Sons of Anarchy - "With an X"

Season 4, Episode 6

Problems with earning that feminist badge

 “This about how you guys treat women.”

-Tara

“Your dick almost got people killed.”

-Opie

Back when the third season of Sons of Anarchy was receiving some heavy criticism for how it was handling its storylines, Kurt Sutter, as is his wont, took to the internet – mostly Twitter and his blog – to claim that most people didn’t get what the show was going for, but that a small portion of the audience – mostly women – did. Given that SOA was written specifically with Katey Sagal (Sutter’s wife) in mind, it would make sense that Sutter was the kind of man that would take solace in the support of a female audience, just as it makes sense that he would make a show that would appeal to a sizable female audience, even on a network as male-friendly as FX.

Moreover, SOA and Sutter certainly feel at times as if they are feminist, and even if I have no proof of that one way or the other, it sometimes makes me question what happens on screen. While Gemma Teller is a fantastic feminist creation, an anti-heroine meant to respond to the wave of fully-fleshed out anti-heroes, the show’s next biggest female lead, Tara, is a bit more problematic. Though she is strong and self-assured like Gemma, it sometimes feels like the Tara’s intelligence waxes and wanes based on the needs of the script, and that tends to rob the character of her power. And if Tara – one of only two main women on the show – isn’t nearly as powerful as Gemma, that starts to make the latter look like the feminist exception to the rule and it becomes much harder to accept the feminist angle that I believe the show is trying to adopt.

And it’s with that mindset that I want to discuss the gender disparity present in “With an X”. Sutter kind of put himself in a tight spot when he created a show for a male-oriented network with only two female leads. It puts the show in a precarious situation, in that if only one of the female characters remains a strong human being while the other does not, it might just seem as if the first character is an aberration, and the other is merely holding up the uneven status quo for female characters on television (as I suggested above). Perhaps as reconciliation, Sutter does populate the world of Charming with other recurring female characters, but – and this is partly due to the fact that recurring characters get less screen time and thus rarely can be as nuanced as the main characters – these female roles tend to be boiled down into offensive “types” and they don’t function as real characters.

The closest we come to a third female lead is Lyla, so perhaps we should start with her story. Perhaps the biggest source of recurring female characters for the show is the porn studio that the club occasionally runs into. While Lyla is presented as a fairly strong character, and tellingly is not ashamed of her profession, the show, by the way of the Sons, tends to look down on the porn stars adult film actresses as a whole. It’s not just that the show looks down on women who are in control of their sexuality, but that most of the actresses are generally dumb and/or petty, especially in the way that they constantly flirt with the club members.

Even Lyla, sweet and strong Lyla, isn’t totally immune from the “stink of porn”. Now, what the show has been trying to do with her, and what I think it’s actually being doing fairly successfully up to this point, is to present Lyla as the exception to the porn star rule, and while it makes for a strong character, it also creates the same problems as it does with the Gemma/Tara pairing. But beyond that, the show is also trying to use Lyla and Opie’s relationship to create drama both in the fact that Lyla got an abortion and Opie’s general jealousy about her profession. This is obviously supposed to create the kind of relationship drama that this is show is good at, and up until this point, the blame between the two characters for the problems in their relationship has been spread fairly evenly. But as we head out unto a new stage of their relationship, I fear that going forward, the show might ask us to empathize more with Opie that Lyla, mainly because he’s a main character and she is not. Or, to put it another way: Does the show really want us to believe that Lyla’s lie of omission about the abortion was somehow worse than Opie cheating on her?

(As another example, we also saw how Gemma and possibly Tara feel about the working ladies when Gemma tried to avoid talking to Lyla out in the parking lot. It was a small moment, but her “here comes another one” comment would seem to indicate that the porn stars in SOA don’t even have any support from other female characters, and that just furthers the sense that this show looks down on women of that profession.)

And speaking of porn stars, there’s Ima, perhaps the most problematic female character to ever grace the show. Ima is mostly a plot device, a way to get between Jax and Tara in the third season and between Opie and Lyla here in the fourth. Setting aside for a second the fact the obvious meta-textual use of a female character in order to serve the story’s need, there’s something more troubling in how other characters react to her. Jax and Opie just saw her as a way to get back at the women in their lives, and both Tara and Lyla chose to focus most of their blame and anger on her instead of towards the men that wronged them.

In short, Ima is exactly the kind of female stereotype that a show claiming to be feminist (or at least with very strong feminist undertones) would want to avoid. I get that on some level Ima is also a plot device that is supposed to have the characters evaluate their relationships, and part of the reason Tara and Lyla react against Ima in a far more angry fashion than they do the men in the lives is because of the love they still have for their men. (Awwwww.) But that doesn’t change the fact that the show still treats her like a slut (in the sex-negative sense) and we are supposed to hate her because of it. The same goes for the closing scene, where Jax beats her up, calls her a ‘whore’, and spits on her. It’s a scene that’s supposed to be heroic for Jax, as he both overcomes the implied temptation to cheat and sticks up for his family and friends, but it’s still a scene that depicts violence against a woman, and that makes me queasy.

As if to add one final insult to injury, the episode also introduced Tig’s daughter Dawn Margaux, who, it turns out, is only there to con $12,000 from him by spinning some fake story about her sister Fawn. While this story ends on a sweet note – Tig lends her the money even though he knows she’s playing him, just because it will likely lead to him seeing her in the future – but that doesn’t stop the character from fitting into the “scheming bitch” type. Perhaps there’s more to this character – Tig influence (or lack thereof) probably wasn’t good for her development – but for now she’s just a stock character used to tell an inconsequential story, and it shortchanges would could have been a more nuanced discussion on the negative affect club men can have on a woman’s psyche.

But what about the male characters? When it comes to women behaving poorly in television shows, I implement what I call the “It’s Always Sunny rule”: Much like how we accept Dee as one horrible person amongst a group of five, I’m willing to forgive a show for horrible female characters so long as there is an equitable number of equally horrible male characters. And on that mark, SOA tends to play by this rule.

Picking off right where we left off last week, tonight’s focus was on the club’s search to find the missing brick of cocaine, and there was some obvious connections to the overall theme, as we see the club quickly turn on one another. Not only are Will and Rat (who?) quickly under suspicion as the newest members of the group, but Juice ends up killing Miles just to save his own skin. And with Clay faming out Tara’s death to the cartel, it’s fairly clear that these are not good men, and it the respect that this show presents a world of horrible people, the horrible women fit right in and the show couldn’t really be accused of depicting women as somehow lesser than men.

However, there’s a catch. Despite the fact that these characters are so horrible, they are out protagonist, and at least in this instance, that carries a bit of badass nature with them. In what is a somewhat indulgent fantasy of masculinity, just about everything the Sons do, at least as a group, is supposed to be considered ‘cool’. Much like with Jax beating up Ima, these characters actions sometimes feels like a throwback to the gender roles of yore, where men could get away with doing things that society know deems unacceptable. But why are only the men are praised for this? Why doesn’t the show praise the women for being sluts (sex-positive use this time), or Lyla for sticking up for what she wants for her body?

I’m not saying that the show always lets the male characters off the moral hook – we are supposed to hate both Jax and Opie for cheating with Ima, and look down on Opie’s jealousy when it comes to Lyla’s job – but we aren’t supposed to hate them for being bad boys, even as we hate female characters for being bad girls. And in a show that goes out of its way to have one or two strong and intelligent female characters (depending on how Tara’s acting any given week), it becomes quite noticeable, as well as difficult for the show to hide behind any pretensions of feminism.

Quotes, Etc:

They had to have Tara clean up Opie’s eye from the punch? I get that she’s the de facto club doctor, but you think they would know how to clean up a simple cut, being bad asses that frequently get into scrapes and all. 

Surprisingly, “I’m going to hurt you, then kill you, doctor bitch.” actually checks out as grammatically correct, at least according to Microsoft Word.

“Able likes her. She’s teaching him Spanish.” “Well, just keep her away from Tig.”

“My kid just showed up.” “Which one?” “The crazy one.” “Which one?” “Yeah, I know.”

Two more Gemma gems: “Bitch, she will rip your little tits off.”  and “This is why mothers should drown baby girls.” Serious question: Can a line in show still be misogynistic if it comes from the mouth of a woman, and/or if the line is meant to be humorous?