Gossip Girl premiered on September 19, 2007, and to this day it still has many loyal supporters. The glitz and the glam of the upper east side, and the constant scandalous drama has people hooked on the character’s lives. You’ll still find people arguing over team Serena or team Blair, or complaining about who was chosen to be gossip girl. With many of the watchers longing for and romanticizing the messed up lives of the NYC elite, characters who represent everyday people that critique the rich society end up being villainized. Most notably, Jenny Humphrey.
Jenny Humphrey was the youngest of the characters (alongside her best friend/future step-brother Eric Van der Woodsen); she was from Brooklyn and went to school among the Upper East side students, and just tried her best to fit in. When the show started it was clear that her and her older brother Dan, were protagonists because they were like your average person.They showed and critiqued the toxicity of the Upper East Side, which was clearly the initial intention of the first season. But as the showrunners decided to give redemption arcs to characters such as Chuck Bass, they ended up sacrificing the whole heart of the showing, leaving young impressionable viewers romanticizing abusive men like Chuck Bass, and being blatantly classist towards the less rich characters like Jenny, Dan and Vanessa.
In the show’s pilot, Jenny was a young bubbly girl who was trying to fit in with her rich peers like Blair Waldorf. Jenny gets invited to Blair’s party, where Chuck throws himself on her while she protests, making it clear he would have raped her, if Dan and Serena didn’t rescue her. Throughout the course of the first season, you see Jenny trying to fit in, basically serving as Blair’s servant, and eventually after all of Blair’s schemening against her, Jenny beats her at her own game. Jenny is eventually cut off by Blair and is harassed by Blair and her minions.
She was a generally well-liked character in her first season, with many fans still saying how they want “The old Jenny” back , after Jenny’s stark change in direction in later seasons. Jenny’s character was clearly being affected by her past sexual assault by Chuck and bullying by her peers at school. Jenny’s style also took a drastic change as her Actress, Taylor Momsen, who at the time was still a teenage girl, was trying to find herself. Unfortunately, her change can also be credited to the fact the writers wanted to uplift the villains of the first season, and that left people demonizing Jenny for minor actions but defending characters who have done much worse, simply because the show wanted them too.Once you really look at it, she really did not do anything that bad.
I’ll admit Jenny was not my favorite character either, and there were definitely times where she did piss me off (i.e. when the show had Jenny and Eric fighting in season 3 for no reason, inadvertently being involved in Serena’s drugging by Juliet.). The one action people tend to credit their hatred of her to, is when she loses her virginity to Chuck in Season 3. That scene irks me as well, but for different reasons. I think it’s absolutely disgusting that they had a young girl lose her virginity to her sexual assaulter. People will claim she deliberately broke up Chuck and Blair (despite the fact they were already broken up at that point), or claim that she went up their with the plan to have sex with Chuck and took advantage of his vulnerability at the moment (also untrue as Jenny went up so she could talk to Nate and play video games, and Chuck offers that she stays but only if she does what he does aka drinking and sleeping with him). After she sleeps with him, she cries and tells Eric how much she regrets it, with viewers claiming she was just playing the victim in this scene. It takes two to tango, and both of them to some extent were at fault for the occurrence but putting all blame on a 16 year old girl who was once sexually assaulted by him is very gross.
The fact is most of the hate towards Jenny stems from misogyny and classism. Characters who were either rich or a man could get away with virtually anything in fans’ eyes while Jenny was hated for doing the bare minimum. The hate towards her was honestly pretty uncalled for, especially considering the amount of hate Taylor Momsen still receives by fans for playing Jenny. Jenny was flawed, she wasn’t the best character, and she didn’t have the best personality but she was not by any means the villain people make her out to be. Justice for Jenny!