Elizabeth Meryment: Better single than bored
August 20, 2005
It's not hard to be offended by elements of popular culture; Big Brother Uncut, of course;
movies starring Jennifer Lopez; high school English syllabuses that include as texts ABC
websites with links to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission home pages. But
recently some sensibilities have really been hit by the worldwide success of the television
series Desperate Housewives.
It's not the show that insults greatly, over-rated though it surely is, given its glacial plotlines
and ludicrous female - and male - stereotypes.
Rather, it's the term desperate housewives that irritates. Why are two million-plus viewers in
this country alone so keen on a show that promotes the notion that housewives are desperate
or, indeed, that housewives exist?
While women with children who don't do paid work are now more euphemistically referred to
as stay-at-home mothers, such women are relatively scarce and usually rather more smug than
desperate. Why smug? Because they have figured out a way to rear children, have somebody
else pay the mortgage and avoid going to work, too.
In one sense, the emergence of Desperate Housewives is a logical extension of the obliteration
of the Sex and the City generation of women from popular culture. Desperate Housewives is
what happened once the single and sexually liberated ladies from the SATC generation got
married and moved to the burbs. They're certainly no happier there but at least most of them
finally found husbands.
Until recently, the single and fabulous twenty or thirtysomething woman was a popular and
prominent figure in popular consciousness. Apart from SATC's Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte
and Miranda, in the past decade there has been Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones, a fantasy figure
for most women: hopeless, insecure and overweight, but one who ended up with Mr Darcy (for god's sake).
Locally, there were the glam young things from The Secret Life of Us, a successful show set
in Melbourne's St Kilda, this itself almost unthinkable given the parlous state of local TV drama.
Meanwhile, in Britain, people loved This Life, a show in which cool, young people hung out,
went out and slept together.
Going back further, the 1960s and '70s gave us The Mary Tyler Moore Show and That Girl,
two shows where, again, the single and independent woman was celebrated. Even if she were
slightly ditsy, this gal was to be admired. By contrast, serious (or even comic) portrayals of
single people -- young, single women particularly -- have vanished from our night-time screens
and books. What present show is about the state of being single?
It's interesting to speculate why the figure of the sassy single woman has disappeared --
unlamented and hardly missed -- from our lives.
Surely it is partly because society has become increasingly conservative, both politically and
socially. In one sense, the single woman is literally disappearing; surveys and statistics show
jumps in the number of people opting to get married over living in de facto relationships.
Cementing this is the ever-rising popularity (and expense) of white weddings. The wedding
story has indeed replaced the love quest in contemporary fictions. Check out two Hollywood
films: Monster-in-Law, featuring Lopez and a horribly aged and miscast Jane Fonda as her
vile mother-in-law to be, and Wedding Crashers, about a pair of "committed womanisers
who sneak into weddings to take advantage of the romantic tinge in the air". Before that
were The Wedding Singer, The Wedding Planner, Runaway Bride and My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Single people are certainly out there and a trouble issue for them is that the SATC-style portrayal
of single life became so overblown and outrageous that it's hardly surprising people became fed
up with the solo femme and were glad to be rid of her.
Quite unfairly, single people came to be seen as selfish and self-obsessed. This is spurious because
most singles, especially those in their 30s, do more for their extended families than those with
children, who, by necessity, tend to be more self-focused, busy and insular. And, let's face it,
single people are usually more dedicated employees.
Yet the tide is against singles. When British journalist Fielding recently reprised her Bridget Jones
newspaper column, she was soundly derided for doing so. The consensus was that Fielding, 47,
partnered with a younger man and worth pound stg. 17 million ($40.5 million), has overshot the
mark, timing wise. In The Observer, Polly Vernon noted that "the column was very funny
the first time around" but that Bridget now seems a poor portrayal of the single person.
"Ultimately, singles will be an important, affluent majority [in Britain] as opposed to, say,
a stigmatised, pitied bunch of freaks." Well, perhaps Bridget isn't the best example of
singledom but surely it's better to be portrayed as slightly loopy than not at all.
As for Desperate Housewives, there's something eerily retro about the whole show. Bored
women stuck in the suburbs with nothing better to do than try not to go crazy and kill themselves
or their husbands. Sounds like something Alfred Hitchcock might have dreamed up in the '50s.
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