Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Critic’s Notebook

Why the Sudden Urge to Reconsider Famous Women?

Pop culture has never been more interested in reclaiming women from the recent past, like Pamela Anderson and Janet Jackson. But not every reclamation succeeds.

Celebrity media coverage from the 1990s and early 2000s has become notorious for how it policed women’s behavior.Credit...Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times; Photographs by Getty Images

In a scene from the FX series “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” Monica Lewinsky (Beanie Feldstein) sits in her darkened apartment in the Watergate complex. Puffy eyed and pale, she watches herself pilloried on late-night television. David Letterman makes her the subject of a Top 10 list. Jay Leno begins his monologue with a barrage of Monica jokes.

“Happy Monica Day,” he says, his face contorted into a smirk. “Is it a federal holiday? All zippers at half-mast?”

“Impeachment,” which concluded its 10-episode series in November, is a deliberate recuperation, filtering the events of the mid- to late 1990s through the ostensibly more enlightened lens of the present. How terrible we were, we are invited to think. How ignorant, how naïve. We would never make that zipper joke today. Or wouldn’t we at least make it funnier?

The series joins a surge of works that aim, in part, to reclaim the lives and narratives of maligned women of the recent past. These range from scripted series (“Pam & Tommy,” “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” recent seasons of the “The Crown”) and movies (“I, Tonya,” “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” “Spencer”) to documentaries (“What Happened, Brittany Murphy?,” “Allen v. Farrow”) and podcasts (“You’re Wrong About”). Two recent documentaries by The New York Times — “Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson” and “Framing Britney Spears” — also examined the media’s treatment of iconic female celebrities as part of larger investigations.

Image
Janet Jackson, scrutinized after her 2004 performance at Super Bowl, was the subject of the New York Times’s 2021 documentary, “Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson.” Credit...Frank Micelotta/Getty Images

Taken all together, this, it seems, is a new hot trend: appreciating women, however famous or infamous, as fully human.

“We’re trying to do better, I think,” said Sarah Marshall, a journalist and the host of “You’re Wrong About,” the chatty, piercing podcast that has devoted more than a dozen episodes to unpacking the cultural perceptions of women such as Lewinsky, Tonya Harding, Anita Hill and Anna Nicole Smith. “And we believe we can learn. There is something very hopeful at the center of all that.”

To understand this swell of reclamation, it is useful to consider why public-facing women were so maligned in the first place. In America, at least, women in public life have nearly always been the exception rather than the rule, with their behavior and appearance explicitly policed.

“Women still are looked at as second-class citizens,” said Tracy Everbach, a professor of journalism at the University of North Texas. “They are still judged by their appearance, they’re still judged by what they wear, how much they weigh, what their hair looks like.”

This policing via popular media — comparing women’s outfits, judging their beach bodies and speculating as to how and why they were or weren’t pregnant — served as a warning for less famous women: See what can happen when you leave the house? The subtext was that any woman who put herself out there was asking for whatever she got. Disparagement was the price a woman paid for fame. That not all of these women sought or desired fame didn’t seem to matter.

Carolyn Chernoff, a sociologist who researches women and popular culture, said this media scrutiny seemed to worsen in the 1980s, perhaps as a reaction to feminist gains. “More and more women are in the workplace, are getting more power, are working visibly in powerful jobs,” she said. This led to what she called a “correction,” with the media coming after any woman perceived as too famous, too powerful, too exposed.

Ironically, the feminist gains of the ’80s and ’90s weren’t even particularly sturdy. “We had Sally Ride going to space and Toni Morrison winning the Pulitzer,” said Allison Yarrow, the author of “90s Bitch: Media, Culture and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality.” “But what I realize now is that it was one woman per industry who can succeed.”

According to Yarrow’s analysis, famous women who found themselves in the news were the targets of negative coverage. Worse, she said, the narrative became that women purposely engineered negative coverage for personal gain.

Cindi Leive, a former editor of the women’s magazines Self and Glamour, said that, in the late ’90s, “there was definitely a sense in general of celebrity watching as sport.” (The magazines she edited weren’t as brutalizing as the tabloids, but they did reaffirm some of the same biases.) “There’s an element of dehumanization that crept into all of our coverage — the industry broadly,” Leive said.

If you flipped through certain magazines at this time you could be forgiven for thinking that there was no right way to be a woman, only wrong ones — bimbo or frump, slut or prude, shrew or doormat. The line seemed impossible to walk, especially in heels — although being pretty, white, thin and rich typically gave you a leg up. For women who violated the hegemonic norm in other ways the challenges were much worse, though not necessarily the public scrutiny.

“Race and class and power have a lot to do with who gets covered in the first place,” Chernoff said.

There are, however, significant examples of Black women whose lives were scrutinized in this era. Tabloid stories mocked Whitney Houston’s drug use and tracked Oprah Winfrey’s weight, while coverage of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings in some ways mirrored the Lewinsky saga.

Why are we reconsidering so many of these women now? Some of it owes to a generational shift. As Yarrow noted, the ’90s-era teens who read those tabloids are adults now and some of them are rethinking the messages they absorbed in their adolescence. “It became very clear that any woman who really made the news in the ’90s was turned into someone who was angry or bitchy or slutty or power grabbing,” Yarrow said of her own re-examination.

From left, Monica Lewinsky, Tonya Harding and Pamela Anderson are among those now being reconsidered in contemporary TV and film.Credit...At left, Axel Koester/Sygma, via Getty Images; David Madison/Getty Images; Kypros/Getty Images

Marshall argued that the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election — and the suggestion that internalized and externalized sexism may have contributed to her loss — seems to have accelerated this societal reassessment. “It was normal for Democrats to talk about her cankles,” she said. “That maybe scared some people straight.” Certainly the rise of the #MeToo movement the following year led to a recognition of power imbalances related to gender and how women had often been blamed for male predation.

Additionally, the nature of celebrity has diversified and changed. The advent of social media has meant that women in the public eye can speak to their public directly. All of this has hastened a re-examination of the celebrity coverage of the past.

It seems generally well-intentioned. “It’s a better impulse to reconsider than not to reconsider,” Leive said. “It’s better to poke at our assumptions than not to, and a lot of good can come of it.”

But not all reckonings are created equal. Recent projects have been criticized for sensationalism (“What Happened, Brittany Murphy?”) or for harming the women they purport to champion, an accusation leveled at the “Pam & Tommy” series, which was created without Pamela Anderson’s participation. In the most egregious examples, these stories harness a particular woman’s travails without acknowledging the systems and forces that contributed to her treatment and how these systems persist in our own time.

In the ’80s and ’90s, coverage of famous women tended to focus on the particular — one woman’s outburst, one woman’s heartbreak — rather than reckoning more broadly with celebrity culture or the pressures of stardom. Unfortunately, reconsiderations have largely repeated this pattern, centering on individual actors rather than industry-wide problems.

“We haven’t really questioned the systemic part of it,” Rafia Zakaria, the author of “Against White Feminism,” said.

While some works — like “Impeachment” and “You’re Wrong About” — acknowledge larger forces and allow for nuance, others, like the early episodes of “Pam & Tommy,” exude a kind of smugness, celebrating our purported progress. We can revel in past misdeeds while congratulating ourselves for our present sophistication. The critic Kathryn VanArendonk has christened this mode “empathy tourism.”

“We look into this world as outsiders and cluck at the things they got wrong,” VanArendonk writes. “No matter how close any of these works get to the women’s authentic experiences, we are still only ever looking back at them from our comfortable remove.”

That smugness upsets Leive, who has worked in media since the ’90s. “I can guarantee you that we weren’t all ignorant,” she said. “There were a lot of smart people who still made these errors and published these mistakes and so the thing that should tell us is that everybody is probably making plenty of those same kinds of errors right now and we just don’t see them.”

It isn’t as though contemporary culture has abandoned reductive stereotypes. Think of the girlboss, the femmepreneur, “that girl.” (Then again, there has been a productive embrace and complication of the idea of the bimbo, once an insult and now an ambition.)

None of this means that we should abandon the work of reclamation. Rather it dares us to think more critically about whose lives we reclaim and to learn from the mistakes of the past rather than simply re-enacting them. It also spurs us to treat all women, and not only those in public life, with more empathy.

“If it just entertains you and lets you say, ‘Well, we were terrible,’ it’s failed in some way,” Marshall said. “If it makes you say, ‘Well, we were terrible. How do we not do that next time? How do we behave with just a little more grace, a little more compassion?’”

Alisha Haridasani Gupta contributed reporting.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT