Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black has been praised for its diverse and humane portrayal of women in a minimum security prison—but in a recent piece for The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky caused a bit of a kerfuffle when he suggested that the show is guilty of a reductive and irresponsible treatment of a particular group: men.
Early in Berlatsky’s piece, he admits that his complaint may seem “silly.”
To which my response is: Yes, it is silly. Let me count the ways:
Other shows have already covered the prison experience from the male perspective. Key to Berlatsky’s argument is the fact that, while OITNB focuses on a women’s prison, in reality men are the ones most victimized by the prison-industrial complex. This is an incontrovertible fact, and Berlatsky would have a reason to complain on these grounds—except for the fact that there are already plenty of options for pop culture portrayals of how men fare in prison, and in other oppressive societal structures.
There’s Oz, to start with, an HBO series about men in prison that ran for 6 seasons. There’s also The Wire—though not set exclusively in prison, the show is probably the best pop cultural document of our cities’ oppressive social structures, from schools to housing to politics to law enforcement and, yes, corrections. If it’s a sympathetic portrayal of a man victimized by systemic racism, drug policy, and the prison industrial complex Berlatsky’s looking for, he need look no further than D’Angelo Barksdale (among others).
Of course, beyond these two shows, there’s a whole range of stories in books and film focusing almost exclusively on the male perspective. Men’s experiences of crime and punishment have been obsessively documented—and though there’s certainly something to be desired about many of these stories given our current prison crisis, to suggest that a single female-centered narrative in a sea of male-centered ones represents some kind of imbalance in perspective is simply absurd.
Berlatsky’s criticism completely ignores the premise and POV of OITNB. Another component of Berlatsky’s argument is his complaint that OITNB seems to reinforce damaging gender stereotypes: that women in prison are victims and men in prison are predators—when in reality, men are very often victimized as well.
OK, but—this is a show about a women’s prison. It tells women’s stories. That’s kind of OITNB’s deal. That many of these stories will cast some of the female prisoners in a sympathetic light, and some of the men in their lives in a negative one—that’s kind of inherent to the parameters of the show. Complaining that a show set in a women’s prison doesn’t give enough attention to the ways that men are victimized by social structures is kind of like criticizing The Sopranos for not giving enough attention to Italian Americans who aren’t mobbed up—fair, as far as it goes, but failing to actually engage critically with the substance of the show. Berlatsky isn’t really asking OITNB to change its artistic approach. He’s asking it to be a different show—or, worse, failing to engage with it at all.
Stories—TV, books, movies—always have a point of view. That’s how they work. OITNB’s is mostly female. Deal with it.
Within those parameters, OITNB is extremely fair to its male characters. OK, so OITNB is a female-centric show. It mostly tells women’s stories, from their point of view. But for a show about women, it actually has a lot of awesome male characters—vibrantly alive, complicated, and sympathetic. It would be so easy for the writers to portray the men as cardboard villains. But they don’t.
Caputo is a lonely perv who actually (occasionally) wants to do right by the women under his care. Healey is a self-righteous jerk who might be a little better if he could get any love from his Russian bride. Bennett is a basically good guy who starts doing bad things when he starts to understand he’s in a situation he can’t control. Even Pornstache reveals unexpected layers of humanity from time to time.
And the women—well, they’re hardly the sainted victims Berlatsky seems to think they are. Though their backstories generally work by wresting us into sympathetic identification with them, warts and all, they are hardly perfect: some are selfish, some are scheming, some are self-deluding, some (including Piper) are destructive.
Basically, OITNB’s treatment of both men and women is a lot more nuanced, and a lot less black-and-white than Berlatsky lets on. Which ought to be obvious to anyone engaging with the substance of what the show is, rather than wishing that it was something it isn’t.
The overlooked bit is that Berlatsky’s concerns about OITNB are the very ones feminist critics have long expressed about popular media in aggregate.
The idea that focusing on one group’s narratives while ignoring another’s can exclude and marginalize the ignored group, that’s inherent in the article’s thesis. As is the idea that when exclusionary narratives include a few unflattering, unsympathetic representatives of that excluded group, they can unfairly misrepresent the entire excluded group.
What’s interesting, at least to me, is that the feminist critique has consistently held that the aggregate is far more problematic than the individual instances. The fact that a television show like HBO’s Silicon Valley is fundamentally a story about men and their lives is not a problem per se. Rather, it’s the fact that the *overwhelming majority* of the stories our culture values are been men’s — stories in which men’s concerns and struggles are at the forefront, and women’s are absent or peripheral.
In that context, it seems strange to single out OITNB for this type of criticism. Its focus on women’s stories in a women’s prison is a novel departure from our media culture’s norms, rather than One More Example Of An Overwhelming Trend. Applying Berlatsky’s logic consistently would mean that Silicon Valley is *per se* damaging to women, even if it offers an accurate picture of life in a hipster tech startup.
That doesn’t mean that that show’s problematic aspects can’t be identified and critiqued, of course. Just because OITNB tells rarely-heard stories doesn’t make it some sort of progressive gospel. But critiquing it precisely *because* of its uncommon focus — is missing the forest for the trees.
I think you’re ignoring a whole lot of feminist critique here.
There’s certainly some criticism that’s on the lines of, we need more representation in aggregate. But there’s also plenty of criticism which talks about individual works of art, and examines the gender assumptions and biases in those.
That’s what I was doing in OITNB. My point was that the show makes little effort to engage with the fact that prison is largely an institution aimed at oppressing men (esp. from minority groups), and that when it does address male prisoners, it does so in a stereotypical way. I argued that that is linked to its treatment of female prisoners, who are shown as worthy of sympathy because they are embedded in fairly stereotypical melodramatic gendered narratives.
The point is that this show, in particular, presents male and female prisoners in stereotypical ways, and that, as a result, it has a lot of difficulty mounting an institutional critique of prison beyond, here are some sympathetic women in prison. Since prison is by and large populated by men, the sympathy directed at women (and I argue directed at women as women) is unable to deal with the injustice of prison as an institution.
Women in prison isn’t actually a novel departure, either. It’s a genre that’s been around for more than 50 years. OITNB uses many tropes from that drama…including the use of melodrama to frame the problem of prison as specifically a problem with women suffering in a place that isn’t meant for them, rather than as an institutional critique of prison as a whole.
I think that OITNB may address this criticism to a certain extent. In Season 2, the reporter who’s looking for misallocated funds at the prison visits Piper and says something along the lines of “The prison industrial complex is awful, a moral catastrophe on the level of slavery. But no one cares. So I’m just trying to track down where some missing funds went.”
I butchered that, but you get the idea. I think it’s interesting to read that discussion as a statement of intent on the part of the show. Basically, taking on the entire prison system isn’t OITNB’s project. The show just wants to tell the stories of some women who are caught in the system. But for those with eyes to see, these women’s stories are just the tip of the iceberg.
In general, my position is: engage with the show you’ve got, not with the one you show it were instead. Within the parameters of the story it’s trying to tell, its subject mater, and what it’s trying to accomplish, OITNB is pretty darn responsible, and probably more fair in its portrayals than one might expect.
I think you’re ignoring a whole lot of feminist critique here.
There’s certainly some criticism that’s on the lines of, we need more representation in aggregate. But there’s also plenty of criticism which talks about individual works of art, and examines the gender assumptions and biases in those.
That’s what I was doing in OITNB. My point was that the show makes little effort to engage with the fact that prison is largely an institution aimed at oppressing men (esp. from minority groups), and that when it does address male prisoners, it does so in a stereotypical way. I argued that that is linked to its treatment of female prisoners, who are shown as worthy of sympathy because they are embedded in fairly stereotypical melodramatic gendered narratives.
The point is that this show, in particular, presents male and female prisoners in stereotypical ways, and that, as a result, it has a lot of difficulty mounting an institutional critique of prison beyond, here are some sympathetic women in prison. Since prison is by and large populated by men, the sympathy directed at women (and I argue directed at women as women) is unable to deal with the injustice of prison as an institution.
Women in prison isn’t actually a novel departure, either. It’s a genre that’s been around for more than 50 years. OITNB uses many tropes from that drama…including the use of melodrama to frame the problem of prison as specifically a problem with women suffering in a place that isn’t meant for them, rather than as an institutional critique of prison as a whole.