Meta: The Straights Are Not Alright (Rules of Engagement s1)-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

CW: heteronormativity, compulsory heterosexuality, sexism, reproduction and infertility

Rules of Engagement is a guilty pleasure of mine because it’s so problematic and also just so very straight. Its humour skews a lot more conservative than most of the other shows in this study and it’s definitely not as thematically dense either. Usually this is the kind of show my parents would have on in the background at home, it wasn’t necessarily something we would drop everything to watch. Like most non-soaps of the 2000s and earlier, Rules is designed to be watched in such a way that you can miss a week and not be totally lost, and in fact you aren’t expected to have seen every episode, certainly not right before the next one. Episodic appointment television, especially a laugh-track sitcom, works better with conservative themes because the story is expected to regress to the mean at the end of the episode, meaning character and audience growth have little expectation of permanence. The audience needs to be able to understand the relationships and storyworld at a glance, which rewards stories that conform to stereotypes and well-worn tropes and that maintain a status quo as long as possible. That lack of persistence of memory affects the type of fandom that emerges around traditional sitcoms compared to soaps or sci-fi; cult fandom tends to be less drawn to these types of shows because there’s little payoff for such systematic devotion. Thus, applying a cult fandom approach to watching this is tedious in some ways and illuminating in others. The main takeaway doing so for Rules has given me is this: the straights are Not Okay^TM.

 

Rules follows three couples at different stages of their relationship: Audrey and Jeff, who’ve been married for 12 years; Adam and Jennifer, who have been dating for 7 months and are recently engaged; and Russell, who is a womanizing bachelor, later joined in season 3 by his assistant/future husband Timmy. Much of the humour relies on common truisms in straight culture: all spouses despise each other but not enough to do anything about it, men and women are fundamentally different and when they aren’t it’s funny, marriage is a trap that sucks the joy and freedom out of your life, all men are puerile pervs and women use sex as a weapon to keep men in line, etc. The show does poke holes in these tropes at times, but certainly the first season is saturated with a cisheteronormative worldview in a way that is actively harmful to the characters.

I’ll talk about Adam and Jennifer more next post, but now that they’ve started living together they run into issues as a couple that Jeff and Audrey advise them on. However, it frequently becomes clear that while their advice sounds familiar and makes a cynical sort of sense, it really is abnormal how poorly Jeff and Audrey relate to each other. In some ways they’re an excellent example of the problems with the ‘ball and chain’ trope, where straight marriage is a prison, all partners eventually resent each other but leaving is more inconvenient than staying, and unironically loving and valuing your partner is naïve at best. Everything in Audrey and Jeff’s relationship is framed as a transaction or a power move, where the only possible motivation for the other doing something kind or thoughtful is some sort of deceit, intrigue, or bribe. They consistently lie to each other simply to catch the other out in their own lie, often leading to situations that get out of control. For example, at one point Audrey buys a chair she hates but refuses to return:

Audrey: No, and let Jeff think he’s right? No, I gotta figure out a way to get rid of it without that conniving weasel thinking he won.
Jennifer: You guys have a different relationship than Adam and I.
Audrey: I know, it’s sweet you’re in love. But it all leads to the same place. (6x7)

When Audrey ‘agrees’ to return it out of respect for Jeff’s hatred of it, he immediately comes to the conclusion she hates the chair:

Adam: Wait a minute, you hate the chair, and she’s sending it back. You won.
Jeff: That was just a battle, I wanna win the war.
Adam: What war?
Jeff: Marriage
Adam: Marriage isn’t gonna be like this for me and Jen.
Jeff: Sure it will (6x7)

Jennifer and Adam both note how different their relationship is from Jeff and Audrey’s, for while it has its own measure of heteronormative antics, it’s much less Machiavellian than Jeff and Audrey’s constant games. What the contrast does is showcase how despite Jeff and Audrey’s assertions that all married couples eventually become as cynical and manipulative as them, their animosity is in fact not inevitable and says more about their own idiosyncrasies than marriage itself.

Jeff: And we’re “too critical of each other”
Audrey: Which “makes people uncomfortable” (6x11)

Jeff and Audrey are much more beholden to cishet gender roles than the other characters, and thus they tend to play out the inherent contradictions of heteropatriarchal stereotypes.

And yet, all of them are confronted with heteronormative models of the life course that they violate in some way. Despite being married for 12 years in the pilot, Audrey and Jeff ‘still’ have no children, which they perceive as a failure. Adam and Jennifer are engaged for about five years by the end of the series. Russell’s age is ambiguous but significantly older than he pretends to be, and he has yet to ‘settle down’, instead preferring hook-ups with women he never sees again until his whirlwind wedding with Liz at the end of season 5 (which ends as quickly as it began). Timmy is on track for an arranged marriage that falls through, partially because he wants to marry for love (of course, he ends up in a somewhat arranged marriage either way, but that’s another conversation).

Russell and Timmy embrace the queer life course (albeit reluctantly), and Jennifer and Adam settle into a relatively comfortable het relationship that eventually leads to marriage on their own time. But for Jeff and Audrey, their failure to conform is a source of worry, and the queerness of their journey unsettles them in such a way that whereas Adam was the focus character in the pilot, Jeff and Audrey quickly became the main characters of the series. We first see Audrey and Jeff confront their lack of kids late in s1 when Jennifer tries to explain to Adam not to ask why people don’t have kids in case it’s a medical issue:

Audrey: It’s nothing like that, really, when we were first married we didn’t wanna be tied down. […] Anyway, a couple years ago we tried for about six months and nothing happened, so…
Jeff: Yeah, it’s too much pressure. Put it aside, decided to get busy with careers. (1x5)

While they seem personally content with this, they feel external pressure to have kids.

Audrey: Are we terrible people for not having kids yet?                 
Jeff: No we’re not terrible people.
Audrey: I mean seriously, just about everybody we know has kids.
Jeff: Well, that’s why we stopped hanging out with them. It was all, “Suzy got a new tooth” or “little Jimmy made a poopoo”. Real interesting… (1x5)

The dictates of heteropatriarchy make having children not just an expectation but a moral imperative, such that by not having kids they’re not only behind but somehow selfish. Ironically, when it turns out there actually is a medical reason they haven’t conceived, they eventually recruit a surrogate, their lesbian friend Brenda—the only way they can be a ‘normal’ straight couple is with help from their queer friends.

The pilot opens with an epigraph: “When you’re single, you’re exactly as happy as you are. When you’re married, you can only be as happy as the least happy person in the relationship” (1x1). Instead of an injunction to foster love and respect in the relationship, Audrey and Jeff—and by extension many married straight couples—take this more as a statement of fact about how marriage makes everyone miserable yet miserable together. To be clear, I do think Jeff and Audrey love each other and would much rather be together than with anyone else. And in general, the conceit of the ball and chain ‘joke’ is meant to be that despite how much they complain on the surface, at its core the couple truly does love and respect each other. But at a certain point, it stops being a joke and starts describing an actual approach to straight relationships. To which queer people often ask: if the straights hate being married to each other so much, why do they keep doing it? Are they okay?