Lifetime: Television for Terrorizing Women

I have to admit I have a truly guilty habit of watching really bad tv sometimes. It's not entirely my fault; I have an unemployed roommate, who aside from going to yoga two times a day and doing volunteer tai-chi with AIDS ward patients at a local hospital, spends the majority of her day smoking pot and watching re-runs of "7th Heaven" and Maury Povich paternity test shows (just to give a few examples.) Together we discovered our sick fascination with Lifetime made-for-tv movies. The more I watch these horrendous productions complete with bad actors, poor screen writing and shoddy cinematography, the more I question what the producers of Lifetime are thinking when they commission this stuff. Perhaps I am making the assumption that the phrase "Lifetime: Television for Women" (and apparently Gay Men now that Project Runway has moved networks and taken Bravo's constituency with them) somehow is supposed to denote empowering programming for women. And yes, indeed, there are instances where Lifetime will air actual mainstream, Hollywood produced films that speak the romantic side of my inner feminist lesbian. Examples including "Boys on the Side," "Fried Green Tomatoes," and "Thelma and Louise." However, I'm constantly confounded by this former style of programming that deals not at all with issues that might empower women or imagine a world of gender equality but rather focus on extremely hyped up situations of all the reasons women SHOULD be terrified in our society.

Take for instance my new recent favorite, "Mother, May I Sleep with Danger" starring Tori Spelling (that's bad enough in itself right?) The film hinges around a college girl whose mother has a funny feeling about the new boy in her daughter's life. After investigation, she comes to find he's a murderous kidnapper, but only after Tori's character has been seduced and held captive by the embodiment of masculinist sexual violence in the character of her boyfriend. Of course, mother and daughter prevail, presuming the kidnapper to be dead, but of the course the movie ends with him with a different hair style seducing some new girl. In what ways does this film empower women? Not at all. Rather it spreads the message to mothers that indeed your daughter is a naive slut who is easily seduced despite your warnings and that even after mother and daughter ban together to fight the beast, the demon of male sexual violence will still be present, just hidden in a different form.

Or another one of my favorites is "Fatal Reunion" detailing the horrific story of a woman who, believing her husband to be cheating on ther, contacts an old highschool fling who becomes very attached, and then is believed to be stalking her (the protagonist is threatened with a cross-bow, classic, finds her golden retreiver poisoned, and discovers her house to be vandalized.) In the end, it the stalker turns out to be the high-school flings crazy wife who has it out for all the women he engages with behind her back. What's the message here? Either your husband's infidelity turns you into a murderous psycho-bitch or if you question your husband's fidelity you will bring death and terror into your family's life. What options does this provide for a positive feminine subjectivity?

When I asked my aforementioned roommate why she personally liked to watch this filth, she replied, "I dunno. Women liked to be scared I guess." What I believe this speaks to is the constant sexual victimization of women that is usually just compounded by trying to explore the idea of woman-as-victim in the first place. Perhaps Lifetime does have a strategy that I'm overlooking. Maybe we need to expose the epistemic cruelty of such stories before we can actually locate woman-as-agent in the media. I mean, the network does juxtapose this crap with great woman-centered movies such as the ones mentioned above. But at the same time, after decades of reformulating women as agents, given the great advances made by sexual liberalism in the 1920s, women's work outside the home in the 1940s, and the women's movement of the 1970s, why do we still hark on this cultural precept of woman as victim and commodify it for entertainment....for women? It completely vexes, but naturally it's not just the first in a long list of American cultural standards that make no coherent sense to a queer sex radical.