Trigger Warning: sexual assault, misogyny
It’s been a little over a month since the The Sex Lives of College Girls season finale aired, but creator Mindy Kaling is already making headlines again; her problematic Scooby Doo reboot Velma has drawn the ire of media outlets as diverse as The Atlantic, Forbes, and Fox News. Given the pop culture war the show has caused, I decided to delve back into Kaling’s last project, one that I found deeply disturbing, yet has found itself a large social media fandom.
The Sex Lives of College Girls, the first season of which aired in 2021, doesn’t exactly call itself a feminist show, but it’s still content to take the praise for being one that is dispensed by fellow East Coast elites. It’s a female-led show that positions hook ups, party culture, and men at the center of every character’s arc, a show that depends on outdated and misogynistic ideas about women and sexuality. In short, it may be even more exhausting to be a woman in the world of SLOCG, as fans call it, than it is to watch it.
The Sex Lives of College Girls is set at the fictional Essex College, an elite private Vermont college. It follows four first-year suitemates, all lovable in their own ways, but doomed by bad writing that seems to enjoy young women making humiliatingly bad choices. Kimberly is a liberal elite’s version of a poor person, a scholarship student from a small town in Arizona whose season one arc sees her lose her financial aid because of her obsession with a guy. Whitney is a soccer star trying to step out of her senator mother’s shadow; she’s a unique character who is given zero autonomy outside of a risky love affair with her coach and a predictable series of hookups with her bully of a lab partner. Leighton is a closeted lesbian who doesn’t want to be defined by her sexuality, whose arc is perhaps the most evolved, though the bar is low. Finally – and probably most egregious – is Bela, co-creator Mindy Khaling’s self insert, a former nerd who hopes to be a comedy writer and hook up with a lot of guys.
I had high, high hopes for this show. After years of shows that position high school as the pivotal time in every person’s life and glorify young people doing things no high schooler should see as normal (ahem, Euphoria), a light, female-centric show set in college sounded like exactly what we needed. But after two full seasons, the misogyny has become overwhelming and I can simply no longer stomach it.
In season one, Kimberly becomes infatuated with Leighton’s brother, Nico, an older frat boy who all but ignores her as she prostrates for his attention. One night, as Kimberly explains that she feels like she doesn’t fit in at Essex because of her family’s socioeconomic status, the Upper East Side born and raised Nico tells her she does belong, and inexplicably makes the first move on her. Over the course of the next few days, she ditches her classes and work study job to hook up with him, causing her grades to drop. When a professor agrees to give her an extra credit opportunity, she invites Nico to his office, where the professor catches the two of them. Unwilling to put in the work to bring her grade up, she cheats on a major test and is caught. Her scholarship is revoked, and the season ends with her uncertain prospects. Why does a show about young, accomplished, progressive women glorify them throwing away everything for a man who barely respects them?
Whitney has an affair with her married assistant soccer coach. While she is at first betrayed to find out he is married, she continues to date him, allowing Dalton to have it all–a wife at home who swallows every lie he tells her and the simpering Whitney, who finds the dates he takes her on (in the middle of nowhere so as to keep her a secret) romantic. When she begins to question whether she deserves better, her friends give her such advice as, “the best way to get over someone is to whore out with someone hotter right away.” This is not exactly fantastic advice for impressionable young viewers.
Leighton’s arc in the first season drifts into traditional and lesbophobic stereotypes – she starts dating a girl named Alicia, but when Leighton isn’t ready to come out because she doesn’t want to be defined by her sexuality, Alicia breaks up with her, saying she doesn’t want to be pushed back into the closet. The depictions of lesbian women in SLOCG don’t exactly reinvent the wheel.
Bela comes to Essex to join the Catullan, an exclusive campus comedy magazine. Throughout the course of the first season she swaps sexual favors for support in joining the Catullan, hooks up with many men, and is sexually assaulted. She eventually winds up dating one of the men who didn’t believe her when she came forward about her assault. For each of these things she is demonized and seen as the one to blame–the show attempts to make Bela’s confidence in her sexuality empowering even as she is degraded and judged during each experience.
The show makes its priorities clear, laying the groundwork for deeply misogynistic stories in the second season. Men are the center of every storyline, and are frequently lauded for their appearances – multiple times, the camera pans to a shirtless 30-year-old playing a college student who is running in slo-mo while women gawk and admire – rather than being written as strong characters. Women talk graphically about sex and graphic acts are shown on screen – it is an HBO show after all. It’s not that sex in the media is bad, it’s that the representation in SLOCG dates back to a certain kind of white feminism that has remained popular since we began to discuss it in pop culture, circa the 2010s.
This model of feminism preached the benefits of “hookup culture,” a culture defined by casual sex and increased openness about sex and sexuality. At first, this looked like progress in a culture that demonizes and conceals womens’ sexuality, a culture that creates gender-based double standards regarding who can enjoy and talk about sex. But ultimately, hookup culture is not freeing. Under patriarchal hegemony, female sexuality will never be free of stigma. Ultimately, within hookup culture, women who are attracted to men are unable to free themselves of the expectations to look or act a certain way; though “girl power” narratives put forth by the media and even individuals may make the choice to engage in hookup culture feel empowering, until we live in a world where patriarchal hegemony does not exist, nothing we do will be free of its grasp. One does not ever choose to participate in this culture, as our decisions are shaped by the world we see around us. The world we see around us is deeply misogynistic, and has only ever accepted female empowerment and sexuality as long as it serves patriarchal interests.
At first, the show’s worst crime was its promotion of surface level white feminist ideas about sexuality, but it grew darker in its sophomore season.
Kimberly’s storyline, once again, focuses her fixation on a guy. Though there are many potential social issues to explore through Kimberly’s character, such as class divides on college campuses, this so-called “woke” show simply can’t stop reverting to an obsession with masculinity. Like every male-female storyline on the show, the men come across as aloof and cool while the women appear foolish and simpering. Like Nico in the first season, Jackson observes Kimberly’s infatuation with a perpetual smirk; though he never seems to respect Kimberly or even like her, he is more than happy to hook up with her. Kimberly then attempts to hook up with Whitney’s ex-boyfriend, Canaan, causing the two women to turn on each other. Why is a female-led show whose main characters have very progressive politics so determined to show women as silly, conniving, petty, and obsessed with men who do not respect them?
Whitney is assigned to be lab partners with a boy who condescends her by saying she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and she should leave the work to him so they both get an A. Whitney despises him, but in a scene that comes out of nowhere, the two begin to hook up in their classroom. This narrative – that hating a man because he treats you badly means you are secretly attracted to him – is both old and sexist. Additionally, the way the show seems determined to force together any eligible male and female pairing borders on icky – the image of 40-something showrunners sitting around writing graphic scenes about the exploits of 18- or 19- year-old women makes me uncomfortable.
Leighton’s storyline picks up with her getting a new girlfriend, Tatum. Tatum is supportive of Leighton’s closeted status, and their relationship seems to be one of the only healthy ones on the show. However, at the end of the season, Leighton comes out and realizes she misses her ex, Alicia. It’s a fairly traditional arc for a teen show, but I can’t help but wonder if the lesbian cliches are a way to make queerness more palatable, or somehow akin to straightness. Take, for example, the way Leighton’s sexuality is handled during the strip show that Bela organizes as a fundraiser–yes, in the warped world of the show, somehow the college approved a for-profit strip show. As the men dance suggestively, Leighton says, “weirdly, I’m into this.” The show earns its diversity points by having a lesbian main character, but she never refers to herself as a lesbian, choosing instead to call herself “gay,” a small but notable linguistic choice. She praises men’s bodies and even hooks up with one, and she distances herself from her sexuality through the cliché closeted storyline. This year, a record number of shows with queer female leads were canceled. SLOCG was renewed for a third season. Why are lesbian women (to say nothing of lesbians who do not identify as women and are seen on screen even less) still only allowed to be visible if they somehow serve the patriarchy by centering masculinity?
However, none of these patriarchal missteps come close to Bela’s season two storyline. She begins dating a man from The Catullan, though he initially didn’t believe her when she came forward about her sexual assault. When a famous comedian comes to do a show at Essex, Bela asks what she can do to make a good impression on him, and Leighton tells her to do something to make her memorable. Attempting to take this advice, Bela goes to his hotel room and initiates a hookup with a man at least 30 years older than her and in a position of power. Bela is then demonized for this decision when her boyfriend finds out and breaks up with her for cheating on him.
The problem goes well beyond cheating. The launching of the mainstream #MeToo movement in 2017 showed the scale of sexual abuse in the entertainment field, and the way systemic gendered power imbalances created a network of abusers who kept their crimes an open secret for decades. Comedians were indicted for their role in this system too, with famous examples such as Louis C.K. being accused of assault and harassment, trusting their status and fame to keep them safe from accountability. Women have historically always been blamed for the abuse they’ve endured, and are taught from a young age that women who were sexually assaulted were somehow asking for it or seduced their abuser without intention. Mindy Kaling is a female comedian who has surely seen the misogyny, double standards, and abuse women in the industry must endure.
And yet, when she had the choice to write a story featuring a young female comedian she chose not to criticize a culture of abuse and misogyny, but to write a storyline that blatantly deviates from reality. Sure, you’re bound to find the odd case where a woman initiated something with a more powerful man. But even then you’d have to question what ulterior motives she had for doing it, such as the way women are forced to accept the narrative of “sleeping her way to the top” that is often used to tear down successful women. Behavior doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and you cannot separate an individual’s actions from the system they were raised in.
Even acknowledging the fact that such a situation is theoretically possible, those cases are not very common. The #MeToo movement exposed an organized system of men coercing women into abusive dynamics. If Bela’s story was happening in the world we live in today, in the vast majority of cases, she would have been an unconsenting victim to the whims of an older and more powerful man. Why would SLOCG flip the script and make Bela a vixen, using her sexuality to get ahead – in other words, the trope men have created to demonize women for centuries? What explanation is there for this choice other than internalized misogyny on the part of the show’s creators? In every industry since forever, men have forced women to sexualize themselves or give into heteropatriarchal ideas about the role of women, yet within the world of the show, men are innocent victims falling prey to seductive, powerful women. This is not reality, but it will become so for the show’s young viewers.
The show started as good fun – short episodes, fast pacing, and female friendship. But it’s misogynistic to its core, the very ideas the show is based on returning a modern show to the darkest of ages when it comes to ideas about women. Young people, women, queer women, everyone who has historically not been represented on screen deserves better than this.