Pop culture paints poor picture of women and technology
There has been plenty of recent discussion about women and the Internet, from what law enforcement can do to make it safe for women to live, work and write online to economic schemes for rescuing the Internet comments sections from their own worst tendencies. Pop culture this fall seems to have a novel and sour twist on the question, suggesting that women should stay away from the Internet and social media or risk turning into narcissistic, obsessive, mercenary morons.
Tuesday night saw the debut of "Selfie," the most painful example of the bunch. The show is an update of "Pygmalion," but with a twist: "Selfie" protagonist Eliza (Karen Gillan) is not socially unpolished because of her poverty, but because in exchange for social media stardom, she apparently traded away part of her brain.
Eliza is the kind of person who brags "I have 263,000 friends, followers and Insta-acquaintances" and tells her married lover: "I know it's intimidating to fall for a girl with a strong pelvic floor and an advertising presence on her Facebook page." It takes utter Internet humiliation for her to realize "when Siri is the only one who's there for you, you realize that being Friended isn't the same thing as having friends." When she gets caught playing on her phone during a wedding, she tells her colleague Henry (John Cho) "I'm not used to paying attention to super-boring long stuff, OK?"
Eliza's narrative of transformation in "Selfie" relies on the idea that technology has corrupted her, and that by separating her from her phone and her social media accounts, Henry can turn her into a better person on every level. But the way she behaves suggests that she might have been a self-involved twerp with or without the Internet to escape into.
A similar idea animates Jason Reitman's new movie, "Men, Women & Children," which hits theaters on October 17. The film traces the various ways technology upsets_or seems to upset_the lives of residents of a Texas town.
A sexless couple begin seeing other people they meet through an online escort service and the matchmaking adultery website AshleyMadison.com. A single mother slides from building a website to promote her daughter's acting career to selling private photo sessions with the girl that are not precisely age-appropriate. A teenage girl finds inspiration for her anorexia on Tumblr. And another mother's overzealous monitoring of her daughter's social media takes a bad turn.
"Men, Women & Children" does not really make its case that the Internet caused these families' problems, rather than simply providing new outlets for them. But it suggests over and over again that it is particularly women who are prone to damage themselves and others through the use of social media. In both "Selfie" and "Men, Women & Children," concern about how women and girls use the Internet sometimes seems like a proxy way to express a deeper contempt for female characters.
Milder suggestions that something nefarious happens when women encounter technology shows up in elsewhere in pop culture this fall. In "A to Z," one of the young lovers, Andrew (Ben Feldman), works for a Tinder-like dating service run by a shrill woman who is obsessed with making sure her clients hook up but do not enter real relationships, thereby keeping their memberships. If she were a man, she might be a swashbuckling titan of industry. Instead, she comes across as both slightly crazed and an amoral opponent to Andrew's romanticism (which might get him treated like a ditz were he a woman).
All in all, it makes for a strange moment. Pop culture seems to feel that women should stay, if not in their kitchens, in the safe confines of the non-virtual world.