Why Was 90s TV Full of Violence Against Women?

One of the most popular, sought-after women on television in the 90s was a new mainstream television character: the Woman in Jeopardy. The “Woman in Jep”—or just “Jep” to her network honcho friends—was victimized or put into life-threatening situations in countless made-for-TV movies. She was a perennial hit and commanded huge ratings. Often, Women in Jep were versions of the “damaged girl,” which made it acceptable, somehow, for them to be savaged by their abuser or torturer.

Network executives told the press that Jep films empowered women characters, enabling them to assume qualities they weren’t normally given by television writers and producers. Women in Jep could “cajole, demand, infiltrate, investigate and settle scores,” all in the name of offing a threatening man-monster, said one magazine. These women didn’t need a hero to free them; they could save themselves, and did so in an arsenal of skimpy outfits. Of course, in reality, Jep was a gimmick to sate audiences who wanted to see women suffer and dole out abuse on TV.

Oftentimes, a Woman in Jep needed to overcome a bum rap, like causing her best friend’s demise in The Woman Who Sinned on ABC, or sexually abusing her own baby on CBS’s In a Child’s Name. A female pediatrician “faces the loss of her practice, her family and her freedom” when she’s accused of murdering an infant patient in Deadly Medicine on NBC. The wrongly accused baby abuser on CBS, a professional dental hygienist, is beaten to death by her dentist husband. After a while, Jep films began to resemble a choose your own adventure: Fallen Mother/Angry Babysitter/Delicate Sorority Sister Encounters Homicidal Husband/Psychopath Brother/Sadistic Lawn-Care Professional wielding Knife/Drill/Scary Whisper Voice.

Viewers watched some 250 made-for-TV movies in the 1992 season. A woman was physically or psychologically abused in at least half of them, according to a Newsweek report about the rise of Jep, cheekily titled “Whip Me, Beat Me . . . And Give Me Great Ratings.” There were murderously jealous ex-husbands, alcoholic fathers, and fiendish sons to fend off— years’ worth of them. These Sunday night films were some of the networks best-performing content of the decade. Industry insiders called them a remedy, plugged in when programmers failed to create hit series. And many were supposedly based on real-life scenarios and true crimes. Like the stories of Nicole Brown Simpson, Princess Diana, or Anna Nicole Smith, fictional Women in Jep became scintillating content, the kind 90s audiences hungered for. Entertainment Weekly summed up the fervor this way: “Somewhere in America a wanton act of criminal violence is being committed. And somewhere in Hollywood, an agent is trying to lock up the movie rights, a producer is pitching the story to a network, and an actress is praying that the tale involves a lethal weapon, a desperate woman, an Emmy-nominatable breakdown on the witness stand.”

Hollywood clamored for Women in Jep scripts because they “played well in the flyover,” meaning the states between the East and the West Coasts. “It’s a case of serial sexual harassment: a dozen TV movies about women in jeopardy in the month of November alone,” explained Newsweek. When executives heard pitches, “the first thing many say is ‘Where’s the jep?’ (The second is ‘More jep!’),” the article continued. If a script was boring, executives might demand that women be chased by a knife-wielding hospital orderly or demonic construction worker to liven things up.

The rise of this genre solidified the idea that women enjoyed watching other women suffer, since they were the films’ most frequent consumers. Jep became so prevalent that critics questioned and even mocked the trend. “Women are being beaten, terrorized, abducted and killed at an alarming rate,” wrote the Detroit Free Press. “It does seem like there’s a shocking amount of this,” Robert Thompson, a television and popular culture professor at Syracuse University, told the Columbus Dispatch. “The old traditions have kicked in again where, in fact, often women are the victim.”

Not all women wanted Jep. Actress and Oscar nominee Diane Ladd, who appeared in many TV movies, bemoaned the crappy scripts she was getting. “When I have these meetings with network executives, and most of them are men, it’s all women in jeopardy movies . . . it’s women being abused by Coke bottles,” she said in a television appearance at the time. Ladd speculated that women watched the films less because they enjoyed them than because they feared such horrors. Newsweek noted how some 95 percent of television movie writers at the time were male.

At the time, women were rarely both violent and empowered onscreen. The 1991 film Thelma & Louise was a notable exception and a huge hit. The difference is that it was made by and for women. It featured two strong female leads (Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon) and a female writer (former music video production assistant named Callie Khouri) who won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Unsurprisingly, many studios passed on the film. One male executive’s response to the script was, “I don’t get it. It’s two bitches in a car.”

Another effect of Jep flicks was that they normalized crimes against women. A panel of psychologists who found that television egregiously misrepresented women also discovered that sexual violence on television, like in Jep, “leads to increased acceptance of rape” and “can instigate antisocial values and behavior,” according to a 1992 study.

Meanwhile, television executives were quick to blame audiences for the onset of Jep. “We look to the audience to tell us when they’ve had enough,” the CBS entertainment president said at the time.

THE LONG ISLAND LOLITA

Audiences who devoured Women in Jeopardy fictions were primed to consume such stories when they occurred in real life. Amy Fisher was 16 years old when she became romantically involved with a married auto mechanic, Joey Buttafuoco. In May 1992, Fisher rang his doorbell, pulled out a .25 caliber Titan semi-automatic pistol, and shot his wife in the head. The bullet nearly killed Mary Jo Buttafuoco, shattering the base of her skull, nicking an artery in her neck, and tearing her eardrum. Fisher was described as a “teen girl psychopath.” The incident was “Fatal Attraction . . . teenage style.”

Fisher’s crime became a national headline with the discovery of a sex tape. Buttafuoco had persuaded Fisher to work for an escort service for extra cash, and there was video proof. Eight days after Fisher was arrested, her 28-year-old client Peter De Rosa sold the tape to the tabloid television program A Current Affair for $8,000. This launched Fisher to national prominence and tabloid infamy. The 14-minute video reportedly showed Fisher servicing a client. That she was underage didn’t deter broadcasters. The press simply condemned her for sluttishness. “Anything,” she tells her john. “I’m wild. I don’t care. I like sex.”

The story had the perfect ingredients for a tabloid feast in any decade: an underage girl, sex, prostitution, women competing for a man, and attempted murder. It wasn’t so much the violent shooting that propelled media obsession, though they did dwell on the catfight; it was Fisher’s filmed prostitution. The media cast her as a selfish, unrepentant tramp. Journalists called her a “pubescent prostitute” and “lingerie temptress” who “wore cutoff jeans that fit her like white on rice.”

Newsday took on the persona of a sex partner with the headline “Oh Amy, Oh Amy, Oh Amy.” When New York Post writer Steve Dunleavy interviewed Fisher’s father, he admitted that Fisher had been “vilified in print as a venal, spoiled little bitch” by many journalists, including himself. The headline of the piece was “Lolita’s Dad Begs Forgiveness for His Girl.” The assistant district attorney prosecuting Fisher called her “shrewd, manipulative, and brazen” because she asked clients to contact her directly rather than go through the escort service she worked for. Her sexuality was Machiavellian.

New York tabloids nicknamed Fisher “the Long Island Lolita,” alluding to the pedophile victim in the novel by Vladimir Nabokov. What was rarely mentioned was that her relationship with Buttafuoco was, by definition, statutory rape. Instead, the press romanticized their connection and gave it a poetic cast—an “Oedipal tinge,” since Fisher was just a girl, and Buttafuoco was “old enough to be her father,” Time magazine wrote. The literary quality of the encounter was emphasized, not the illegality and immorality of it, nor that Fisher was a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a much older man.

Buttafuoco was sentenced to a mere six months of jail time. Fisher bore the blame instead, with the popular press depicting her as a villainess and erotomaniac—the wanton and wild slut. “To call her a 17-year-old girl who’s living at home is as accurate as calling John Gotti a businessman who lives in New York,” the prosecutor said. Fisher pleaded to reduced charges that would put her in prison for nearly seven years. She was diagnosed with severe depression and attempted suicide twice. In her memoir Amy Fisher: My Story, Fisher writes that she was raped at 13 by a worker in her house, and later had an abortion. “So here I was, on the brink of sweet 16: a class-cutting, report-card forging, ashamed secret rape victim who’d been sexually abused as a little kid,” she wrote.

Fisher had few defenders. One columnist at the New York Post, Amy Pagnozzi, took up for Fisher and criticized the media for focusing more on her sexuality than her violent crime. “Amy Fisher will be made to pay as much for her sexuality as for any crime she may have committed, while the men will get off like they always do,” she wrote. Fisher was clearly the victim, according to Lesléa Newman, author of the 2009 novel Jailbait, which was inspired by the Fisher story. “He’s going to say whatever he needs to to get into her pants. She has no self-esteem. So he’s going to say, ‘I love you. I’ll leave my wife for you.’ Obviously, she shouldn’t have shot Mary Jo. But she’s abused and abused and then she was desperate to hold on to what she was promised,” Newman told me. The bulk of the media coverage, however, portrayed the teenage victim as a calculating villainess.

Fisher’s story was a natural fit for Jep, and she sold it to a production company for $80,000. The Big Three television networks ran made-for-TV movies, which the New York Times called the “Amy Fisher Film Festival.” The press coverage turned Fisher into a Melrose Place–worthy villainess who used sex for power, and now Hollywood was glamorizing her for it. The films were among the most-watched TV movies of the year. Since Fisher was portrayed by attractive young actresses like Drew Barrymore, the message was, “If you become a teenage prostitute and go out and shoot somebody, maybe you too can become a media celebrity,” according to the New York Times.

Joey Buttafuoco’s lawyer told reporters that Fisher could go from being “a $180-a-night prostitute to a $2 million-a-night prostitute” because of her fame. The sketch comedy In Living Color spoofed Fisher with a skit in which she offered a seminar called Amy Fisher Bang for Your Bucks. In it, Fisher is too dumb to count the number of reasons to sign up for her own work shop, let alone how much cash she earned. When the Buttafuocos sold their story, they reportedly made roughly triple the amount Fisher did.

Fisher was freed from jail in 1999, but her sexuality was so threatening, all those years later, that it still warranted jokes to defuse it. The New York Times called her a “chastened hussy,” still emphasizing sex. Saturday Night Live imagined that the most satisfying part of Fisher busting out of jail would be to reunite with her cutoffs and see-through halter top. SNL’s version of Fisher, played by Cheri Oteri, was poised to open up a shop selling “classy tear-away underwear” upon her prison release.

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Excerpted from 90s BITCH: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality. Used with permission of Harper Perennial. Copyright © 2018 by Allison Yarrow.