Thank you, Nicola Coughlan
Usually when I sit down to write this blog it’s because I’m feeling angry or academic about some piece of pop culture that has crossed my path. And frankly, anger is a permanent state for most of us killjoys. We need to stay mad at the world because the world is maddening. Sara Ahmed tells us as much when she tells us to be “[m]aladjusted: Don't Adjust to Injustice!”[1] Myles Horton in his autobiography, The Long Haul[2] tells his readers that his anger was like a fire. He needed to stoke it, keep it lit and hot and burning, but that he couldn’t let it become too large or it would overtake him. That is how I see anger. It is my most productive emotion and as long as I nurture it—but don’t allow it to consume me—I can continue doing the work of killing joy and finding joy in killing joy.
All that is to say that this post is not like the others. This post is truly full of feminist killjoy joy… it is joyful.
And it’s about Bridgerton.
Yep. That Bridgerton. The over-the-top-production-value romance TV show out of Shondaland that has been binge-worthy viewing for two seasons.
I’ve watched every episode. I love everything about this show. Sure, it’s a little heteronormative, but I see hints of transgression and homo-eroticism everywhere and I couldn’t wait to watch the new season.
I knew that season three would be based on the fourth book in Julia Quinn’s 8-book exploration into the love lives of a landed aristocratic family in an alternate history Regency Era ton in England.
Confession: I adore period romance. I’m a sucker for it. If you want to know how many times I’ve watched the Kiera Knightly Pride & Prejudice I couldn’t tell you… it would be too many times to count. I’ve watched every single television/ film adaptation of any and every Jane Austen book, including content about the lady herself (see: 2007’s Becoming Jane starring Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy or 2013’s Austenland starring Keri Russel). BUT I also always feel guilty when I indulge in stories of young women being swept off their feet by dashing men while looking fabulous in their corsets and doublets and wooing one another with perfect English accents. The guilt doesn’t come from the “guilty pleasure” of the romance genre, or the nauseating “chick-flick” moniker, but because of the racial dynamics of pretty much all period-drama: I know I’m ONLY watching people who look (more or less) like me. White. EVERYONE is white, and I want to consume media that looks more like the contemporary world. Enter Bridgerton. A re-imagined Regency Era where Queen Charlotte is a woman of color (which she very well might have been), where people from across all of the English colonies have been incorporated into the aristocracy, and where inter-racial marriage is a non-issue… as long as everyone carries a title and money enough in their purse. So yeah, I am IN TO Bridgerton.
Spoilers to follow…
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Each season is built on the foundation of a conventional romance plot. In season one we see the story of Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) and The Duke (Rege Jean Page) who pretend to fall in love and then are caught off-guard when they actually do “burn for” each other and the show was beautiful and sexy and full of passion. Season two explored a Shakespearean Beatrice & Benedick vibe where lovers Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) and Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley) hate and then realize they love one another.
The Duke, Daphne, Kate, Anthony
We knew season three was going to be the friends-to-lovers story and that it would focus on Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) finally fulfilling her life-long infatuation with one Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton), but I had NO IDEA HOW GOOD THIS WOULD BE.
I watched the first four episodes when they dropped and the carriage scene… OMG. Then I re-watched the first four episodes in the couple of days before the second four episodes dropped and when I watched the scene again, I got to thinking… WHY I am I reacting so strongly to this scene. Bridgerton has never shied away from centering female pleasure (and THANK YOU for that).
Every love-scene is dripping with sex and desire and close-up shots of clothes falling to the floor and bodies pressed against one another, culminating in the man checking in multiple times asking, “Do you want me to stop” and the woman offering affirmative consent as they whisper breathlessly phrases like, “Please. Don’t stop.” No one can tell me that consent isn’t sexy when it’s done like this. Then the man’s hand, or entire body disappear from the screen as they move to give pleasure to their partners. Cut to the woman reacting to receiving pleasure… and we’re off to the races. It’s HOT, it’s about female pleasure, and it centers affirmative consent and it’s all done by expect intimacy choreographer, Lizzy Talbot. Talk about feminist killjoy joy!
But this season was different. I became obsessed with and I couldn’t stop thinking about that carriage scene. Then I watched the second half of the season and the mirror scene… I’m dead. But again… WHY?
The scene followed the predictable Bridgerton script of the man confessing his love for the woman, her melting into him, him asking for affirmative consent:
Colin: You must tell me to stop if you do not wish for this.
Penelope: I do not wish for you to stop.
He undresses her and looks at her. He actually sees her and helps her to see herself and then he tells her to “lie down,” undresses for her (and us I presume, based on the ways the camera pans up and down his abs) and then we’re in the throes of their first time together and Pen’s loss of virginity. It’s sexy, and the music swells, and the light glows from behind their bodies, and it’s beautiful.
But it isn’t any more or less “sexy” than any other Bridgerton sex scene (I know because I went back and watched several. Research can be FUN). So why could I not get this one out of my head?
One of the things I love most about theory is that, like a good therapist, it helps me to understand and process how I feel about the world around me. It offers me the tools to unpack and understand the affective responses I have to the culture and ideas I encounter. So, after watching and rewatching this and other scenes I came to the realization (duh!) that the difference was Nicola Coughlan being on screen and being beautiful, and in her body, and accepting that she is beautiful.
I was born in 1983. I remember being in the first grade and deciding I didn’t want to do dance class anymore because I knew I “didn’t look right” in the recital costumes.
I wanted to wear t-shirts when I went to the pool. There was a restaurant called The Ground Round where kids under twelve would be publicly weighed at the entrance and then their kid’s meal was the amount on the scale. 68 pounds? Your meal was 68 cents. I would skip friends’ birthday parties when they were hosted there… I hated being the “most expensive” kid at the party.
Kate Moss and the Delia*s Catalog
I grew up in the 90s during the “heroin chic” era where models like Kate Moss were rumored to say things like, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” I grew up constantly hearing about Weight Watchers points from my mom and the “South Beach Diet” from my dad. I grew up wanting to look like the models in the Delia*s catalog.
I grew up watching movies where a 135-pound Bridget Jones in Bridget Jones’s Diary was considered fat. I remember watching Titanic and people talking about how fat Kate Winslet was. So, if they were fat, I must have been truly disgusting.
I grew up surrounded by “low fat” Snackwell’s cookies and commercials for diet pills, and stores like “5,7,9” a store which only carried those sizes and nothing more.
Kate Winslet and Renee Zellwegger being “fat”
I honestly don’t know how fat I was growing up, though I do remember being called Erin Fat-lin by kids in the fifth grade.
Suffice to say I hated my body. I was ashamed of my size, of my belly, and the cellulite and thickness of my thighs, and the stretch marks on my breasts, and my wide-hips, and my too-thick-ankles, and just about everything else. I couldn’t wear the (once, and please never again) fashionable skintight low-rise jeans and a crop top. My body would have been “disgusting” in those styles. And so I woke up every day hating my body. There are almost NO photos of me from age 9-19… I refused to allow anyone to take a picture of me. And to this day it is a struggle for me to NOT hate my body. I’ve more or less decided that the hate might never go away, but I try to keep it in my own head for fear of passing it on to my daughter and another generation of women.
I learned (and have apparently forever internalized) from the world around me that anyone in a larger body could never be beautiful and could never be worthy of love. Fat people were gross, and I was one of them.
To see Nicola Coughlan nude on screen and being called beautiful, multiple times and then to notice myself noticing her and thinking to myself, “she is beautiful” was a kind of revelation for me.
Sara Ahmed tells us that “Noticing = The Feminist Killjoy’s Hammer.”[3] When we notice things that are new, unique, unusual, or out-of-place we then by nature might want to ask ourselves why we found that thing new, unique, unusual, or out-of-place, and by answering that question we can learn to better understand and then critique the world around us.
I noticed myself noticing how beautiful Coughlan was and then realized that it was the first time in my entire life where a woman whose body was somewhat similar to mine was told she was beautiful and worthy of love… and by a handsome young Bridgerton man no less.
The idea that a body like hers/ mine could be something not “to-be-covered-up” but rather to be celebrated as beautiful was, to be honest, one of the sexiest things I’ve ever fucking seen. And now I can’t unsee it.
In all the other love scenes I rewatched as I thought through this blog post (again, research = fun!) I always saw two pairs of traditionally “perfect” bodies. I saw women with perfect, perky breasts; flat stomachs; long lean arms and legs; a thigh-gap; chiseled collar bones; delicate wrists; and tiny dimples on their lower backs just above their smooth, cellulite-free asses. I was a voyeur into a world I’d never know or see or have access to.
But to see Coughlan’s large breasts hanging against her round belly when she lay on the settee was to see myself. We always talk about representation and that “you can’t be what you can’t see,” but it’s not just being seen, it’s being seen as beautiful, being seen as sexy, being seen as worthy of affection from the ‘perfect male specimen’ that is a Colin Bridgerton. And yes, I am aware how wildly hetero-normative that is but that doesn’t make it any less affective or valid.
At a press event for the show a reporter called Coughlan “brave” for offering her nude body for us all to see she, and she replied in the most spectacular way imaginable saying “You know, it is hard because I think women with my body type — women with perfect breasts — we don't get to see ourselves onscreen enough”
To see Coughlan and notice her beauty is a small, but significant step forward to maybe, one day, seeing my own body (and perfect breasts) in that same golden Bridgerton light.
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[1] Sara Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way. (New York: Seal Press, 2023), 242.
[2] Myles Horton, The Long Haul: An Autobiography. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990).
[3] Ahmed, 146.
