Bones is letting me down

Bones is letting me down.

I know, I know. Bones is just a fictional forensic anthropologist who solves crimes and writes novels on TV. She can’t really let me down. She’s not alive. Nonetheless, I have this feeling of disappointment that I can’t shake.

When I look at it closely, I realize that I have felt this way before.



I was an up and coming assistant professor, new Ph. D. and book contract in hand. I had prospects. I had a future. I had a number of mentor Ph. D. women who loved me and supported me. I admired them, the women of my mother’s generation who had been the first to enter the academy in force, the women who broke down the barriers that limited all US women, the women who had often stayed single and without children. I wanted to be just like them.

To many of these academic women of the second wave of feminism, success was everything. Raised to the refrain of “women can’t…..,”-- they proved that women could. But they often took the system as they found it. As the frontrunners, they had no choice. They found the academy unfriendly towards women and children, so they hid what made them distinguishable – their different relationship to love, children, family. The typical professor had a wife to take care of things at home. These women did not. They tried to fit in. Blend. They choose to not have children. Or if they did, they came back to work just days after their births/adoptions, as if what they had done had little impact on them. If they married or formed partnerships, they tended to choose other academics, so they could, literally, “marry their work.” Many of them (not all) “passed” into the academic system, making academia a god to which they sacrificed, nun-like, their non-academic selves. The media took the real life examples they found and made them into a larger-than-life stereotype of the career woman driven too hard to love, the woman professor who chose books over babies. The old idea that women couldn't have a working brain and a working womb at the same time was living on.

But academic women were not fazed. My mother’s generation had high hopes for me and young Ph. D. women like me. And I disappointed them. I had a baby. “You’re ruining your career!” was all I heard. When I asked my woman dean for maternity leave, she at first denied it. She had done it without maternity leave. Why couldn’t I? Until I had a baby, until I could no longer fit the standard image of a professor, I didn’t see any difference between me and my mentors. Suddenly, a rift appeared. The system wouldn't recognize me as a birthing professor, and I wasn't getting much help from many of the women I thought would help me. I resigned my position because it was clear there was no place for me and my baby in that ivory tower office. And I'm not the only one.

Academic feminist women of my generation, of the third wave of feminism (and many second wave feminists, too) don’t want to choose between books and babies, literary life and love, academics and family. We want both, and our protests are changing academia enough to make a space for us and our messy love and children and birthing bodies (see the book Mama PhD and my retired column Mothering in the Ivory Tower). I know it's changing because I am back in the ivory tower, and I don't have to perform childlessness any longer. But it's not easy for any of us.

I’m mad because the show has the potential to say something important about these issues. I watch it because it is well written. The writers have played with the stereotype of the Ph. D. woman, making Bones, often, a more complex character. Bones knows karate and is sexually liberated and sings “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and is often so much more than I expect. And, yes, we are similar. She and I – we both lead with our brains. We both have problems interacting socially. And we both regularly miss common cultural references. I often laugh at her because I see myself in her. Bones is the only show I regularly watch on TV, and I know many other Ph. D. women who say the same thing. It is a show with immense possibility for people like me.

Here is the rub.

When she turned down the opportunity to develop a relationship with her partner, Booth, on the grounds that she is a scientist, she became, suddenly, like my former woman dean. Some of my former mentors. Bones is a woman Ph. D. of my generation – but she is spouting the thinking and attitudes that belong to the stereotype of the 1970’s feminist (and a few actual ones). Bones says that science and work are more important to her. That the family she has created through a group of co-workers is enough for her. That she is satisfied to maintain her asexual relationship with her work partner as the best connection to others she has. That all her highest needs are met by her career.

I feel tricked. I thought Bones was a revolutionary character – one that would transform the stereotype of the academic woman. But she’s not. She is the writers’ view of what an academic feminist is. And that view is based on the much-attacked stereotype of second wave feminists, not the real people standing before them now. They have set up a straw man, an extreme version that never really existed. And I am frustrated.

You see, I am particularly bothered because I am a Ph. D. woman who just married her work partner, another Ph.D. who teaches English with me. And I know many other Ph. D. women of earlier and current generations who have married and are happy. Women like me don’t have to choose between being a career woman and being part of a family. We can do both. It is happening for me.  So, I know it can happen for Bones - if the writers would take on the challenge.

TV writers seem to be as afraid of giving their lead action-oriented women husbands/babies as the academy has been about women professors having husbands/babies. Action leads, like professors, are supposed to be men, or act like them. They don't know how to write it any differently. Look what they did to Mulder and Scully's relationship on the X-Files. They didn't even try to write it. They disappeared the father and adopted the baby out. They ran from the challenge of depicting a woman who is an action lead and a wife and a mother at the same time like, well, a dean running from providing an institution-wide maternity leave policy. But that was then. What about now?

I would love to see a real, mature relationship develop where we can see Bones as a full human being – and break the regressive stereotype she has become. Some say it can’t happen because the story needs tension and conflict. I guess those people have never actually been in relationships because I’ve never known one without tension and conflict. I think the story of how Bones and Booth work it out would be just as filled with tension as the current storyline. And more grown up.

This is what people do, folks. Real people, like you and me, find love, in whatever form we desire, and we work on it – through conflicts and tensions. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m ready for Bones to stop being a wooden stereotype and become a real girl. I’m ready for the relationship between Bones and Booth to grow up. And I think the audience will rise up to meet the challenge. Give us something new. Give us something we haven’t seen before. Give us the story of how they work it out.