After binge-watching, our favorite TV-related pastime is complaining about the characters we binge-watch.
We love to pick apart every questionable decision and self-involved navel gaze. The question is: Why do we focus on the so-called bad behavior of women while letting the terrible men get away with murder (often literally)?
Take Sex and the City (1998-2004) and Girls (2012-2017), two of HBO’s historically most popular shows (now getting a second life thanks to streaming): Both are about a quartet of female friends, including two of the most heavily critiqued main characters in TV history, Carrie Bradshaw and Hannah Horvath, respectively. Carrie and Hannah were eviscerated by audiences and critics alike — and now the actors who played them are asking why.
Sarah Jessica Parker — who revisited her iconic SATC character in three seasons of the spinoff And Just Like That — told The Huffington Post in June that Carrie is “an extraordinarily decent and good person [and] an extremely devoted friend,” comparing the backlash against the columnist to that of beloved fictional men.
Sorry, Sex and the City fans, but Sarah Jessica Parker doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with Carrie Bradshaw. “There’s a sentiment sometimes that she’s frustrating or she’s selfish or she makes poor decisions or she doesn’t manage her money. Well, yeah, all of that has been true over the course of the last 25 years.” […]
“It’s always interesting to me that [Carrie] is so condemned, but a male lead on a show can be a murderer and people love him,” she said. (Joe Goldberg and Dexter Morgan, we’re looking at you, psychopaths.) “If a woman has an affair or behaves poorly or spends money foolishly … there’s a kind of punitive response to it.”
Sarah Jessica Parker in ‘Sex and the City’ © HBO/Courtesy: Everett Collection
Amelia Ritthaler, host of the “Girls Rewatch Podcast,” and her July guest Lena Dunham made similar points.
“Originally when [Girls] aired, everybody was like, ‘Hannah and Marnie should die,’” said Ritthaler. “‘These are evil people. Rot, bitches.’”
Dunham offered Sopranos patriarch Tony as a counterpoint: “People were like, ‘Tony Soprano is a misunderstood, kind man. He doesn’t want to whack people,’” she said. “One handjob goes awry in Brooklyn [on Girls] and everyone’s like, ‘You ladies need to take a swim in a pile of toxic waste.’”
The disconnect made her realize “that women just doing things that women do was meant to be a terrible, terrible secret.” She called the revelation “eye-opening.”
Lena Dunham, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet and Allison Williams in ‘Girls’ Jessica Miglio / © HBO / Courtesy: Everett Collection
Sure, Carrie and Hannah made mistakes, but put in the context of their lionized male counterparts, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. That is, until you factor in misogyny. Then its logic is plain as day.
“Male protagonists are often framed as ‘antiheroes’ … Viewers are conditioned to excuse, even glamorize, their flaws as complexity,” Shawn French, founder and host of podcast “The Determined Society,” told Us Weekly. “When a woman lead shows the same imperfections, insecurity, ambition, selfishness or even just being messy and human, the reaction flips. Instead of ‘complicated,’ she’s labeled as ‘unlikable.’”
Slamming the sexism. Sarah Jessica Parker clapped back at critics who mocked the return of Sex and the City characters in HBO Max’s And Just Like That simply because they aged. “There’s so much misogynist chatter in response to us that would never. Happen. About. A. Man,” Parker, 56, told Vogue for the December cover […]
French says the reaction belies something deeper: “Many people still unconsciously expect women on screen to be aspirational, nurturing or morally grounded. When they aren’t, it can trigger criticism,” present tense. Meaning, it’s still happening.
Just look at social media after episodes of The Summer I Turned Pretty (starring Lola Tung as Belly) and Emily in Paris (Lily Collins as Emily) air. Yikes.
“The truth is, women don’t need to be perfect to be worth watching,” French says. “By giving female characters the same freedom to be flawed, raw and real as their male counterparts, we get closer to authentic representation and audiences ultimately benefit from richer, more relatable stories.”