I’ve always been a fan of angry women.
In the Australian television show Dance Academy, Abigail Armstrong is a ruthless competitor, a prickly foil to the ingénue protagonist. Before a competition, she grimaces at bouquets sent to her from her boyfriend and mother. “I told them not to send me flowers. I don’t want to be humanized.”
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the popular Cordelia Chase deflates egos with perfectly-executed quips. When her love interest says, “You have no shame,” she responds, “Oh, please. Like shame is something to be proud of.”
In a fictional series I reread constantly in high school, Jessica Darling, central character of Sloppy Firsts, describes her sister thusly: “I am fluent in snark. Bethany only notices snark when…[it] uses a heavy blunt instrument to smack her repeatedly about the head as it screams, ‘I’M SNARK. DO YOU FUCKING HEAR ME? I’M SNARKY SNARKY SNARK!’ And even then she’s like, ‘Ohhhh? Snark? Is that you?’”
For years, I obsessively polished a bright, clean façade, making sure that it looked faultless from every angle. But when I read a book, or watched a television show, my favorite characters were inevitably the opposite of the false charade I myself carried. These women were chaotic. They were not polite or kind or understanding—unless as a slick form of manipulation. They didn’t knife their skin into thin strips, folding each section like a paper accordion. They didn’t fold easily. I kept them nearby, in my back pocket. I wore them like armor.
In this way, I’ve always been fascinated by the ways that female anger manifests during adolescence and adulthood. Girls are conditioned to repress and (violently, always violently) internalize their anger, but, inevitably, these emotions take a new external shape. I couldn’t be angry, but my favorite characters could. What kind of psychic marks does that leave on a young girl’s mind? What is the psychological catharsis of witnessing angry girls and women onscreen?
On Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, the titular character is a woman I wanted to befriend almost immediately. In the opening scene, a harried Fleabag turns to the camera, fixing the collar of her coat. As she informs us, a man is coming over.
“[Y]ou’ve accidentally made it out like you’ve just got in yourself, so you have to get out of bed, drink half a bottle of wine, get in the shower, shave everything, dig out some Agent Provocateur business, suspender belt, the whole bit, and wait by the door until the buzzer goes—”
She opens the door, smiling easily, brightly, at the handsome man at the door.
Yes, I thought, We’d be friends.
At once, Fleabag drew me in. It is a show about an angry woman whose pain and trauma and unyielding humor makes her messy (often) and funny (always). It is a show that keenly understands the theatricality of womanhood, the pressures to contort ourselves into new versions of ourselves that are fine, we’re totally, completely fine, even when we’re not. Fleabag treats us like friends, but she is performing not only for those onscreen, but for us. By acting darkly witty, droll, unperturbed, she can continue trying to hide the soft, vulnerable parts of herself. So she laughs when a family member says something cruel, tilting her head at the viewers, eyebrows raised, letting us “in” on the joke, even as she witnesses—and we witness—the cruel thing land on the floor, untouched, waiting for her to deal with it.
And it’s an incredibly human thing.
But it’s also an incredibly female thing.
Fleabag’s story is distinctly, proudly tied to the chaotic foundations of womanhood. It is about a woman who is acting her heart out not only for the people in front of her, but for the people she has invented inside of her head. She can never get away from the unceasing feeling that others are watching, always, and so she acts, always.
In “The Female Price of Pleasure,” Lili Loofbourow offers a shrewd analysis of this gendered type of presentation:
“Women are supposed to perform comfort and pleasure they do not feel under conditions that make genuine comfort almost impossible. Next time you see a woman breezily laughing in a complicated and revealing gown that requires her not to eat or drink for hours, know a) that you are witnessing the work of a consummate illusionist acting her heart out and b) that you have been trained to see that extraordinary, Oscar-worthy performance as merely routine.
One side effect of teaching one gender to outsource its pleasure to a third party (and endure a lot of discomfort in the process) is that they’re going to be poor analysts of their own discomfort, which they have been persistently taught to ignore.”
And what do so many of us do? We create stories about ourselves, our lives, our friends, our families. We tell ourselves who we are and how we should act and what we should do. We create roles and we try to fit into them. It makes life easier and it makes life harder. Even with the clean narrative arcs stretched along each second of every moment, we can’t always follow them the way we wish we could. And Fleabag gets that, too. It lets the messiness seep out, the jagged Crayola marks zig-zagging outside of the lines.
In the first episode of Fleabag, Fleabag and her sister, Claire, attend a feminist lecture in a large auditorium. The lecturer reaches the stage and asks, “Please raise your hands, if you would trade five years of your life for the so-called ‘perfect body’?”
Fleabag and her sister shoot their hands up immediately. When everyone stares at them in judgment, they guiltily put their arms down.
“We’re bad feminists,” Fleabag whispers.
But they’re not. They’re just women trying to figure out how to navigate the world as women. And, as the show illustrates, it is disingenuous to erase the imperfections of that struggle. We can know, intellectually, that having the “perfect body” doesn’t matter. But magazines and diet YouTube videos and TikToks and Hollywood blockbusters still demonstrate the ways in which having a “perfect body” should be an aspiration for all of us. These pressures shape us, inform the ways we think, and to struggle with that does not make us weak. It makes us human.
In Bad Feminist (a book I highly recommend), Roxanne Gay movingly writes:
“I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying — trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.”
Even as Fleabag smirks, remarking cleverly upon the situation in front of us, she is really, secretly, seething. Like so many of us, Fleabag is angry. She is furious. She lost her best friend, her father refuses to engage with her emotionally, her sister has a new, successful life, and she just finds herself failing, over and over again. She laughs. We laugh. But there’s a ripple of something raw, dark, always coursing through each scene like a riptide. So Fleabag looks at us, hands up, as if to say, “What the fuck?”
And, of course, the moment Fleabag had my heart forever:
Fleabag and Claire tentatively walk up the steps to a fancy spa. It is an imposing, posh building.
Then, in the background, a man aggressively yells, “Slut!”
Fleabag turns around “Yes?”
Fleabag showed me that you can write about difficult things, about traumas and black days, with humor and warmth. Fleabag is very much aware of her social limitations, but she is also clever and funny. Waller-Bridge’s writing is sharp because she creates characters that do not feel like characters. When Fleabag speaks, it seems as if I am in the room with her, watching these conversations take place. Waller-Bridge captures the nuanced minutiae of Fleabag’s inner voice, unearthing the quirks and random discrepancies of the human mind with seeming ease. Here, I learned how writing becomes stronger when you talk about the lumps in your bed—not when you smooth them away.
Joan Didion once wrote, “Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.”
Whenever I feel the discomfiting urgency under my skin, like worms wriggling restlessly beneath the soil, like tectonic plates shifting and scraping against each other below the earth’s crust, I read—about female antiheroes; about a lane of oak trees, crisp and studded with yellow leaves; about the gothic spires of a well-worn church; about a dusky sky, papered with clouds; about the rise and fall of a city thousands of miles away. I try to seek relief from the pressure of nonstop motion, an influx of too many people doing too many things. I look for stories. I look for something bigger and greater and vaster than myself. Something contradictory and funny and free—something true.
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