In her series, The Single Woman in Hollywood, Hayley examines the ways that single women are portrayed onscreen, plotting them on a highly scientific matrix of Horny/Sexless and Messy/Organized.
If there is one trope that simply will not die, it is the uber-successful, workaholic woman who “doesn’t have time for love.” While her perfectionism has translated into career success — denoted by a lot of blue-grey suits and low ponytails — this intensity and general uptightness has apparently not made it easy for her to be loved. After all, her standards are too high, or her schedule too busy, or her ponytail too tight to let someone into her life.
This is the Sexless and Organized woman.
When we see the high-powered female executive, her singleness is always a point of contention. A high-powered male executive who is single is seen as a catch, but a woman in the same position is seen as a piece of baggage. Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada runs through husbands, derisively deemed an ice woman. Other shades of this character emerge frequently in movies: Sandra Bullock in The Proposal, Katherine Heigl in 27 Dresses, and Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner. While Horny/Organized women are demonized for their sexual agency, Sexless/Organized women are bemoaned for their prudishness, coldness, or that famous catch-all bullshit phrase, “high standards.”
In the realm of TV, Miranda Hobbes from Sex and the City is a Sexless/Organized woman. Miranda and Steve are one of my favorite fictional couples, because of the nuance that she is allowed to have in her role. Instead of making Miranda fundamentally change who she is to welcome Steve’s love into her life, she learns how to allow herself to be vulnerable in a way that is genuine, authentic, and makes sense for her. Miranda is fiercely independent, and guards that independence closely, because it’s one of the only constants that she’s ever had in her life. Her journey is less about becoming a different person, and more about realizing what she is already capable of doing. Steve doesn’t want Miranda to change — he is obsessed with exactly who she is! Miranda spends six years slowly realizing and accepting this, which is incredibly hard to do. Realizing that people will love us the way we already are is one of the hardest truths to acknowledge in a media landscape that consistently tells women they need to change in order to find love.
Katherine Heigl in 27 Dresses is another fantastic, different example of this kind of overbearing workaholic, but she is also a people-pleaser who is constantly putting other people first. She has — like so many of these kinds of characters do — an unrequited crush on her boss. The unrequited crush is a safety blanket for the Sexless/Organized woman. It gives her a dumping place for her romantic feelings without having to deal with any of the messy vulnerability and rejection that can come from acting on them. This kind of yearning and pining is meant to be seen as romantic, but it is actually just another example of emotional unavailability.
And the truth is, a lot of Sexless/Organized women are emotionally unavailable, but in a way that society deems productive — even healthy. The Sexless/Organized woman internalizes her pain and channels it into something like her job or her friendships or her time playing Scrabble with her dad’s retirement community. And this is the crux of the problem! We talk so much about the emotional unavailability of straight men, especially in romcoms. We justify their brooding existence or their playboy lifestyle, because that’s just who they are. In Hollywood, a man’s emotional unavailability is absorbed externally, to be dealt with or justified by other people, while a woman’s is absorbed internally to be dealt with on their own.
Sandy from Grease is a great example of another kind of Sexless/Organized woman, until the last scene of the movie, which we will get to in a second. Sandy meets Danny on summer vacation, and while you can interpret Danny’s bravado and bragging to his friends how you want, it is clear that the two of them enjoy a fun, flirty, mostly PG-rated fling based on mutual attraction. At their core, Sandy and Danny are just normal, slightly boring teenagers. They fall somewhere between promiscuous and prude, like the vast majority of teenagers do. But Sandy is teased with an entire musical number about her prudishness, and Danny is pressed into his “bad boy” persona the second he re-engages with his friends. I think that Grease paints a really accurate picture of what it means to be a high school student, even if everyone in that movie is in their thirties. Unfortunately, Grease drops the ball by making Sandy turn into Danny’s sexpot dream girl instead of making Danny drop his macho bullshit for literally one second. It’s aggravating beyond belief. But honestly, the real crime here is making Sandy wear fucking leather pants to her end of school fun fair. It’s June — she is going to sweat to death.
Long live the Sexless and Organized woman, who Hollywood simply will not leave alone. Some women like wearing cardigans and being good at school, or a no-fuss ponytail and being good at their jobs. And these women are whole and good even if they do not have a significant other, or a string of hot hot hookups.