I’m scrunched up in a fetal position on the floor of my childhood bedroom, tufts of carpet imprinting in my face. On the dusty, fingerprint-stained screen of my laptop: Fleabag is staring at me in one of her trademarked fourth wall breaks. And I am looking right back. Eye to eye. In a few minutes, I will be crying. My lungs will fill with the kind of air that only lives between close friends. In a few minutes, the series will end, the screen will fade to black. But I don’t know that yet.
Instead: I am following the life of Fleabag, a thirty-something White woman played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge as she navigates life after the death of her best friend. And though I, a sixteen-year-old Brown girl from Jersey, am worlds apart from its British protagonist, “Fleabag” has become a comfort show for me. I watch it whenever I feel lost, whenever I’m looking for reassurance and guidance in my life. The character has so many qualities that resonate: The expansiveness of her grief, her feelings of alienation in a modern world, her tongue-in-cheek humor.
And I’m in good company. Since its conception as a stage play, “Fleabag” has captured the minds and hearts of millions, has won more Emmys than Phoebe Waller-Bridge can hold, and has found a place on Barack Obama’s year-end favorites list. Fleabag’s relatability has garnered widespread acclaim for the show. Yet I’m wary of making my love for “Fleabag” public; whenever I mention it as one of my favorite shows, I get this sinking feeling in my chest. Because, while it is a technical masterpiece, Fleabag has also been the subject of an onslaught of criticism.
There’s this one scene that I used to like a lot. Fleabag is sitting with an older business woman, Belinda, at a bar. Martini in hand, Belinda confesses: “Women are born with pain built in, it’s our physical destiny — period pain, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it with ourselves throughout our lives. Men don’t. They have to invent things like gods and demons… they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other… and we have it all going on in here. Inside, we have pain on a cycle for years.”
At the time (sixteen and forever cursing my period and forever scorned by boys), it felt like Belinda was talking straight to me. But now, the entire monologue makes me cringe. It’s imbued with the sort of biological essentialist rhetoric of trans-exclusionary radical feminists. To a lesser extent, it ignores the swathes of suffering that men of color experience at the hands of oppressive systems. In short: It’s a scene that hasn’t aged well.
Despite all its claims to capture the “universal female experience,” “Fleabag” falls short. “Fleabag” is, at its core, a TV show about a White woman. There are few characters of color in the entire six hour run of the show, and Fleabag almost never confronts class or racial dynamics during her exploits. The misogyny in “Fleabag,” though it resonates, is often devoid of the nuances of intersectionality. When Fleabag says that she “wouldn’t be such a feminist if [she] had bigger tits,” I think about what a privilege it is for the size of your tits to be the deciding factor of whether to be a feminist or not. As a Brown woman, being a feminist was never a choice for me. If I’m not a feminist, I’m campaigning against my right to exist.
White is the default. Due to a whole load of systemic oppression related supply chain reasons, we end up with a lot of shows written, directed, and acted in by White people. White women in TV and movies and all sorts of popular culture are given the privilege of experiencing uncomfortable emotions. They are allowed to be loud or quiet, sexual or prudish, they are allowed to grieve, they are allowed to have people for whom they can grieve. They are a literal blank slate for us to project our emotions onto. When women of color are on TV, they are relegated to plot lines about racism. So, when it comes to finding sisterhood in emotions outside of Feeling Oppressed, I do turn to “Fleabag,” even as I cringe at its titular character’s outdated thinking. Nobody else has that perfect mix of intense desperation and horrible decision making skills as our lovely protagonist. And yes, while shows like “The Mindy Project” or “Never Have I Ever” fit all of the demographic categories that I should theoretically like, I still find myself revisiting Fleabag every couple of months. I take a free Sunday, grab a soft blanket I don’t mind getting tears on, and binge the whole show. What can I say? It’s Fleabag.
Image by Raph_PH is licensed under the Flickr License.
