There’s a
new show on CW about Rebecca, a high-powered lawyer in New York who quits her
job just as she’s being offered a promotion so she can move to the Inland
Empire. She pretends it’s because she
wants a change of pace, but it is very clearly because of a high school
boyfriend she just reconnected with. She
is a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
The show is
cringe-worthy, and I still haven’t made it through the second episode (but I
will!). As I watch, I want her to
realize what a rockstar she is, that she can get any guy she wants because
she’s fabulous. Instead, she’s made some
guy who can’t even be bothered to text back in a time-appropriate manner the
center of her universe. His worst
offense, honestly, is that he’s boring.
As an audience member, I want to shake Rebecca into realizing she’s
better than him, he’s boring, and she needs to move on.
Unfortunately,
emotions aren’t rational. And if I’m
being perfectly honest, as much as I have trouble watching it, I’ve been
Rebecca before. I’ve had obsessions
about guys who only sort of knew who I was for much longer than I’d care to
admit.
We’ve
entered a new era of female roles, one that is less about Damsels In Distress
and more about Strong Female Characters.
Don’t get it twisted – the Strong Female Character is an improvement,
sure, but can often be just as one-dimensional as the Damsel In Distress. She’s powerful and intelligent and beautiful
and doesn’t take shit from anybody.
She’s an Ideal, which often comes at the expense of a sense of humor or,
worse, any sense of humanity.
There’s a
double standard in unrequited love stories.
When a boy loves a girl who doesn’t love him back, it’s romantic, and
we’re meant to sympathize with the guy.
Even when she just wants to be friends, he complains about the Friend
Zone, and we’re still supposed to feel bad.
When a girl loves a boy who doesn’t love him back, it’s creepy and
weird. Love is to be decided by what the
man wants. A woman’s worthiness is to be
decided by the man who may or may not want her.
With both
the Strong Female Character trope and the unrequited love double standard in
mind, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend emerges as a breath of fresh air. Rebecca is a human face to a woman who is
smart and successful and not strong in any way.
She puts a human face to a woman who knows chasing a guy across the
country is crazy and has to pretend she moved for other reasons. Rebecca tells a story many women are more
familiar with than they’d care to admit, and from a perspective that is rarely
showcased.
I don’t
know how long Crazy Ex-Girlfriend will be on the air, and it does have some
kinks to work out still, but its perspective and its characters are
refreshing. When there’s discussion
about more women in Hollywood, we don’t just mean more female roles. We mean more female stories. We mean Crazy
Ex-Girlfriend.
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