This was supposed to be a great fall for women on television, but several weeks in, it feels like it may be better at the cause of getting women acting jobs than at providing entertainment aimed at women viewers. With that odd disconnect in mind, my friend Lux asked me what I thought made a show woman-oriented a while back, and I was reminded of it again reading Nellie Andreeva’s meditation on The Playboy Club, Charlie’s Angels, and Prime Suspect*’s ratings troubles when she wrote:

For Playboy, there was a lack of clarity who the show is for. With a popular mens magazine in the title and the promise of scantly-clad bunnies, the series seemed to be targeting men. But it was at its core a female soap. The confusion with its mixed identity was clearly visible in the pilot, which looked like a soap, felt like a soap and behaved like one until it suddenly veered into dark territory with a murdered mafia boss’ body being dumped in the river.

As with most of these things, I think it’s easier to narrow down a definition by figuring out what’s not aimed at women. New Girl, despite its name and female protagonist, really don’t feel to me like it’s aimed at women at all. The show’s advertising focuses on how the character is perceived (thus, “adorkable”) rather than who she is. Most of the episodes I’ve seen so far are on the surface about problems Jess resolves, but are actually about the things her male roommates learn from helping her solve problems — the show is about their emotional growth more than hers. Up All Night, by contrast, could work for either gender of coastal elites, but I think is slightly more aimed at women. It’s not that Will Arnett’s stay-at-home dad Chris doesn’t have a character arc, because he clearly does. But there are also women wrestling with a whole range of career and life issues, and the core couple’s storylines are, obviously, interdependent. Raising a small human tends to do that. And I can’t quite figure out if 2 Broke Girls is supposed to be aimed at women or not: it’s got female protagonists, but it remains unclear whether they’re meant to be points of entry or objects of consumption (which may be more a problem of execution than artistic intent).

Tone isn’t really determinative, either. New Girl may be all Dirty Dancing-themed sing-a-longs and sunshine, while Prime Suspect looks gritty and muted, lots of grays and washed-out purples, plus, you know, omnipresent brutal murder. But the show is essentially a funhouse version of what it feels like to work in a bad male-dominated environment. It’s kind of a horror story with a female protagonist who gets to be a hero without having to be a virgin. And it’s not really tone that’s wrong with Playboy Club. It’s that the show puts women’s bodies on screens but no concrete ideas in their heads to relate to. Finding your dad by posing for Playboy is not an idea Viewers at Home can relate to, or analogous to any situations we are likely to face in real life.

*You should watch Prime Suspect. Maria Bello is very good, and the show deserves to survive.

There’s been a lot of discussion of a series of illustrations, some of which are reproduced here, that show what male superheroes would look like if they were posed like Wonder Woman is on the cover of the latest Justice League. I was particularly interested to see those images in conjunction with a new study that looks at 1,000 Rolling Stone covers and determines that the images of both men and women have become more sexual more frequently over the 43 years the magazine’s been published, but that over time, the number of sexualized and hypersexualized images of women has increased faster than the number of comparable images of men. I mention this because while I think reducing women to their sexuality is a problem, we’ve also got something of an equal opportunity problem here.

The reason those images of superheroes posed like Wonder Woman are resonating is in part because they’re funny, they’re superheroes in drag. They help make clear why it’s ridiculous to have Wonder Woman running around fighting evil in a swimsuit — it can be hard to see things as ridiculous when they’re all you’ve ever seen, but when you see a reversal, like a pantsless Batman, it’s usefully jarring. But these images don’t accomplish their full purpose because they aren’t actually meant to be sexy. They don’t communicate to men what it’s like to see another man held up as an object of pure sexual desire for women’s consumption.

That’s one of the reasons I cracked up in the 2 Broke Girls extended trailer when Kat Dennings explains that she can’t resist her cheating newly-ex boyfriend because of “he had these muscle thingies [adjacent to his abs]…I don’t know what they’re called but they make smart girls stupid.” Or why Crazy Stupid Love is selling the joke where Emma Stone tells Ryan Gosling, “It’s like you’re Photoshopped!” when he takes off his shirt. There’s this idea that female desire doesn’t exist, or if it does, that it’s sort of laughable, which both of those examples thankfully reject, but as a result, we have fewer images of men that are just purely about being beautiful and covetable. Patrick Swayze’s incredibly desirable in Dirty Dancing, but the fact that there are so few images of men that are just available for the female gaze like that hugely magnifies the significance of his performance and his self-presentation in the movie.

I don’t want to live in a world where we remove all images of women that are desirable. I just want more of other kinds of images, and equal opportunity for women who like to sigh over dudes to have images to sigh over.

There’s a lot of hysteria surrounding the announcement that Kenny Ortega, director of such notable projects as the High School Musical movies, is going to helm a remake of Dirty Dancing. There are complaints that you can’t mess with perfection (you can’t), or that you can’t replace Patrick Swayze (also true). But for me, the biggest problem is that any remake is likely to miss that the point of the movie isn’t the core romance — it’s about politics.

Irin Carmon, in what remains my favorite essay about the original movie and one of my favorite pieces of nostalgia criticism ever, explains that the greatness of the movie is in part that Baby “Can dance with the owner’s son and thaw a little when she learns he’s going freedom riding with the bus boys, then see how he treats Johnny. She can find out that the supposed prize, Yale Medical school and out-WASPing-the-WASPs Robbie, is also an Ayn Rand-reading cad whose life philosophy is, ‘Some people count, some people don’t.’ She sees this [and what happens when abortion isn't readily available], and she isn’t cowed, even if she has moments of doubt.”

Anyone who think Johnny and Baby’s affair is really going to last beyond the summer, or even optimistically, beyond her first of college, is fooling themselves, high on hormones and the giddiness of that final lift. And that’s part of what makes it a great romance — both Baby and Johnny are fully immersed it in, passionate without concern for the final shape of it. There’s no romantic comedy nagging about putting a ring on it, or need to put Jennifer Grey through a makeover session, to tear her down before she can be built back up. Baby is a great, but very human person, who grows into her adult greatness through an affair, through breaking the law to help someone secure an illegal abortion with serious consequences, through spending her summer working (even if her work is a kind of play) rather than just relaxing. Johnny is the mirror in which Baby comes to see herself as a whole person. It matters that her vision of herself and her clarity about it last, not that she and Johnny get married.

Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights is not a good movie, exactly, and it’s counts as one of a number of odd decisions that Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal made with their careers after Y tu mamá también. And even if it’s not entirely successful at engaging with them, the show has clear and defined politics. Instead of class in the Catskills, it’s capitalist imperialism in Cuba that’s supposed to keep the two characters apart. The Cuban character, of course, isn’t actually a revolutionary — he’s just related to one — just as the American may have all her pretty dresses paid for by her businessman father, but that doesn’t mean she’s signed on to big business’s agenda in Cuba. Interestingly, the movie’s drawn from a much more political script which was commissioned, killed, and repurposed years later to fit the Dirty Dancing format, which may explain why it has a coherent, if weak, political perspective. It would be interesting to see what the original movie would have been like, or what would have happened if the story involved the heroine developing not just pro-choice and good class politics, but politically and economically radical ones.

I’ll be curious to see if they even try to concoct a political scenario for the remake. But if they do, I hope someone remembers that this isn’t a story where Romeo and Juliet defy their stupid family feud because the other person is just too awesome to resist. This is a story where the Montagues and the Capulets have really and substantive differences, and Juliet sides with the Capulets on substance, not on hormones.