Portrait of the Artist As a Young Pig: The Muppets, Childhood Trauma, and More Fun Things to Do On a Sunday

Time is a lie.

Summertime doubly so.

There is no such thing as people, or movement, or reality. Nothing matters anymore, but not in a cool way. Life is Wednesday divided by ennui minus December to the power of vodka over wise old owls in academic robes. I don’t know anymore. Taylor Swift put out a really arty, good album full of authentic generational feeling and I might die if I go to the grocery store. The fuck am I supposed to do with that. I guess a thing I feel about a lot right now is that David Foster Wallace peaced out way too soon. None of the 90s Gen X ironic apathetic detachment writers had any idea how powerful unironic apathetic detachment could be.

HI EVERYONE. HAVING A GOOD ONE? YEAH. YOU TOO?

I’ll be honest: everything has sucked so much this month that I find it impossible to concentrate for very long on anything. There’s just way too much illness in my family and unknown variables and internal stressors and deadlines that require at-the-moment-hilarious levels of emotional whimsy and intellectual focus and mostly I find myself staring into the middle distance or doomscrolling, which has to be THE WORD of 2020. It’s not that I haven’t been prepared my whole life for Bad Things Happening, it’s just that I never imagined they would happen…and keep happening…and people would just get used to it…while they kept happening at exactly the same pitch of intensity…and just shrug and start talking about the sounds otters make instead because there is a kind of hopelessness where hope isn’t even comprehensible anymore but otters are, and everyone’s misery circuits are so exhausted, and our remaining synapses are so burnt out from pain and cynicism and injustice and helplessness that the only thing left for them to do is go ha ha they sound like tauntauns.

And that’s where I’m at. So I’m gonna talk about otters.

Not really. I’m actually going to talk about pigs. But it’s the same vibe.

A new iteration of The Muppet Show dropped today. It doesn’t really matter what it is (Muppets Now) because you know what it is: another weird, vaguely offputting attempt to modernize something that doesn’t need modernization, to appeal to a lucrative youth demographic that has no particular affection for the Muppets and thus still won’t care even if they’re in a Tiktok frame, instead of just fucking doing The Muppet Show the way it always was, which isn’t really dated as a format any more than SNL is, and which everyone who wants to watch The Muppets in 2020 actually would like. But good luck with that, guys. Maybe Kermit unrepentantly cheating on his partner and lying to his family will suddenly be endearing content children will relate to this time. (Yes, that happened in the 2015 ABC The Muppets show, and no, I’m still not over how bizarre and stupid an idea that was.)

I watched a bit of this ostensibly-improvised (is it?) show and naturally at some point Miss Piggy came on and I got the same tense-stomach feeling I always get whenever I see Miss Piggy. And the story of this essay is the story of why, and also the story of what you’re doing when you write for children, even if you are also writing for adults at the same time and it’s all colorful fuzzy fun with jokes. 

So many jokes.

I loved the Muppets as a child. I was born in 1979, that’s basically like saying I loved oxygen as a child. So random, I just thought breathing was the best. Fucking every kid loved the Muppets, whether they were in their Sesame Street form or their cooler, later-night The Muppets Show pokemon evolution. But I particularly loved The Muppets Show because it was set in a theater and in my early childhood my parents were involved with arts and theater, and the dynamic between Sesame Street and TMS felt very particularly real and almost titillating to me. A lot, though not all, of the same Muppets were on both shows, especially back in the pre-Elmo days, and particularly Kermit crossed over quite a bit. So watching them every day being super child-focused, teaching letters and numbers outside on a city block, with little kids dancing around during the day was fun and all. But seeing them inside once a week, running a shabby old theater, talking to grown-up celebrities, arguing about art and money and relationships, and making jokes that went way over my head in way that actually went right to the center of my head and lived there until I grew up enough to understand them, had that same electric not-usually-allowed-to-see-this feeling of running into your teacher at a jazzy restaurant at night, or going to the office with one of your parents for a day. The Muppet Show felt like real life. The Muppets felt like real people who had a second job. They felt like real people because they had a second job.

And so, there was Miss Piggy.

Now, I didn’t attach right away to Miss Piggy, because she was blonde. Oh, young children, let me tell you of a mystical time called “the 80s” when “diversity” merely meant “brunette.” You laugh, but as a dark-haired white kid, I severely overly attached to any female character on television who had brown or black hair. Especially if that hair wasn’t a direct code for “evil” (looking at you, She-Ra). It wasn’t nearly as common as you think. Good, positive female characters were largely blonde (occasionally redheaded), largely super-peppy and positive, largely possessed of soft, high voices, and largely submissive to the nearest dude. (Yeah, yeah, Scooby Doo, but though I cannot tell you why, I never liked Scooby Doo even when it was crazy popular and never cared about anyone in it. Go figure.) 

So Miss Piggy was probably going to be that, I thought. 

And then she wasn’t.

And I started to really identify with her, because had a big personality and she was loud and proud and ambitious and dramatic, she wanted a career more than anything, she wore beautiful clothes and nothing anybody ever said made her stop thinking she was the best, and if people started acting the fool around her, she karate-chopped them and went right on her way. Which, yes, is kind of disturbing now because we emphasize not hitting anyone in modern edutainment, but in the 80s, that was how boys acted on TV all the time and everyone liked them for it, only now Miss Piggy was doing it, and she was a girl.

Basically all the reasons Miss Piggy became an icon of gay kids and drag queens everywhere, because she looks like a girl and acts like a boy and still gets to be on TV.

But most importantly to me, she had a big, deep, low voice. I was a child and had no way of knowing she was voiced by Known Man Frank Oz, but I did immediately grok that the high-pitched sweet tone was put on, and the low, growly one she slipped into when she got upset was the real deal. And maybe this means nothing to you and never would have meant anything. But if you’ve heard me speak? I’ve had this voice since the fifth grade. Even in third grade I was a low alto in choir. And I know I had it in fifth grade because one of my absolutely seared into the brainflesh memories of specifically-feminine humilation is when my fifth grade teacher, a man I adored and admired and thought was probably actually magical, took me into the hall one day and explained to me that I needed to work on my voice. He told me, very kindly, because he absolutely meant it to be kind, to work on raising and softening it, because “unless I grew up to be a news broadcaster” (what?) my voice was inappropriately low and loud for a lady and it wouldn’t get me anywhere. I remember feeling hot and full of confrontation-adrenaline and confused and saying that the boys talked just as loud and their voices were just as low as mine. My teacher told me that was fine for them, but did I really want to sound like a boy? 

I was ten. I was still playing with Barbies and drawing unicorns in my notebook. I felt such a deep shame that I couldn’t even begin to unpack. I had zero tools to understand that I was being scolded for inappropriate gender presentation because that wasn’t even a phrase back then. My fifth grade teacher let me have a moment alone to pull myself together before going back into class and I stood there in the hall and cried because I didn’t know how to change my voice, my voice which was just part of me and, before that instant, hadn’t known was wrong and bad and broken. 

And I whispered to myself in frustration and humilation: but Miss Piggy sounds like me.

But the problem is, Miss Piggy is all those amazing things. She is. 

And everyone around her treats her like shit.

I didn’t really notice it until around that time, around fifth grade. You take things in pretty uncritically when you’re little. Full House was super popular then, too, and kids at school had started to call me Kimmie Gibbler, who, for those of you who don’t know, was the geeky, loud next-door neighbor girl that no one in the Tanner household liked and the adults just regularly verbally abused for fun. In fact, they called Kimmie, a thirteen year old child, I should point out, all the things Miss Piggy’s colleagues called her: annoying, obnoxious, ugly, stupid, fat, arrogant, talentless, boring, unlovable, unwanted, and both of them got that very special language that implies them to be slutty without actually saying it because this is supposed to be for kids.

All the things people called me. 

And would, throughout my adult life, too, because the world is trash! My first husband told his family, who had a big frown over the fact that I was a pierced feminist with ambitions and a loud voice and no desire for children and OPINIONS perish the thought, that I was just like Hermione. Super annoying at first but you get used to her. And then I got Hermione presents for Christmas for like three years because that was the only lens through which they could accept me as a human being. If there was some fictional character who was like me and not the villain.

And that’s why I’m writing all this nonsense—because that’s why fiction is so powerful. People use it. People use it to form their thoughts about other humans in real life. They use it to understand or not understand people, to fit them into their mental paradigms. To tell them whether a person is worth of love or abuse. When people who make fiction are very evil, they deliberately use it to convince people like them to hate people not like them. You know, speaking of Hermione. 

Fiction is how we encounter the world before we encounter the world. Before we have the ability, agency, money, or time to travel and meet a wide variety of humans and experience the spectrum of Stuff That Can Happen. It seeds and creates our reactions so that we have easy access to them when we need them for realsies. Fiction is where we first begin to learn how to live. What we will accept from others. What we will expect from ourselves.

So it matters what we find when we open a book or turn on the big screen.

It matters, maybe not a lot in the face of pandemics and injustice and cancelled elections, but it does matter a little that Miss Piggy is relentlessly dragged and bullied by everyone on The Muppet Show. No one seems to like her, no one even seems to tolerate her, even though, minus the karate-chopping, she never really does anything to deserve their regular abuse. It’s a theater, everyone is constantly jockeying for stage time and believes they’re a huge star. Kermit, who is otherwise the most wholesome character ever, puts her down, sneers at her, undermines her confidence, tells other people how much she sucks and how much he hates her, hides to avoid having to talk to her, and calls her names. And he’s supposed to be her boyfriend/husband. 

It’s like if Mr. Rogers suddenly called Mr. McFeely a fucking douchebag or brought his wife onstage and explained to the kids at home what a useless bitch she is and everyone in the studio laughed along snickered ha ha she is a useless bitch he’s so right and then they all got Emmys. 

Of course, it’s all very Boomer I HATE MY WIFE LOL comedy. Even Piggy’s hitting is part of that Vaudevillian schtick of the fat, dumb, jealous harridan wife. And while the karate-chopping seems abusive in retrospect and I’m not excusing it, the Muppets pretty regularly smacked each other around for comic effect. The Muppet Show wasn’t Sesame Street. Rowlf sings a song that pretty strongly implies he might have murdered someone. (You and I and George don’t @ me) They even made a musical instrument out of hitting Muppets of various sizes on the head to produce screams at different pitches. It’s a common tight five these days to point out Kermit and Piggy’s abusive relationship, but her end of it never scanned to me as a kid because boys were just constantly shoving and punching each other and laughing about it on every show, it was shown as integral to their friendship, so the insults got to me in a way the hitting didn’t. You never got the feeling people hated Miss Piggy because of her chopping habits, only because of, you know, her entire personality. 

And that’s pretty borne out by the fact that the culture and comedy has changed so Miss Piggy doesn’t really do that stuff anymore, but Kermit still compulsively shit-talks her to everyone he can, up to and including the celebrity guests who visit their mutual workplace. And possibly cheats on her because why not.

And yet, the celebrities themselves, all along, were pretty endlessly kind and complementary and even flirty toward Miss Piggy. They recognized her talent and her charisma and 98% of them loved it. They even joined her for chopping hijinks. And she blossoms under their mere lack of abuse, then always becomes overly attached and clingy, because everyone in her life is nightmare-trash to her 24/7 and calls her fat, ugly, stupid, and annoying like it’s their job so she consistently mistakes simply not cutting up her soul and laughing at the pieces for true love. You know, like I mistook someone who described me as super annoying but you get used to her as a person who loved me. And almost every time, it irritates the absolute rainbow swampshit out of Kermit and everyone else that anyone is being nice to Piggy or paying her any attention at all. Because they believed she was unlovable, and they wanted back-up on that.

No one on The Muppet Show is subjected to the level of constant pride-shredding hate that Piggy is. She is the butt of every joke, she is the punching bag for every other character. And because there were really, really not a lot of female Muppets then, and past a certain point Piggy was the only one who was in virtually every episode and not a fucking chicken, all those jokes started to feel like they weren’t just about how lame and terrible Miss Piggy was, but how lame and terrible girls were.

And that’s why every time I see Miss Piggy on screen, I get tense and uncomfortable and wobbly. Because I know I’m about to watch my childhood in microcosm. Because I identified with her so much, and every part of her I saw in myself were the exact parts that the other Muppets dumped all over her for, the exact parts the people in my life dumped all over me for, and no matter how modernized or updated the show ever gets, how much it emphasizes love and family and acceptance and the lovers, the dreamers, and me, I always know it’s coming, I always know Miss Piggy isn’t included in any of those positive messages, I know someone is going to be piercingly cruel to her and her painful reaction will be played for laughs because she’s so over-dramatic and stupid, isn’t she, why can’t she just be cool in the face of everybody around her hating her guts ha ha girls suck. 

What does it say that the Muppets keep getting rebooted and rebooted and restyled for modern audiences, put into whatever frame is popular in non-puppet entertainment, be it mockumentaries or memes, but being a complete piece of shit to the only major classic female character fucking never goes out of style?

AND LOOK I KNOW THIS IS A LOT OF ENERGY FOR MISS PIGGY OKAY

The point, and the reason for the energy, is this.

It’s not about a pig. Not really. There’s a million other characters like her, and human beings who have the same kinds of complicated 4000 word essay feelings about them, even if the feelings themselves vary in a billion different ways.

Fiction affects us. It affects our whole lives.

I write for kids about half the time. And I am very conscious that representation matters so bone-deeply, because all I ever fucking wanted was for a girl who looked and acted like me to be treated like a person on TV and I hardly ever got it and I would have been happy with fucking brown hair, let alone growing up as a POC kid or trans or disabled or any other divergent-from-the-default identity. I did turn out to be queer and constantly struggle with that pesky inappropriate gender presentation thing, but at least I had Miss Piggy…except what I slowly learned from her was that you can be as fabulous and different as you want, but it won’t change that the dickhead boys you work with will hate you for it and never let you forget it and blame your reaction for their abuse. Is that an accurate life lesson? Yep. Should it be? Fucking no.

When you create fiction for children, you have to deal with the fact that part of what you’re doing is giving them small, managable, fictional traumas that help them to handle the real, much bigger traumas in their lives. Not finding anyone who looks or acts like them in the pop culture that does show plenty of versions of their peers is not a small manageable trauma. Only finding characters who look and act like you is actually a trauma, too, because it robs a young person of the beginnings of empathy for anyone else and can materially contribute to them growing up to be a total dripping fuckshit. And using a non-traditional female character as a fifty-year punching bag, especially if she’s the only significant female character you got, is not a fictional trauma because that’s how non-traditional women get treated in the real world, especially if they’re the only ones in the office, or the playgroup, or the faculty, or the theater, or the election.

It is your job to think about this stuff. As a writer. As a reader. As a parent. As a teacher. We have passed the time when not thinking about it was cool.

And if you are a writer, you have to be regularly asking yourself: am I creating a character that is going to give a child a stomachache every time they see them into their 40s?

It might seem like a pithy, easy statement to say hey try not to traumatize children with your work. On the one hand, you will always traumatize children a little, fiction is traumatic when you’re a child and the line between real and pretend is drawn in invisible ink. When you do it well, because the trauma comes from witnessing conflict that arises organically, tension that scares or excites, and catharsis that’s resolved satisfyingly among characters that don’t reinforce exclusion or incite self-hatred, it’s part of a thrilling story and it teaches them how to grow up and survive and be confident in themselves. When you traumatize your audience because you abused characters who reminded them of themselves for no reason but getting that default white cis straight boy demographic to laugh at them and never with them, and certainly never to cry with them or for them (because you kind of hate those sorts of people in real life too and guess what kids can tell), that is cruel.

And Miss Piggy’s life has always been cruel.

Today I watched her talk to RuPaul. A black drag queen with a deep voice and a big personality and beautiful clothes. She asked him if being a diva could ever be a good thing. And in no way was that played as a question full of pain and need and self-questioning and longing for acceptance, but I heard it that way all the same. But RuPaul told her of course being a diva was good and beautiful, and he told her she was a diva, that she was fabulous, and he’d always thought so. 

And I cried like a TOTAL ASSHOLE because I know at least RuPaul was saying that not just to her, but to all the queer kids who loved Miss Piggy and saw themselves in her, because Piggy has been a gay icon forever for every single reason she was my icon, and while though I don’t think Miss Charles has ever given much of a thought to brassy queer girls with deep voices, maybe he was saying it just a little to me without knowing it, and Miss Piggy turned to Kermit in triumph and said: did you hear that?

And Kermit, naturally, said something shitty to her under his breath, cutting her down just so she couldn’t even have that simple moment, and everyone watching at home would know they weren’t meant to like her now or believe RuPaul, and everything still sucked forever because Kermit is the protagonist so what comes out of his mouth is to be taken as truth, so his vicious little comment took that moment away from the people Ru was really talking to, too.

Fuck you, don’t traumatize children, I don’t care if you’re on gritty ol’ HBO now. Everything is trash and fear, let us weirdo fabulous bullied kids who don’t conform hear RuPaul say it’s okay that we exist.

You, too, Joanne, you Death-Eater. JUST AS AN ASIDE.

I still love The Muppets. None of these BIG FEELS ABOUT A PIG take away from the fact that I still love these characters, and this music, and everything about the story of their creation. And I don’t even really think much of this is terrifically on purpose. It’s just barfing up the same old cultural biases, and then all the reboots continuing them and reinforcing them because that’s staying true to the source material, isn’t it? That’s the meme of Miss Piggy. She sucks and everyone in her life hates her. Why mess with it? It’s funny. It creates that classic Muppet social dynamic. You know, no matter what she does or how many famous people say she’s a good person, it’ll never make anyone she loves respect her. Comedy gold. It made everyone in the writers’ room laugh. It’s fine, you snowflake. It works. 

Boy does it work.