Spinster focused on a single lost love, destined to go unmarried unless the lover returns. Tina Fey's portrayal of her character Liz Lemon, on the hit NBC series "30 Rock", exemplifies another classic spinster stereotype. Lemon, a 40-something single woman whose relationships never seem to work out, has unrealistically high expectations for a male partner: her dream husband is the archetypal "Astronaut Mike Dexter", and for much of the series her character is holding out on settling on a man until she can score an astronaut. Unpopped popcorn kernels have been dubbed "old maids" in popular slang, since like unmarried women
The Spinster and Her Enemies the threat they posed to male dominance", and with exposing "enormous male opposition" to what Summerfield referred to as "gyn/affection". She wrote that while Jeffreys depicted the hold of the "ideology of compulsory heterosexuality" as absolute, further documentary evidence was needed to determine the extent to which this was true between World War I and the 1970s. Jane Egerton described "The Spinster and Her Enemies" as a major work in "The Sexual Imagination from Acker to Zola: A Feminist Companion" (1993). The feminist Rene Denfeld criticized "The Spinster and Her Enemies" for being part of a repressive, anti-sexual trend within