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It’s the late 2010s and I’m a teenager carefully watching my mom out of my peripheral. She’s paying attention to the TV and the animated man on the screen in a hilarious combination of suit, tie, and yellow beanie. He’s eating ice cream in a diner with a friend: a girl who’s made it very clear she likes him this whole season, only to be met with his awkward body language, stumbled excuses, and quick subject changes.

I’ve seen this one before, but my heart is in my throat when the companion asks Todd Chavez (Aaron Paul) if he’s gay.

Todd responds, “I’m not gay. I mean, I don’t think I am, but I don’t think I’m straight either. I don’t know what I am. I think I might be nothing.”

I click the next episode of BoJack without hesitation.

BoJack Horseman is a Netflix original animated tragicomedy set in a fictionalized version of Hollywood. Our cast includes a mix of humans, anthropomorphized animals, and celebrity cameos. As it aired from 2014 to 2020, BoJack went on to receive consistent critical acclaim and a dedicated audience who loved the balance between the wacky scenarios typical to adult animation and the honest portrayal of serious topics like substance abuse and depression.

When season four graces our screen, I finally hear the word that I’ve held close to my chest for years now spoken aloud: “asexual.” Todd Chavez, our wacky slacker sidekick, initially reacts with an aversion to the label.

But after some uncertainty and self-reflection, Todd embraces his identity in “Hooray! Todd Episode!” During a vulnerable moment, Todd comes out to BoJack: “I’m asexual. Not sexual.”

I share a look with my mother, the woman who’s known me all my life, who still knows me best, and hope that she understands.

*

Todd Chavez was one of only two asexual characters included in GLAAD’s 2017-2018 “Where We Are on TV” report, marking the first year the annual publication included asexuals in its data. While the publication notes that there was some asexual representation on television in previous years, “those characters were often relegated to one-off episodes, which did not allow for nuanced exploration.”

Seeking out asexual representation on TV was an often-disheartening exercise for a young asexual (commonly shortened to “ace”) like me. As a greater number of queer characters stepped into the spotlight, I searched desperately for the aces. When it came down to it, most of our “ace representatives” pre-2017 were only “ace-coded” characters, portraying some common signs of asexuality without ever encountering, exploring, or articulating the term. Asexuals would often recognize these signs or find the experiences of the characters relatable to their own asexual experiences, but we rarely heard our label spoken aloud.

Sometimes, it was enough to be the character left uncoupled by the end of the narrative—like Frozen’s Elsa—to be hailed as an “asexual icon” on internet forums. The ambiguity of the unlabelled asexual meant little repercussion for portraying common ace stereotypes like the logical and emotionless “robot” over and over again. Think The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper who says he “find[s] the concept of coitus to be ridiculous and off-putting.” Sheldon is touch-averse and sex-repulsed, but never uses the term “asexual” to describe himself. The lack of articulated labels leaves it up to fans to draw their own conclusions and, in more cases than not, leaves the writers space to retcon any common ace markers to suit their narrative needs. When the word “asexual” was actually uttered, it was met with a “fix it” attitude like House M.D.’s episode “Better Half.” (House spends his 44-minute run-time trying to disprove the claims of a self-identifying asexual couple, unfortunately succeeding when it’s discovered the man has a pituitary tumor that lowered his libido and caused erectile dysfunction, and the woman admits she was faking for her husband.)

Todd Chavez’s ground-breaking journey on BoJack was an important milestone for those of us looking to see our sexuality portrayed with positivity and a complex, comprehensive multi-season storyline on screen. When I showed my mom BoJack, already knowing where Todd’s journey would lead, I was secretly building a foundation for my own coming out moment.

As Todd comes into his own understanding of his identity—an asexual who is interested in romance, but sex-averse—the show demonstrates the variance in ace experiences. A couple from his Asexual Alliance group explain the difference between aromantic asexuals—those not interested in sex or relationships—and aces who enjoy dating. Todd’s childhood friend Emily (Abbi Jacobson) informs us that some asexuals do have and enjoy sex. As Todd’s dating life progresses, we see the struggles that arise from dating while asexual, such as Todd dating Yolanda (Natalie Morales) because they’re both asexual, even though they have nothing else in common.

The thing I dreaded most about my own coming out moment was having to explain to my family what asexuality means. I didn’t want to field questions, discuss the nuances, and be delegitimized because I was just an inexperienced teenager. One of the benefits of representing marginalized identities on screen is that representation bridges gaps in understanding. Pink Triangle Press’s 2024 PTP Pink Paper, a research report on Canadian 2SLGBTQIA+ media representation, explains, “9 in 10 media professionals agree that on-screen representation increases understanding and drives acceptance of 2SLGBTQIA+ people in society at large.”

In its delicate handling of my identity, BoJack provided the crash course on asexuality that I dreamed of. My mom was an apt student who was enticed by the series’ rapid-fire shifts between tense dramatic moments and silly schemes. By the end of the series, she left with something meaningful: some basic knowledge about a type of sexuality she wasn’t previously familiar with. All that was left for me to do was to point at Todd and say, “Mom, that’s me.”

Yes, I came out to my mom using BoJack Horseman. Turns out TV is a useful tool.

*

Since BoJack, I’ve encountered more asexual characters in the media I love, though many of them aren’t as widely visible as the ones found on television. Most of my favourites come from books or indie content on the internet with a limited audience. On TV and popular streaming services, especially in Canada, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

In GLAAD’s most recent “Where We Are on TV” (2023-2024), they reported four asexual characters across streaming and cable: Sex Education’s O, Heartstopper’s Isaac, Heartbreak High’s Cash, and Big Mouth’s Elijah. At four characters, we see double the total from Todd’s ace-debut year—all of them found on Netflix, two carried over from the previous year—and still pitifully in the single-digits. The 2024 PTP Pink Paper report omitted data on asexuals as there was not sufficient ace representation in mainstream Canadian media.

A greater number of characters only have their asexuality confirmed by their creators rather than shown on screen. According to SpongeBob SquarePants creator, Stephen Hillenburg, in a 2005 People Magazine interview, he “never intended [SpongeBob] to be gay. I consider [him] to be almost asexual.” SpongeBob is asexual! Who knew? Many other creator-confirmed aces can be easily-missed by audiences, buried in interviews and old social media posts. The aces are out there—more of us than you’d think—but where are our storylines?

It’s tough work seeking out asexuals on screen. Alongside intersex and Two-Spirit, we’re still one of the most underrepresented queer identities on mainstream TV. Nearly a decade after he said “asexual,” Todd Chavez is still important to me, still my favourite character in western animation. He gave me the courage and the resources to express my pride and come out to my family by bravely embarking on his asexual journey. As the next generation tunes in to their favourite shows, I hope they find their Todd.

My mom told me that once, when I was a toddler, a stranger advised her to sign me up for modelling. My green eyes, medium-light skin, and curly dark brown hair gave me a certain look, they said, which was super in. My mom said no, despite the fact that mixed-race girls like myself were in demand.

Kimora Lee Simmons, who is Black and Asian, began modelling for Chanel when she was just 14 years old. It was the late 1980s, and soon, she was being mentored by Karl Lagerfeld, reportedly the first designer to put a mixed-race model on the Paris runway. Ten years later, she launched her own clothing brand, Baby Phat. It was an instant hit: people weren’t just obsessed with the clothes, but with Simmons herself wearing them down the runway.

By the early 2000s, when my toddler modelling career was put indefinitely on hold, being mixed-race in the industry was applauded: assuming, of course, that you were the right type of mix. Which is to say that your skin could be modified to suit whatever was most marketable at the moment. At the epicentre of this movement was America’s Next Top Model (ANTM), which Simmons would later be featured on as a judge. By the show’s second cycle, contestant April Wilkner’s half-Japanese, half-white race was regularly discussed. It wasn’t the only time race became a point of fashion on the show. The appearance of changing race through makeup and outfits was a challenge in cycle four.

Naima Mora, a mixed model whose background includes Black, Mexican, Native American and Irish, had her skin lightened with makeup and was posed alongside a blonde, blue-eyed toddler. Mora ultimately won the season. Her look echoed the sentiment across the modelling industry and Hollywood in general: it was the latest trend to be able to look at someone and not be able to tell where they were from.

In 2004, the Guardian dubbed this phenomenon Generation EA— ethnically ambiguous. “The fact that you can’t be sure who they are is part of their seductiveness,” casting agent Melanie Ross said in the article. What was attractive or “exotic” about my mom, a white woman from Ontario, or my dad, a Black man from New York, wasn’t something that I would fully grasp until I was a teenager. I didn’t want to be considered exotic or alluring or sexy as a mixed-race child. I wanted to see a family like mine on TV.

In elementary school, I was the only mixed kid. It was isolating: some kids made fun of my curly hair, others accused me of being adopted. Complete strangers would ask “What are you?” without even asking my name. Later, though, it seemed super common. In high school, there were at least three of us in just the school band. By the time I moved to Toronto for university, I had met tons of people who came from mixed backgrounds like mine.

Despite this, and despite growing up seeing that my identity was trendy in modelling, Hollywood tells a different story. The only time I saw a mixed family on TV actually exploring their identity was in a cartoon called American Dragon: Jake Long, and as much as I loved seeing the misadventures of a boy who was half dragon on his mom’s Chinese side, it wasn’t the same. It’s not that there aren’t mixed people on TV or in movies: Mariah Carey, Rashida Jones, Zendaya, Halle Berry, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Keanu Reeves are all examples. They also all have one thing in common: they have lighter complexions, allowing them to weave through roles easier than darker- skinned Black actors.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Viola Davis spoke candidly about not only missing out on jobs because of her darker skin tone, but also how easy it is to get cast in stereotypical roles. “If I wanted to play a mother whose family lives in a low-income neighbourhood and my son was a gang member who died in a drive-by shooting, I could get that made,” she said in the interview. “Let’s be honest. If I had my same features and I were five shades lighter, it would just be a little bit different.”

Colourism—the specific way that skin tone plays into prejudice and discrimination—is perpetuated by the global beauty industry. It acts within the realm of systemic racism: it’s not just that Black people are more likely to experience discrimination and racism, it is that within race, people with darker skin tones are more likely to struggle when compared to other people of colour. As a light-skinned mixed person, I benefit from this system whether I like it or not.

Season five, episode 10 of Black-ish discussed colourism in a way that TV hadn’t seen before. Protagonist Dre Johnson (played by Anthony Anderson), said: “Because we look different, we get discriminated against differently. Like in the case of O.J. [Simpson]. A magazine made his skin look darker to make him seem more villainous.” (That magazine was TIME magazine.)

Black-ish (and its spin-offs), which aired countless episodes focused on racial discrimination, has also been accused of perpetuating colourism itself, partly because of the show’s choice in casting biracial actors in the roles of Dre’s children, while also casting mixed women as the stereotypical exotic love interests.

The casting of mixed actors has sometimes been controversial. In 2016, actress Zoe Saldaña came under fire for her portrayal of Nina Simone in a biopic. Saldaña, mixed with Black and Latina ancestry, was accused of blackface after it was revealed that she was made to darken her skin and wear a prosthetic nose for the role. But at the same time, Saldaña has openly rejected the idea that just because she’s Latina, she can’t also be Black. “There’s no one way to be Black,” she said in an interview with Allure magazine. “I’m Black the way I know how to be.” (She has since apologized for playing the role.)

Saldaña’s words address the complexity of race, something that Hollywood has struggled to grasp. Though it’s common for celebrities to be mixed, they’re almost never cast as such. I would never deny Saldaña’s identity as Black; the issue is that actors aren’t given the opportunity to showcase their complexities in their roles. This contributes to toxic beauty standards of colourism and sends a horrific message, declaring that you’re only as beautiful as your skin’s ability to be marketable to the latest trend. More often than not, the trends involve lighter skin mimicking Eurocentric beauty standards.

In Hollywood, it’s easier to push mixed people into a single box. In Black-ish, the box is Black. For some actors, like Dwayne Johnson, the box depends on the project. His mix of Black and Samoan has allowed him to play roles from ancient Egyptian king (The Scorpion King, 2002) to Greek legend (Hercules, 2014) to Middle Eastern antihero (Black Adam, 2022). But usually, Johnson’s characters don’t have a background where their cultures are discussed, leaving it up to the audience to interpret.

Henry Golding, the British Malaysian star of Crazy Rich Asians, has said people told him that he wasn’t “Asian enough” to play the lead in the movie. “Just because by blood I’m not full Asian doesn’t mean I can’t own my Asianness,” he said in an interview with Bustle. He also said when he played a romantic lead in A Simple Favour alongside Blake Lively—his ideal role— the character’s race wasn’t specified: it was just a character written as a person. “It was never written as an Asian role— it’s never really highlighted that I am an Asian person married to Blake Lively. But that’s what it should be like,” he said.

But what about the mixed-race people who can’t fit comfortably into the ethnically ambiguous box? While actors like Dwayne Johnson and Golding can blend in, there’s more backlash for mixed people who aren’t Hollywood heartthrobs. Names play into casting just as much as skin tone does. Chloe Bennet, who is half white, half Chinese, struggled for years to book acting roles under her birth surname, Wang. The first audition she took after changing her name resulted in a job, she said back in 2016.

To be mixed-race is to be prepared to constantly contradict yourself. It’s always having to repeat yourself when someone accuses you of being too much of one thing or not enough of the other. It’s about never really seeing yourself accurately represented in media because there is no one way to look or be mixed. It’s unfair to say all mixed people in Hollywood should be forced to prioritize one half of their culture while simultaneously trying to prove that the other half exists. Pretending that mixed people aren’t mixed can perpetuate colourism. Dark-skinned Black girls deserve to feel beautiful and see themselves too.

You can’t choose your genetics, but you can choose to call out injustice. Whether we see ourselves reflected in media or not, there are infinite ways to celebrate culture while rejecting the idea that lighter skin is better.

Photo ©Disney Channel/Courtesy Everett Collection

In the summer of 2008, I became obsessed with High School Musical.

My family and I were “visiting” my paternal uncle in Canada at the time. I say “visit,” because it was more of a two-month trial for my parents to gauge whether or not they wanted to immigrate here from Lahore, Pakistan.

During the days, my aunt and uncle took our family to downtown Toronto for sightseeing. At night, they let us make a small dent in their enormous collection of Bollywood films.

During a visit to the Toronto Public Library’s Yorkville branch while on a break from sightseeing, I picked up High School Musical: The Junior Novel, a novelization of the Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) of the same name. After reading (and re-reading) the novel, and repeatedly flipping through the eight pages of photos of the movie’s cast inside it, I became obsessed with High School Musical.

High School Musical was released on the Disney Channel two years earlier, in 2006. The film is, as the name suggests, a musical set in a high school, one named East High. Its plot centres on Troy Bolton and Gabriella Montez, who first meet at a New Year’s Eve party—during which they discover their love of song together—and later at East High where Gabriella is a transfer student.

Though Troy is the captain of the basketball team and Gabriella eventually joins the scholastic decathlon team, they both decide to follow their newfound love of music and audition for the school musical together. Their decision inspires admiration from other students, who also decide to reveal their secret passions; derision from their friends, who try their best to convince them to “Stick to the Status Quo” (a song from the movie); and outrage from the drama club royalty, Sharpay and Ryan Evans, who try to sabotage them.

The movie premiered to an audience of 7.7 million, the highest-rated premiere for a DCOM ever at the time. Fifteen years after its release, it remains the ninth most-viewed premiere of a DCOM, while its sequel, High School Musical 2, claims the first spot with 17.2 million. It has left behind an enormous legacy.

The film spawned two sequels (the third film even received a theatrical release grossing almost $253 million), three foreign adaptations, a spin-off film, a concert tour, a sing-along reunion, an ice show, an actual staged musical, a reality competition, a book series, several video games, and a Disney+ TV show that launched the career of pop star Olivia Rodrigo.

In the novel, Troy and Gabriella feel “a spark of electricity” while singing to each other that leads them to almost kiss as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve. My prurient, pubescent brain became so fixated with that scene that I re-read it nearly every single day before returning the book. My fixation eventually evolved into a desperate need to watch its source material and witness the chemistry between Troy and Gabriella for myself.

However, since two years had passed since the film’s release, Family Channel—which owned the rights to broadcast Disney Channel shows and films in Canada—did not air a rerun and my cousins didn’t own the DVD.

When I requested them to reserve a copy at the library, I found out that it had a months-long waiting list. When I sought out the DVD in stores, its price—$19.99, as I recall—seemed exorbitant when I converted it into Pakistani rupees. When I tried to search for snippets of it on YouTube, all I found were lyric videos featuring stills from the movie.

When I finally returned to Pakistan, bought the DVD—and its sequel, which had been released a year earlier—and watched the movie, my desperation didn’t dull; it matured into mania.

I turned on the subtitles during the songs so I could write down the lyrics to memorize later, rewinding the scenes so I could get the number of getchas in “Get’cha Head in the Game” right. I practiced the “Bop to the Top” dance routine in my bathroom—my DVD had a dance practice in the bonus features. I recorded the songs onto a cassette so I could listen to them without having to set up my DVD player.

I slobbered over Zac Efron, squealed after learning that he and Vanessa Hudgens were dating and shipped—though I didn’t know that was the term for it—them together. I scoured the web for any and all news of High School Musical 3—which was released in October that year—during the short bursts in which I was allowed to use my parents’ computer. I begged my mom to buy me books from the High School Musical book series and became the proud owner of High School Musical 2: The Junior Novel, as well as four other books in the series.

I probably would have accumulated more had I not suddenly been forced to give most of my books away. My parents had enjoyed their free trial and decided to immigrate to Canada.

My parents moved our family from Lahore, Pakistan to Toronto eight months later in March 2009, in the middle of my Grade 6 school year. Though I was devastated to leave all my friends and extended family behind, I decided to view the move as the “Start of Something New” that Troy and Gabriella had sung about. However, when I arrived in Canada, I found out that High School Musical had left me woefully underprepared to navigate the North American school system.

Though my family did have a DVD player (after numerous years of breaking and fixing our VHS player), we didn’t have cable. Thus, much of what I’d learned about North American schools aside from High School Musical was through brief snippets of sitcoms on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, depending on what my maternal cousins—who did have cable—felt like watching.

What I’d gleaned from reruns of Kenan & Kel, Kim Possible, That’s So Raven, Phil of the Future, Drake & Josh, American Dragon: Jake Long, and Hannah Montana was that all North American schools had cafeterias that were filled with tripping hazards, science labs where experiments always went awry, and locker-laden hallways where conversations, confessions, and confrontations happened—sometimes at the same time.

This was in stark contrast to my school in Pakistan, where students brought all their textbooks and notebooks to school every day in heavy backpacks, which was probably why they stayed in one classroom throughout the day unless it was for music, gym, or lunch, and ate the aforementioned lunch in the school yard.

I’d also learnt that North American students had surprise pop quizzes, free (but not always appetizing) lunches, and no uniforms; that every school had a teacher who hated you, an athlete that everyone worshiped, and a popular blonde girl who never hesitated to sabotage you; and that it didn’t take long for new students to fit in.

I envisioned myself as Gabriella at my new school. I had brown hair and brown eyes; I had the grades and the love for reading; and I had a decent voice—I had been part of the school choir in Pakistan. I failed to take into account, however, that I also had the label of “immigrant” attached to me.

As an immigrant student, I spent several months figuring out whether pencil crayons were pencils or crayons (they were coloured pencils), what Language Arts was (English), and why students had to change into gym clothes (in Pakistan, we just had to change our shoes). As a Muslim immigrant student from Pakistan, I fielded microaggressions about my “good English,” why I didn’t wear the hijab (I started wearing it full-time in Grade 8), and how I was so smart.

This experience, I later found out, was not limited to me; many new immigrant students in North America often struggle to overcome the sociocultural and linguistic differences present between their native country and their new country. These struggles are further amplified if the students are racialized and belong to minority faiths, given how deeply Christianity and xenophobia are entrenched in the entire North American education system, including Canada.

Black students have their hair and bodies policed, are streamed into lower education tracks, and are suspended at a disproportionate rate in Canadian schools. Middle Eastern and Muslim students are called terrorists; South Asian girls are bullied for their body hair; and East Asian students are mocked for their eye shape. Nearly all racialized students are teased for their “weird-smelling” food, their perceived lack of fluency speaking English, or their cultural or religious traditions (such as oiling their hair) in Canadian schools.

Whether it is due to their race, religion, or culture, or an intersection of all three, BIPOC students often face both covert and overt racism, not only at the hands of their fellow students but also teachers and school staff.

Despite how common this experience is, however, immigrant and refugee students are almost never represented in mainstream media. When they are, they are often Long Duk Dong-esque figures used as punchlines because of their “weird” food and even weirder behaviour.

Though the casts of movies and TV shows aimed at teens have been slowly diversifying in the decade since I immigrated, the BIPOC actors almost always play supporting characters to white leads and the movies and TV shows they star in almost never capture the racism and microaggressions many BIPOC students experience in the education system.

This is also the case in the High School Musical cinematic universe. As long as the student in question is kind, hardworking, and tries their best, they can achieve everything they want. The closest High School Musical comes to showing BIPOC students’ experience in the education system is the drama teacher Ms. Darbus’s dismissive attitude toward Troy’s best friend and basketball teammate, Chad Danforth, who is Black.

Many of my teachers, throughout both middle and high school, demonstrated an amplified version of this attitude. Ms. Darbus’s attitude was limited to telling Chad to settle down in class and implying in conversations with his coach that Chad’s athletic accomplishments outweighed his academic ones. My teachers, however, regularly lambasted racialized students—especially Black boys—for ordinary offences such as being late, wearing caps, and chewing gum inside the classroom; derided them for being “loud” and “disruptive;” and treated them with decidedly less empathy than their white students. I vividly remember my Grade 8 teacher rolling her eyes at several female Black students for cheering too loudly during a school event.

Though I couldn’t earn Gabriella’s popularity, I did eventually earn her reputation of being my high school’s “freaky genius girl”—though I was more freaky than genius.

I couldn’t participate in many extracurriculars like the students in High School Musical because they required both time and energy. I needed someone to give me a ride to and from rehearsals, games, and performances; someone to pay for jerseys, equipment, instruments, entry fees, and hospital bills in case of injuries; and someone to persuade my teachers to give me extensions for deadlines that I would miss for these extracurriculars. I felt hesitant asking my parents for this, knowing how hard they were already working.

Thus, I decided to excel in the classroom instead, causing students in my grade to mock me behind my back for being a teacher’s pet. They didn’t realize that this was the only way to ensure that I received the same opportunities as my white counterparts and that despite it, I still often got passed over for opportunities, awards, and empathy in favour of my white peers. I once had a teacher yell at me to go find a park bench when I fell asleep in class after staying up all night to finish assignments.

Thirteen years have passed since I first became obsessed with High School Musical, six since I graduated high school. Yet sometimes I still seethe with anger at the callousness that I and my fellow immigrant, racialized students experienced—and continue to experience—in the Canadian education system. I wish I could go back in time, armed with the knowledge and confidence that I now possess, and stand up to the teachers and students who doubted, dismissed, and derided me and my peers.

Though some Canadian school boards now offer anti-racism support—after numerous demands from racialized students and parents—the Canadian education system continues to harm and disadvantage immigrant and BIPOC students.

Fifteen years ago, Troy and Gabriella and the rest of the East High Wildcats assured the world that “We’re All in
This Together.” They were wrong.

Photo by INSTAR Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Every week, when I was a teenager, I used to squirrel my hand-me-down laptop away to my bedroom and scour the internet’s sketchy streaming sites for the latest episode of Gossip Girl. (I couldn’t watch it on the family TV—after all, it was, per its marketing, “every parent’s nightmare.”) From quippy dialogue, to attempts at edgy subject matter, to nonsensical use of cell phones, it was a show that was completely of the 2000s.

The first season aired in 2007, in the back half of the decade known—in the parlance of zippy tabloid journalism—as the Naughty Aughties. It was supposed to be an age of irreverence, the age of snark: it was biting, it was catty, it was mean. From burgeoning blogs to reality TV, so much of that decade’s entertainment was predicated on the appeal of laughing at rather than with.

That world can feel very distant these days. Our current pop culture landscape is for the large part one of feel-good shows, peppy positivity, and political awareness. When a reboot of my favourite teen soap dropped this July on HBO Max (and streamed on Crave in Canada), it looked a little different. This time the clutch of privileged Upper East Side teens are presented as racially diverse and fluid in gender and sexuality. Where the publicity for the original focused on shock, scandal, and designer clothing, this new version, creator Joshua Safran told Variety, was to “tell more queer stories.”

Gossip Girl is not the only ’00s show hitting small screens for the second time. HBO also plans to drop new episodes of their Sex and the City revival, And Just Like That… this fall, minus Samantha, but with the added promise of three new series regulars played by women of colour. Meanwhile, a reality show entirely conceived around gawking at fat people’s bodies, The Biggest Loser, premiered a rebooted version in 2020 that purported to be about a “holistic … look at wellness.”

But have these shows really changed, or are they a product of our neoliberal moment?

Referring to the contemporary renaissance of 19th century liberalism, an ideology that espoused laissez-faire economics and minimal government interference, neoliberalism is underpinned by a belief in the necessity of sustained economic growth. In our late capitalist era, this mindset has also taken on the trappings of socially liberal positions, resulting in hypocrisy—acknowledgement of systemic issues while pushing “solutions” that rest on individual actions. We live in a time where our governments prefer to offer a sugar-coating of palatability to bitter pills like widespread economic inequality. And in an effort to engage more progressive young demographics, so do television networks.

While the new iteration of Gossip Girl aims to be more diverse, there are no fat characters, no characters with disabilities, and as Refinery29’s Kathleen Newman-Breemang points out, the actors of colour cast in the new series are all light skinned. The handful of LGBTQ2S+ characters act out scenarios ranging from the mundane (marital spats) to the downright troubling (student-teacher hook-ups)—not so much the “queer stories” promised as a rehash of established heteronormative tropes from the show’s original run.

Queer Eye, which was rebooted by Netflix in 2018, takes a slightly more holistic approach to revamping its source material. The original run, which aired from 2003 to 2007 and originally went by the title Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, was predicated on the dual stereotype of the straight man as slobbish and emotionally disconnected and the gay man as fashionable, neat, successful, and emotionally intelligent. While the show made strides in representing a certain (very narrow) kind of queer identity in the pop culture mainstream, it typically shied away from political statement, representing any problems plaguing its “straight guys” as mere personal failings—a lack of personal style, an uncultivated sense of taste.

While the rebooted version introduces some racial and cultural diversity, the “Fab Five,” the series’ makeover experts, by no means embody the breadth of LGBTQ2S+ communities that use the queer label. The show has, however, captured our current zeitgeist of self-love, body acceptance, and self-care.

The version of these things that the show peddles are divorced from their radical progressive roots. The show co-opts terms like “self-care”—originally coined by Black feminist poet Audre Lorde. The makeover subjects—the show calls them “heroes”—are suffering, we are told, because they don’t love themselves enough, they don’t take time for themselves, they judge themselves too harshly. Hair products and interior decorating then become supposed radical acts, imbued with the power
to shift one’s entire life.

But, many times in the series, it quickly becomes clear how hollow these concepts are. Episodes where the Fab Five help out a young climate change activist or a previously unhoused community worker quickly beg the question, how does any of this address systemic problems?

In July 2021, Netflix released a one-off episode of the show on YouTube, accessible to anyone with or without a Netflix subscription. The episode, sponsored by Delta Air Lines, featured a 26-year-old Delta employee living a spartan lifestyle as he struggled to pay off his student loans. The makeover subject, William Holmes, says in the episode that he is burdened by student debt like “most millennials,” and that it is “really slowing our generation down” in life.

For millennials who have been repeatedly told that financial security would be within our grasp if we gave up luxuries like avocado toast, the show’s advice is downright infuriating. The Fab Five decide Holmes’s main problem is that he’s not “being in the present and having fun,” as the show’s culture expert Karamo Brown puts it. In the end, Holmes gets a new wardrobe and new decor for the bedroom in the house he shares with several roommates, as well as a smattering of advice to “be more confident” and “[go] out and see the city, because life is good.” There is no offer to pay off his debt, let alone a message about the broken systems that created the student debt crisis that Holmes is a part of. Unable to grapple with the reality that lifestyle cannot save a life, the show unearths problems and makes vague offers to solve them with a Band-Aid solution.

Some recent reboots attempt to capitalize on the politics of the current moment without addressing their past misdeeds. Friends, the juggernaut sitcom that ran 10 seasons, ending in 2004, depicted an almost entirely white New York City, and faced questions and criticisms around its lack of diversity during its original run. One of the show’s few Black employees, writers’ assistant Amaani Lyle, filed a lawsuit alleging a culture of racism and sexism behind the scenes at the show. Rewatching it on streaming services 20 years later, many younger viewers have bristled not only at the lack of diversity, but at its incessant homophobic jokes and homophobic and transphobic plotlines.

The 2021 Friends reunion did not address these issues, instead recruiting an assortment of celebrities, political figures, and fans to talk about why Friends had been so special. A collection of people including Malala Yousafzai, the women’s education activist and youngest-ever Nobel laureate, talked about how the show had brought them through lonely, difficult times in their lives. It’s not just a show, they suggest—it has more power than that.

Yet, the show’s importance seemingly does not cut both ways—for many people who, for years, brought up their problems with the show’s content, the implication was that the show couldn’t possibly have power, that it was just a sitcom.

A similar case is Project Runway, the fashion design reality show that first aired in 2004. At the time, the direction of the show was heavily shaped by producer Harvey Weinstein, who saw it, according to a 2017 LA Times report, not only as a vehicle to put a bunch of models on TV, but to meet them himself. Along with shots of young models in their underwear, the show often featured contestants insulting plus-size models, and even using a transphobic slur as a catchphrase.

After Weinstein was brought down by a wave of sexual assault and harassment allegations in 2017, the show was retooled and relaunched with a new host, model Karlie Kloss, and new judges. This new version attempted to incorporate modern criticisms of the fashion industry by using a range of model sizes and setting challenges based on sustainable design. But, again, behind the surface-level changes, the show makes no attempt to dismantle the industry that supports it. In one 2020 episode, a contestant made a quip about Kloss’s connection to Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner (Kloss is married to Kushner’s brother) and was promptly sent home.

The catty shows of the 2000s have been declawed, but what we are delivered so often is neoliberal rhetoric without any progressive substance. So much of TV today has the gleam of corporate art—cold, frictionless, inoffensive, but insubstantial.

Nostalgia is often cited as the cause for our cultural obsession with reboots and sequels, but perhaps there is another drive, not to revisit the gleeful meanness of the 2000s but to surgically remove the painful elements of a property of which we remain fond. Perhaps some reboots come from an attempt to turn painful artifacts into empowering ones, not entirely disingenuously. But the problem is a constant idealizing: if not of the past, through the lens of nostalgia, then of the present, serving up a race-blind, post-feminist, progressive world, where all that needs to change is your skincare routine.

Neoliberalism is, in a way, the ultimate reboot. Reboots are safe. They’re comforting in their familiarity, and they offer the illusion of change without the hard work of making that change. Like signage for condo developments promising community growth while gentrifying a neighbourhood, or bank-sponsored floats in Pride parades: a progressive veneer hiding something more sinister.

Photo by Doug Peters / Alamy Stock Photo

“Sometimes people’s … personal life becomes bigger than their work,” says pop star Britney Spears at one point during Framing Britney Spears, the New York Times-produced documentary released in February 2021. Though the complaint backgrounds a montage of Spears being chased around by paparazzi in the late 2000s, it may as well have been issued on the topic of more recent discussions about her, where her ceaseless legal problems have often threatened to eclipse her actual art.

Directed by Samantha Stark, the film serves as the sixth instalment in the Hulu/FX docuseries The New York Times Presents, and is broadly concerned with the origins and contours of the legal conservatorship (or guardianship) that has governed Spears’s life for nearly 14 years. The star was placed under a temporary conservatorship of both her estate and her person in February of 2008 after an extended period of personal and legal struggles, which culminated in two involuntary psychiatric holds at the top of the year. The arrangement was made indefinite that October, and while it remains in place at the time of writing, Jamie Spears, Britney’s father and former co-conservator, officially filed a petition to end it in September 2021.

A secondary tale that emerges in Framing Britney Spears is that of #FreeBritney, the fan-led movement that has sought to liberate Spears from the conservatorship, concerned for her personal well-being and believing that she’s being taken advantage of financially. (Former co-conservator Andrew Wallet once called the arrangement a “hybrid business model” while petitioning for a raise, and Forbes recently estimated Jamie Spears to have earned at least $5 million before taxes from it.) #FreeBritney “runs from the innocuous to the extreme,” journalist Liz Day explains in the film. Some fans scrutinize and explain court documents; others look for what are supposedly hidden messages being posted by Spears on Instagram.

And though the movement can be conspiracy-like in nature, at least some fan speculation has turned out to be correct. In audio from a June 2021 hearing, which was transcribed by Variety, Spears spoke publicly for the first time in years about her legal arrangement, telling judge Brenda Penny, “I truly believe this conservatorship is abusive.” Among other things, Spears alleged that her handlers have prevented her from visiting friends who live only a short distance away, that she’s been medicated and forced to work against her will, and that she hasn’t been allowed to have an intrauterine device removed even though she’d like to have another baby. (Spears has two teenage sons with ex-husband Kevin Federline.)

Where Stark’s documentary most succeeds is in efficiently recapping the events that led up to June 2021, giving viewers the necessary legal and cultural context to fully understand the conservatorship. And yet, because of that same efficiency, the film has to make necessary omissions for the sake of its runtime. One of these is Spears’s actual body of work—the thing that made her a beloved cultural figure in the first place. A few words are said about her 1998 video for “…Baby One More Time.” Former MTV VJ Dave Holmes notes of her meteoric rise that “she produced excellent videos.” But then we drop the subject completely; it’s established that Spears is working constantly through the 2000s and 2010s, including performing a wildly successful Las Vegas residency from 2013 through 2017, but the art itself takes a back seat to her snowballing legal problems.

And, perhaps because the film has driven so much of this year’s conversation about Spears, that elision of her work has carried over to what feels like the majority of social media posts and think pieces about her. This is particularly unfortunate in her case because her art has been the main channel through which she’s attempted to take back control over her life and narrative in the more than two decades that she’s been famous. On numerous occasions, she’s used her music and music videos to plead for respect and privacy, to laugh at herself when it was clear that she wasn’t going to get any, and even to carry out revenge fantasies against people who’ve hurt her. To downplay this, as the film does, is to inadvertently and mistakenly paint her as a passive figure in all that she’s been through.   

Spears has been known for singing about fame and its complications since as early as her second album, 2000’s Oops!… I Did It Again. The film features multiple montages of her fielding invasive questions from journalists and the public during her imperial years, with Spears addressing her body and self-publicized desire to remain a virgin until marriage. But, while we see that her music is breaking records worldwide, there’s no indication that said music quickly became about being a young woman navigating young adulthood in the public eye.

In 2000’s “Lucky,” she tells the story of a starlet who can’t figure out why she’s so sad even though there’s technically nothing missing in her life. “I’m so fed up with people telling me to be someone else but me,” she sings on 2001’s “Overprotected.” She opens “I’m a Slave 4 U,” from the same year, with an accusation: “All you people look at me like I’m a little girl.” Media scrutiny of Spears around this time could indeed be quite horrid, but an equally important part of the story is how she capitalized on it, when she could just as easily have recoiled.

Tabloid coverage of the star entered a new phase in 2002, following her breakup with fellow pop star Justin Timberlake. His music video for “Cry Me a River,” released in November of that year, depicts him breaking into the home of a Spears lookalike and watching her shower from the shadows. The ex-lover in his lyrics is implied to have cheated on him, a narrative that the press ran with. “He essentially weaponizes the video for one of his singles to incriminate her in the demise of the relationship,” critic Wesley Morris summarizes in the film. But Stark chooses to end that particular chapter there, skipping over what Spears did next, which was respond.

In her 2004 video for “Everytime,” Spears is depicted as one half of a famous couple feeling the strain of omniscient paparazzi. In a scuffle with photographers and frenzied fans, she’s hit in the head with a camera. She doesn’t realize that she’s been wounded until she’s in a hotel bathtub, where she loses consciousness and eventually dies. The camera-as-weapon metaphor was arguably heavy-handed, but the video served as a reminder to the public that there was a real person at the centre of this insatiability. Its most haunting moment has a man clamouring for an autograph while Spears is carried into an ambulance on a stretcher. There’s no retaliation at Timberlake, just a shifting of perspective.

Some challenges would be trickier to recast artistically. Spears’s so-called breakdown proper is generally considered to have lasted from late 2006, when she filed for divorce from Federline, until February of 2008, when the conservatorship took effect. The film covers this period in excruciating detail, from the week that she famously shaved all of her hair off at a Los Angeles salon, to losing custody of her sons, to various rehab and psychiatric ward stints. Not covered, of course, is the work that she released while this was happening.

On 2007’s Blackout, there was no attempt at deflection. “Piece of Me,” the album’s second single, has Spears instructing any critics to “get in line with the paparazzi who’s flipping me off / Hoping I’ll resort to some havoc, end up settling in court.” The song pokes fun at the “hot mess” persona that had by that point made her a favourite punching bag for late-night television, and one of the tabloid industry’s biggest cash cows. As with some of her early work, it was as if Spears recognized the constant surveillance and unflattering coverage to be inevitable, and turned her attention to how she could exercise agency within that dynamic.

The film abbreviates the next decade or so, giving us a montage of Spears making television appearances, touring, promoting fragrances, and winning awards for her work. “She’s living the life of a busy pop singer, and yet we’re also being told that she’s at risk constantly,” says journalist Joe Coscarelli, referring to the conservatorship remaining in place. Her work during this time continued to reference her bumpier years, and often emphatically. In the video for “Hold It Against Me,” from 2011’s Femme Fatale, her fall from grace is represented as a literal plummet, the star surrounded by monitors playing music videos from her cultural peak. In its climax, she battles a double of herself, seemingly alluding to her
own demons.

A more complicated entry was the video for “I Wanna Go,” from the same album. Spears plays herself in a revenge fantasy targeted at the media, cussing journalists out in a press conference before wreaking havoc outside the courthouse. At one point, she hams it up for a photographer before smashing his camera on the ground. When she finds herself cornered by several more, a long-corded microphone appears, which she swings around to violently take each of them out. While the metaphor is once again unsubtle, it corroborates the idea that Spears thinks of her music as her main form of resistance.

But the same video happens to end on a less cathartic note. After she’s rescued from the onslaught of press by a friend, who begins escorting her away from the scene, he turns back to face the lens with an evil expression, diabolical laughter heard in his head. The shot is an homage to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video from 1983, which ends with an identical moment. But it can also be read as a suggestion that Spears was skeptical of the people she was being told to trust.

Since her debut in the late 1990s, the star has been plagued by the narrative that she’s malleable, an empty vessel through which other people’s ideas and wants can be communicated. That line of thinking, combined with evidence supplied by tabloids that she needed help, allowed the conservatorship to go unquestioned by many people prior to this year. But as Spears’s former team member, Kevin Tancharoen, says in the film, “That idea that Britney is a puppet who just gets moved around and gets told what to do is incredibly inaccurate.”

Taken together, Spears’s artistic output paints a picture of a woman who doesn’t take anything lying down, a fact that can co-exist with the many instances—personal, cultural, and legal—in which she’s been unambiguously targeted. Downplaying that work in discussions about her runs the risk of buying into the idea of her as vulnerable and absentminded, just as her legal opponents have spent almost a decade and a half insisting she is. “Believe me,” she sings toward the end of “What U See (Is What U Get),” a deeper cut from her sophomore album. “You’ll be looking for trouble / If you hurt me.”

Illustration by Deshi Deng

I love sci-fi. I have since I was a kid, and I especially love weird cyberpunk movies. Lately, though, the main thing I notice in sci-fi is creators’ inability to envision a world without violence against sex workers. This really hit me watching both the 1982 film Blade Runner and the 2018 Netflix original Altered Carbon. Both utilize a similar film noir in a dystopian future premise, which leads to having similarities in how sex work is viewed in their stories. Altered Carbon has sex workers as an integral part of the plot and Blade Runner utilizes pleasure bot gynoids as the villains and a more reserved, ladylike gynoid as the main love interest. They were released 36 years apart and yet nothing has changed when it comes to the perception of sex work in either. Once I started paying more attention, I started noticing the contempt sci-fi holds for sex workers beyond just these two works.

In sci-fi, the class divide between the ultra rich and the rest of the world is made abundantly clear. They show us the nice, clean, sterile environments where the nice, clean, usually white, ultra rich live and contrast that with the violent, chaotic, dirty slums of the rest of the city or world. In these slums there are bright, colourful images of women shaking their bodies around. Billboards, holographic projections, and full service sex workers are everywhere in the streets. It’s a male fantasy hyped up on gigabytes with humanoid, artificially intelligent cyborgs who can appear and disappear as needed. You can have it all, as long as you can pay.

Within two episodes of Altered Carbon, protagonist Takeshi Kovacs befriends a sex worker named Alice to gain some knowledge about the case he is investigating, just for her to die once he has the information he needs. Alice is never seen in the show again and never given any real moment of mourning. Sex workers are the ones who experience violence and death because, due to their work, there is no regard for them as complex human beings.

The series revolves around the idea that bodies are just a fleshy host for a human consciousness stored on a futuristic disc that can be removed, and yet I don’t recall seeing people doing extreme sports to the point of body death, or having their bodies used in violent ways as the sex workers do. Their bodies, and the consciousnesses within, just don’t matter enough to be valued or have their deaths investigated.

Sci-fi often relies on the concept of improved bodies, whether it’s cybernetic body mods or completely fake robotic bodies. This brings up the idea of female androids, known as gynoids, being made specifically to fulfill a male fantasy, as Rachael was in Blade Runner. Rachael was made by Tyrell, the creator of the machines, to provide companionship and to test how they develop with false memories. The gynoid comes up often in sci-fi; the first appearance can be found in Metropolis, a film from 1927 where a robot is given skin so she can replicate a human and work as an exotic dancer. Since then gynoids have been used in sci-fi to be the perfect woman, submissive and ready for sex at all times.

Androids, such as Data from Star Trek, are seen accomplishing hard goals, completing tasks that are difficult for humans, and furthering their careers. They are created to do what man can do and surpass them. They are expected to learn the meaning of being human and reflect back important truths for humanity. Gynoids are made to be used, to be tested, to see how far they can be pushed and broken. When Data makes a daughter, Lal, she is put through a series of tests until her brain literally breaks down like any other machine on the ship and subsequently dies all within one episode.

Within sci-fi works there is an implication of legality for sex work. The protagonists are law enforcement or law adjacent, some kind of voice of reason and a moral compass for the viewer. Yet they never care much about the sex workers and their working conditions. Their main concerns with the businesses revolve around the owners’ other shady side gigs rather than the violence the sex workers are experiencing. It informs the world-building narrative on how sex work is viewed within these so-called radical futures.

It’s an acceptable career, with people of many genders and races working within it. However, it is intrinsically accepted that they will experience violence and no one will do anything to stop it. But they aren’t owed respect for this job, they are disregarded and murdered constantly, and the protagonists—as well as other characters—don’t bat an eye at another dead sex worker.

Framing these bodies—these sex workers—in this way shows that, despite being advanced in technology, the future still remains incredibly bleak when it comes to sex worker rights. There is no care or consideration despite the generally perceived acceptance of the career. Which begs the question: if sex work is legal, why are there no protections? There are some burly men around the doors of the sex clubs preventing weapons from getting inside, but nothing to prevent sex workers being murdered. There do not seem to be any laws to fall back on to create safety, no defense systems beyond the doormen, nothing they can fall back on for help. Where are the alarm buttons? The safety weapons for the workers? The harsh punishments for clients who injure workers?

Consider for a moment Inara Serra, Firefly’s (2002) resident companion. Within the Firefly universe, sex work is presented as an honourable and enjoyable trade. Oftentimes throughout the series, ship engineer Kaylee Frye refers to the job as exciting and glamorous, even fantasizes about the opportunity to do the same work and hangs out with Inara to learn more about how the position works. We see her carefully screening potential clients, only picking those she wishes to spend time with. When a client threatens Inara, she quickly makes it clear that he will not have access to her or any other sex worker again. She has respect and standing both among the crew and in any society they visit, and she uses this to get the crew out of rough situations.

People respect Inara and the work she does; she has defenses and can have bad clients banned so they can’t see another sex worker again. This setting provides sex work legitimacy, safeties, respect, and schooling. There is a sea of sci-fi that takes influence from Firefly in other ways, yet it seems no others have ever wanted to utilize the concept that sex workers may at some point be considered worth protecting and even admiring.

Why have there been so few works that have bothered with an apparently all-too-radical idea that sex workers are, in fact, people and deserve to have rights, security, and safety in their trade?

Present-day sex workers are fighting for decriminalization, for safety, for protections—why can’t we see these things existing in these works? We’ve become so complacent in the idea that sex work is something that deserves aggression, violence, and even death, that even in these so-called advanced futures we can’t imagine otherwise. We still see sex workers as disposable because it is the easiest way to see them.

Without complexity, without stories and lives, just another plot device that is killed to give the main character reason and purpose.

Schoolgirl by Beige Blum

Growing up as a biracial child, Beige Blum longingly wished to see fictional characters and media personalities that resembled part of her identity. Being of German and Filipino descent, she grew up noticing that Asian characters hardly made an appearance on screen, and if they ever did, they were almost certainly not Southeast Asian. Instead, Blum remembers growing up with more East Asian pop culture influences, such as Sailor Moon, Pretty Cure, or even Disney’s Mulan. Despite not being Chinese, Blum remembers clinging onto Mulan as one of the few characters that more closely resembled her own identity.

“I think a lot of Asian kids could relate to Mulan. She was like our pinnacle Disney princess, like our figure,” Blum says.

Years later, Blum was still interested and influenced by East Asian pop culture, such as anime, J-pop, and K-pop. However, as an adult, Blum felt “unsettled” by how others in fandom and social media spaces perceived Asian pop culture figures. Online, she saw how Asian music idols were being infantilized, while real Asian women were referred to as “waifu.” “Waifu” refers to the term an anime fan uses to call a fictional character their wife. Seeing a word typically used to express adoration for a fictional anime crush be used on real Asian women made Blum uncomfortable.

“I don’t exist to be part of your fantasy. I’m not your waifu,” Blum says.

As an artist, she channelled these feelings into an artwork series titled Not Your Waifu, which explored the fetishization and racist stereotypes surrounding Asian women. Blum says her work aims to challenge the idea that Asian women have no autonomy and that they are submissive objects to be pushed around. Her work uses clever imagery, such as comparing Asian women to paper doll chains, to challenge the idea that Asian women are the same and interchangeable. In her piece titled Schoolgirl, a young woman is depicted having a schoolgirl uniform sewed onto her forcefully as she attempts to break free from the fetishization being imposed on her.

Blum hopes that her work will lead to individual self-reflection and that people will feel more comfortable calling out these misrepresentations.

“It’s so easy to just consume media and be like ‘It doesn’t affect me. It doesn’t affect anybody else. It’s just pop culture’ … I want people to see my artwork and think this is an issue,” she says.

Photo by Virginia Sherwood / © Bravo / Courtesy: Everett Collection Photographer

In its 15 years on television, here is a mere sample of the delicious moments Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise has come to be known for: New York housewife Aviva Drescher pulling off her prosthetic leg and throwing it across a room while shouting, “The only thing that is artificial or fake about me is this!”; New Jersey housewife Teresa Giudice viciously flipping a table during a fight; New York’s Kelly Bensimon having a meltdown while on vacation with the other women while claiming fellow housewife Bethenny Frankel was conspiring to kill her; New Jersey husbands Joe Giudice and Joe Gorga tackling each other after one called the other’s wife “scum,” inadvertently revealing Gorga’s spray-on hair; Atlanta’s NeNe Leakes tearing a producer’s shirt and allegedly choking him during a party; and Frankel having a nervous breakdown declaring “Life is not a cabaret.” Honestly, for those of us who follow these women like a religion, it just might be.

Which also makes it all the more difficult to convince non-believers that the franchise is as ground-breaking and feminist television as, say, Big Little Lies or Broad City. Spanning 10 instalments (minus spin-offs and international iterations), including Orange County, New York, Atlanta, Beverly Hills, and Potomac, The Real Housewives is an undeniable institution. Still, it’s never managed to shake off the labels—“toxic,” “trash”—stamped onto it by those who have likely not seen more than a single episode (if that) and have a habit of convulsing at the sounds of women talking.

There is an explanation for this, the same one that has been trumpeted about since reality television found its footing in the early 1990s and into the 2000s, with MTV’s The Real World and CBS’s Survivor. Unlike crime procedurals, sitcoms, or drama, reality TV shows are often assumed to lack substance in favour of the superficial. Such is the stamp slapped onto much of anything in the pop culture world, which has long been trapped inside a limiting gender binary: anything of prestige lives in the masculine, while anything that deals in celebrity lives in the feminine. Reality TV, then, has been sanctioned a feminized property, to be consumed only by women and gay men. (It’s no coincidence, by the way, that those are two marginalized demographics.) While sports—reality’s closest counterpart within the binary—are for straight cis men; sweat, endurance, ass-slapping, and all.

In an interview, Kristen Warner, associate professor of journalism and creative media at the University of Alabama, says the need to make this distinction is rooted in the world of soap operas and melodrama, which are also sanctioned as belonging to women due to their “exaggerated” tone. She says, “There’s a general implicit disdain for work that targets women because it is often thought of as hysterical and emotional. Real Housewives caters to connections about community, women’s relationships with each other, with men, and their children, so it is always clicking toward that genre convention, which creates those responses. God forbid we think about all the things that women on these shows go through as something that can be teachable and valuable.”

Consider, for example, The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano, Mad Men’s Don Draper, and Breaking Bad’s Walter White, all of whom are beloved and admired for being bad men with broken hearts, who are forgiven for breaking the rules and tossing ethics out every window they pass by. Outside their tried and true demographic, these housewives are rarely granted such a read, despite redefining the concept of what a “housewife” is. These are women who have been through it all—domestic abuse, suicide, bankruptcy, infidelity, motherhood, divorce—and have built their own businesses, are raising daughters as single mothers, and are of an age well past their prime if it were up to any other television network.

But, while we place Soprano, Draper, and White on a pedestal for committing murder, assault, adultery, extortion, and money laundering, to name a few, we write off the housewives for flipping tables, throwing punches, and yanking wigs. These criticisms, by the way, come before the assessment of some of these women’s more recent indiscretions, which fall directly into Soprano, Draper, and White territory, with Salt Lake City housewife Jen Shah’s fraud allegations, Beverly Hills housewife Erika Jayne’s embezzlement allegations, and New Jersey housewife Teresa Giudice’s 2015 jailing for mail, wire, and bankruptcy fraud, which also led to her husband’s deportation. Soprano is cackling in his television grave.

It’s a blurring of the lines even noted feminist Gloria Steinem can’t get behind, having said on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live to the franchise’s creator and super-producer Andy Cohen himself, in 2013, that “[the series] is women—all dressed up and inflated and plastic surgeried and false bosomed … it is a minstrel show for women.” And while there is no mistaking that they can be brash, tacky ($25,000 for a pair of sunglasses!), and oh so ear-piercingly loud, and their choices offensive (supporting a husband faking cancer!), it’s also ignorant to say they are only this. For 15 years, these women have lived their lives on screen, experiencing the greatest heartbreak—from their partners’ deaths to their children moving out and on—and have showcased the powerful bond of lifelong friendships at an older age like no other television series has since Sex and the City. There is bad, certainly, but there is also tremendous good that comes with a side of laughter.

Just a few months after Steinem said those words, fellow (bad) feminist Roxane Gay appeared on the same show, disagreeing and saying, “I think that the Real Housewives franchises allow women to be their truest selves. We see the mess, we see their amazing friendships, and everything in between. When women are allowed to be their fullest selves, [it is] the most feminist thing we can do.” Because it carries so much weight, we tend to forget that feminism is just that simple, and is rooted in granting women complexity. Unfortunately, the screen rarely allows for anything other than good or evil when it comes to women, but that middle ground is exactly where Bravo has built a home.

That density is what makes these women real and relatable. That’s because the focus is not—despite how it may seem to the outsider—on appearance, wealth, and class. In fact, those are really only thin veneers for the stories within, which include everything from Frankel’s rising up from selling cupcakes in grocery store aisles to building a million-dollar lifestyle empire, to Sonja Morgan’s money pit mansion that exudes old money on the outside, but is falling apart on the inside, steeping her in debt, a broken family, depression and alcoholism. As writer Brian Moylan puts it in his book The Housewives: The Real Story Behind The Real Housewives, “There is a critique or counterbalance for just about everything somewhere in the great Bravo oeuvre.” It regularly reminds us that, as New York housewife Luann de Lesseps once sang, “money can’t buy you class”—or happiness.

And it’s those melodramatic moments where they say and do exactly what they want to that might be the strongest connective tissue between housewife and fan. As Warner explains, “that is the thing that brings us out of the didactic of good or bad and into the catharsis that these shows offer us as women who were raised and/or are stuck and abiding by certain ideologies.” In a sense, then, Real Housewives has no space for society’s growing love of respectability politics, which have never favoured the marginalized.

As yet another noted feminist, Camille Paglia, said during a talk at the Skirball Cultural Center in 2012, this franchise shows “the authentic ferocious energies of female sexuality” and, in this singular endeavour, functions as “anthropological documents” that make us more media literate through our consumption not only of the shows, but their cast reunions, aftershow, social media chatter, and the buzzing group chats where we dissect every moment and go over what we might have done, what we hope happens, and who we’re rooting for. As Moylan writes, “Since many Real Housewives aficionados hold all these events in their heads at the same time, it becomes possible to interpret the world through a million lenses at once.”

Another way in which The Real Housewives has long been strutting ahead of the rest of television is the way in which it features entirely Black casts, in the cases of The Real Housewives of Atlanta and of Potomac. Although the former has been one of the network’s highest rated instalments since it began in 2008, it’s also proved divisive, with many criticizing the franchise for showcasing now infamous moments when the women have physically lashed out at each other, perpetuating stereotypes of the “angry Black woman.” For Warner, though, this goes back to “the shame of complex women.” To begin with, there is an incredible dearth of Black women characters on screen, and The Real Housewives has provided a space that is not exclusive to “the Olivia Popes who are pedigreed and have educations, we’re talking Black women in everyday life who never really get seen, who have children, who may not have all the education, but do have street savvy, compelling personalities and interesting stories.”

Certainly, and particularly in the case of the franchise’s other instalments, there is still much work to be done in terms of representation. But, says Warner, when it comes to believing that these women might hinder us from future progress, “the reality is that if you think … Black women are loud, violent, or hypersexual, that’s because you’ve been conditioned into thinking it’s an accurate stereotype. And then it doesn’t matter how many degrees or how much money that housewife has if her getting upset can destroy all progress…. We blame them for perpetuating stereotypes when there’s no correlation to the causation; these things are happening because of how we are hierarchically represented in the world.” In other words, the Real Housewives are not making or breaking any of these stereotypes, but they are offering a spectrum of Black women a platform.

And, in doing so, building on that lively community of otherwise marginalized viewers who congregate several days a week to discuss the various instalments airing at each time, who take great pleasure in seeing powerful, shameless women do, say, and act the way they want in ways we can’t or aspire to.

One might even say, with their individual taglines, the series’ quick cuts and reaction shots, confessionals and gif-ability, The Real Housewives has long operated as a kind of televised comic book, reshaping another genre that has never “belonged” to us. Why, then, can’t we consider these women a special kind of superhero, who has carved her own space for her very own matriarchy? Clownery included.

Illustration by Fraser Wrighte

Dear Alexis,

You once said you escaped a Thai drug lord’s car by bribing him with sex. You said that one of your longest relationships was a three-month affair with a Saudi Prince, but you spent two of these months trying to escape from his palace to an embassy. These are only a couple of your adventures, not including the time you were taken hostage by Somali pirates on David Geffen’s yacht.

Schitt’s Creek has been called the perfect show for how it allows queer relationships to exist in a world without judgement. But there are a great many people who do exist in the face of judgement in this show, specifically the people of the countries you’ve traipsed through. “Aroon was a lovely gentleman, until he ran out of money,” you say of the Thai drug lord. Your words contain multitudes, but also stereotypes flimsy as gauze; if you were to look at these sentences with an interrogative gaze, they would fall apart because stereotypes are never meaningful, though they do have grave consequences.

After Aroon’s story, one thinks, maybe it’s an anomaly. Unfortunately, this anecdote is the beginning of a trend: foreign countries are name-dropped so unimaginatively they read as though a writer was tasked with writing flat jokes based solely on stereotypes. You, a delicate, rich white woman, had to bribe a person of colour with sex because he became violent—it was all you could do to survive; you emerge from the story cunning and deft.

When a show like Schitt’s Creek is sold as a depiction of life unfettered by judgement and discrimination, then, by a cruel calculus, your stories mired in stereotypes become fact. These are strange jokes laced with a fiery spirit—they flow in a direction that doesn’t seem intuitively right. One would expect for the joke to land at your expense, to show you blundering through unfamiliar and foreign landscapes with your bags of cash and glittering privilege. Instead, they show a precocity and cunning on your part—a deep knowledge of the way things work in these countries—that work against the intellect of those who ought to know the rules of the game best, those native to the countries where you’re a tourist. In these scenarios, you and your friends emerge unharmed, while your adversaries are humiliated in their own spaces.

On a more meta level, I wonder why these images were written into the show to begin with. The show pokes fun at your socialite past in so many respects, but never in these jokes, which is why their racism is so glaring. They serve to show you have lived a wild life but also that you’re very smart, and therefore earn your growth in the show. But your intelligence could be, and certainly is,
shown in less racist ways.

Everyone says Schitt’s Creek is an escape to empathy and radical acceptance; unfortunate that it’s marred by these flashes of dirt thrown at entire countries and ethnicities. I wonder how writers who have put this much time and care into character development, crafted lines with introspection and circumspection for every lead, could do this to swaths of people—reading them based not on their definitions of themselves, but for filth, based on otherizing sentiments, what Westerners have always arrogantly said about them. You might tell me to get over it, that these lines crept in unawares, but this is a TV show, it’s much mediated. You might tell me they’re accidents. Maybe. But the first line in Schitt’s Creek is uttered by an apparently Latina maid who opens the front door to government agents: “Immigration?”

What do these jokes say about the people who have created a show that is internationally beloved for being a place where love flourishes unapologetically? What do they say of the things we’re willing to ignore to find a glimmer of hope? What do they say of viewers who are willing to erase the agency of people of colour in order that we may be comfortable?

Your stories seem to be racist in a polite way, an idiosyncratically Canadian way, which has now been smuggled into the U.S. Ew, Alexis.

Warmest regards,

Alisha Mughal

Britney Spears photo, Doug Peters/Alamy Stock Photo · The Real Housewives of Atlanta photo, Virginia Sherwood/© Bravo/Courtesy: Everett Collection Photographer · SCHITT’S CREEK Photo, CBS/NOT A A REAL COMPANY/Album · Sex and the City photo, INSTAR Images/Alamy Stock Photo

Things I have been involved with in my life include anti-gentrification activism, a sex worker arts festival, protesting a youth superjail, harm reduction work, community radio, a feminist bookstore, and independent publishing. I’ve also watched 11 years of The Bachelor franchise, likely more than that of The Hills and related shows, and could draw you a flow chart connecting Full House, Sister, Sister, Fresh Prince, and Blossom. Perhaps I contain multitudes, but, more likely, this isn’t all too rare.

That said, I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, in that I don’t believe in the part about feeling guilt for consuming pop culture. The truth is that celebrities impact our culture and ignoring it doesn’t change that fact. Pop culture also offers a lens through which to see the world, which can be enlightening for better and worse. Reality television started blurring the lines between the media and “real life” decades ago, and the advent of social media—which these days tends to have overlap with reality television—has only made those grey lines more apparent.

To me, it’s impossible to separate how the U.S. wound up with Donald Trump as a president with his presence on their televisions through The Apprentice. A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila was perhaps the trashiest television I’ve consumed—and I’ve seen at least a season of Married at First Sight—but it’s hard to write it off as inconsequential when she years later revealed herself as staunchly alt-right and attempted to take fans with her. Of course, pop culture doesn’t only impact us in negative ways, it’s also a powerful tool when it comes to representation and other issues—at least it can be. And consuming media from and about other eras can often remind us of the times we’ve lived through, both positive and negative.

When we started working on this issue, Britney Spears was in the media non-stop with activists arguing that the conservatorship that’s governed her life for years is a disability rights issue. Mental health advocates weighed in. Reproductive justice activists joined the cause when Spears noted that she’s been banned from removing an IUD or trying to have another child. This is a prime example of pop culture’s interplay with our world and politics. In her feature, Sydney Urbanek argues that Spears does have a voice and uses it in her music, but that people haven’t been paying attention to her artistic output. Sadaf Ahsan makes a case for The Real Housewives as an unlikely poster child for feminism. Joelle Kidd writes about reboots of shows from the aughts trying to make up for their previous offenses, but only making surface-level changes. In her personal essay, Zeahaa Rehman offers us a look at her immigration to Canada from Pakistan as a youth, and how her beloved High School Musical could have better prepared her for the transition.

If you’d have told me when I started this job two and a half years ago that I would end up writing about The Real Housewives in an editor’s letter, I likely wouldn’t have believed you. But, I do believe that we need to be bringing our values and political lens to all of the world around us, not just the parts that are easiest to take seriously. I hope this issue inspires you to give up any guilt you may have about indulging in your pop culture pleasures.