This post contains spoilers about season 3 of Scandal and the first episode of season 4.
A New York Times article written by Alessandra Stanley enraged millions of people last week by reducing Shonda Rhimes to an “Angry Black Woman.” Stanley didn’t mention that the creator, writer, and producer is actually a prominent champion for women at a time when they are underrepresented and misrepresented on television. Rhimes doesn’t just include women in her shows, she plunges into issues that affect women in the real world in an intersectional and nuanced way. And her inclusion of hard-hitting women’s issues continued last night with a discussion of sexual assault and gender inequality in the workplace.
In the season 4 premiere of Scandal last night, Republican President Fitzgerald Grant wants to sign a law ensuring all women are paid equal to their male counterparts. And after a male senator — a key vote in Senate on the gender pay legislation — sexually assaults a young Hill staffer named Kate, and a public relations cleanup crew tried to spin the incident as Kate’s fault, Olivia Pope springs into action. Before it’s revealed that the victim was not actually a senator — as initially believed — but her younger aide, Olivia dropped some knowledge about the victimization of female assault survivors.
“The press is loving this story: elder statement, lion of the party, attacked in his home. The man is lying in a hospital bed being sainted and prayed for. He’s a rapist…he’s a sexual predator. And the actual victim, the survivor of his assault, the hero of the story, is a woman who feels like she can’t come forward. Because in a he-said-she-said situation, women aren’t believed. Because it could hurt her career, because the very fact that some man put his hands on her could damage her credibility as a United States senator.”
By the episode’s end, Olivia is back in the PR saddle, refocusing the narrative and putting the blame back on the perpetrator. In a press conference she strongly affirms that Kate is brave for standing up and refusing to be silent about her assault. “Kate chose to be a hero, a hero to the next girl who thinks she doesn’t have a choice when it comes to being harassed in the workplace where, somehow, women still make 77 cents to every male dollar.”
Rhimes chose to confront two issues that drastically harm women, and did so by treating them as intersectional problems, as opposed to two separate ideas. Rampant discrimination against women exists in the workforce — 1 in 3 women say they’ve experienced discrimination at work — and it happens in numerous ways. Women still make 78 percent of what men doing the same job earn, and women of color do even worse. This is true even if a woman has more education than a male counterpart, or works in female-dominated jobs. Some women are instructed to sleep their way to the top, or blamed for turning on male counterparts. And 1 in 5 women have been sexually harassed by a superior.
Rhimes didn’t just talk about one form of prejudice that hurts women at the expense of another. She treated them as two injustices that work together to harm women on a societal level. The episode continued her streak of telling women’s stories with refreshing nuance, as she’s previously included storylines that other shows tend to shy away from.
In Grey’s Anatomy, Cristina Yang chose to have an abortion, something TV audiences aren’t used to seeing. To use Vulture’s words, “That’s right! Someone actually had an abortion — not a miscarriage, not an ectopic pregnancy, not a last-minute change of heart — on national television!“ And not only was there an abortion, Cristina was firm in her resolve and did not regret her decision. Even when her husband shamed her, Yang knew she did not want children, and wouldn’t apologize for it. Although she did have an ectopic pregnancy in an earlier season, she’d also wanted to have an abortion at that time. Breaking the trend of shows shying away from abortion, and writing about it when other women writers won’t, Rhimes challenges the stigma that hurts 1 in 3 women who go through the procedure.
As she did with abortion, Rhimes gave her audience a more realistic of another prominent issue that effects women, rape, than a show like Game of Thrones, which repeatedly and unnecessarily uses rape as a plot device without acknowledging the impact sexual violence actually has on women.
Unlike the Game of Thrones writers, who essentially re-wrote George R.R. Martin’s story to include a graphic rape scene between Cersei and Jaime Lannister, Rhimes did not approach rape lightly. In season 3 of Scandal, it’s revealed that Mellie was raped by the President’s father, but the incident isn’t incorporated for 3 minutes of shock-value and then completely disregarded. And it wasn’t used to suddenly make one of the show’s villains more likeable. Instead, Scandal incorporated the scene to provide context for a primary character, the results of which were integrated in 11 episodes thereafter. And it showed how physically and emotionally harmful rape is for victims. Mellie attempted to commit suicide soon after the rape, and with the exception of telling the person who saved her, the First Lady was too ashamed to reveal what was done to her — a secret she held for 15 years.
At a time when women had fewer speaking roles in the last primetime television season than in 2012–2013 TV shows, Shonda’s programs all have female leads. And each of those women, while flawed, is intelligent badasses who get things done; one is an outstanding surgeon, one a public relations genius, and the other a prominent attorney. They’re also surrounded by other women at the top of their game. All of the shows pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors, and take it a step further by countering the San Diego State University study that found that men are shown at work more frequently than women, whereas the Rhimes shows primarily feature women at work. And her female leads aren’t twenty-somethings like the other 60 percent of women on television.
So no, Shonda Rhimes isn’t an Angry Black Woman. But she is a smart one.