Copyright by Michaela Sophia Kollin 2020
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Copyright by Michaela Sophia Kollin 2020 The Thesis Committee for Michaela Sophia Kollin Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Thesis Marital Hegemony and Alternatives to Monogamy in 21st-Century American Television APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Mary Beltrán, Supervisor Jennifer McClearen Marital Hegemony and Alternatives to Monogamy in 21st-Century American Television by Michaela Sophia Kollin Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin May 2020 Abstract Marital Hegemony and Alternatives to Monogamy in 21st-Century American Television Michaela Sophia Kollin, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2020 Supervisor: Mary Beltrán Television’s heritage as a domestic medium has encouraged a subtle social conservatism that places primacy on the nuclear family, and by extension, on committed, monogamous relationships. While alternatives to monogamy are not completely absent from television, these alternatives are presented as temporary and ultimately unsatisfying experiments that primarily serve to bring characters closer to the inevitable monogamous relationships they actually want. In my thesis, I explore this tendency to establish marriage and monogamy as norms by analyzing two types of deviance from this norm: casual sex, and non-monogamous relationships. In order to perform this analysis, I examine sitcoms and light melodramas such as Two and a Half Men (CBS, 2003-2015), How I Met Your Mother (CBS, 2005-2014), The L Word (Showtime, 2004-2009), Casual (Hulu, 2015-2018), Insecure (HBO, 2016-) and You Me Her (Audience Network, 2016- 2020). I also scrutinize whether these alternatives are portrayed as empowering and healthy or pathetic and deviant, and how race, class, sexual orientation, gender and time period influence whether these characters and their non-monogamous relationships are v framed as empowered and empowering. Television both reflects and perpetuates social norms, so examining how television treats non-monogamy and/or casual sex can help illuminate the types of sexual behavior American society views as good and right and which types of behavior it condemns as unhealthy or damaging. Even as television has become slightly better at representing gay characters, the types of relationships characters tend to be in, whether gay or straight, are often heteronormative in their monogamous, dyadic fidelity. Additionally, regardless of the genders of the people in the relationship, in narratives focusing on characters who engage in casual sex, the more traditionally masculine role of pursuer is also framed as more empowered, while the traditionally feminine role of the pursued is portrayed as a comparatively disempowered gatekeeper who must reject the womanizer’s advances in order to demonstrate her own agency and level-headed self-interest. vi Table of Contents Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Literature Review .......................................................................................................5 Sexuality, Dating and Womanizers on Television ..........................................5 Feminism and Sexual Empowerment .............................................................9 Queer Theory ................................................................................................14 Monogamy ....................................................................................................14 Methodology .............................................................................................................16 Chapter Breakdown ..................................................................................................18 Chapter 1: Male Womanizers and Masculine Fantasies ...................................................22 Virility Props ............................................................................................................24 The "Bimbo" Frame ..................................................................................................26 Contrasting Portrayals of Girlfriends and Hookups .................................................28 The Portrayal of Girlfriends ......................................................................................37 Intimacy Issues Stemming From the Mother ............................................................45 Casual Sex as the Degradation of Women ................................................................47 Conclusion ................................................................................................................50 Chapter 2: Lesbian Lotharios .............................................................................................53 Casual Sex and the Rejection of Monogamy as a Fear of Intimacy .........................55 Secondary Lesbian Lotharios as Foils for Straight, Male Protagonists ....................58 Sex Roles, Power and Pleasure .................................................................................60 The Magic of Lesbian Sexual Magnetism ................................................................64 Lesbian Casual Sex as Misogyny(?) .........................................................................69 vii Race, Identification and Wish Fulfillment ................................................................72 Conclusion ................................................................................................................78 Chapter 3: Non-Monogamy and the Construction of Appropriate Sexual Desire .............79 One-Episode Soap Opera Swingers ..........................................................................84 Non-Monogamy as a Tawdry Procedural Backdrop ................................................91 Non-Monogamy as a Period Oddity .........................................................................96 Non-Monogamy as a Failed Experiment ................................................................100 Non-Monogamy as an Endgame Romance ............................................................114 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................118 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................119 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................127 viii Introduction Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, the expectations that young people would immediately settle down into marriage in their early twenties and wait until marriage to have sex, have waned significantly (Bogle 2002, 2). Additionally, subcultural acceptance of non-monogamy has also ebbed and flowed throughout the last half-century. However, despite these significant chances to social norms governing marriage, love and sex, non-monogamy still has not reached mainstream acceptance and respectability in American society. Although people are getting married later in life, marriage rates are down 9% in the past 25 years (as of 2017), and there is no longer a reputation-ruining taboo against pre-marital sex, eventual monogamous marriage is still an unquestioned expectation in American society (Parker & Stepler, 2017). As Franka Heise notes in "‘I’m a Modern Bride’: On the Relationship between Marital Hegemony, Bridal Fictions, and Postfeminism,” contemporary American culture still reinforces and legitimizes monogamy as a societal duty and frames heterosexual marriage as the most desirable (and ultimately only legitimate) form of intimate relationship (2012, 1–2). Even after the 2015 legalization of gay marriage in the United States weakened the singular status of heterosexual marriage as the sole acceptable form of romantic partnership, monogamy and marriage are still positioned hegemonically as the only common-sense, mature type of romantic intimacy. American television of the 21st-century reflects the contradictory and warring schools of thought that influence sex and relationships in the contemporary era. Television simultaneously plays into loosening of standards that once decreed that young people must immediately enter into a committed, monogamous relationship by increasingly exploring the fantasy of rejecting the social mores that elevate committed 1 romance over casual sex (through the figures of the womanizer and the swinger) while also reflecting the continued society-wide assumption that monogamous marriage is inevitable, and ultimately, desirable. The continued social centrality of monogamous marriage as the naturalized pinnacle of healthy relationships and adult maturation has heavily influenced the depiction of non-monogamous relationships on television, often relegating these depictions to tertiary cautionary tales a monogamous couple or singleton encounters as a subplot of an episode. Within these narratives, non-monogamy is utilized to scare the character back into committed monogamy and to make them realize that monogamy is ultimately more fulfilling than swinging, which is portrayed as a hedonistic and empty indulgence. In situations like this, the character(s) almost always decides that their foray into swinging or acting as the “unicorn” (the third person to enter a throuple) to an established couple is not for