Why I Dream of Jeannie Is the Last Happy Submissive on Television
Why I Dream of Jeannie Is the Last Happy Submissive on Television
In 1965, a woman said yes master on prime time television, with a smile on her face, and nobody picketed the studio. She was a genie, she was joyful, and families watched her every week at dinnertime. I have the t-shirt. The actress who played her is 94 now and still keeps the original bottle in her library.
I did not grow up with the show the way a lot of you did. I found it later, dubbed in French on a cable channel that re-ran my parents' shows. But the moment I watched it, I understood something. Jeannie is the cleanest picture of happy submission I have ever seen, and we have lost it.
The bottle, the island, the freedom
The first episode is the whole philosophy in miniature. Tony, an astronaut, crashes on a deserted island. He finds a bottle, rubs it, and out comes Jeannie, trapped for 2,000 years. He uses his wish just to get rescued. Nothing else. Not all the money in the world, not all the women in the world. Just off the island.
And then he does the thing that changes everything.
"Thou hast set me free, master. Now I belong to thee." — Jeannie, I Dream of Jeannie (1965)
He frees her. He tells her they are even, she owes him nothing, she can go. And it is precisely because he freed her, and asked for nothing, that she chooses to slip her bottle into his bag and stay. The devotion comes after the freedom, not before it.
She was free, and she stayed
That is the part people miss. Jeannie is all-powerful. She can make anything appear, go anywhere, be with anyone. She is beautiful with or without the magic. She has every option in the universe.
"She could have gone with any other guy. But that's not what she wants." — Marian
She picks Tony, consciously, because she figured out from 2,000 years of experience that he is a better man than the genie who trapped her in the first place. And their life together is the opposite of the other couples on the show. The other NASA wives and husbands look bored and a little cold. Tony and Jeannie are always laughing, always touching, always building some crazy thing as a team. Their living room turns into a campsite. It rains indoors. It is never boring.
"Yes master was a symbol of devotion and gratitude. It was not a symbol of being oppressed." — Marian
Then Fifty Shades happened
So what changed between a country that loved Jeannie and a country that flinches at the word submissive?
Pop culture happened. Fifty Shades of Grey made dominance about a red room, about something dark and taboo and private. Django, 12 Years a Slave, a whole wave of art, correctly, attached real horror to the words master and slave. And in the middle of all that, the sweet, sunny version, the Jeannie version, just quietly faded out.
My generation grew up with no happy submissive to point to. Even in Fifty Shades, Anastasia is not happy. She spends the whole story trying to turn Christian into someone who is not dominant at all. There was no example left of a woman who says yes master and means it as love.
Innocent is not dumb
The pushback I hear is that Jeannie is naive, that she only gets a pass because she is a fantasy who does not have to do the dishes. And sure, that is part of the joke. But naive and dumb are not the same thing.
"She's not unconscious. She's not this dumb woman. It's conscious submission." — Marian
Jeannie has 2,000 years of life behind her. She is soft, playful, nurturing, and completely in command of her own power. She restrains herself. She could make everyone who annoys her vanish, and she does not. That is not weakness. That is a powerful woman choosing where to point her devotion. It is the geisha thing, women who shaped enormous decisions through the men they advised, fully feminine and fully formidable at the same time.
I am Jeannie
I say this plainly on the show: I am Jeannie. Maybe not as blonde.
"Master discovered me. He freed me gradually from all the cages I built for myself." — Marian
That is my actual story. Master found me, and then, slowly, he took down the walls I had built in my own mind, the anxieties, the cages. And the freer I got, the more devotion I chose to give. It built exactly the way it built for Jeannie. I am not furniture. I do not live in chains and I do not get whipped all day. I am a woman who embraced everything she has, her femininity and her intellect, and pointed it at one worthy man on purpose.
That is the whole happy submissive movement. To make yes master mean what it meant when Jeannie said it. Go watch one episode and tell me I am wrong.
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