Mud masks are censored, but date rape is hilarious
Two Golden Girl’s episodes perfectly illustrate PC BS
Like many of us, I’ve had a lot of time to watch TV and streaming services over the past year. There came a point where I felt I had actually finished Netflix and I had binged a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have under normal circumstances. What I ended up doing, was watching a few series I had only seen as a teenager, dubbed (with ridiculous voices) on television back in Europe. The Golden Girls, for example, turned out to be quite a bit less annoying in original English, genuinely funny at times, and pretty progressive for its decade. So over the months I ended up watching all seven seasons.
The Girls deal with a number of issues with an (at-the-end-of-the-episode) open mind: homosexuality, single motherhood, artificial insemination, sex at older age, etc.; they show strength in sisterhood and independence. At the same time, the series falls into the same trap as many others in suggesting that women’s lives revolve around men and that often they have little else to talk about. Although I have to say, I do think — unlike other TV shows — they actually tried to keep the topics varied, as much as that was possible with some of their characters being total caricatures; especially Blanche. Overall though, it was refreshing to revisit this group of older women navigating life, and not see them confined to being one-dimensional personae relegated to what so many female characters end up as: being the victims of sex crimes, or having dreamt of their perfect wedding since they were 9 years old and thus turning into bitch-bride, or feeling incomplete if they don’t have children.*
Having said that, there is one episode that really bothered me, the one where Dorothy finally explicitly says that her ex-husband Stan raped her on her first date, as a consequence of which she became pregnant and had to marry him. An issue that is danced around implicitly in many other episodes. She recounts having a fuzzy memory of her first sexual encounter with Stan, she says: “I was totally unconscious” and “I swear, he must have slipped me something”. Her own mother doesn’t believe her and makes a joke— laughter, clapping. The scene not only gets laughter, it even ends up in the highlights reel at the end of the season. So, different times I tell myself uncomfortably.
But then, due to something unrelated, I searched the internet about the Golden Girls actresses and I stumbled across an article with the headline “Hulu pulls Golden Girls mud mask episode over blackface concerns”. In one episode, Dorothy apparently meets Blanche and Rose with mud masks on their faces. Hulu encountered criticism for the ban from many black voices, saying that they were perfectly capable of distinguishing mud masks from blackface. Rose even goes as far as saying “we’re not really black, it’s just a face mask” or something to that effect. A clumsy joke, sure, but in the character’s own words explicitly not blackface.
Those two episodes perfectly embody societal hypocrisy and PC bullshit. Removing the mud mask episode doesn’t do anything for anyone. It’s patronising to black people, in my opinion. However, I don’t know if the joke is racist or not, because I don’t know the writers intentions. So the only thing I can do, is to look at it from the perspective of all other Golden Girls episodes. Rose states a fact about the situation, which is supposed to be funny mostly due to the things Rose generally says. She tends to state the obvious with child-like directness and naïveté. According to a write-up I read, the episode brings up other questions of race, I don’t know how it ends (I wasn’t able to watch it), but it apparently it concludes with joy over a mixed-race baby. Which would be consistent with all other episodes: whenever any of the characters experiences any prejudice early in an episode, we can be sure their opinion has changed by the end of it. The show’s overall spirit is one of unison as well as the overcoming of rifts and bias.
So what about the date rape? Of course, Dorothy, just like Rose, simply states a fact: she was drugged and raped (and comedy ensues). But the difference is, there is no ambiguity about it, no interpretation based on the character who did it or the character who talks about it later. Date rape is actually serious compared to a mud mask that might or might not be equivocal. Yet that episode is still on Hulu and it’s still in the sodding highlights reel. Congrats, Hulu, for being PC jerks paying lip-service to … I don’t even know whom. I’m not a fan of censorship, but banning seriously racist content can be a good idea in so far as it prevents racists being able to point to it as validation. But the same must apply for sexism and misogyny. According to Hulu, however, we clearly must continue to be sure not to make any jokes about certain races or religions, but rape — that’s just a kneeslapper.
*(Because I don’t want to give Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady the time to write an entire article about The Big Bang Theory, I will mention here the damage the writers did to two of their female characters at the end of the show. It is clear to me, that particularly in TBBT almost everyone is a caricature, but they all get to evolve and they all get to surprise us by defeating convention. So it is more than disappointing, when it turns out the brilliant scientist Amy also dreamt of nothing else than her perfect wedding as a child. I don’t know any actual woman to ever tell me that she dreamt up their perfect wedding as a child, but it happens in every other TV show or movie. And the independent Penny, out of nowhere, with no discussion or anything, suddenly really really wants children, after she has assured us for an entire season that she didn’t want any. Even if you’re not entirely opposed to having children — trust me, there is a discussion the day you find out you’re pregnant. Given the otherwise strong roles these writers created for women, I’d say only a man could have come up with these cliches. There, I got that off my chest!)
