Girls Just Wanna Have Friends

Or rather, I just want girls to have friends. In fiction, I mean. In case I’m not being perfectly clear, I would like to see brainy female characters in fiction that does not necessarily focus entirely on “the battle of the sexes”, women, or romance have the same social network the guys do.

Of course I’m thinking about this because of House again, and everyone knows it, so I might as well use the example that brought this to my interest. One of the big deals about House, the character, is that his male colleague, Wilson, is his “only” friend. What this means is unclear, since it’s obvious that every other recurring character on the show cares about him somehow, and he cares about them, and he doesn’t argue the point when other people call Cuddy and/or Lucas his friends (in fact, in a couple episodes this season he himself has even explicitly referred to Cuddy as his friend*). But, anyway, it’s one of the things the viewer is supposed to take for granted as a revealing character trait.

Er… except, practically speaking, the character who actually doesn’t seem to have friends is Cuddy. Like I’ve mentioned previously, every single other character on the show is connected first to House. She and Wilson are close, but he’s loyal to House. Even her boyfriend seems to be more obsessed with House than with her (and his original social connection was with House, too). Wilson’s POV episode showed that he spends some of  his social time with people who aren’t main characters who are on “his” side (even if sometimes he’d rather this weren’t the case); Cuddy’s episode implied that Team Cuddy is pretty much a one-woman show with no time-outs for lattes with galpals or emotional confidences with other non-protagonist characters**.

Now, this isn’t weird per se — I mean, we don’t tend to see fictional characters having friends outside the ones who feature in the story — except for the fact that no attention is drawn to her social isolation. It’s treated like it’s normal, and that’s weird, too, because it’s clearly so abnormal that the exact same trait has been used to show the eccentric genius character is, in fact, an eccentric genius.

And, thinking about it, a lot of female characters are like this — at least, a lot of female characters who are supposed to be strong , especially those who are supposed to be smart, and especially those who co-star in stories where the main character is male. In the Harry Potter series, when Hermione becomes friends with Ron and Harry, she literally has no other friends. And throughout the series, she doesn’t seem to be pals with anyone but them and their friends and relatives. Scully starts out okay, with a female best friend who sets her up on a blind date in the first season, but by the end of the series, she’s left with her tough-guy brother and namby-pamby mom, who aren’t so much a support system as plot devices to make Mulder angst more and to  take care of William off-screen, respectively. Even in the new Sherlock Holmes movie, Irene Adler seems to operate on her own when she’s not chilling with Holmes and Watson.

Okay, pause: it might seem like I’m being harsh on some of the supporting characters here. How the heck am I defining “friend”, you might ask, if family like Margaret Scully and boyfriends like Ron Weasley don’t count? Well, first of all, one’s relationships with family and with romantic partners have a different dynamic from straight-up friendships with one’s peers. But try it this way: imagine the female character has just had an argument with her significant other. Is there a character on the show to whom she could not only vent about it, but whom she could trust to take her side to the other person’s face (e.g. they aren’t just a voice on a phone, or a mention offstage, or sympathetic in her company and on the guy’s side elsewhere), and not for selfish reasons (e.g.  they want to date her themselves)?

Admittedly, this doesn’t get at the noeud of what it means to be a friend, but you get the idea by imagining yourself in her shoes, right? If you just had an upsetting confrontation with someone important to you, there would be some people you’d want to go spend time with — possibly family if they live close by, possibly friends of either gender — and some people whom you care about dearly but just wouldn’t want to trust with those kinds of feelings, like mutual friends.

I’m not making this any more precise, am I?

Look, I guess it’s just a feeling I have about Cuddy, Hermione, Scully, Irene Adler, etc. I don’t want to go so far as to say they don’t have “girlfriends”, although they don’t, because I think male friends can serve this social purpose, too [OK, they don’t have to be gay or use offensive language, but the concept of that series of videos was too coincidentally related to resist]. I just have an overwhelming sense that “smart chicks” are frequently characterized as lacking friends and social support in their peer groups and particularly among others of their own gender, whether they’re deans of medicine, witches-in-training, or Lisa Simpson. And while male characters in the same circumstances get emphasized as loners or emotionally troubled, friendless, smart women get swept under the radar as “normal”.

Maybe a counter-example will clarify what I mean. Contrast, if you will, Star Trek: TNG, in which Dr. Crusher, Guinan, and Deanna Troi were very smart ladies but always seemed to have a strong social connection with the rest of the crew, including each other, or Dexter, in which Deb*** connects with Rita and the kids, has a friend in Quinn, and may or not be closer to Masuka than her bro is. If Dr. Crusher gets in a fight with Captain Picard, you can bet at least one member of the crew will agree with the doc out of respect and reason; if Deb and Dex get into a spat of sibling rivalry, you can count on Quinn or another colleague to back her up.

So why are Dana and doctors so different from Deb and Deanna? (See: alliteration is our friend!) Short answer: I dunno. Longer theory: if you look at the smart female characters who do seem to have supportive social networks, they are characters who exist in settings where they’ve consciously been put on more or less equal footing with the guys. On the U.S.S. Enterprise, the writers and actors try hard to “erase” gender — in the twenty-fourth century, except when it comes to the physical acts of sex or childbirth, women and men are theoretically interchangeable****, and nobody should comment on it either way. Similarly, on Dexter, Deb’s portrayed as “masculine” — part of the “old boy” culture of police officers, a girl who can spit and swear and play macho as well as any of the guys.

Maybe that’s unfair. I can think of smart, powerful, fictional women who are definitely feminine and who are defined as having one loyal friend, a la Holmes or House. Trouble is, they’re all villainesses. Hmmm….

Until next week!

* Um, well, except for the bit last week where he was all like, “Funny, [friends] is last thing I want us to be”  — only he totes called her his friend himself just the episode before. Ah, Princeton Plainsboro Junior High…*****

** Only somewhat serious hypothesis: because if it weren’t, then her relationship with our protagonist, House, would be a lot more difficult to justify in story terms. Like,  if Cuddy were your friend, in real life, would you not be all, “uh, hello, bad news bears!”?

*** Though LaGuerta follows my friendless model…

**** Well, childbirth is no longer an exception in Star Trek: Enterprise. Incidentally, although I never saw Enterprise except for this single episode, it may be one of my favourites in all five series, just for the concept.

***** Be it resolved: House would only become more interesting with the addition of Drs. Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, newly graduated from the medical school of Sweet Valley University. Discuss.