Well, I'm in the next generation of feminists.

[iverglas]

26. odd to the thinking person ;)

It doesn't even take any thought for me, these days.

I would have left off watching Homeland half-way through or earlier, except the co-vivant liked it and I didn't actually hate it. The female lead character was way past non credible. And the other (scarce) female characters were wives. Oh, and daughter. One of the wives, the male lead's, got a fair amount of screen time, but she was wife, nothing more. And her storyline revolved not around her job (she didn't have one as far as I could tell, despite having been a lone parent for some years) or anything actually personal to her; it revolved around sex: her affair with someone else. The entire story was densely populated by male people, absolutely everyone the female lead interacted with.

I just look at the first episode of a show now, and if that's the case, it's almost always no second episode -- unless the story is about something specific to men, and there's nothing to say that can't be worthwhile: The Green Mile, for instance, was about an all-male environment, and it had things to say. But The Sopranos? No, ta very much. Not for five minutes. Men with female appendages, and nasty men at that. Horrible thing.

Unfortunately, female-lead television shows are often in the B list. Crossing Jordan, Bones ... not the good material for them. And look at something like The Closer -- strong female lead, surrounded by men. If we can believe she became chief of police or whatever, couldn't we believe a couple of her detectives were women?

I didn't watch the original Law and Order for the first 4 or 5 years it was on air. I watched one episode and saw three male cops, three male lawyers, and a hooker, and I didn't come back next week. They even had a black lawyer; but no women anywhere in a cast of six main characters. I thought men were supposed to be good at arithmetic -- there are probably a couple of dozen ways they could have managed to squeeze even one woman into that set, but for some reason it just didn't occur to them. Then, a season or two after the beginning? -- came the female lawyer. And then the show went whole hog wild -- the woman medical examiner, the woman firearms expert, the woman psychiatrist, the wheelchair-using tech guy, the gay Asian psychiatrist FBI agent ... ! All secondary characters shoehorned into the cast, but I'll give 'em credit. And eventually the black woman lieutenant. I've seen more than one series where the same thing has happened. But what is it that makes these guys unable to get it on the first go??

What can we do about it? Pine for the days of Mary Tyler Moore and Murphy Brown and hell, Roseanne, I guess.

Second-wave feminist teevee.