Cally, Dee, and Ellen: on the reviled feminine on BSG (Cally)
womenlovefest concludes! unless I think of something to say tomorrow, or whenever. like I need an excuse to rant about why fandom is wrong to hate women. But I'm grateful to have been provided one, all the same!
Day 1: what gender-neutral society?
Day 2: why these ladies?
Day 3: Ellen Tigh
Day 4: Dee
Day 5: Cally
I admit upfront that while I’ve always liked Cally, I don’t have quite as much of a handle on her as the other two ladies on this list. Any more advanced Cally scholars are exhorted to offer their takes on anything here. Also yes, there are a lot of issues with her story, but this post is about celebrating her, because: <3 <3 <3.
Cally is another character where people flatten her out into expectations of femininity, and then complain that she’s - what was that hateful word? - vacant. Except Cally was anything but vacant! She was brave, and dedicated to justice, and loved her family and hated the frakking cylons who were coming after her, who didn’t much love her job but was quite good at it and knew it had to be done, who was a New Caprica survivor and still vocally supported Baltar’s trial, who sometimes got frustrated at her husband because she was working just as hard as he was but wanted the best home possible for their son, too.
But she was Tyrol’s wife, and Tyrol says he didn’t really want her, so she was a hollow title. Vacant.
No, thank you.
I feel like the fandom narrative over Cally/Tyrol is “Cally pines over the Chief forever and finally guilts him into marrying her after he is totally a victim of how he beat the crap out of her.” [1] But that presumes such an emotional power discrepancy, where she’s clawing her way up on every level in that relationship. But, I don’t know, Galen’s hateful shit fit aside. Cally, way back in Water, is a total Chief/Boomer shipper! She’s all cheerful and indulgent when she covers for their date, and a huge part of why I love her is that she’s not the type to swallow back irritation and jealousy. She thinks they’re cute, the Chief is her friend, and she’s totally sweet about helping them out. Even if I were going to take the gross “consolation prize” perspective on their relationship, she’d still be awesome in her own right, but this read where they built something together gives her more power and agency.
Cally, possibly more than any other character, gets the most explicitly sexist slams. How many times does some dude or other explicitly tell her to shut up? Cottle dishes out one of the show’s most explicitly misogynist slams, with (and this part is burned into my brain) “you gotta love a woman who can complain even with her jaw wired shut.” Oh, how refreshingly politically incorrect of you, doctor. (Apparently that line is not supposed to make me hate him with a burning passion? This is supposed to be okay, even endearing? Alrighty.)
She ends up being one of the strongest, most genuine voices for old-school populism, and on American television, that’s a very rare thing, particularly among a character who’s not a villain. It’s one thing for Zarek, mass murderer, challenger to the president, and future shameless sellout, to go on about redistribution of resources; it’s another thing for a hardworking, unambitious, unwaveringly loyal young mother to agitate for labor rights. And yeah, fuck the Chief, because Cally is the one voicing social criticism throughout Dirty Hands.
I’m always blown away, too, by her quick moment with the Pegasus deck crew. After her horribly traumatic experience on the Astral Queen, she’s boxed in a room with a bunch of dudes who are openly admitting to being rapists. Oh my God, horrifying. Except Cally, though she’s (understandably) more than fine with flushing all the Sixes and Eights out an airlock, and though she’d have every right to run and hide, gets back in their asshole faces and tells them they’re wrong before marching out with dignity. Cally, I love you so.
Really, Cally is the flip side to Dee in a lot of ways. She has the same unromantic perspective on their situation, but where Dee clamps down and clings to the façade, Cally sets forth to find fulfillment. She’s more honest about it when she doesn’t have it, which is what gives her the chance Dee never gets to find some actual happiness. She pushed to have and raise her baby in the best possible environment, but still kept on plugging at hard physical work and huge social responsibility.
Cally is a hopeful person making the best she can out of her shit life. She’s kind of metaphorically as well as narratively acting as a mother, in her optimistic attitude about planning for Nicky’s future, because believes he does have one. (Naturally, this could go to some problematic places - childless, fatalist Dee; Ellen’s relationship to motherhood can go in any number of directions - but for Cally, it’s fantastic.) This is a powerful role in the series. We need to start making babies. Cally’s home life is just as much about saving humanity as her day job is. Cally Tyrol is a fucking superhero.
Except femininity is both expected and trivialized - in this case, her second shift as a mom understandably shortens her fuse at work - and the Cally-hate snowballs. Our perspective on Cally, throughout S3, is limited to the Chief’s perspective on her, and he boxes her into the “wife” role for sure, but we see enough of her that we don’t have to go along with it.
Dee we run away from like a hot potato because she’s embracing her femininity without the one type of meager success we grudgingly allow to it, normatively-defined fulfillment through the role of “wife.” Ellen we’re supposed to see as the train wreck of femininity and ambition, interesting from a safe distance but mindlessly dangerous. Cally is reviled because she was really doing great, until the rug is yanked out from under her with her discovery of Galen’s Cylonness, not because she did anything wrong.
And we’re supposed to associate her with settling. Because she has femininity, she pretty much does it right while still being a valuable expert in her professional field, she seems to enjoy it well enough most of the time, and….that’s against the rules! Being a girl is miserable, and if she doesn’t even understand that, well, she must be dumb and deluded, or something. SPARE ME.
Cally’s motherhood experience is probably the most realistic, and therefore, the target of the most discomfort. Her post-partum depression as depicted in TTTB is heartwrenching, and, from what I understand, painfully true to life. And women and madness is always a difficult subject, but leaving aside the question of whether the narrative played into problematic tropes with her illness, real women do suffer from post-partum mental health problems. They’re not “hysterical women” stereotypes, they don’t deserve to be obliterated out of popular culture because we don’t want to hear about Lady Problems. Cally’s experience let their voices be heard. And maybe that’s what fandom doesn’t like, that she’s not only portraying femininity, but telling women in our world that they don’t have to suffer for theirs.
Superhero.
AND SHE JUST JOINED TO PAY FOR DENTAL SCHOOL, HOW DO PEOPLE NOT LOVE HER SO MUCH ALWAYS. IDGI. HATERS GONNA MOTHERFUCKIN HATE. CALLY RULES.
[1] As dead to me as he generally is after 4.5 (how dead to me? TOTALLY DEAD TO ME), I’m actually ambivalent about that, given his compromised agency due to (a) being unconscious and (b) possibly vulnerable to having his strings yanked by Cavil. Still, DEAD TO ME.
Day 1: what gender-neutral society?
Day 2: why these ladies?
Day 3: Ellen Tigh
Day 4: Dee
Day 5: Cally
I admit upfront that while I’ve always liked Cally, I don’t have quite as much of a handle on her as the other two ladies on this list. Any more advanced Cally scholars are exhorted to offer their takes on anything here. Also yes, there are a lot of issues with her story, but this post is about celebrating her, because: <3 <3 <3.
Cally is another character where people flatten her out into expectations of femininity, and then complain that she’s - what was that hateful word? - vacant. Except Cally was anything but vacant! She was brave, and dedicated to justice, and loved her family and hated the frakking cylons who were coming after her, who didn’t much love her job but was quite good at it and knew it had to be done, who was a New Caprica survivor and still vocally supported Baltar’s trial, who sometimes got frustrated at her husband because she was working just as hard as he was but wanted the best home possible for their son, too.
But she was Tyrol’s wife, and Tyrol says he didn’t really want her, so she was a hollow title. Vacant.
No, thank you.
I feel like the fandom narrative over Cally/Tyrol is “Cally pines over the Chief forever and finally guilts him into marrying her after he is totally a victim of how he beat the crap out of her.” [1] But that presumes such an emotional power discrepancy, where she’s clawing her way up on every level in that relationship. But, I don’t know, Galen’s hateful shit fit aside. Cally, way back in Water, is a total Chief/Boomer shipper! She’s all cheerful and indulgent when she covers for their date, and a huge part of why I love her is that she’s not the type to swallow back irritation and jealousy. She thinks they’re cute, the Chief is her friend, and she’s totally sweet about helping them out. Even if I were going to take the gross “consolation prize” perspective on their relationship, she’d still be awesome in her own right, but this read where they built something together gives her more power and agency.
Cally, possibly more than any other character, gets the most explicitly sexist slams. How many times does some dude or other explicitly tell her to shut up? Cottle dishes out one of the show’s most explicitly misogynist slams, with (and this part is burned into my brain) “you gotta love a woman who can complain even with her jaw wired shut.” Oh, how refreshingly politically incorrect of you, doctor. (Apparently that line is not supposed to make me hate him with a burning passion? This is supposed to be okay, even endearing? Alrighty.)
She ends up being one of the strongest, most genuine voices for old-school populism, and on American television, that’s a very rare thing, particularly among a character who’s not a villain. It’s one thing for Zarek, mass murderer, challenger to the president, and future shameless sellout, to go on about redistribution of resources; it’s another thing for a hardworking, unambitious, unwaveringly loyal young mother to agitate for labor rights. And yeah, fuck the Chief, because Cally is the one voicing social criticism throughout Dirty Hands.
I’m always blown away, too, by her quick moment with the Pegasus deck crew. After her horribly traumatic experience on the Astral Queen, she’s boxed in a room with a bunch of dudes who are openly admitting to being rapists. Oh my God, horrifying. Except Cally, though she’s (understandably) more than fine with flushing all the Sixes and Eights out an airlock, and though she’d have every right to run and hide, gets back in their asshole faces and tells them they’re wrong before marching out with dignity. Cally, I love you so.
Really, Cally is the flip side to Dee in a lot of ways. She has the same unromantic perspective on their situation, but where Dee clamps down and clings to the façade, Cally sets forth to find fulfillment. She’s more honest about it when she doesn’t have it, which is what gives her the chance Dee never gets to find some actual happiness. She pushed to have and raise her baby in the best possible environment, but still kept on plugging at hard physical work and huge social responsibility.
Cally is a hopeful person making the best she can out of her shit life. She’s kind of metaphorically as well as narratively acting as a mother, in her optimistic attitude about planning for Nicky’s future, because believes he does have one. (Naturally, this could go to some problematic places - childless, fatalist Dee; Ellen’s relationship to motherhood can go in any number of directions - but for Cally, it’s fantastic.) This is a powerful role in the series. We need to start making babies. Cally’s home life is just as much about saving humanity as her day job is. Cally Tyrol is a fucking superhero.
Except femininity is both expected and trivialized - in this case, her second shift as a mom understandably shortens her fuse at work - and the Cally-hate snowballs. Our perspective on Cally, throughout S3, is limited to the Chief’s perspective on her, and he boxes her into the “wife” role for sure, but we see enough of her that we don’t have to go along with it.
Dee we run away from like a hot potato because she’s embracing her femininity without the one type of meager success we grudgingly allow to it, normatively-defined fulfillment through the role of “wife.” Ellen we’re supposed to see as the train wreck of femininity and ambition, interesting from a safe distance but mindlessly dangerous. Cally is reviled because she was really doing great, until the rug is yanked out from under her with her discovery of Galen’s Cylonness, not because she did anything wrong.
And we’re supposed to associate her with settling. Because she has femininity, she pretty much does it right while still being a valuable expert in her professional field, she seems to enjoy it well enough most of the time, and….that’s against the rules! Being a girl is miserable, and if she doesn’t even understand that, well, she must be dumb and deluded, or something. SPARE ME.
Cally’s motherhood experience is probably the most realistic, and therefore, the target of the most discomfort. Her post-partum depression as depicted in TTTB is heartwrenching, and, from what I understand, painfully true to life. And women and madness is always a difficult subject, but leaving aside the question of whether the narrative played into problematic tropes with her illness, real women do suffer from post-partum mental health problems. They’re not “hysterical women” stereotypes, they don’t deserve to be obliterated out of popular culture because we don’t want to hear about Lady Problems. Cally’s experience let their voices be heard. And maybe that’s what fandom doesn’t like, that she’s not only portraying femininity, but telling women in our world that they don’t have to suffer for theirs.
Superhero.
AND SHE JUST JOINED TO PAY FOR DENTAL SCHOOL, HOW DO PEOPLE NOT LOVE HER SO MUCH ALWAYS. IDGI. HATERS GONNA MOTHERFUCKIN HATE. CALLY RULES.
[1] As dead to me as he generally is after 4.5 (how dead to me? TOTALLY DEAD TO ME), I’m actually ambivalent about that, given his compromised agency due to (a) being unconscious and (b) possibly vulnerable to having his strings yanked by Cavil. Still, DEAD TO ME.