protagonist was female instead.” It’s the trend that’s so maddening. I want action and thrillers and sci-fi and everything to exist with a female protagonist as often as a male. The way things are at the moment, I’d settle for half as often.

But that’s how the kyriarchy operates: in systems so huge that fighting it seems like a lost cause.

I'm a Christian. Hear me roar.

One of the founding ideas of this blog was my thoughts on anger. The angry woman has long been a cliché of feminism, both in the jeers of opponents (“man-hater”, “feminazi”) and in the fighting words of women themselves (“hear me roar”).

There is pretty good reason for this anger. First-wave feminism used anger to fight blatant injustices that were enshrined in law; second-wave feminism needed the force of anger to make its point in the face of a society that refused to even see that injustices still existed; in the third wave and beyond, anger is still a powerful tool for the recognition of oppression. Many feminists feel that we as women have been socialized to be docile and unassertive and to avoid conflict in a way that men have not, and that we therefore need to reclaim our right to be angry and stand up for ourselves just as much as men.

In principle, I agree. I think our culture still presents boys with images of aggression and assertiveness as the ideal to aspire to, while the female model is still largely meek and mild, and that disparity isn’t right at all.

But – hey, meek and mild; what does that remind me of?

“Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” – James 1:19

“Do not let the sun go down on your anger... Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you” – Ephesians 4:26, 31

“Everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” – Matthew 5:22

That last one was said by Jesus himself, and in context he’s basically equating anger with murder. So does this mean that, while as a woman I want to assert my right to anger, as a Christian I should never be angry? Is this a case where my Christianity means I have to sacrifice my feminist principles?

That’s the question I started out with. Luckily for me, those passages from James, Ephesians, and Matthew all have a little more to add.

The full sentence in James 1:19-20 is: “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” Ephesians 4:26 starts with the words “Be angry and do not sin”. The parallel in Matthew 5:21-2 contrasts “Whoever murders will be liable to judgment” with “Everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment”.

The implication? Anger itself is not always and inevitably a bad thing. Jesus himself got pretty angry on occasion – with the traders in the Temple, with the Pharisees and members of the religious establishment – and the caveats in these Bible passages seem to imply that righteous anger is actually a good thing. Read a few Psalms, and you’ll quickly find that the blazing fury you experience when faced with injustice and oppression is a feeling God absolutely shares.

However, “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God”. Our anger might be a right and righteous reaction to injustice, but that does not mean our subsequent actions will necessarily be right. The injunction to “be angry and [...] not sin” is a warning against the wrong ways we can put our righteous anger into action: we risk trying to enact the judgment that it is God’s right alone to enact. Perhaps we try to humiliate the person we are angry with, or we nurse a grudge and let the sun go down on our anger, instead of forgiving our brother.

In practice, then, righteous anger against injustice shouldn’t be dismissed; but it should be used in constructive, forgiving ways. Getting angry at that homophobic comment on the message boards wasn’t my mistake – responding to it with rudeness and hate was. As a feminist on the Internet, I see a lot of rudeness and hate, and as a Christian I should be turning my angry reaction into a kind and truthful response.

Basically, the problem isn’t that women are socialized to be meek and mild; it’s that men are socialized to be aggressive and assertive. As with so many things, Christianity has turned my thinking upside down.

Fall TV

I love the fall TV season. The buzz and anticipation surrounding new shows; the looking forward to returning favorites; the obsessive comparing of personal and critical reactions to the major pilots – it’s all very intense, very geeky, and a lot of fun.

The disappointments are as much a part of it as the good stuff. There’s the inevitable batch of cringeworthy sitcoms, few of which are likely to see in the new year; the critically acclaimed but entirely unwatched show that gets canceled after two episodes (farewell, Lone Star; we hardly knew ye); the new show from Arrested Development alumni, which never had a chance of living up to the weight of expectations; the turgid sci-fi drama you wanted to like, but just couldn’t.

This is a period of ups and downs, of surprise delights and unforeseen let-downs, a time when all the new shows are in fierce contest for a voice and an audience. In a few weeks, we’ll know for certain which nonessential shows we should drop from our overcrowded viewing schedule, which sleeper hits turn out to be unexpectedly enchanting, and which worlds cancelation or quality decline will make us regret falling in love with; a year from now, many of the titles we discuss will provoke nary a flicker of recognition. But for now, we’ll have our fun.

Fall 2010 is not looking like an especially memorable season so far. Compared with last year – which brought us a unique dramedy in the ubiquitous Glee, an old-fashioned sitcom with a contemporary twist in Modern Family, and the absolutely terrific Community – the new crop of shows looks pretty unexciting. Apart from Boardwalk Empire and the late lamented Lone Star, nothing has really gotten the critical saliva gushing, and the majority of the new shows can be described as nothing more flattering than “watchable”.

In terms of diversity on television, however, a couple of potentially quite exciting things are happening. While Glee, Modern Family, and Community were and remain self-conscious about the diversity of their respective ensemble casts, they still have a tendency to foreground the straight white people and give their minority characters short shrift: Glee’s main character is straight white Rachel, Community’s is straight white Jeff, and Modern Family is just now starting to address the problems in its portrayal of its gay couple.

Now, Undercovers gives us a main couple of characters who are both non-white and happily married. Mike & Molly is a surprisingly funny sitcom about two overweight people, who are (for the most part) portrayed as sympathetic and complex human beings, not just walking slapstick factories. It’s not that much to go on, but it gives me hope because both these shows are offering something that the rest simply aren’t. An action-adventure series whose leads happen to be African-American? A show – ANY show – whose main characters are plus-sized? In a country where ethnic minorities constitute over a third of the population, obese people are almost as many, and the demographics in TV shows are obscenely skewed toward thin white people, every step in the right direction is something to be celebrated.

Labels: not just for pickle bottles?

I know that labels are for food and clothes, not people. I know that very well. So why did I choose three potentially incendiary, rarely combined labels for the title of my blog?

The fact is: we define ourselves all the time. It’s how we figure out who we are. Not everyone wants a label for every aspect of their life, but all of us claim membership of some social groups as major aspects of our identity.

The problems with self-definition arise when the labels I use as a convenient shorthand for parts of my identity are misunderstood by others: when people have an instinctive negative reaction to a certain term, or when people understand a given label differently than I meant it, or when people think something is the only (or the most important) aspect of who I am.

And so I’d like to expand on each of my three chosen labels, and explain a little of what they mean to me.

Gay

For a lot of people, being gay means nothing more than who they sleep with, but for me it’s part of a much larger system of beliefs and thought. I am a white, middle-class, able-bodied, cis-gendered woman, so I have a lot of privilege. Being gay – being part of a minority group that is still openly and systemically discriminated against in many parts of the Western world – is the thing that made me start to question my privilege in other areas, and to recognize the systemic bias against minority groups that is still prevalent in our supposedly advanced society.

Arguably, it’s because I’m gay that I’m a feminist, that I try to be attuned to instances of racism and ableism and transphobia and classism and ageism, that I reject the network of ingrained prejudice and systemic oppression known as the kyriarchy.

Christian

Christians have rather a reputation for being fans of the kyriarchy. In fact, many Christians have heartily embraced it as God’s will for us. I find this rather odd, because, as I see it, the kyriarchy’s biggest critic is this one guy named Jesus.

Jesus railed against the most powerful people in his society. He spent his time on earth with women, with prostitutes, with lepers, with the poor, with dishonest tax collectors – with every marginalized and oppressed group in first-century Palestine. At every turn in the gospel story, it is the downtrodden that witness the key events and play the key roles.

To me, this is nothing less than a condemnation of our earthly systems. All forms of oppression are profoundly ungodly, because the only one we should be serving is God, and that is a free choice. Choosing to be subservient to anything else is idolatry, but at least it is an exercise of free will; forcing others to be subservient is a denial of their free will and thus their humanity. God doesn’t do that, so why do we?

Geek

My gayness and my Christianity work together, and, although the combination is frequently challenged by members of both groups, they strengthen each other. That’s something that cannot be expressed too many times or too many ways, for the sake of both gay people and Christians. But it wouldn’t be a true picture of who I am if I didn’t include my geekiness.

I became a Christian a couple of years ago, and I started coming out a couple of years before that, but I’ve been a geek longer than anything else. As a bookish kid, I had a hard time at prep school, and I love that my geekiness is now something that I can own, and through which I can connect with others. I define geekiness as an especial affinity for the worlds of media, pop culture, and fiction: a passionate devotion to books, music, film, TV, and so on.

Gay Christian geek: the three areas of my life are constantly growing and interacting. There is always more to learn about fighting oppression and about God, and about the relationship between them. Filtering pop culture through these lenses helps me to understand more about this world and my place in it.

Writing about these things is my journey. Where I’m going, I can’t yet say. The only thing I know for sure is that I’ll learn a lot along the way.