U Not Gonna Like This

This was posted at the Men's Movie Guide:

Hate men? Tune in

Herald Sun (Melbourne) 4 February 2005
By Andrew Bolt

Unhappy, unfulfilled, unappreciated, unloved: these are the Desperate Houswives. And who's to blame? Men, of course.

There's no mystery to the huge success of Desperate Housewives.

It's scented tissues and Lindt chocolate for the self-pitying modern woman, of whom we now have so very many.

A show whose opening titles show one weepy cartoon woman punching the head of her mean lover and another tossing her broom out the window after sweeping up after her face-stuffing husband, shouldn't be such an enigma to the feminists and theorists who've pondered its massive appeal.

Oh, we poor women, miserable in our suburban luxury. Oh, those foul men. Just wait until they get home from earning our money.

Yet how the experts have struggled to figure what made this soap a smash in America, the buzz of Britain and now a sensation in Australia, with 2.5 million of us tuning in to its premiere on Channel Seven this week.

Overlooking the whining obvious, they've looked instead at its high-gloss exterior and seen there a mirror of their own obsessions.

One male critic drooled that the secret of this dissection of American Gothic suburbia ­ gutting the hyper-lives of four desperate at-home women and one predatory slut ­ was perhaps that it was "showcasing female sexuality in a way women would find erotic".

By which he means there's sex without nipples, and the women do most of the pouncing and bouncing. As shy guys dream.

But when celebrity groping victim and feminist Naomi Wolf saw Desperate Housewives, she saw instead that the deepest of the "deeper reasons" for its success was that it "says the unsayable", especially that motherhood "can be extremely tiring and boring" ­ as Wolf said she found when she tried it.

True, motherhood sucks in Wisteria Lane, where our heroines lead lives that, outwardly, seem styled by Martha Stewart. Lynette, you see, has sons she can't stand, and who aren't ever shown in a "love-you-after-all" scene to make up for being ugly brats who turned mum from a corporate hottie into the dowdiest woman in her manicured street.

As for brittle Bree, her own wretches mock her delicate gourmet cooking and eat at her even more delicate confidence instead. So, yes, motherhood is hell on Wisteria Lane. Yet the children are just one whinge in a storm of women's sighs.