Cougar Town: The Happiest Heterosexual Place On Earth

I only finished all of Cougar Town because of my unfortunate completionist impulses, but it left me with some interesting thoughts about men. Great. Because it's not like they get any attention in our current culture...

I'm tired of hearing about the "male loneliness epidemic" as if so much of what that entails isn't just a bunch of overgrown babymen refusing to put in even an ounce of self-improvement, listening to red-pill garbage, and blaming the women who rightfully find them to be undateable. "Men suffer in silence!" they cry, from their thousands of podcasts that are excruciatingly, gratingly anything but silent.

Yes, that is my lead-in to talk about the show Cougar Town. I got suckered into watching this show because I remembered a scene that I caught randomly in the breakroom at work: Jules' (Courteney Cox) two best friends, Ellie (Christa Miller) and Laurie (Busy Philipps) are talking and Laurie starts to share a story from her youth about a fire in her family's trailer - she's the trashy friend with a pure heart trope, contrasted against the biting but secretly sentimental Ellie. The two don't like each other and struggle to get along, and as Laurie starts her story Ellie interrupts and says something like, "I know you're here telling me this story, but I have to say I'm really rooting for the trailer fire!" That moment of dark humor really tickled me. I was trying to find that scene for a video project that I was working on later, but I had it confused with a different episode where a hurricane rolls through their Florida beach town and eventually I had scanned through enough episodes with no luck that I just decided to watch from the beginning.

Now, this show isn't awful. There is a pretty stacked cast of people that I enjoy from other things. If you like Courteney Cox in Friends, I would say that she has a similar range in this show (even if the nature of her quirks are different than Monica Gellar's); nothing Oscar-worthy, but watchable. Miller's Ellie and her loveable doofus of a husband Andy (Ian Gomez) are the heart of the show for me, and provide the best humor. Dan Byrd (I will always associate him with Easy A) is fun as Jules' son Travis, Philipps does what she can with a somewhat limited character type, Brian Van Holt is surprisingly charming as Jules' ex-husband Bobby Cobb, and although he only shows up in about a third of the episodes, character actor Bob Clendenin brings a creepy charm to oddball neighbor Tom. Jules' primary love interest Grayson (Josh Hopkins) is hot but forgettable for the most part. He looks familiar in the way that generic brown-haired men with good bodies can look familiar; I checked his IMDB and the only things he's been in that I would have seen were Ally McBeal and Brothers & Sisters, two shows that were hot at the time but I've all but forgotten. There are some other familiar faces that pop up, but overall the show is predictably mid with occasional heartfelt moments that actually hit and the occasional LOL-worthy moments like the aforementioned trailer fire exchange.

The show never hit a level of entertainment that I would call it truly great (and some episodes, even "good" was a stretch), but it also wasn't bad enough for me to be able to break from my completionist drives and stop watching. So, as I subjected myself to all six seasons - 102 episodes, nothing like the 8-episode bullshit we get told is a full season these days! - I started to pay attention to these characters and how they were presented. And although the show is centered on Jules and her full social group of girlfriends, lovers, and the extended network of her son, the dynamic that I found most interesting was among the three male leads: Grayson, Andy, and Bobby Cobb (and to a lesser extent, Travis, but more on him later).

Grayson is the typical divorced man hitting midlife, bedding women half his age who just needs to be "fixed" by the love of the right woman - enter Jules. Bobby Cobb, Jules' ex, is flighty and irresponsible, but brings a measure of earthy heart to the group. And Andy is the typical goofball husband with slapstick tendencies who is often paired with the high-strung and demanding wife character that Ellie represents. All three have some of the typical "dudebro" kind of qualities, but for the most part none of them rise to the level of true toxic masculinity.

As the show progresses, these three characters develop friendships that have a real nuance to them. They are able to be vulnerable and intimate with each other in ways that we don't see a lot on television, especially in this sort of traditional sitcom format. They support each other and talk about their feelings. There is plenty of physical touch. They clearly love and appreciate each other in ways that are so healthy and help deconstruct the destructive myths of toxic masculinity.

Sounds good, right?

In a way, yes, but it happens in the context of a world that is absolutely without a single hint of queerness. There is not a single recurring character who is queer, and I can't recall even a queer-coded side character or one-time appearance character. If there was, it had to have been a lesbian because I was looking with my biggest magnifying glass to find any hint of male queerness, and there was absolutely nothing.

The only thing that comes remotely close? There is an episode where Travis comes out as gay to manipulate Grayson. That manipulation is exposed very quickly, but just in case his heterosexuality wasn't established clearly enough through dialogue, he ends up eventually banging Laurie, one of his mother's best friends. Oedipus who, bitch?!

There is an episode where Laurie turns Grayson's bar into a gay bar as a joke (because creating a safe space for queer people OHMYGAWD SO FUNNY!) and there are some jokes here and there among the guys that everyone is "a little bit gay" - except that it all happens where there is no evidence of a single person who is a LOT gay.

I love that Grayson, Andy, and Bobby Cobb get to explore the nuances of their relationships, and that they get to express their emotions, but in order for the show to allow it, it has to obliterate even the possibility of queerness.

This fear about vulnerability equating to queerness isn't new. There is a whole segment of the discussion around the monstrous feminine in film studies that explores how in horror, women are often made into literal monsters in order to make it ok for men to explore their feelings without the threat of being perceived as gay. Think of Reagan in The Exorcist: in Blatty's novel, the child is a boy, but was feminized for the film to provide that monstrous female antagonist so that Father Damian could express that he *gasp* loved his mother without being painted as a simpering fag.

I want men to be able to express their emotions. I want them to be able to bond, to touch each other, to embrace, to cry, and to have the full human experience, but if the only way they can feel safe doing that is in a world devoid of any evidence of queerness, then that's never going to be possible in the real world. Queerness exists; it always has, and it always will.

And further, if you don't already have that desire somewhere in your psyche, then hugging your bro isn't going to turn you into some sort of slobbering cockhound. Fellas, if you want to get it on with a dude, then please do so - people living authentically and openly are so much happier! And if you don't want that, if it has never entered your mind, then crying when you feel like crying, being vulnerable with the other men in your life, or just washing your dirty nasty ass crack - none of that is going to suddenly make you gay.

I appreciate that Cougar Town tried to create different expressions of masculinity. I just wish that it didn't feel the need to erase every speck of queerness from its canvas to do so. How much richer could it have been if there was a queer male presence there, sharing in the bonding and vulnerability, showing that emotional intimacy and sexual desire aren't the same thing, and that you don't have to erase the existence of one to have the other? That would have been truly transformational!

Instead, queer viewers got to once again see themselves erased, not in the service of religious bigots or conservative "family values," but in a well-intentioned attempt to allow men to feel something without the specter of same sex desire. I'm not willing to be erased for that, and I don't think I should have to be.

Gawd, and they wonder why we don't care when cis straight white men are lonely? Put down the podcast mic, hug each other, and leave me the fuck out of it.