The Lie That ‘Gilmore Girls’ Tells

 

 

I love Gilmore Girls. I’ve seen the entire series at least three times over. It was a huge bonding experience with my mom. It’s portrayal of mother/daughter relationships is the most accurate I’ve ever seen. I love how all of the characters have massive flaws, making the whole show more realistic, albeit frustrating at times. But in the midst of the relationship truths and daily obstacles there is a secret lie that Gilmore Girls tells and it has to do with women’s bodies.

Lorelai and Rory eat whatever they want, whenever they want and however much they want. Breakfast is donuts and pop tarts. Cheeseburgers, pizza, and take-out are a daily thing. There’s some sort of TV/junk food binge every other episode. There are jokes galore about the “Lorelai Effect” which is some sort of cosmic force which permits them to eat anything and not get fat.

Then there is Sookie, an amazing gourmet chef that obsesses over perfect ingredients. She goes out of her way to find locally grown produce and hormone free poultry. Everything she makes is a gourmet concoction which every Foodie would love to try and have the recipe for. She is never shown eating junk food, or even eating for that matter – not that I recall. She’s on her feet all day long, cooking and directing her kitchen staff and then often goes home and makes huge, healthy dinners for her husband.

And she’s the fat friend.

 

 

Am I the only one who finds a problem with this?

Sookie is the fat friend, yet she is the only character besides Richard and Emily who maintains a long term relationship throughout the show.

Sookie is the fat friend, yet she doesn’t binge watch TV or eat chemical laiden junk.

Sookie is the fat friend, yet she rescues Lorelai in every food dilemma she has. (Her mother’s events, her father’s health issues, making her breakfast whenever she has a fight with Luke…”

However, repeatedly throughout the show Sookie is made out to be the ridiculous one because the character is not only fat, but accident prone and demanding in her profession.

Melissa McCarthy is one of my favorite people. She’s an amazing actor who’s not afraid to get down and dirty (Bridesmaids). I was so excited when I found out that she’s launching her own clothing line and horrified to find out that she was not included in the Gilmore Girls reunion. Recently I’ve seen “articles” about McCarthy’s weight loss being attributed to diet pills – which is not only a false representation of the actor and her work campaigning for body positivity but also takes advantage of all of the women who see her as a role model.

 

 

Recently my mom and I were talking about pop tarts for breakfast and the Gilmore Girls. I usually have them on hand for the kids and sometimes I’ll grab a package too if I’m rushed…or if I just want one. Lorelai and Rory eat pop tarts and they’re thin. Why can’t we do that? What’s wrong with us? Why can’t we eat what we want and look like Lorelai?

Because it’s TV.

And it’s a lie.

I Don’t Want to be Washed Out

I am deeply in love with Womanist Theology, but I cannot call myself a womanist because I don’t have the experience of a black woman. And experience is central to the hermeneutics of suspicion. Alice Walker in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens says “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.” And when I consider the experience of white women, this washed out definition seems accurate. In my class at seminary, “Reading the Bible from the Margins” one of our first topics of discussion was African American Spirituals. In listening to the spirituals and reading about how they are created I was struck by how their development depended so much upon both emotion and community involvement. Spirituals usually begin with someone saying/singing/shouting something out from a place of faith and emotionally charged worship. Then others pick up that phrase and add to it affirming that person’s addition.

This doesn’t happen in white communities. White women, for the most part, don’t have that affirmation that would give them the confidence to speak out to that degree. Walker, in coining the term, “womanist” describes it as an affirmation to a young black girl by an older relative, “Girl, you actin’ womanish.” As in, “You are a woman.” The moment that most white girls are told that they are a woman is when they get their period for the first time. This “rite of passage” Effectively links the word “woman” to embarrassment, sexuality, and something that has to be hidden.

White women are taught to be reserved and hide their emotions. If we are too emotional then we could be seen as incapable and histrionic. We live in fear of being misunderstood or thought of as too smart or too stupid. In Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones Bridget repeats the phrase “Inner Poise” to help control herself in social situations. Inner poise, inner poise, inner poise. But really Bridget’s aspiration to inner poise is an illustsration of how women, white women in this case, are expected to keep our expressions placid and our bodies elegant.

So we get our periods (something that is just now starting to be accepted as normal and not something to be ashamed of), we grow up, and we don’t know how to handle our emotions. When we don’t know that it’s ok to be angry or sad, years of emotional repression manifests into panic attacks, anxiety, depression and very real physical issues like fibromyalgia.

As an example, I have a little story featuring my beloved Aunt Chris.

When I was in the ninth grade, my Aunt Chris surprised me by coming to my biology class to give me my new clarinet which she bought when mine broke. I was so excited and it was so beautiful and I felt so loved but I didn’t know how to express it. Chris said later that she was surprised at how reserved I was.  I didn’t know how to not be reserved. That’s how my mom taught me because in her experience if she was too emotional she would not be taken seriously. People would think she was crazy. She would be met with sexist comments. The list goes on.

Chris was the ultimate rebel. She didn’t hide her emotions. People would say she had no tact, no filter, etc. But really she was living her life, audaciously  by refusing to conform to the expectation of a white woman’s inner poise. She wanted to be purple. She didn’t want to be washed out.