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Feminist Media Studies

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“Nothing Hurts the Cause More Than

That”
Rosalind Sibielski
Published online: 05 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Rosalind Sibielski (2010) “Nothing Hurts the Cause More Than That”, Feminist
Media Studies, 10:3, 321-334, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2010.493650

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 “NOTHING HURTS THE CAUSE MORE
THAN THAT”

Veronica Mars and the business of the

backlash

Rosalind Sibielski
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The final season of the television series Veronica Mars was marked by a narrative shift from an
apparent investment in supporting feminist values to a virulent attack on US feminism. This shift
reproduces several of the tenets central to the discourses of the backlash, including the views that
feminism promotes hostility towards men, that it has betrayed women rather than advocating on
their behalf, and that feminist liberation comes at a tremendous personal cost, which leaves
women miserable and unfulfilled. This essay examines the show’s transformation into a backlash
text within the context of the pressure reportedly placed on writers and producers to increase
ratings in order to avoid cancellation. It argues that because the series’s reproduction of backlash
rhetoric can be read as reflective of the popular view that feminism is antithetical to the values of
the US cultural mainstream, it illustrates the influence of the backlash on US market forces, as well
as on US popular culture. It also suggests that, in the process, the series reveals a great deal about
the ways in which profit motives intersect with, and possibly override, ideological considerations in
the production of popular culture texts.

KEYWORDS Veronica Mars; feminism; backlash; television

In Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Faludi notes that “fear and
loathing of feminism is a sort of perpetual viral condition in our culture” (1991, p. xix).
Nineteen years after this observation was first made, even a cursory survey of popular
discourses surrounding feminism in the United States reveals that this condition is still in an
acute stage. In spite of the social reforms to come out of the US women’s movement, the
rhetoric of the backlash promotes the idea that feminism has done more harm to women—
and to US society—than it has benefited them. At the same time, alternately citing
and dismissing continued occurrences of gender inequality, postfeminists advance the
argument that feminism is either unnecessary (because it has ostensibly succeeded in
meeting all of its goals) or untenable (because it has failed to meet those goals), but in any
case no longer viable in the contemporary moment. Political pundits like Rush Limbaugh
and Ann Coulter routinely deploy the term feminist as an epithet, prompting Baumgardner

Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, 2010

ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/10/030321-334
q 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2010.493650
 322 ROSALIND SIBIELSKI

and Richards to dub feminism “the other F word” (2000, p. 50), while the reluctance of
young women and men to claim feminist identification, even while fully supporting
feminist principles, has led Douglas to christen the current period in American feminism
“the era of ‘I’m not a feminist, but . . . ’” (1994, p. 270).
Part of the present ambivalence surrounding feminism within hegemonic US
culture can be traced to its denigration or misrepresentation within mainstream popular
culture texts. In particular, as media scholars like Douglas, Faludi, and Dow all suggest,
contemporary film and television narratives in which “single, professional and feminist
women are humiliated, turned into harpies, or hit by nervous breakdowns [until] the wise
ones recant their independent ways” play a prominent part in this endeavor (Faludi 1991,
p. xi). However, distorting feminist values and practices while investing them with negative
significations routinely invoked to discredit feminist politics is not the only representational
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strategy popular media texts deploy to malign feminism in the eyes of the general public.
One of the more effective tactics employed by backlash rhetoric to undermine feminist
work has been to reduce US feminism from a collection of varied, multifaceted, and,
at times, conflicting movements loosely unified in terms of their investment in improving
the social and material conditions under which women live their lives to a monolithic
and fanatically dogmatic program reflective of patriarchal anxieties and stereotypes
surrounding feminist discourses rather than those discourses themselves.
In (mis)representing the goals of US feminism, such rhetoric also tends to conceive of
it exclusively in terms of a warped caricature of second wave principles and practices, that,
as Douglas points out, never really existed outside of its portrayal in the news media and
popular culture (1994, p. 165). While the continued representation of feminism within these
terms in the vast majority of hegemonic cultural texts therefore works to render feminism
at once uniform, static, and anachronistic by effectively anchoring popular understandings
of it in a fictive past, it equally occludes the fact that contemporary feminism(s) are not only
continually adapting in response to contemporary social conditions, but also in response
to the discourses of the backlash. Thus, while as Douglas, Faludi, and Dow all argue,
popular media texts often function to reinforce backlash rhetoric, in some cases they also
participate in efforts to reclaim or to rehabilitate feminism by attempting to counter that
rhetoric, ultimately suggesting that mainstream popular culture is not so much aligned
with the politics of the backlash as it is a disputed terrain upon which both feminist and
backlash discourses compete over the meanings assigned to feminism within US culture.
The television series Veronica Mars becomes noteworthy within this context, because
the program appears to insert itself into both sides of this project at different times during
its three-year run. Although the series never explicitly claimed identification as a feminist
text, in its first two seasons it seems to endorse a model of empowered femininity
popularized under the banner of “girl power” in the late 1990s, suggesting a feminist-
friendly tone to the series even if the feminist orientation of girl power discourse is open to
debate. In marked contrast, in its final season the show’s political allegiances appear to shift
from an investment in supporting feminist values (albeit indirectly) to vilifying those values,
embarking upon a virulent attack on US feminism that extends across the first nine
episodes of the season, and which, like the backlash texts described above, narrowly
envisions the feminism it critiques in terms of patriarchal stereotypes mainstream culture
often (mis)takes for feminism rather than actual contemporary feminist values or practices.
Significantly, these seemingly contradictory attitudes towards feminism articulated
by Veronica Mars do more than imply a contested relationship between the series and
 “NOTHING HURTS THE CAUSE MORE THAN THAT” 323

the feminist ethos it alternatively appeals to and disavows. When placed in the context of
the pressure reportedly placed on writers and producers in the show’s final season to
increase ratings in order to avoid cancellation, it also suggests that it is equally possible
to read the program’s transformation into a backlash text as reflective of the popular
view that feminism is antithetical to the values of the US cultural mainstream, in
which repudiating any association with feminist discourse becomes a pre-condition of
broadening audience appeal. The anti-feminist turn to Veronica Mars in its final season
therefore not only illustrates the tensions between backlash discourse and feminist
discourse within US popular culture, but it also illustrates the ways in which backlash
discourse seeks to marginalize feminism by positioning it in oppositional relation to both US
public sentiment and US market forces.
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Veronica Mars and TV’s Appeal to the “Feminist” Demographic

In examining the role of popular culture texts in reproducing or challenging backlash
rhetoric, it is important to keep in mind that while popular culture may figure as a contested
ideological terrain, in most cases it is also created within and distributed by a network of
commercial interests, in which the ability of those texts to turn a profit is a major
consideration in their production. Accordingly, although in the US the relationship between
the television industry and feminism has largely been an uneasy one, with the articulation
of feminist discourse in some popular texts counterbalanced by its disparagement in others
and its appropriation and commodification in still others, the extent to which feminist
values are endorsed or condemned by a given television series is as much the result of a
business decision as it is of a desire on the part of its creators to promote a particular
political agenda. In this light, it is equally important to acknowledge that although
representations of women in narrative TV shows underwent a transformation in the US in
the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the Women’s Liberation Movement, that transformation
was as much a response to women’s increased earning potential as it was to shifts in
cultural attitudes surrounding gender roles. Indeed, as Lotz points out, while television’s
representation of the empowered “career woman” in shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show
(1970 –1977) can be read as reflective of the infiltration of feminist values into the US
cultural mainstream, it is equally reflective of the television industry’s bid to profit off of the
social changes effected by feminism, as networks and advertisers alike became persuaded
that programming that appealed to “liberated” women made good business sense, since it
was assumed that such women “controlled much of their disposable income and had more
of it to spend” (2006, p. 8).
This appeal to female consumers in a manner that both exploits and commodifies
feminist politics is also found in the female-oriented programming that has gained
prominence on US television networks in the last decade. Hao argues that, as with the
“liberated woman” TV shows of the 70s and 80s, the current surge in media products
marketed through discourses of female empowerment is the result of an appeal to a
particular consumer demographic, in this case, a generation of twenty-something women
who have been raised in the wake of second wave feminism, and whom marketers assume
“the best way to sell to” is to “speak to . . . as feminists” (1988, p. 30). Thus, television
networks and advertisers seeking to capture the attention—and the earning power—of
young, affluent, professional women began flooding the airwaves in the late 1990s with
programs like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001),
 324 ROSALIND SIBIELSKI

and Alias (2001–2006), all of which mobilize appeals to female empowerment in order to
attract viewers supportive of feminist slogans, if not necessarily of feminist politics.
Although, like Buffy, it is targeted to an audience believed to be comprised mainly of
teenage girls rather than young professional women, Veronica Mars can be included among
this recent spate of television programs that invoke feminist ideals in order to solicit female
viewers/consumers.1 Set in the fictional town of Neptune, California, the show features
a smart, tough-talking, assertive protagonist who splits her time between attending
high school and assisting her father in his work as a private investigator, while additionally
solving cases for her classmates on a freelance basis. It also exhibits the same address
to “liberated” women described by Hao and Lotz above, making it possible to read the
apparent feminist orientation of the show in its first two seasons as a marketing strategy,
as well as (or perhaps, rather than) a narrative incorporation of feminist values.
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Veronica Mars aired for two seasons on UPN (2004–2006) and for one season on The
CW (2006– 2007), the network formed after the merger between UPN and The WB. For most
of its run on both networks, the series struggled to remain on the air, undergoing three
timeslot changes and several phases of narrative retooling in an effort to attract audiences,
as well as the advertising revenues that go along with large ratings shares. Although
the series made the cut onto The CW when UPN and The WB began consolidating
programming, it was only picked up for thirteen episodes (Adalian 2006). This order was
eventually extended to twenty after the series managed a slight increase in ratings, but that
extension came with “the proviso that [its creator] endeavor to make the serialized drama
more new-user-friendly” (Jensen 2006, p. 79), with renewal for any additional seasons
dependent upon ratings further “pick[ing] up in the second half of the season” (Adalian
2006). After failing to deliver on both conditions, the network declined to pick up the series
for a fourth season, officially announcing its cancellation in May 2007.
Although the series was never a ratings hit, it did manage to attract a dedicated fan
base, as well as garnering praise from television critics who championed the program for
its complex narratives, its blend of noir stylistics and teen TV plots, and its “headstrong,
complicated lead character” (Fudge 2007, p. 15). Significantly, much of the critical attention
surrounding the show has focused on Veronica’s relation to cultural discourses concerning
female empowerment, with the character variously celebrated for her “sharp wits, steely
nerves and . . . wicked sense of humor” (Bianco 2004, p. 04D), and her “tough and
intelligent” blend of “street and book” smarts (Gallo 2004, p. 70).
Veronica’s much vaunted toughness places the series within a sub-genre of recent
pop culture texts that Inness (1999) describes as “tough girl” narratives for their depiction of
physically and emotionally strong women who assume the character traits—and the
narrative roles—once reserved exclusively for male protagonists in action-adventure or
superhero stories. To the extent that Inness reads the emergence of the tough girl as a
response to the influence of second and third wave feminism upon US popular culture,
the invocation of this figure within the narrative spaces of Veronica Mars suggests a link
between the show’s representation of female empowerment and its appeal to a feminist-
friendly demographic. Thus, Stanley’s observation that Veronica is “closer in spirit to Philip
Marlow than to Nancy Drew” not only points to the character’s appropriation of the speech
and behavior associated with the hardboiled detective of the noir genre (2004, p. E5), but
when read within the context of the tough girl’s assumption of masculine gender markers
as a challenge to patriarchal gender norms, it also aligns the series with larger feminist
discourses on gender, power, and representational practices.
 “NOTHING HURTS THE CAUSE MORE THAN THAT” 325

Veronica’s coding as a tough girl is primarily accomplished on a narrative level

through her exploits as an amateur private investigator—not only a traditionally male
sphere of employment within US popular culture texts, but also one that routinely requires
her to talk or to fight her way out of physical harm. This narrative appropriation of skills
generally coded as the domain of masculinity is mirrored on a visual level by Veronica’s
adoption of clothing and mannerisms equally coded as “masculine” within US culture, as
well as her concomitant mockery of the interests and behaviors traditionally associated
with teenage girlhood. In this way, Veronica’s toughness is implicitly linked to gender
transgression through the unconventional (for an adolescent girl on TV) appearance
and behavior she embodies, while that gender transgression becomes linked to female
empowerment through the agency that her rejection of hegemonic femininity confers
upon her, a discursive connection that would seem to gesture towards second wave
feminist arguments surrounding the role of hegemonic femininity in women’s oppression.2
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Veronica’s costuming becomes significant in this regard, because it is invoked within

the series as a double signifier of both toughness and gender transgression. Throughout
the series, Veronica is most often depicted wearing jeans, long-sleeved t-shirts and boots.
While it has become acceptable within the US for women to wear clothing of this type
without it calling their gender identification into question, Veronica’s style of dress is
marked as transgressive within the text mainly because it deviates from the style of dress
adopted by the female 09ers, the clique of wealthy, popular students at Veronica’s
high school, whose pastel wardrobes, long hair and glossy lipstick embody a much more
conventional model of teenage girlhood. Even when Veronica appears in “feminine”
clothing, her choice of miniskirts and combat boots still suggest toughness far more than
hegemonic femininity, while her dark eyeliner, black nail polish and occasional pigtails
don’t so much feminize her as evoke a Riot Grrrl aesthetic. In this way, while Veronica’s
costuming contributes to her tough girl coding, it also establishes discursive links between
that coding and a rejection of female gender norms, a connection made explicit in episodes
like “Welcome Wagon,” in which Veronica playfully imitates Clint Eastwood, and her
boyfriend, Logan, responds by sardonically remarking, “I didn’t think it was possible to
make you more butch.”
Unfortunately for Veronica, while her “butch” character traits may allow her to excel
as a sleuth, they also exacerbate her outsider status among her high school peers,
particularly the 09ers, who shun her for her working-class roots, as well as for her father’s
role in the botched murder investigation of her best friend, the bad-girl socialite Lilly Kane.
Importantly, though, while Veronica’s toughness may be linked to her social margin-
alization in the series, a connection suggested by the fact that the ridicule and harassment
she is subjected to by the 09ers is most often centered upon the model of non-normative
femininity that she embodies, it is nonetheless invested with positive significations because
it also allows her to negotiate the isolation of adolescent nonconformity, transcending—
and ultimately embracing—her outsider status rather than suffering for it. In this way, the
series further links Veronica’s toughness to discourses of female empowerment by making
it the key factor in her refusal of victimization, a central theme during the first season, which
is emphasized by her assertion in the episode “Like a Virgin” that her way of coping with the
insults the 09ers direct at her is to “get tough.”
This narrative positioning of toughness as empowering is also emphasized through
Veronica’s portrayal as a rape survivor. The fact that Veronica was raped is first revealed in
the pilot episode, in which her experience of waking up the morning after attending a party
 326 ROSALIND SIBIELSKI

to discover that she had been slipped GHB and sexually assaulted is related in a flashback.
This sequence ends with a series of shots in which Veronica straightens her clothing, forces
back her tears, and walks slowly to her car. Filmed from a low angle, these shots are framed
to connote stoicism rather than helplessness, an implication furthered by the voice-over
that accompanies them, in which Veronica confides to viewers, “I never told my Dad. I’m
not sure what he would have done with that information, but no good would have come of
it. And what does it matter? I’m no longer that girl.” While this final statement might be
interpreted as an indicator of loss, it is delivered in a way that suggests empowerment
rather than grief. As such, the series attempts a delicate balance between refusing
victimization and acknowledging the trauma of sexual assault by positioning the rape as a
source of Veronica’s toughness.
Within this context, it is worth noting that because whenever Veronica is depicted in
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the show’s flashback sequences her clothing and hairstyle are much more conventionally
feminine (with the soft-focus filming of the flashbacks further “softening” her look in
a way that connotes a vulnerability in sharp contrast to her toughness in the diegetic
present), and because the rape is the last event to precede Veronica’s transformation in
appearance, the series seems to suggest that it too is a contributing factor in her refusal of
hegemonic femininity. However, while it therefore becomes possible to read the implied
“masculinization” in her mode of dress as reflective of an attempt to desexualize her
appearance in response to being sexually assaulted, this does not appear to be the way that
the series encourages her change in wardrobe to be read. Veronica’s style of dress may shift
from dresses and skirts to jeans and t-shirts following the rape, but those jeans and t-shirts
are almost uniformly form-fitting, accentuating rather than concealing her body. As such,
while her alteration in appearance does seem to be definitively connected to a change in
her character as a result of being raped, that change is coded within the narrative primarily
in terms of her becoming emotionally stronger, suggesting that in adopting the tough girl
look she is not so much trying to make her body disappear beneath her clothes as she is
trying to make her sense of vulnerability disappear through her tough girl persona.
By framing Veronica’s response to being raped as a refusal of the status of victim, the
series thus appears to mobilize survivor discourses advocated by feminist activists, in which
women who have been abused or assaulted are encouraged to take back the power stripped
from them by “self-consciously redefin[ing] their relationship to the experience from one of
victim” to one of “survivor” (Naples 2003, p. 163)—a move which would seem to further
ally the series with feminist politics. However, if the series’s apparent championing of
transgressive femininity and its exploration of female empowerment suggest a feminist
orientation to Veronica Mars in its first two seasons, it is important to acknowledge that the
feminism the show embraces is a highly negotiated version, in which the empowerment that
Veronica embodies is contained through its predication upon an individualist transcendence
of personal obstacles that effectively divorces questions of gender subordination from a
cultural or political context by implying that constraints upon female agency are a personal
problem rather than a social one. At the same time, while Veronica’s empowerment may be
tied to her challenging gender norms, the positive significations conferred upon her “gender
bending” in the series are equally constrained by their contingency upon the fact that she is
portrayed by an actress who, by even the most conservative standards, conforms to US
cultural ideals of heterosexual female attractiveness, and is thereby still contained within
the limits of what hegemonic culture considers to be acceptable—and marketable—in a
female lead in a mass media text.
 “NOTHING HURTS THE CAUSE MORE THAN THAT” 327

Although the invocation of even this compromised form of feminism in a mainstream

TV series may seem progressive, as previously suggested, the intent behind it cannot be
entirely separated from the consideration that feminist programming is only produced and
aired by television networks to the extent that it is profitable. Thus, if an appeal to a
feminist-minded market does not prove lucrative, another approach is likely to be deployed
in an attempt to recoup production costs. It is perhaps not coincidental, therefore, that
Veronica Mars’s sudden embrace of backlash rhetoric should occur at exactly the same
time that the show was facing cancellation due to the low ad revenues it was generating
for The CW.
While the series underwent a number of textual changes in its third season apart from
its anti-feminist narrative turn, the fact that a negative representation of feminism was
central to the plots of almost half the episodes would seem to suggest that the show’s
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transition from feminist courting to feminist bashing was not incidental, even if it was never
explicitly referred to by writers or producers in any of their public comments concerning
efforts to increase ratings. Indeed, given the auteur status routinely conferred upon the
series creator Rob Thomas by fans and TV critics alike, it is difficult to see these changes,
which seem to completely contradict the ethos of the show in its earlier seasons, as
something other than a bid to increase viewership. As Entertainment Weekly writer Jenson
implies, Thomas’s artistic clout and the “Quality Show rep” that allowed the series to avoid
cancellation while staying true to its vision in its first two seasons were trumped by the
need for the fledgling CW to attract advertisers in order to continue broadcasting past its
first year on the air (2006, p. 79). Ultimately, then, when viewed in light of Hao’s contention
that although “feminism sells” in contemporary US culture, the “backlash sells even better”
(1988, p. 30), the fact that Veronica Mars began espousing backlash rhetoric when the
question of its renewal became tied to the commercial viability of The CW would seem to
indicate that the revisions made to the series were perhaps motivated more by business
concerns than by a desire to simply take the show in a new creative direction.

Veronica Mars as Backlash Text

Although the shift in tone in Veronica Mars from pro-female empowerment to anti-
feminist is troubling in its own right, it is all the more problematic for the fact that the issue
of rape, which is employed the first season in order to tacitly invoke feminist principles,
becomes the discursive instrument through which those same principles are attacked in
the show’s third season. The third season begins with Veronica’s matriculation at the
fictional Hearst College. In the first episode, Veronica arrives on campus in the middle of a
Take Back the Night rally organized by the members of Lilith House, the college women’s
group, in response to a series of rapes in which female students are slipped a date rape
drug and sexually assaulted, after which their heads are shaved by the rapist. Veronica
begins investigating the rapes after Parker, the woman who shares a dorm room with her
friend Mac, becomes the latest victim. Far from being aided by the members of Lilith House,
though, who in their role as advocates for the women who have been attacked would seem
to be obvious allies, Veronica finds her investigation stymied by them at several points.
Initially, Veronica is enlisted by Nish, one of the leaders of the Lilith House
organization, to investigate a suspected link between the rapes and the Pi Sigma fraternity.
However, when Veronica’s investigation exonerates the fraternity, Nish, who is also editor of
the school paper, continues to print articles implying that they are behind the attacks
 328 ROSALIND SIBIELSKI

as part of a campaign to get the fraternity shut down. In an even more problematic plot
twist, Claire, another member of Lilith House, then lies about being raped in order to further
what Veronica begins to suspect is a personal vendetta against the fraternity president,
Chip Diller, and not activism born out of concern for the safety of the women on campus.
This suspicion is confirmed when the women of Lilith House physically assault Chip in
what is later revealed to be an act of vengeance on behalf of another woman whom he had
treated in a particularly callous manner.
In this way, the focus of this story arc shifts from an exploration of the links between
instances of rape on college campuses and the maculinist ethos of fraternity culture to the
staging of a female revenge scenario, envisioned from a perspective decidedly influenced
by patriarchal ideology, in which power relations are inverted such that men become
the helpless victims of feminist rage. In the process, the series also appears to take up
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and champion several of the tenets central to backlash discourse, including the idea
that feminism promotes violence and hostility towards men. Thus, while the series’s
demonization of feminist activists may be deployed on a diegetic level to align audience
sympathies against the women of Lilith House, who assume the roles of presumptive
villains for much of the season, on an extradiegetic level, it also functions to align the series,
whether intentionally or not, with the politics of the backlash.
In this context, it is important to note that the derogatory significations inscribed
upon the Lilith House members are established well before their nefarious deeds begin
coming to light, suggesting that their negative depiction within the show has less to do
with their questionable behavior regarding Chip than it does with their feminist allegiance.
From the very first episode in which they appear, virtually every offensive stereotype
circulating within US culture about feminism is invoked in their characterization. They are
depicted as angry, aggressive, and rigidly dogmatic. Moreover, because the majority of
them are portrayed as women of color, cultural prejudices against “uppity” women or
subordinated ethnic groups who openly challenge the status quo of power relations are
mobilized in their representation in order to discredit the brand of identity politics they
become associated with within the text.
In the episode “Wichita Linebacker,” for example, the group lodges a complaint
against the campus satire magazine, The Hearst Lampoon, for making jokes about the rape
victims. Unfortunately, while their complaint has a great deal of merit, the manner in which
they voice their concerns is extremely off-putting, and functions far more effectively to
discourage viewer identification than to engage viewer sympathy with their cause. Unable
to contain their indignation, Nish, Claire and Fern, the third of the featured Lilith House
members, are shown bursting into the Dean’s office while he is in the midst of another
meeting and demanding that he force the magazine to cease publication on the grounds
that it is “offensive to women.” Epithets such as “pig” and “misogynistic rag” are leveled
against the Lampoon and its two (male) representatives, before Veronica, who also happens
to be in the Dean’s office, is dragged into the debate. Significantly, when Veronica is asked
“as a woman” if she finds the contents of the magazine upsetting, she admits that she does,
but when Nish insists that this is because it constitutes “hate speech,” Veronica clarifies,
“I meant more it says it’s a humor magazine, but I’m not seeing it.”
Veronica’s dismissal of Nish’s claim that the magazine is downplaying the seriousness
of the sexual crimes perpetrated against the women at the college effectively delegitimizes
the (feminist) political stance Nish is articulating, making the members of Lilith House
appear as if they are overreacting by registering dissent. Furthermore, because Veronica is
 “NOTHING HURTS THE CAUSE MORE THAN THAT” 329

appealed to as a woman to judge the merits of their argument, she is positioned within the
narrative to speak on behalf of all women and their interests, while the feminist group
appears to articulate an extreme viewpoint that is not shared by anyone outside their
immediate circle. Thus, at the same time that this scene reproduces cultural stereotypes
about feminists lacking a sense of humor, it also reproduces a charge common in backlash
rhetoric by suggesting that feminism is a “fringe” discourse which does not reflect the
values of “average” women.
Concomitantly, feminism also comes under attack in this episode by making it an
object of ridicule. When the Dean accuses the Lilith House feminists of vandalizing his car as
retaliation for refusing to halt the Lampoon’s publication, they deny any involvement. One
of the male writers from the Lampoon then snidely comments, “I agree it’s impossible.
Where would militant feminists get a hold of a softball bat?” This is one of a number of jokes
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made at the expense of feminists or feminism during the show’s third season which play
upon backlash stereotypes of feminist women as reactionary, combative or “unfeminine.” In
“Lord of the Pis,” Veronica waits outside of one of Fern’s classes to question her. Catching
sight of the title of the book Fern is carrying, Veronica remarks, “Female Voice in Celtic
Literature? I am woman hear me bore.” In “Charlie Don’t Surf,” Veronica’s father teases her
about the sensible shoes she dons to go undercover, quipping, “Nice shoes. Did you
change your major to Women’s Studies?” Later in this episode, when Veronica emerges
from the meeting at which she presents the college administrators with the evidence
exonerating the Pi Sigmas in the rapes, she is greeted by the entire Lilith House group, who
stand silently scowling at her, and in her voice-over she sarcastically observes, “When did
the Greek chorus of feminist shame arrive?”
Ironically, in this last scene, the fact that several of the women in the protest line have
had their heads shaved by the campus rapist is visually collapsed into a reproduction of
cultural stereotypes concerning the presumed physical appearance of “militant” feminists,
in which a deviation from hegemonic standards of female appearance is taken as a signifier
of feminist extremism. In fact, in all of these instances, stereotypes about feminism
prevalent in US popular culture are invoked. However, they are not satirized in a way that
would critique misconceptions about feminist practices or beliefs. Instead the alleged
humor in these scenes arises out of an implication that they reflect the truth about women
who identify themselves as feminists, so that it is feminism itself that is being mocked,
and not patriarchal culture’s demonizing of feminist discourse. Furthermore, while it is
anti-feminist sentiments that are most explicitly mobilized in the ridicule directed at the
members of Lilith House in the episodes in which they appear, there is arguably also a
measure of homophobia implicit in the jokes made about them by other characters. This is
most evident in the wisecrack made by the Lampoon writer concerning the affinity “militant
feminists” ostensibly have for softball, which plays upon cultural biases that negatively
identify both feminists and female athletes as lesbians. In this case, the joke appeals both to
anti-feminist attitudes and to the homophobic mindset underpinning the “all feminists are
lesbians” stereotype, in which the descriptors “feminist” and “lesbian” are equally deployed
as derogatory terms.
This stereotype is also invoked in the characterization of Fern, who, of all the
members of Lilith House, is the character most visibly coded in ways that suggest lesbian
identity. In every episode in which she appears, Fern is costumed exclusively in jeans and
flannel shirts. She wears little makeup, and often her only jewelry is the silver hoop through
her nose. This type of body piercing, sometimes referred to as a “bull ring” because of its
 330 ROSALIND SIBIELSKI

insertion through the nasal septum, invokes oblique associations with the slang term “bull
dyke,” a commonly used homophobic slur in US culture, which suggests a discursive
connection between Fern’s implied lesbian identity and her bodily deviation from feminine
gender norms. The most obvious example of Fern’s gender bending occurs in the episode
“Spit and Eggs,” in which she single-handedly hoists an intoxicated undergraduate woman
over her shoulder and carries her to the campus safe ride cart while the male member of the
campus escort service ineffectually looks on. Although Fern is represented in this scene as
intervening to ensure the safety of the woman she aids, and although the subsequent
revelation that the escort in question has been acting as an accomplice to the campus
rapist would seem to vindicate her actions, the fact that her behavior is coded both as
“unfeminine” and as “emasculating” discourages positive readings of her character even in
this instance in which she acts as hero rather than villain because it underscores her
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deviation from heterosexual and feminine cultural norms. Significantly, in doing so, this
scene also exemplifies what Butler (1993, p. 313) has described as western culture’s inability
to conceptualize lesbian identity outside of an imperfect imitation of heterosexual
masculinity. As such, it can additionally be read as reinforcing cultural stereotypes of both
lesbians and feminists as either “failed” women or “wanna-be” men.
It is worth noting here that, in the case of Fern, the same visual signifiers employed to
negatively code her as a man-hating (possibly) lesbian feminist are also used earlier in the
series to positively code Veronica’s nontraditional gender identification as empowering.
That Veronica’s “butch” representation does not arouse nearly the same degree of
animosity or anxiety within the text that Fern’s does therefore raises the troubling
suggestion that what differentiates Veronica’s positive portrayal from Fern’s negative one is
primarily her lack of overt support for feminist causes and her unequivocal heterosexuality.
Within this context, however, it is also important to note that Veronica Mars’s third season
incorporation of backlash rhetoric extends beyond the negative portrayal of the members
of Lilith House to include a rehabilitation of Veronica’s transgressive femininity. Therefore,
while Fern may resemble the Veronica of earlier seasons, Veronica’s positive comparison to
the Lilith House feminists becomes contingent upon her hegemonic feminization, against
which Fern’s ambivalent gender identification appears even more aberrant.
Veronica’s hair becomes noticeably longer in season three. Her makeup lightens to
include more pastel shades, and her wardrobe begins to incorporate a greater array of
“feminine” articles and colors. Interestingly, although she retains enough of the visual
signifiers of her toughness to prevent her from completely forsaking her “butch”
appearance, on a narrative level it is precisely her tough girl persona that becomes the
instrument through which her femininity is recuperated. This project is initiated when
Veronica’s P.I. activities begin to put a strain on her romantic relationship with Logan. In
“Lord of the Pis,” Logan asks Veronica to drop her investigation into the rapes after her
inquiry begins to put her safety in jeopardy. In this and the following episode, they have
several arguments in which he demands that she stop putting herself at risk, and she
refuses, accusing him of acting controlling. Unfortunately, while it is tempting to try to read
this conflict within the context of a feminist critique of the infantilizing of women in
patriarchal culture, such an interpretation is undercut by the fact that it is Logan’s assertion
that Veronica needs protecting, and not Veronica’s assertion that she is capable of taking
care of herself, that is ultimately validated by the text.
As she closes in on his identity, Veronica is physically (not sexually) assaulted on two
separate occasions by the Hearst rapist. Each time, she is represented as being incapable of
 “NOTHING HURTS THE CAUSE MORE THAN THAT” 331

defending herself, and, in spite of the fact that throughout the first two seasons of the series
there are numerous episodes in which she outsmarts or outmaneuvers assailants twice her
size and physical strength, when she is attacked in season three she must rely first on
Logan, and later on Parker, to rescue her. Although Parker’s actions in the latter case can be
read as evidence of her empowerment, allowing Parker to fight back against her earlier
victimization by the rapist, the fact that Parker’s empowerment comes at the expense of
Veronica’s somewhat troubles positive readings of her rescue of Veronica, since it makes
Parker’s refusal of the status of victim dependent upon Veronica’s victimization.
This is not to suggest that this is the first time the series represents Veronica
as imperiled or in need of rescue, however. As early as the first season finale, in which
Veronica’s father must save her from Aaron Echolls, the man Veronica discovers is her friend
Lilly’s killer, there is a pattern in the series of balancing displays of Veronica’s empowerment
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against representations of her assuming the more traditional female narrative role of
damsel-in-distress, although it is unclear exactly what the factors are that prompted these
recurring reversals in her characterization. What does set her rescue from the rapist in
season three apart from these earlier rescues, however, is that in the first two seasons even
when Veronica is saved by someone else she is still represented as actively fighting back,
whereas in season three her being drugged by the rapist’s accomplice makes it nearly
impossible for her to take action to protect herself, effacing both her autonomy and her
toughness by reducing her to helplessness.
Even more disappointing, in “Spit and Eggs” Veronica’s toughness acquires negative
significations by being transformed from a source of strength to an effect of emotional
maladjustment, with Logan pathologizing her autonomy by identifying it as the cause of
the failure of their relationship. “You told me you weren’t built to let people help you,”
Logan tells her in the scene in which he announces that he’s leaving her. “You know what?
I’m not built to stand on the sidelines . . . I’m always here if you need anything, but you
never need anything.” In this way, the series shifts from celebrating Veronica’s toughness to
recoding it as both an indicator of psychic damage and a guarantor of emotional pain.
Significantly, this shift also invokes a theme identified by Faludi (1991, p. x) as central to
both the politics of the backlash and backlash-influenced pop culture texts: the idea that
feminist liberation comes at a tremendous personal cost, which, far from improving the
lives of women, causes them misery and suffering.
If Veronica suffers for her refusal to conform to hegemonic ideals of female
submissiveness during the third season, however, the members of Lilith House are demonized
for theirs, with their depiction as evil-doers hinging upon their characterization as what Fudge
has ironically identified as the backlash view of feminists as “fascist gender terrorists who seek
to control and police all aspects of men’s lives” (2006, p. 59). Nowhere is the series’s affirmation
of this stereotype more clearly inscribed than in the scene in “Spit and Eggs” in which, angered
by the Dean’s decision to reinstate the Pi Sigma charter, the members of Lilith House lay in
wait for him and pelt his car with eggs. Shot from an overhead angle that emphasizes the
vulnerability of the Dean, this image of an angry mob of women converging on a lone, middle-
aged, white male authority figure and shouting epithets while spitting, throwing eggs,
and rocking his car may very well epitomize patriarchal anxieties surrounding feminism.
Unfortunately, like the jokes leveled against the feminist group elsewhere in the narrative, this
image is employed to validate those anxieties rather than to deconstruct them.
This is not the only instance within the show in which the campus feminists assume
the roles of villains either. Indeed, in the same episode they supplant the campus rapist
 332 ROSALIND SIBIELSKI

as the criminals Veronica must bring to justice. In what is perhaps the most problematic of
all the narrative developments during the third season, in “Lord of the Pis” the Lilith House
feminists drug Chip and place evidence inside of a plastic Easter egg inserted into his
rectum that implicates him in the suicide attempt of a student named Patrice Patrelli. They
then shave his head and leave him on the quad dressed only in his underwear, mimicking
the behavior of the serial rapist. When Veronica begins looking into Patrice’s history, she
discovers that Patrice and Claire were friends, thereby establishing a motive for Claire to lie
about being raped in order to exact vengeance against Chip for publicly humiliating Patrice
and driving her to try to take her own life. Veronica then deduces that when this plan failed,
the women of Lilith House took matters into their own hands by assaulting Chip in a
revenge scenario that carries implications of both emasculation and sexual violation.
In an even more horrifying plot twist, both the fact that Claire has lied about being
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raped and the fact that the Lilith House feminists become the principle suspects in Chip’s
attack raises doubts about how many of the assaults attributed to the serial rapist actually
occurred. Veronica voices this concern when, in questioning Claire, Nish, and Fern about
their involvement in what happened to Chip, she remarks, “it’s powerful motivation for
someone to take desperate action. Fake a rape, right? Possibly a series of rapes. How many
of them were real? I mean, other than Chip Diller’s.” In this way, the members of Lilith House
not only replace the serial rapist as the central villains within the narrative, but they also
become the only verifiable perpetrators of a sexual crime, thereby invoking a popular
backlash narrative trope of female avengers committing violent acts of retribution against
men they perceive to have wronged them.
Significantly, though, if the attacks against the Dean and Chip function to villainize
the women of Lilith House by portraying them as the enemies of men, it is imperative to
note that their status as villains is also secured through the ways in which they are equally
portrayed as the enemies of women. Although the vengeance they attempt to exact
against the Pi Sigma fraternity is on behalf of another woman whom the fraternity members
have mistreated, they are depicted as exploiting the victims of the Hearst rapist by using
the assaults to further their own agenda of getting the fraternity shut down. Their lack of
concern for the women whose lives are damaged by their actions therefore positions the
Lilith House feminists as working against the interests of women rather than for them,
thereby reproducing yet another of the claims central to backlash discourse by promoting
the idea that feminists have betrayed women rather than advocating on their behalf. This
point is driven home by Veronica in “Lord of the Pis” when, outraged by the fact that Claire
has lied about being raped, she comments, “Nothing hurts the cause more than that.”

The Business of the Backlash

Ultimately, which cause Veronica Mars ends up hurting, and which one it ends up
furthering, is open to debate. The series’s apparent incorporation of feminist values in its
first two seasons may have been motivated on a network level by a desire to capitalize
upon the recent media market for girl power texts, but it nonetheless also presents
feminist-oriented content in a positive light, a signification approaching an ideological
coup in an era in which the label “feminist” is most often deployed as a derogatory term.
Indeed, although the feminism the series ostensibly embraces is a largely compromised
version, it still facilitates the presence of feminism in US popular culture as something other
than a joke or the purported cause of all the ills plaguing US society.
 “NOTHING HURTS THE CAUSE MORE THAN THAT” 333

This is not by any means to suggest that popular culture texts cannot or should not
engage in critiques of feminist values or practices. To the extent that such critique holds
the possibility of foregrounding cultural debates surrounding feminism, popular culture
texts have the potential to intervene in those debates in important and meaningful
ways. However, if, as in the case of the third season of Veronica Mars, the critique of
feminism offered by those texts is not based on actual feminist discourse, but rather on
patriarchal stereotypes of what feminists advocate, then popular culture ends up merely
reproducing backlash propaganda rather than transforming feminism or offering an
alternative to it. Moreover, when pop culture critiques of feminism are motivated by
economic factors rather than political convictions, as appears to be the case with Veronica
Mars, they reveal far more about the ways in which profit motives intersect with (and
possibly override) ideological considerations in the production of popular media texts
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than they do about the ambivalence surrounding feminism in US culture at this particular
moment.
Veronica Mars’s transformation from feminist-friendly text to backlash text in its final
season can certainly be read as reflective of the contested place of feminism in the backlash
era, in which issues of female empowerment can only find popular representation if they
deny their origins in or their debt to the US feminist movement. However, because the
series’s repudiation of feminism coincides with pressure placed upon the show’s creators
to increase its profitability, it can also be read as reflective of the TV industry’s belief that
such a repudiation is necessary to make television programming palatable for mass
market consumption. As such, it is equally illustrative of the ways in which the operation of
hegemony cannot be divorced from questions of capital within consumer culture. Indeed, if
the series taking up the business of the backlash was in fact a business decision, then it not
only suggests that market forces are a determinant of popular culture content, but it also
suggests that feminism may only have a place in US popular culture to the extent that it
is bankable.

NOTES
1. It should be noted here that the target demographic for a particular television program
does not always reflect viewership, and indeed, like Buffy, the audience for Veronica Mars
was not composed only of teenagers or girls. However, it was mainly teenage girls that the
products featured in the advertizing spots sold during the show were geared towards.
2. See, for example, Brownmiller (1984).

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Rosalind Sibielski is a doctoral candidate in the American Culture Studies Program at

Bowling Green State University, where she has also taught in the Women’s Studies
and Film Studies programs. Her research interests include media representations of
gender, popular discourses surrounding feminism, and girl culture. She is currently
working on a study of the discourse of girl power in US popular culture. E-mail:
[email protected]