Disclaimer: I wrote the following essay before the devastating news about Roe v. Wade being overturned. My heart breaks, I’m both furious and scared for the future of the USA, but I also have nothing to say on the topic that hasn’t been said before. So, maybe you enjoy a little distraction today, or maybe you sit this one out and come back next time.
The very fist issue of this newsletter, which went out many moons ago in the spring of 2019, revolved around a book which I had previously inhaled and loved. The book was a memoir and called “Everything I know about love”, by Dolly Alderton.
“Everything I know about love” tells the tale of a young woman who flails through her twenties, suffers from crippling self-doubt, longs for love yet self-sabotages like it’s her job, and who ultimately declares her female friendships as “the loves of her life” (at least until there’s a romantic partner).
It was one of those books that found me at the exact right moment, I could relate to so much of Alderton’s inner world (not so much to the outside expression of her feelings). And I wasn’t alone: “Everything I know about love” became an international bestseller and Alderton scored a TV deal.
The show premiered this June – but I won’t watch it. I just can’t. Seeing the trailer helped me realize how far I’ve personally come since I read the book, and also how tired I am of what Guardian TV-writer Rachel Aroesti recently coined as the messy millennial woman (MMW).
In her wildly shared analysis titled “How Messy Millennial Woman became TV’s most tedious trope” she describes the MMW as follows:
“She has a complicated love life and a dysfunctional relationship with her family. She is often an unreliable employee and sometimes an unreliable friend. Unhappiness, low self-esteem and a tendency to self-sabotage radiates from her – but she’s also joyful and charismatic: a good-time girl who lurches from chaos to crisis, from euphoria to despair.”
This MMW character has flooded our screens and bookshelves over the past decade; the trend was kicked off by Lena Dunham’s “Girls” in 2012 and found its peak in “Fleabag”, which got the most critical acclaim in 2018/2019. Other examples include “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”, “Feel Good”, “GameFace” and everything Sally Rooney has ever written (and probably will write in the future), although her characters are as joyless as they come.
Before anyone calls me a hypocrite: Yes, I have genuinely enjoyed a lot of those MMW-storylines, I will probably keep consuming them and I do regularly recommend them as pop culture pleasures.
I even have a Fleabag-poster hanging over my desk, because I do think it’s one of the best shows ever written. I also believe that the emergence of the MMW was a much needed pendulum swing from the way women had been depicted (mostly by male writers and directors) until then. You know: wife, mother or whore.
But now that I have indulged in the flawed and unapologetic self-centred anti-heroines for a decade, I feel a deep urge to move on. Because as much as I needed to see those women on TV, I get more and more annoyed with the trope that the MMW has become.
First, who gets to be a MMW? Is it the fat, queer woman of color? No, the MMW usually embodies the most privileged version of womanhood: they are slim, white, straight, upper class women who still look hot with messy hair and a smudged eye liner (Mae in “Feel Good” is a small exception to that rule, as they come out as non-binary in season two). But generally, in order to present yourself as imperfect and to seemingly relinquish power, you first need to have power and privilege.
Secondly, and that’s a biggie, it’s the way those MMW shows deal with mental health. Or rather: mental illness. The MMW is messy and flailing because she carries unaddressed trauma. By not addressing it she becomes the stereotypical “crazy woman”, or as Aroesti put it:
“Ultimately, though, this conflation of a personality type with trauma or mental ill-health is starting to feel unhelpful. It makes destructive behaviour a shorthand for psychological distress – when in reality many people struggle in quieter, more self-contained ways. It also has the effect of making MMW, and her often self-involved unhappiness, strangely aspirational.”
In regards to the aspect of aspiration – Rayne Fisher-Quann wrote an entire essay on the romanticization of depression and other mental issues. “I’m not unwell or self-destructive or entirely unbearable — I’m in my fleabag era!”, she constitutes.
Having looked my personal Fleabag era dead in the eye and after years of suffering finally dragged myself to therapy (which is messy in itself), I wish I could see that narrative arc on the screen as well.
Portraying psychological distress as something chic and zeitgeisty may de-stigmatize the expression of mental health issues – but it misses the opportunity to portray therapy as an essential part of self-care.
Most of the MMW characters also simply lack a sense of accountability. Often, they have a sensible sidekick, who tries to keep them in check – but who is also portrayed as a little annoying or dull (Fleabag’s sister, for example). Why can’t we have a sensible, cautious yet confident woman as the main character for once? Why do those character traits never get center stage?
Ultimately, I just want to see more kindness and more emotional literacy on screen. Send the MMW to therapy. Make her more self-aware. Let her sober up. Send her on a yoga retreat if that’s what kicks off her growth.
I want to see more characters like the ones on “Ted Lasso”, “Schitt’s Creek” and “Grace & Frankie.” I want to see what else is out there for millennial women except for running from childhood trauma, bad dates and shitty bosses. I want a role model, not someone who shows me the worst possible version of myself.
I want Elizabeth Gilbert and Jason Sudeikis to co-create a female-lead show – is that really too much to ask?
pop culture pleasures
My expectations for the second season of “Love and Anarchy” were sky high, but they weren’t only not met, I was actually offended at how bad, how uninspired and how cynical these eight new episodes were. Don’t watch season two, but do watch season one, if you haven’t yet.
This essay by Morgan Parker about being single for all her life made the rounds last week, and I found it deeply moving:
“If one is always in wait of one’s Great Love, if every story depends upon this arc, how am I to be proud of the life I’ve created, who I’ve let myself become? When am I allowed to get comfortable, feel grown? If I choose to keep hoping for a romantic plot twist, does that render my story incomplete, still a pulsing cursor? And if I settle down, officially give up fretting over profile pages and wanting more from my flings and situations, would it be resignation?”
In the “Culture Study”-newsletter, Dana Miranda broke down how personal finance gurus use the same rhetoric as their colleagues in the wellness space and how it all always comes down to: If you’re poor, you’re not trying hard enough.
All the hot girls on TikTok and Insta have Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). Is it a coincidence that the cases of IBS rose while the body positivity movement grew? Well, Natasha Boyd has a point when she says:
“[Women] have to declare that they shit their pants if they eat gluten or dairy, so that abstention from those foods is seen as an act of self-care, and not disordered eating.”
Something positive: Please get more plants and talk to them, it’s proven to boost your mood.
After recommending “Sorrow and Bliss” in the last free newsletter, I have followed up with Meg Mason’s (the author) appearance on the How to Fail podcast. It’s a moving conversation about shame, expectations and friendship.
🦖 🇩🇪 Und falls es euch auf allen anderen Kanälen bisher entgangen ist: Mein neuestes Podcast-Projekt ist live: “Ding Dong Dino” ist ein Kinderpodcast über Dinosaurier und ein echtes Herzensprojekt. Es gibt ihn kostenfrei bei Podimo und Spotify. Ich freu mich so sehr, wenn ihr reinhört, ihn an kleine und große Dinofans weiterleitet und/oder eine Bewertung abgebt.
🇩🇪 Außerdem bin ich ein großer Fan des “Sport Inside”-Podcast geworden, gehostet von Nora Haspers. Besonders die aktuelle Folge, über die Profi-Basketballerin Brittney Griner, die momentan in Russland in Haft sitzt, fand ich super spannend.
This is all for today. Thank you so much for being here and please tell a friend if you enjoyed this read.
Take care,
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Inwards/Onwards #11
You're not special and that's a good thing
“I suppose it all started with the rise of blogs. I don’t know if anyone remembers the early days of thoughtcatalog, but when they started out it was all just personal essays on love, heartbreak and what we today categorize as mental health. Those essays were like crack to me in my very early 20s. I had so many confusing, sometimes shameful feelings and it blew my mind that complete strangers had already written about them.”