October 21, 2004
Home Front
‘Desperate Housewives’ demeans women
In my baby-boomer lifetime, I have gone from flower child to thirtysomething to soccer mom to empty-nester.
Somehow, I missed out on being one of those Desperate Housewives.
You know that stereotype, too, I’m sure.
Exhausted by my spoiled kids, abandoned by my workaholic husband, obsessed with the perfection of my home and driven mad by it all, I burn down the house of my rival, have sex with the garden
boy, poison my husband or blow my brains out in front of the family portrait.
Sunday night’s "Desperate Housewives," ABC’s newest reason for Muslims to hate us, is billed as a dramedy. It’s as schizoid as the women who live on back-lot perfect
Wisteria Lane in Surburbia Somewhere, and just as predictable.
If you aren’t sure whether to laugh or grab a tissue after watching this show, it is because it is neither funny nor dramatic. The show’s writers have chosen one of each female
stereotype from the human pantry, set them in a perfect suburban cul-de-sac, and infested their dialogue with enough cliches to require an exterminator.
The ensemble cast includes one Martha Stewart, one hot-tempered Latina, one predatory divorcee, one hapless but sympathetic divorcee and a passive, defeated former career woman overrun by her
children. The only feminist in the neighborhood is a precociously together teenage girl, who demands to know when her mother last had sex.
If it weren’t for the mysterious note and the mysterious box unearthed at midnight and the mysterious widower who just moved in, there would not have been a thimbleful of curiosity generated
for another episode.
The search for lasting love, the complexity of family life, and the conflicts of the modern requirement that women both work and manage the home are all fertile ground for drama. But the suburban
tele-women of "Desperate Housewives" make me long for the smart-aleck vacuousness of the girls on "Sex in the City" or the brilliant suburban send-up of Tom Hanks’
"The ‘Burbs."
In the meantime, I’ll take my McMansion housewives Carmela Soprano-style: smart, tough and very dangerous.
Susan Reimer is a family columnist for The Baltimore Sun.
