Deviant Women: On Hit Series "The Dropout" and "Pieces of Her"
Musings on our cultural obsession with bad women
Hello from the other side of wisdom tooth surgery! Recovery has been less than ideal as it has taken up most of my spring break, but I’m eternally grateful to my wonderful support system and every bowl of mashed potatoes, oatmeal, soup and pudding that they’ve made and fed me. A lot of Major Life Decisions are coming at me at once in overlapping and conflicting timelines, and for the most part I’m just overwhelmed. Being knocked out by wisdom tooth surgery does mean that I’ve gotten plenty of medically mandated rest. I feel like I’ve watched the entirety of Hulu and Netflix’s library (hence this week’s essay), but if you’ve got more that you think are can’t-misses, send them my way. Being physically not 100% has definitely forced me to slow down in ways that I usually don’t let myself, and while I’ve been a little bored over the past week, it was a nice reminder that taking breaks is important and that my worth isn’t measured by how productive I am.
THE WEEK IN GRATITUDE
In celebration of International Women’s Day, my short lil essay “Writing Rebellion as a Tool of Resistance” was published in Rebellious Magazine’s 10th anniversary issue. My essay was one of ten pieces selected to be in the issue that answered the prompt, “What makes you rebellious?” I’ve made it a goal to have one freelance piece published each month outside of my regular freelance gig, and so far so good! I’m really grateful to the editors at Rebellious and happy to be able to share my writing with a new feminist Midwestern audience.
Jobs, jobs, jobs! Or more accurately, interviews, interviews, interviews! In the last week alone I’ve been able to schedule interviews for four different opportunities that are all very different and will be rewarding and challenging in their own ways. Marketing yourself is hard, y’all! As is negotiating your salary…maybe I’m not as much as a #girlboss as I thought I was. New jobs have always been weird for me—over the past few years, each new job also meant a departure from my current city and the end of a relationship. Luckily, three of the jobs that I’m considering are in town and the fourth one would only require a minor relocation. At least I know that whatever I end up doing, I get to drag my (willful) boyfriend there with me…and the hypothetical cat that we will adopt (not so willfully on his end).
Two words: medical gauze. Recovery days 3-5 were excruciating, which, according to the crowd-sourced medical advice from friends, family, and a lot of flash-on pictures I took of my mouth, is pretty “normal.” But I knew something was wrong on day 6 when the pain was radiating throughout my jaw and into my ear. After a few phone calls where the clinic dissuaded me from coming back in, a follow up visit did, in fact, confirm that I had dry socket (rip). The medicated gauze they inserted into the hole has been LIFE SAVING and I’ve been well enough to go to a concert, eat a Real Dinner, bake a few treats, and write this newsletter. Yay!
POEM OF THE WEEK
As many of you might’ve seen on social media, this past Wednesday was the one-year anniversary of the Atlanta spa shootings. Of the eight who were killed that day, six were Asian women. Since the beginning of the pandemic, anti-Asian hate and hate crimes has risen significantly around the world, and in the last year alone, documented anti-Asian hate crimes in the U.S. rose by a whopping 339%.
As I’ve written in newsletters past, news of these crimes have made it incredibly difficult to live and move around in an Asian body. While I’m excited to go home and visit family next week in New York, I wonder how “worth it” it would be to go into the city and meet my brother for dinner. The stakes just seem too high. Because of my various relocations and the pandemic, I haven’t properly been in the city since 2019, and the chances that I’d ever feel safe enough to do so alone ever again—the same city that I’ve been going to concerts in since I was 15—feel impossible. With stunning simplicity and quiet skill, the poem It Is What It Is by Franny Choi feels like it encompasses these feelings exactly: the resignation to fear, the learning how to live anew within it.
“There is no worse evil than a bad woman; and nothing has ever been produced better than a good one” —Euripides
I’ve been watching more TV than usual this semester, which might just be a product of my desperate desire to break up the challenging monotony of writing my thesis. Lately, I’ve been watching both Hulu’s The Dropout and Netflix’s Pieces of Her. And while these choices might just be personal taste (recently I’ve been wanting to watch only suspenseful things), I’ve been thinking to myself that there’s got to be a reason why so many of these kinds of shows are being produced at the volume and rate that they are. Below are my musings on our cultural obsession with bad women and why we can’t just seem to let them go.
(Content warning: Contains spoilers for both shows!!)
In a particularly unnerving scene in Hulu’s new show The Dropout, former biomedical entrepreneur and fraud criminal Elizabeth Holmes (played by Amanda Seyfried), stands on a boat with a CEO billionaire who she hopes will invest in her company, Theranos. Trying to prove that she has what it takes, she and the two other men start screaming, “I GET THE FUCKING MONEY!!!!!” over and over again, each time with a lot more gusto and rage, each time with a lot less sanity. Overcome with feelings of power and grandeur, Elizabeth rips her life vest off of her, revealing her ill-fitted beige pantsuit, and throws the vest overboard.
Marked by unchecked human hubris and an eerie absence of remorse, The Dropout (which currently has 5 episodes out) follows Elizabeth Holmes’ journey from being an inventive child to the billionaire owner of a biomedical company whose cutting-edge technology, had it ever turned out to be functional, was supposed to make medical treatment easier for millions of people by testing for illnesses using a single drop of blood. Instead, sandwiched within the story’s arc are scenes of her being interrogating about—and subsequently admitting to—crime after crime she committed.
Despite the many challenges she faces—failed prototypes, rival companies, a crumbling office crawling with ants in a dangerous neighborhood outside Palo Alto—it’s hard to give Elizabeth the title or the sympathy of an underdog. The determination and cognizance with which she embodies the characteristics and mindset of capitalist greed make her pretty heinous. And yet, we would not be irked to the same degree by her actions had she been a man, socially destined for power and primed for an unchecked sense of importance. Beyond the magnitude and horror of her actual crimes, what actually keeps us watching The Dropout is the very fact of Elizabeth’s identity as a woman, and the incongruence of her actions with her gender.
For this same reason, we are resistant to her success as much as we are curious about it, peeking through our fingers to see how she could possibly get herself out of the mutli-million company-sized hole she has dug. We can’t look away as she jumps through yet another hoop, only to slam into another roadblock, which she then weasels her way out of with a different, more convoluted, bold-faced lie, yet another premature promise. We root for her only in so much as we want to see how else she will con another investor, partner company, or employee, all the while trying to do the mental gymnastics that will allow us to believe that she is even capable of any of this in the first place.
Elizabeth treads a fine line between overcoming the parameters set by her womanhood and playing into the unfair judgments that come with them. In a scene in the episode “Old White Men,” we see how masterfully she weaponizes her femininity in a meeting where the Theranos board tells Elizabeth that they are removing her from her position as CEO. Standing in front of a room full of men more than twice her age, she admits through tears, “I’m just a girl who had a dream to change the world. And I just didn’t realize how hard it was going to be. I need help. You’re absolutely right. I need adult supervision.”
For a moment, we are made to believe that the merciless and avaricious boss who believed too fully in her own brilliance—the same woman who made everyone on her team skip sleep and repeatedly prick their fingers dry to produce a working prototype sample the night before an international negotiation—is finally ready to admit to her own flaws, only to realize that not only is her moment of humility a borrowed monologue, but that she is reciting it only to salvage her position and make another false promise.
This isn’t to say that Elizabeth’s desire to surpass sexist discrimination actually leads in her immunity against it. In fact, we see her fall into the same pitfalls that many women do in the workplace. Wanting to come off as more intimidating to the old white men that make up her board of trustees, Elizabeth practices saying catch phrases like, “This is an inspiring step forward” to the mirror in an unnaturally deep voice in order to sound older and more capable. When she first pitches her idea as a college sophomore to a renowned, older female professor at Stanford, she is scolded for being so ambitious and “wanting too much,” a tactic of old guard second-wave feminists who believe that young women of the new generation don’t deserve success unless they’ve suffered for it.
As Elizabeth hardens herself into the ruthless and borderline-sadistic entrepreneur that she convinces herself she needs to be, we see her humanity slip away in ways that feel almost unsalvageable. With each passing episode, we continue to ask ourselves, “How could she be so heartless? As a woman, could she really not care for others? If her undying belief in herself and her product really is for the benefit of others, how could she possibly stomach making false promises to the medically most vulnerable with trials she know will end in more harm than good?”
It will be interesting to see how much more Elizabeth can get away with before someone calls her bluff once and for all. As more and more of her fraudulent story unfolds, it’s important to think about what it is exactly that simultaneously fascinates or horrifies us: the nature of her crime, or her stark rebellion against all the things that have been naturalized for her as a woman.
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The nurturing and benevolent characteristics that we have ascribed onto womanhood and make spectacles out of are held to an even higher degree of scrutiny when the woman in question is a mother. The parameters around what kind of woman someone can be become even tighter when other lives and their subsequent morality are on the line. This cultural hyperfixation on “bad mothers” becomes glaringly obvious in the TV adaptation of Karin Slaughter book Pieces of Her, a series which has remained at Netflix’s Top 10 list since its release two weeks ago. After surviving a traumatic massacre thanks to her mother, Laura, who fearlessly stands up to the gunman, Andy finds herself questioning everything she’s ever known about the woman who gave her life, who isn’t at all who she seemed to be.
Though I admittedly didn’t finish the series (the suspense wasn’t properly curated to hold viewers’ attention for all eight episodes, IMO), Laura’s main betrayal to her daughter doesn’t seem to lie in whatever it is she did (or didn’t) do, but in the fact that whatever it was grates against our cultural idea of what it means to be a mother. Apparently handy with a knife and well-versed in dealing with hooded men who try to kidnap her in the middle of the night, Laura’s image as the mild-mannered suburban mom with endless patience and warmth is shattered, leaving Andy to question almost every detail of her life.
As evidenced by the harsher punishments that women receive in prison over men (for infractions as small as disobeying an order or swearing), and moreover, the harsher punishments that pregnant women receive in cases involving drug use, women who have been marked as deviant suffer more for it because of the very expectation that they can’t be. Culturally conceptualized as too subordinate to do any actual harm, those who exist outside of this impossible expectation are labeled particularly monstrous. Especially in the latter example, we see the institutional ramifications of the deeply engrained belief that women’s bodies are not their own if and when they become pregnant. Simultaneously owning nothing and answering to everyone, the pregnant woman is everything but autonomous.
At a bar on her way up to Maine after escaping from their hometown in Georgia (a vague but urgent order given by her mother), Andy asks a stranger sitting nearby, “Do you ever have that thing where you think you know someone as well as you can possibly know someone and then one day it’s clear as day that you were totally fucking wrong?” With this question alone, not only is Andy’s hurt evident, but so is her belief that as Laura’s daughter, she’s entitled to know everything about her. In the same way that the state prioritizes the fetus’ wellbeing over any choices a woman might make about her body in the cases above, Andy is prioritizing her mother’s complete knowability over her agency as a full human being—one entitled to privacy, secrets, and even some delinquency.
The cultural practice of essentializing women down to their biological capabilities and confining them to a certain set of demure and caring characteristics make it so that anything outside of this becomes worthy of spectacle, both intended for us to gawk at and be enraged by. And who knows, maybe Euripedes was right that nothing better has ever been produced than a good woman… but who would want to watch a TV show about that?