What’s Wrong With Identifying With the 21st Century Woman?

Upon reading some beautifully written essays criticizing some of my favorite films and TV shows, I came to the realization that trying to write a piece denying those arguments might not have been the best of ideas. But, given that I didn’t really have the time to go back–plus my stubbornness and need to finish what I’ve started–I thought I’d give it a go, even if I just end up looking like one of those pretentious clumsy women I’m about to talk about. 

Within the last couple of years, many films and TV shows started showing women who play out what we’ve always wanted to say but were too ashamed to admit. Fleabag, The Worst Person in the World, Shiva Baby, Lady Bird—the list goes on. The female protagonists were not the perfect, hot, and beautiful women of the male gaze, nor were they the strong decided women our favorite women-written heroines represented. They were problematic, lonely, clumsy–even annoying at times. They were pretty much, real.

Fleabag and Julie have no idea what to do with their own lives. Their family dynamics are toxic, their love lives too complicated. Suddenly, it was okay to be an anxious feminist who likes giving blowjobs and still wants the perfect body. But how far can ironic self-loathing and ignoring traumatic experiences get you in life? And should these behaviors be normalized? That’s what some feminist women argued we should be thinking about while identifying a bit too much with those characters we’ve begun idolizing. 

The first point on which many academics shed a light while talking about these characters is that they are in no way representative of those that don't fit the ‘white upper-middle-class pretty woman’ description. These films and TV shows don't usually worry about politics overall, aside from that which affects the main character, a woman “as carelessly destructive with her life as her privileged male counterparts,” states Rebecca Liu in her article for feminist film journal Another Gaze. 

It is true these characters pretend to be universal representatives, they are meant to be identified with, and yet it is a very small number of women who really can resonate with that reality. Who can even have the luxury of being mindless with their own future to the point these women do? Who are these powerful geniuses who manage to get through everything with a bit of charm and focus on their artistic lives?

But most of the criticism falls toward the way these women, who some take as role models, approach life. “Performative nihilism”, “passivity”, and “dissociative feminism” are some of the expressions used to name the way these characters tend to deal with pain. Some go as far as to say these characters and their creators have stopped fighting for women's rights by detaching themselves from the oppression they live with daily. 

Such readings of narratives that finally put women in the foreground and express feelings and thoughts we, as women, are taught to keep to ourselves, seem to deposit too much social responsibility upon texts that serve primarily as means of expression of female artists like ourselves. Films and TV shows like Fleabag, Shiva Baby, and Frances Ha showcase women in a way most of our favorite women artists of the last decades never thought they could, unapologetically bringing our thoughts into the mainstream and rejecting patriarchal society in a way that’s appropriate in the context we currently live. 

These characters are not supposed to be role models. They don’t shove moral tales and lessons upon viewers as if that was the right thing to do as the perfectly chaotic woman of the 21st Century; they do nothing but prove just how much feminism has failed generations of even the most privileged of women. 

It is in fact empowering to see unlikable and mentally unstable women on screen. Personally, I don’t see anything passive about these characters’ attitudes towards their daily struggle with  violent men and quietly sexist old women. Fleabag always tries to take a stance upon her sister’s abusive husband, but she also likes to joke around about her best friend’s suicide and sleep with a lot of men, what’s so wrong with identifying with that and having a laugh with her? 

Women on media should be allowed to have as much sex as they want without being called out for their so-called destructive behaviors. These characters are not meant to be perfect feminist allegories. They simply comfort us in showing that we are not alone in an era of  “#MeToo and liking oral sex.” 

If these films explored past their white cis middle-class perspective of things, they could certainly build more complex narratives of oppression in the 21st Century, really standing for what they propose in the first place. But it is undeniable that these characters lend us back the voice we may have lost in the discourse of modern feminism.