In her new 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.
Who among us doesn’t love working on our night cheese from the comfort of a Slanket? Liz Lemon, the beloved and problematic protagonist of 30 Rock, is described as having “more sexual hangups than a phone sex line operated by Gilbert Gottfried.” She has worn a Duane Read bag as underwear. Her inability to find lasting sexual and romantic happiness is a constant discussion throughout 30 Rock.
Liz Lemon is Sexless and Messy.
Liz’s existence was a stark contrast to other highly popular female TV characters at the time. It was a television landscape that favored sleekness, wealth, sex, and fashion. 30 Rock was on the air from 2006 to 2013. Sex and the City had just ended in 2004. Keeping Up With The Kardashians and Gossip Girl premiered in 2007, and we welcomed a brand new social media platform — Instagram — into our lives in 2010. Our external lives were supposed to be flashy and cool, two things that Liz is not.
Looking beyond Liz, Sexless and Messy is one of Hollywood’s absolute favorite kinds of single women to depict because it means that our protagonist is probably going to get a makeover scene. Nearly every Disney Princess falls into the Sexless and Messy category: Ariel gets legs, a bath, and a dress that isn’t made out of old sailcloth. Cinderella gets a magical makeover complete with delicate and insane footwear. Belle puts on a big flouncy ball gown and changes her hairstyle. Outside of the animated world, we have iconic examples with Gracie Hart (Sandra Bullock) in Miss Congeniality and Mia Thermopolis (Anne Hathaway) in The Princess Diaries. Behind every frizzy head of hair or tattered dress, there is a beautiful, appealing woman just waiting to emerge. The fallacy here, of course, is that there was nothing inherently unattractive about these women — they were just not appealing to men.
Liz Lemon and Gracie Hart are very similar characters, with their emotional immaturity and self-sabotaging behavior. The shorthand for Messy-ness onscreen is usually an inherent loneliness that manifests in these characters’ daily lives. We watch Gracie come home to a shitty apartment and heat up a frozen meal in a broken microwave. There is an entire episode of 30 Rock dedicated to Liz Lemon’s inability to say “I love you” to her boyfriend. These women build up walls and throw themselves into demanding jobs that serve as an excuse for not doing any sort of introspection. Vulnerability is the enemy of the Sexless and Messy woman. She doesn’t need it; there is no value in leaving yourself open to potential rejection.
On the surface, Liz and Gracie have big, flashy jobs, but there is Mess in their professional lives, too. It’s a running joke on 30 Rock that TGS is not a good show, and even when tempted by the ability to work up the ladder or change careers, Liz balks and remains with TGS. It’s her security blanket — the show is chaos, but it's familiar chaos. Gracie disobeys orders on a mission, and ends up compromising one of her fellow agents and gets taken off active duty as punishment. She’s become reckless, and it’s easy to infer that this isn’t the first time she’s been given a punishment for her behavior. These jobs sound fancy on paper, but they are a nightmare on a daily basis.
The crux of the Sexless and Messy Woman’s struggle is always her inability to inspire sexual and romantic interest from men. Either she is aware of it and eternally frustrated, like Liz Lemon or Mia Thermopolis, or she has closed herself off from the possibility, like Gracie Hart. Women who state their wants and needs are often labeled as “needy” and “desperate.” It furthers the damaging idea that women aren’t supposed to say what they want, and instead mysteriously and miraculously orchestrate their lives in a way where everything they want just falls into their lap — including the “perfect man.” If you express an emotion, you might scare away a man. If you say what you want, and the man you’re dating does not want the same thing, it’s seen as a failure on your part, and not an indicator of baseline incompatibility. This is an infinite loop that plagues so many of our Messy women.
Despite Hollywood’s warnings, there is nothing wrong with being Sexless and Messy. Who among us has not been Sexless and Messy? The lived experience of single women is varied and vast, and the freedom of singledom comes in the agency you have to do whatever you want at any given time. We see Sexless and Messy women coming home to empty apartments like it’s a bad thing, rather than a respite from a demanding job. We never see them spending two hours at Target, running their hands over jewelry and trying on sixteen different sundresses and sending photos to their friends. We never see them waking up early to read a good book, or going for a long walk, or deciding to deep clean the bathroom at 2am. The quiet peace and freedom of being single that we never see is powerful, even for the Sexless and Messy.