Chapter 17
DECONSTRUCTING THE WOMEN OF THE BIG BANG THEORY: SO MUCH MORE THAN GIRLFRIENDS
Gender is a big deal for The Big Bang Theory. At first glance, viewers might see Penny, Bernadette, Amy, and the other women on the show as merely the sidekicks who help flesh out the leading men: Penny is the on-and-off girlfriend of Leonard, Bernadette dates Wolowitz, Amy is “with” Sheldon (at least in some quasi-Vulcan capacity), and Leslie is one of Leonard’s earlier and very memorable sexual partners. Yet these women are so much more than just girlfriends and even more than colleagues, friends, or neighbors—they also embody a constellation of feminist issues concerning sex, gender, and behavioral expectations.
In addition to teaching us a little quantum physics, dropping loads of sci-fi and superhero trivia, and giving us lots of laughs, The Big Bang Theory can also help us illustrate gender theory, especially in the way the show uses the wide range of characters, female and male, to challenge our traditional ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman. More precisely, this chapter will explore, with the help of some major figures in feminist philosophy, the ways in which the female characters push the boundaries of what it means to be “feminine” or “a woman.” (And don’t worry, we won’t leave out the men!)
Feminist scholars, including philosophers, often make a hard distinction between a person’s sex, which is biological, and a person’s gender, which is social or political. By this, we mean that unlike sex, a person’s gender is not determined by her or his chromosomes but rather by how other people and society in general choose to categorize her or him, as well as how that person chooses to categorize her- or himself. On one hand, while a person’s sex can be fairly easily seen by peeking in her or his undies, that same person’s gender is a much more complicated affair. Yet on the other hand, gender is more amenable to change, either by an individual person’s changing her or his appearance, mannerisms, or attitudes, or through a broader societal shift (such as women’s movements).
The most straightforward example of this in The Big Bang Theory is Louis/Louise, Sheldon and Leonard’s neighbor in apartment 4B before Penny moved in, whom we see for the first time in one of the flashback scenes from “The Staircase Implementation.” Biologically, “Louis” is obviously a very large man, but by dressing as a woman, “Louise” has chosen to adopt the female gender in her outward appearance. Because we don’t spend much time with Louis/Louise—do I smell a prequel series, anybody?—it’s impossible to know which gender he/she identifies with internally. Nonetheless, the insight of the distinction between sex and gender is that Louis/Louise does not necessarily have to adopt the male gender simply because of his male biology.
It’s not only Louis/Louise, though. Almost all of the characters on The Big Bang Theory break stereotypes about how men and women are “supposed” to be or act. Penny is the “normal” one of the bunch, which, ironically, makes her stand out as “abnormal.” The men all possess various traits commonly thought of as feminine (such as Leonard’s sensitivity), and, aside from Penny, the women possess traditionally male traits (such as Leslie’s sexual aggressiveness). None of the men is particularly athletic or “dominant,” and most of the women (with the exception of Penny) are very intelligent—portrayals that stand against common perceptions of the “essence” of men and women.1
“It’s a Warm Summer Evening in Ancient Greece . . .”
Though the point has been reinforced and refined by modern feminist scholars, the distinction between sex and gender goes back at least as far as Sheldon’s proverbial “warm summer evening in ancient Greece” from “The Gorilla Experiment.” In The Republic, Plato (424–347 BCE) argued that the biological differences between men and women—that “the female bears and the male begets”—are not relevant for the issue of occupation. Indeed, Plato challenges those who think otherwise to provide a valid reason why women (in general) cannot perform the same tasks as men.2 More directly, the philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) wrote in The Subjection of Women that “Standing on the ground of common sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes. . . . What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing.”3 Although Mill noted the potential oppression in defining “women” as men prefer, modern feminists have emphasized the point, arguing that formal equality between the sexes does not guarantee real equality because the common perception of women in society, and even among women themselves, has been formed historically by men and cannot simply be revoked as if it were a law.4
In modern times, the most influential philosopher to write on issues of gender has been Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), whose 1952 book The Second Sex set the tone for feminist philosophy and scholarship from that point on. The most famous line in the book, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” is a memorable and highly influential statement of the distinction between sex and gender.5 Beauvoir described the status of women in society as “the Other,” defined by men in comparison to men, thereby condemned to being the “second sex.” In the spirit of existentialism and its emphasis on self-creation and radical freedom, Beauvoir called on women to take control of their identities and define themselves as they want to be, not as men have wanted them to be, and not to let their biology determine their destinies.6
In her 1989 book Gender Trouble, contemporary philosopher and theorist Judith Butler built on Beauvoir’s description of the sex/gender distinction and added her own unique twist.7 Butler’s chief contribution was the concept of performativity: gender is merely a matter of performance, in which the categories of “woman” and “man” are defined only by how people behave (or “perform” them), without any prior foundation. Like Beauvoir, Butler’s position is antiessentialist: there are no essentially female or male characteristics, but instead, men and women are expected to behave in certain ways, deeply rooted in historical inequality and promoted by those in power—men—in order to maintain that power over others (or the Other), namely, women. By “following the script” laid out by men, women only perpetuate these patterns of discrimination and oppression. Furthermore, not only is there no essential difference between the female and male genders, there is, in fact, no “female gender” (or “male gender”) at all. Each person is unique, and it is up to each person to choose how to live her or his life, following the performance of any gender (which, Butler also argues, is not necessarily limited to the familiar two).8
Now let’s look at how the women of The Big Bang Theory “perform” their “roles,” starting with Penny. Penny is pretty, sweet, perky, and all things we traditionally think of as feminine: the perfect California girl (just by way of Nebraska). Though she is very funny, both clever and quick (especially when knocking Sheldon down a few pegs), she isn’t particularly bright in the same way as Leonard or Sheldon. Consider her job as a waitress at the Cheesecake Factory. In “The Maternal Congruence,” she had to (gasp) memorize the menu: “Hey, it’s a big menu. There’s two pages just for desserts.” Her unlikely relationship with Leonard shows that she can see beneath the geeky surface. Yet as she did in “The Precious Fragmentation,” she sometimes doubts herself, quipping, “I need to go back to dating dumb guys from the gym.”
Her portrayal is achingly stereotypical, but perhaps that’s the point. Her femininity—or, to be more precise, her performance of femininity, in literal terms, as well as Butler’s—can be seen as satirical.9 Compared with Beauvoir, Butler was very pessimistic about the prospects for self-creation and eventual freedom from the chains of patriarchal oppression. She wrote that it is impossible to escape gender altogether, but one can satirize it, and in that way one can achieve a tiny bit of political change through parody.10 So Penny’s nuanced portrayal of “the girl next door,” sweet and pretty, who nonetheless shows glimpses of the traditionally male qualities of wisdom and biting humor, may be seen in the spirit of Butler’s call for satirizing gender norms.
As we move to the other women on the show, we can see that as they get smarter, they also become (slightly) less physically attractive. For instance, take Bernadette, Howard’s on-and-off girlfriend—and, as of the end of season 4, his fiancée. She’s definitely smarter than Penny—so much so that Penny feels threatened and asks Sheldon for physics lessons in “The Gorilla Experiment”—but not too smart, so that she doesn’t threaten traditional notions of how being feminine and being intelligent aren’t “supposed” to mix. She’s also very pretty but in a more subtle way than Penny—rather than wearing tight tank tops and short shorts, Bernadette rocks the sweater vest-eyeglasses combination. She can ask pointed questions about Leonard’s physics experiment with big eyes and a girly smile. Just as easily, she can say with wry humor, as she did in “The Boyfriend Complexity”: “Oh, I was working with penicillin-resistant gonorrhea in the lab today, and I was just trying to remember if I washed my hands.”
One step further to the end of the smarts-looks continuum—that’s two blocks over from the spacetime continuum, if you’re wondering—and we reach Amy. Her complete lack of glamour, the way she pronounces her multiple-syllable words without the typical default girl smile and fake stumble, and the fact that she is considered Sheldon’s “girl-who-is-a-friend,” make her the least traditionally feminine of the three women. This is further reinforced by her social awkwardness: she lacks all of Penny’s ease; she is unconcerned with her appearance, compared to Penny or Bernadette; and she is roughly Sheldon’s intellectual equal.11 Definitely not what mainstream society expects from a female—in fact, exactly the opposite, highlighting the absurdity of gender expectations that deny a smart but not conventionally attractive female the full status of “woman.”
“Come for the Breasts—Stay for the Brains.”
Through these three female characters, we see a range of attractiveness and intelligence but always in inverse proportion: the prettiest is not very smart, and the smartest is not very pretty. Although Penny best fits the traditional notion of femininity—sweet, pretty, and not too smart—more broadly speaking, all three affirm the stereotype that very beautiful, feminine women cannot be smart and very smart women cannot be beautiful or feminine. The best we can hope for, by this logic, is someone like Bernadette, who is smart “enough” and pretty “enough,” but not exceedingly one or the other. Nothing against Bernadette, but this expectation of a “trade-off” between beauty and looks (as well as confidence, poise, and so on) is nonetheless a limitation imposed by custom and history on women and represents part of the artificiality of gender.
Luckily, The Big Bang Theory also provides us with examples of women who break this pattern. Consider the vivacious Elizabeth Plimpton, who is Sheldon’s personal guest, due to her renowned work on cosmological physics. She’s drop-dead gorgeous and sexy but at the same time incredibly smart—and sexually promiscuous, breaking another traditional feminine stereotype by sleeping with Leonard and Raj in short order (and hoping for a foursome with them and Howard). Like Bernadette, she’s a bit scatterbrained: for example, when meeting Sheldon at his apartment in “The Plimpton Stimulation,” she says, “I completely forgot your address, but then I remembered that I’d written it on my hand. Lucky for me, I didn’t confuse it with what I’d written on my other hand, which are the coordinates for a newly discovered neutron star. ’Cause if I tried to go there, I’d be crushed by hypergravity.” In combining amazing looks, intelligence, and sexual appetite with just a side of ditziness for flavor, Dr. Plimpton breaks the broader stereotype that women should be pretty or smart but not both—and definitely not sexually aggressive.
Unfortunately, Elizabeth appears in only one episode, but that is more than made up for by Leslie Winkle, a fellow research scientist at the university, Leonard’s occasional sex partner, and one of the banes of Sheldon’s existence. Like Amy, she’s on Sheldon’s general level intellectually, but she also has Penny’s cleverness in her verbal jousts with him (especially when she deflates his pomposity with a well-placed “dumbass”). Her attractiveness is not overbearing and seems completely casual—her confidence shines through her tossed-together appearance. Although not on the level of Elizabeth Plimpton in her carnal appetites, Leslie is “sexually liberated,” perfectly content to have casual encounters with Leonard as well as Howard, who accuses her in “The Cushion Saturation” of using him as a “bought-and-sold sex toy,” to which she replies, “No, not at all. You’re also arm candy.” In “The Hamburger Postulate,” she describes her appeal as a smart, attractive woman with the phrase “come for the breasts, stay for the brains.”12 In this sense, Leslie stands as the feminist icon of the show: a very smart, confident, attractive, and sexually assertive woman who constructs her own identity, regardless of what the men around her may think.
Knock Knock . . . Manhood?
Knock Knock . . . Manhood?
Knock Knock . . . Manhood?
Before we wrap this episode and get ready for the production note, let’s not forget the men of The Big Bang Theory, who challenge traditional ideas about gender no less than the women do. Because scholars such as Beauvoir and Butler focus on women’s gender issues and how the term woman and everything connected to it is defined in relation to “man,” issues concerning the male gender naturally receive less attention. Yet setting aside the topics of power and oppression, men can be subject to the same problems with gender roles and expectations as women (even if the consequences are different).
In fact, not one of the four lead men in the series fits the stereotypical picture of a “man.” Although they’re all very smart (except in Sheldon’s opinion), Leonard is sensitive and short, Sheldon is very thin and persnickety (to put it mildly and pretentiously), Raj is afraid of women (except when inebriated), and Howard lives with his emasculating mother (and is further emasculated by Bernadette . . . and Raj . . . and Sheldon). None of them watch or participate in sports (though Sheldon is an expert in the rules of football, having grown up in Texas), and they all enjoy “juvenile” activities such as playing video games and reading comic books.13 Their collective failure to meet the standard model of a “man” is reinforced by the men Penny brings home: huge, muscular, ruggedly handsome, albeit usually dumb as rocks (especially Zack from “The Lunar Excitation,” who thought the laser the guys were bouncing off the moon would blow it up).14 The one exception is Dr. David Underhill. Introduced in “The Bath Gift Item Hypothesis,” Underhill is a prominent physicist who received a MacArthur Genius Grant but looks as if he jumped out of a “Hot Firemen” calendar. Although this combination definitely confounds Penny’s expectations, she later decides he’s not that smart after all when she discovers the nude pictures of his wife on his cell phone (which only confirms yet another male stereotype: infidelity).
Just as women such as Amy and Leslie may be seen as less than “real women” because they don’t conform to society’s standard of femininity, many people would view our four male friends as less than “real men,” despite their Ph.D.s (and a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thank you very much), simply because they don’t exhibit the “typical” behavior and appearance that society expects from those of the male gender. On the bright side, there are signs that these stereotypes may be diminishing, given the heightened respect and admiration for men such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg—not to mention the fact that Peter Orzsag seems to be as popular with women as Robert Pattinson is.15 Yet this does not negate the fact that men are subject to same socially constructed preconceptions of behaviors as women are, even if the ramifications are different.16
White and Fisher Productions #1
A sitcom about four young, socially awkward scientists and the “normal” girl who hangs out with them may not seem like the most obvious source material for an exploration of gender theory and feminist philosophy, but in a way it’s ideal. There are plenty of shows on TV—not to mention movies, especially romantic comedies—that feature only “pretty people” whom casting directors discover in modeling agencies, chosen to fulfill viewers’ fantasies about what the perfect woman or man looks like, with scripts designed by committee to deliver socially idealized behavior. And that’s just wonderful. (Yes, Sheldon, that was sarcasm.)
Yet deviations from the norm are often much more interesting. Penny’s a great character, but we wouldn’t want everyone on the show to be just like her—as the solitary “normal” person, she becomes interesting when in the company of Leonard and the gang, and the guys are even more interesting in contrast to her, as well as to one another. Not only do almost all of the characters challenge gender expectations, but they each do so in their own unique ways. Does it make them any more interesting to label them male or female as well? Ultimately, that’s what Butler is getting at: gender is artificial, a label that unnecessarily limits and constrains us. If The Big Bang Theory can help us see that, it would be the ultimate act of change through parody—and one hell of a bazinga!
NOTES
1. We don’t have space to talk about this at length, but issues of sexuality are also relevant here, because a man with “feminine” characteristics or a woman with “male” characteristics is often perceived as homosexual. That perceptions of gender and sexuality are so tightly intertwined is one reason that queer studies is a close descendant of gender studies.
2. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin Classics, 2007), 451b–457b. Plato’s claims to proto-feminism are widely challenged, given statements such as “it is natural of women to take part in all occupations as well as men, though in all women will be the weaker partners” (ibid., 455d); on this controversy, see Steven Forde, “Gender and Justice in Plato,” American Political Science Review 92, no. 3: 657–670.
3. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, ed. Susan M. Okin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 22.
4. For a brief history of work on the social construction of gender, see Martha Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody,” New Republic, February 22, 1999, http://www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf.
5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1952), 267.
6. Self-creation and radical freedom are also key insights of the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), who was Beauvoir’s lifelong partner.
7. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 2nd ed. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1999).
8. Butler takes the argument even one step further, claiming that sex, as well as gender, is socially constructed because of the arbitrary “decision” to assign sex based on reproductive organs; see Gender Trouble, chap. 3.
9. Of course, if we are going to call Penny a parody of traditional femininity, what do we call her friend Christy, “the whore of Omaha,” who in “The Dumpling Paradox” makes Penny seem like Marie Curie?
10. Hence the title of Nussbaum’s article cited earlier, “The Professor of Parody,” which is a critique of Butler’s work, especially what Nussbaum sees as a relatively weak form of protest compared to other political action, even by scholars, which advanced the actual status of women and improved their well-being. See Butler, Gender Trouble, 187–189 (using cross-dressing as the main example of parodying traditional gender roles).
11. Leonard’s mother seems to be between Bernadette and Amy—wicked smart, with a staid but not unattractive fashion sense and is incredibly awkward and formal. (While sober, that is.)
12. As longtime sitcom fans, we find it wonderful to see Sara Gilbert (Leslie) and Johnny Galecki (Leonard) reprise their pairing from Roseanne, which also challenged traditional gender roles by portraying Gilbert’s Darlene as dominant over Galecki’s David (while Becky and Mark were very stereotypical—oh, don’t get us started . . .).
13. Your humble authors just read comics for the profound insights into gender theory. (Bazinga.)
14. Everyone knows they’d have to bounce the laser off the moon at least a couple of times to blow it up. Duh.
15. We wish this was a bazinga, we truly do.
16. As above, sexuality often enters into this as well, because a man who fails to conform to the stereotype will often be regarded as homosexual. For instance, Ryan Pacifico, a currency trader (and a heterosexual), was a victim of gay-bashing at work because he was a vegetarian and therefore not seen by his boss as a “real man”. See Zachary A. Kramer, “Of Meat and Manhood,” Washington University Law Review 89 (2011): 287–322, discussed in Mark D. White, “Can a Vegetarian Sue for Employment Discrimination?” Psychology Today, March 28, 2011, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/maybe-its-just-me/201103/can-vegetarian-sue-employment-discrimination.