Women written by women - The reason why Fleabag is the best show of all time

[ partly taken and revised from instagram post ]

Fleabag (2016-2019) written, created and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge is sensational. It’s messy and loud and I loved it so so sooo much!

Yes, I know I’m - very - late to the party but better late than never...

I guess I’ve been waiting a lifetime for a character like Fleabag. Unapologetically complex, bizarre, at times repellingly unlikeable, and yet so sympathetically human.

Flawed, vulnerable, realistic, screwed up and slightly insane.

The way she subverts every possible stereotype is groundbreaking: she is sexy, smart, independent, sad, a bad person, a great person, self-sufficient, reckless, in love, emotionless, immature, kind, needy, angry, peaceful, naughty, selfish, genuine, honest, fearless, scared, unreliable, caring. She is more than three dimensional, she’s real, she’s multi faced, she’s alive and vibrant and intense.

And most of all, she wasn’t written by a man!

She’s not there for our entertainment, not an object to buy and then get rid of. She lives on. She’s like a wave of energy and thoughts that are just passing us by, on their way to some other place. We aren’t her final destination, she isn’t ours.

Furthermore she’s not an example to follow, she’s never just someone to admire or to loathe. She’s chaotic, freaky and messed up, she can’t be pinned down to one adjective, she’s her own person and it’s fantastic to watch. She’s dynamic, she changes, she evolves, she grows and contradicts herself and makes mistakes.

She is not the glamourization of anything. She is not the infamous man eater men paint the feminist trope to be: the simplistic one-dimensional character who sleeps around and does as she pleases without apologising or feeling the need to conform to any male-imposed rule about what’s proper and what’s not, the slutty corruptive seductive emancipated femme fatale, the Lolita, the Jennifer from Jennifer's body, and so on...

Fleabag is so much more than that... She's not only fighting against the patriarchal version of a woman “to marry”, “to impregnate”, but in some ways she impersonates the flaws and virtues at the same time. She’s layered and has a whole bunch of different desires and feelings.

Fleabag decomposes the stereotype, shuttering it into pieces, showing how reductive and constricting it is, like cages, or corsets you need to put on in order to be accepted into society.

She’s not a male definition. And not only was she written by a woman, but she was written to be a full person, not just a character (cause PWB is a genius). She was never seen before because in a society named by men very few women have had the chance to name themselves.

Slut is probably the word men would have used to describe her. The woman who ruins families, whose sexuality breaks up marriages, whose desire is uncontrollable, hence dangerous and destructive. The vampire, the witch, the home wrecker. But Fleabag isn’t that, cause those names were created by men. Those stories were written by men.

Now it’s our turn. We write our own.

This gets especially interesting when she notices that her androgynous silhouette partly allows her to be this way. She says: "I sometimes worry that I wouldn't be such a feminist if I had bigger tits."

Cause in a world dominated by men looking less like a woman is a privilege. That is her privilege. Small tits. A sexy but slightly masculine appearance, that makes her more powerful in the eyes of men. Female characteristic are systematically diminished by patriarchal values (example : very often films that are mostly liked by a female audience are considered to be trash, whereas the ones enjoyed by men - no matter how misogynistic or violent - are always one step above).

Someone once said that power lies in the hands of those who name (define) things, of those who decide what’s right and what’s wrong.

Fleabag doesn’t have an outer male-imposed name. She chose it, she named herself.

Fleabag is the type of powerful we need. She’s not invincible, she can be dethroned at any time, actually she has no throne, it’s more like a pile of garbage, and she’s not an icon, a heroin, a stereotype. She’s actually a very bad feminist in so many ways. But she has this power, a power that all women should have: to name themselves. And Fleabag teaches us that this is a power that we all have within ourselves. It’s the power Ingrid Bergman’s character in Persona didn’t know she had.

I loved everything about Fleabag. Every character. I loved Claire: she is everything that Fleabag was supposed to be by society standards. Which is made even more evident when their dad tells Fleabag that he doesn’t always like her but he likes Claire. And yet Claire looks up to Fleabag so much. Cause she’s not free... The cages men (her father, her husband, even her stepson) have built for her are too tight. She needs more space, we need more space, and we‘ve had enough of male definitions, male prisons, male rules. Your perfect woman doesn’t exist, it’s a fantasy YOU created (*cut to The Stepford Wives*).

We are not precious dolls, barbies, wives, mothers, virgins, bodies, we are not yours to take, to use, to own, we are not property, territory, objects. We are whoever the fuck we want to be. And if you don’t like that, get yourself a nice blow-up doll cause we've had enough of "your" world, it's our time now!

So, cheers to women written by women!

And thank you to Phoebe, to her freedom, her daringness, her power.

May we smash the patriarchy once and for all!