Fleabag and Pornography

Anybody who has lurked on the internet in the past few years is probably familiar with Fleabag (2016-19). It is a BBC TV series adapted from an one-woman play by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Some fans may frown when they see pornography associated with the show. But in Fleabag: The Scriptures, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the writer and creator of the show, says:

Everywhere I looked there were inexplicably naked women – posters on the Tube, adverts for toothpaste, dog food. Someone would have their tits out. Porn was something that people gorged on rather than dabbled with. We were becoming numbed by it, and I was teetering on the edge of a depression. From there I looked down into the abyss and at the bottom of it was Fleabag looking up at me, in lipstick.

After reading this, as I re-watched the show and reread the scripts, I found porn poking its head again and again.

It is impossible to talk about this without mentioning millennial feminism. I don’t think I have enough cultural savvy to pinpoint when millennial feminism “died”, but there is less discourse about the opinion that its peak was in the mid 2010s, which is important because the first season of Fleabag came out around that time.

When I look back at how millennial feminism played out, it is difficult not to find similarities with Andrea Dworkin's description of the Sexual Revolution in the 60s. She describes what made women choose it in the first place in Right-Wing Women:

The girls were idealistic because, unlike the boys, many of them had been raped; their lives were at stake. The girls were idealists especially because they believed in peace and freedom so much that they even thought it was intended for them too.

[...]

And the dream for the girls at base was a dream of a sexual and social empathy that negated the strictures of gender, a dream of sexual equality based on what men and women had in common, what the adults tried to kill in you as they made you grow up.

These were the thoughts behind millennial women going after sexual freedom as well. They were entering the workforce and contributing to the economy on per with men in a way no previous generation of women had. The anachronistic Neo-liberalism deluded them into thinking that this would be enough for them to be considered equal to men, fully human, fully free.

But this dream was co-opted by the post-feminist consumerist culture, most intensely through porn. Dworkin explains:

The propaganda for femininity (femininity being the apparent acceptance of sex on male terms with goodwill and demonstrable good faith, in the form of ritualized obsequiousness) is produced according to the felt need of men to have intercourse. In a time of feminist resistance, such propaganda increases in bulk geometrically.

[…]

This prohibits a sexuality for women outside the boundaries of male dominance. This makes any woman-centered sexuality impossible. What it does make possible is a woman’s continued existence within a system in which men control the valuation of her existence as an individual. This valuation is based on her sexual conformity within a sexual system based on his right to possess her.

I don't think anything influenced millennial women into centering male pleasure the way pornography did. The positive association between pornography exposure and women’s sexual behavior was strongest for the most liberal women. Women used it as training material because they did not want to be “boring” or “vanilla”. Unfortunately no widespread training material was provided to men that would teach them to see women as equals or join their quest for sexual autonomy. As Dworkin says about the women of the sixties:

The girls became women—found themselves possessed by a man or a man and his buddies (in the parlance of the counterculture, his brothers and hers too)—traded, gang-fucked, collected, collectivized, objectified, turned into the hot stuff of pornography, and socially resegregated into traditionally female roles.

Thus, women had no choice but to become aware of the illusion. In the late 60s, more and more women spoke up about their sexual experiences and the scale of women's exploitation was laid bare. As Dworkin says,

These were the beginnings: recognizing that the brother-lovers were sexual exploiters as cynical as any other exploiters—they ruled and demeaned and discarded women, they used women to get and consolidate power, they used women for sex and for menial labor, they used women up […]

I think this awakening for millennial women came in the form of the Me Too Movement. It showed that despite contributing to the economy more than ever, women were still being sexually exploited on a mass scale. In the sixties, when feminists started advocating against rape and violence against women, they experienced a surprising push-back from fellow leftist men. These men were not interested in supporting women here because this did not serve them, sexually or otherwise. Millennial and older women saw a similar push-back from their liberal and leftist male peers during the Me Too Movement. While women were pouring out their accounts of trauma and humiliation, the men started outcries about “false allegations”, “fear of being targeted”, and similar red herrings. Even the so-called “feminist” men who acknowledged the importance of the movement added their voices to this outcry. These hypothetical “fears” were treated with similar importance to women’s whistle-blowing on exploitation by the mainstream culture.

The first season of Fleabag predates this movement. Yet, what makes the representation of women’s suffering under this “sexual freedom” in Fleabag successful is something Dworkin would call “sexual intelligence”. According to her:

[...] sexual intelligence, a human capacity for discerning, manifesting, and constructing sexual integrity.

[...]

Sexual intelligence would have to be rooted first and foremost in the honest possession of one’s own body, and women exist to be possessed by others, namely men. The possession of one’s own body would have to be absolute and entirely realized for the intelligence to thrive in the world of action.

[...]

The use of a woman as a sexual thing murders it. The selling of a woman as a sexual commodity, not just on the street but in media, murders it.

Fleabag is important because for a while, exploring artistic complexity has been impossible for women because their work is prone to categorization. If a female character shows too many flaws, she's not a good role model. If she is perfect, she is setting unrealistic expectations for women. We do not see similar treatments towards male characters however. Nobody wonders if Walter White is a good role model or if Patrick Bateman's lifestyle sets unrealistic expectations. They are given the room to be complex fictional characters. This is where the cultural understanding of female-centric art has fallen behind. As Virginia Woolf said:

This then is another incident, and quite a common incident in the career of a woman novelist. She has to say I will wait. I will wait until men have become so civilised that they are not shocked when a woman speaks the truth about her body. The future of fiction depends very much upon what extent men can be educated to stand free speech in women.

This is where Waller-Bridge triumphs. Her protagonist suffers under the so-called sexual freedom because she is a woman who possesses sexual intelligence but does not find the freedom or authority to fully embody it. Instead of waiting for people to catch up to her or making her art digestible, she makes it so incredibly human that you cannot resist its appeal.

In the first scene of Fleabag, she (Pheobe Waller-Bridge) is standing anxiously in front of a door. She turns to the camera, breaking the forth wall, and tells the audience:

You know that feeling when a guy you like sends you a text at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday night and asks if he can ‘come and find you’ and you’ve accidentally made it out like you’ve just got in yourself, so you have to get out of bed, drink half a bottle of wine, get in the shower, shave everything, dig out some Agent Provocateur business, suspender belt, the whole bit, and wait by the door until the buzzer goes and then you open the door to him like you’d almost forgotten he was coming over.

She opens the door to an attractive man (Ben Aldridge). In the next scene, they are having violent sex. He flips her to the side, she turns to the camera, and says:

After some pretty standard bouncing you realise that he is edging towards your arsehole. But you’re drunk, and he made the effort to come all the way here so, you let him.

Anybody who knows anything about sex knows that the transition from vaginal to anal sex is not spontaneous. The anus is not a self-lubricating organ, so a lot of preparation is needed to make anal sex a pleasant experience, especially for the receiver. This also makes it a sexual act that requires prior conversations and consent. Yet, this transition happens all the time in porn. This is how pornography leaves its mark on the very first scene of the show.

In the morning, the man thanks her and leaves. We see her wondering throughout the day, not about the rape-adjacent experience, but about her own body:

Do I have a massive arsehole?

In the next scene, She is approached by a man (he is called ‘Bus Rodent’ in the scripts). He (Jamie Demetriou) asks her out for a drink. He asks if she has a boyfriend and we see a flashback of her watching a speech of Barak Obama on her laptop in bed. She starts masturbating to it. This is a funny indication to the fact that the mainstream pornography do not understand or cater to women's sexual preferences. Her boyfriend, Harry (Hugh Skinner), “catches” her and starts angrily packing his things. Apparently, this has happened before. He tells her, “I’ve really tried to be there for you through this. You can’t say I haven’t tried.” He leaves her.

We come back to Fleabag giving the man her number. He tells her, “And I will be sure to treat you like a nasty little bitch.” She turns to the camera excitedly.

He explains, “Um, that was a joke.” She laughs and says, “I know.” But she looks to us in disappointment.

After the man leaves, Fleabag checks the time and starts running. She makes it to an appointment for a loan with a Bank manager (Hugh Dennis). She is sweaty and parched because she had to run all the way. As he is going over the details, Fleabag tries to pull her sweater off to cool down and realizes that she is not wearing a top underneath. The manager takes this as an attempt of seduction. She is kicked out. To take her frustration out, Fleabag says, “Perv.” The manager retorts, “Slut.” She is offended, looking back and yelling, “WOW.”

After this, we see her entering an auditorium to attend a feminist lecture with her sister, Claire (Sian Clifford). She explains:

Dad’s way of coping with two motherless daughters was to buy us tickets to feminist lectures, start fucking our godmother and eventually stop calling.

A female speaker (Teresa Waller-Bridge) welcomes the audience to ‘Women Speak — opening women’s mouths since 1998’. She starts by asking:

I pose the question to the women in this room today: Please raise your hands, if you would trade five years of your life for the so-called ‘perfect body’?

Fleabag and Claire raise their hands and look around to find that they’re the only ones with their hands up. They put their hands down.

Throughout the series, we see her experiencing flashbacks of her best friend, Boo (Jenny Rainsford). Later, she drunkenly talks about Boo's death:

I opened the café with my friend Boo. She’s dead now. She accidentally killed herself. It wasn’t her intention but it wasn’t a total accident. She didn’t actually think she’d die, she just found out that her boyfriend fucked someone else and wanted to punish him by ending up in hospital and not letting him visit her for a bit. She decided to walk into a busy cycle lane, wanting to get tangled in a bike, break a finger maybe. But as it turns out bikes go fast and flip you into the road. Three people died. She was such a dick!

The next day, sober and fully clothed, She tells us:

Gotta think about all the people I can have sex with now. I’m not obsessed with sex. I just can’t stop thinking about it. The performance of it. The awkwardness of it, the drama of it. The moment you realise someone wants your body… Not so much the feeling of it.

What makes Fleabag special is that her hyper-sexuality is something we see quite openly. She is not trying to steer clear of that as many female artists try to do because it might cheapen their work or get them slut-shamed. Waller-Bridge’s protagonist “stoops” to that level and lives there.

She is seen desperately trying to find somebody to seduce. When a man checks her out in the streets, she tells us:

Kinda worried I’m about to make a sex offender out of the poor guy.

But the chance of a sexual encounter doesn’t come until she is in a supermarket buying tampons. She is trying to decide whether to buy the regular or heavy ones. She chooses the regular box, looks at us, concedes to her fate and picks up the heavy-flow tampons. Suddenly, the “arsehole guy” appears and says, “Hey.” Fleabag panics and sweeps the heavy-flow tampons for the regular ones, as if it is embarrassing to bleed too much during a menstruation cycle. He asks, “What you getting?” She seductively says, “Oh just these. For my tiny, bleeding… vagina.” After they make plans to hook up later and he leaves, she puts the regular tampons back and picks up the heavy-flow ones. We see that although sex has been normalised, nothing else about a woman’s body have been.

Later, they are in his apartment. He asks her, “What are you afraid of?” Fleabag replies, “Losing the currency of youth.”

When they have sex, He has his hands on her breasts. Aroused, he says, “Yeah…They’re so small. They’re so small. They’re so small. God they’re so fucking tiny. Oh my God they’re hardly even there. Where the fuck even are they?” This is played for laughs, but the most popular pornographic category all over the world was “teen”. The obsession with youth or child-likeness in women that has been popularized through pornography is reflected in Fleabag and arsehole guy’s obsession with girlish youth.

After this sexual encounter leaves her wanting more, we see her on a date with Harry in a pub. Then they’re “making love” in her bed.

She says,

I wish he’d just fuck me. All he wants to do is make love. He’s wasting me. I was once fucking a guy who would breathe on every thrust— You’re so young. You’re so young. I masturbate about that all the time. I masturbate a lot these days. Especially when I’m bored, or angry, or upset… or happy or…

This reflects the fact that women link their use of pornography to emotional needs, such as coping with loneliness, stress, or past trauma. The effect of pornography on her is truly visible here. The mainstream notion about pornography is that its “victims” are the men who watch it, but that is not true. The porn industry has always been infamous for harbouring sex-trafficking of women and children, so labeling the male consumers as “the real victims” of porn is an unrealistic accommodation of male victimhood. But if we were to only look at pornography's effect on the consumers, it still wouldn’t make men the “real victims” of pornography. Women are the targets of aggression in 97% of pornographic scenes. So when men habituate themselves to a diet of porn, they are more likely to act out the violence they see in porn against their sexual partners. Women, however, learn to accept violence against themselves from watching porn, they even expect it. In her memoir Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction, Erica Garza says:

My favorite porn scene of all time involves two sweaty women, fifty horny men, a warehouse, a harness, a hair dryer, and a taxicab. You can put it all together in a dozen different ways and I bet you still can’t imagine just how revolting the scene actually is.

Fleabag's distorted sexual preferences lead to her finding sex with Harry unsatisfying. She starts masturbating during sex, removing Harry on top of her. This is common in female porn addicts. The majority of Porn-addicted women are able to masturbate to orgasm, but a significant number of them (30%–40%) report orgasmic difficulty during partnered sex.

The next day, Harry confronts Fleabag about her search history on her laptop. He reads them aloud:

Anal, gangbang, mature, big cock, small tits, hentai, Asian, teen, MILF, big butts, lesbian, gay, facial, fetish, bukkake, young and old, swallow, rough, voyeur… and public.

He packs up and leaves again. This time, she knows that he is gone for good.

---

In the next episode, she is taking pictures of her vagina on her phone. She says:

My boyfriend before Harry used to make me send him pictures of my vagina wherever I was. Ten or eleven times a day. One day when I was temping, he asked me to—

“Send me one of your favourite bits of your body”

“Your pussy or tits please”

In a flashback scene, she is taking nude pictures of herself in a toilet. More messages chime in.

“Oh my God, I’m wanking! Send me another…”

“ANOTHER ONE. ANOTHER ONE!!!!”

She looks annoyed while taking off her clothes again.

The next important scene is where Fleabag gets kissed by her sister’s husband, Martin (Brett Gelman). She is surprised, disgusted and grimacing. She runs out of the house.

Here, she was on a date with Bus Rodent. As she is leaving, he joins her and suggestively says, “Shall we?” It is clear that he wants to have sex. She is disgusted, but obliges. We watch them have sex in her cafe. She looks like she is suffering. She tells the audience, “Surprisingly bony. It’s like having sex with a protractor.” After he is done, he keeps saying, “That was amazing.” She smiles and agrees.

He suddenly screams and tries to kick something. It turns out to be Hilary, a Guinea pig Fleabag gave to Boo as a birthday present. We see flashbacks of Boo petting, holding, and adoring Hilary. After Bus Rodent leaves, we see Fleabag sitting alone with Hilary. She is uncomfortable around Guinea pigs. In the flashbacks, we see Boo teasing Fleabag by pushing Hilary onto her.

In the present, Fleabag hesitantly picks up Hilary. We watch her hug and pet the pig. She is trying to hold onto something Boo loved so much.

In the next episode, Claire and Fleabag attends a silent retreat. It is called female-only ‘Breath of Silence’ retreat: ‘Women: Don’t Speak’. This conservative retreat is the antithesis of the feminist lecture the sisters attended in the first episode. The women are forced to silently perform menial labor on the premises all day - cutting the grass in the gardens, polishing the floors, etc. Fleabag gets distracted while landscaping and ventures off to an area where noises of men yelling “slut” were coming from repeatedly. Turns out, there is a similar retreat for men, but instead of silently succumbing to chores like the women, they are given feminine blowup dolls and encouraged to take their aggression out on them. She spots the Bank Manager from the loan appointment in this crowd.

Later, she intrudes upon a bonfire where the men are taking turns berating a blowup doll. After the session of outbursts, the instructor teaches the men to apologize to the doll. When they successfully do so, it leads to a celebration. A stark contrast compared to the women's silent retreat. After this, Fleabag and the manager hang out. He was sent to the workshop after he repeatedly touched the breasts of a coworker at work. He says:

I want to move back home, I want to hug my wife, I want to protect my children, protect my daughter, I want to move on, I want to apologise to…everyone, I want to go to the theatre, I want to take clean cups out of the dishwasher… and put them in the cupboard… At home. And the next morning I want to watch my wife drink from them. And I want to make her feel good.

Fleabag says, “I just want to cry… all the time.”

He understands her. He nods.

---

During their stay, Fleabag informs Claire that Martin tried to kiss her on her birthday. Fleabag wakes next morning to find that Claire has left. We see her listening to Boo’s voicemail message to soothe herself.

In the next episode, we see her getting a breast cancer inspection by a doctor. She is so prone to sexualizing her body that she can’t take this as a neutral medical experience. She finds this arousing and teases the doctor. She is humbled by his professionalism.

She meets Claire afterwards. Although she is tense and at the edge, she tells Fleabag that she will leave Martin.

The next day, Fleabag attends her Godmother’s “Sexhibition” with arsehole guy. Godmother (Olivia Colman) introduces the show by saying,

It’s about the beauty of sex. And how it brings us all together. How it excites and connects, how it opens people’s minds. After all, sex got us all here. Sex… brings… life.

Fleabag suddenly gets a flashback of Boo crying.

This lines the sharp contrast between the real-life experience of women and the sex-centric comfort women are sold by the post-feminist media.

During this event, arsehole guy breaks up with Fleabag. He says that he had a partner this whole time and he thinks he should not be fucking around behind her back anymore. Fleabag pretends to not care about this, trying to comfort herself by thinking that Harry will come back to her anyway. But that hope shatters when she meets Harry with a new girlfriend at the event. To stroke her ego, she tries to seduce him by telling him that he should come back to collect his things and asks if he masturbates to her. Harry declines her advances.

Later, she runs into Claire. To Fleabag’s surprise, she is there with Martin. Claire tells her, “He didn’t try to kiss you.”

“He did.”

“He says it was more like the other way around.”

“What?! But that’s just not true! No. Fuck you. Claire, no —”

“Please don’t —”

“Claire, he came out into the garden —”

“Please, I don’t wanna hear it.”

“Claire, you have to believe me.”

“How can I believe you?”

“Because I’m your sister!”

“After what you did to Boo?”

This hits Fleabag hard. She tries to run away from Claire, but runs into the camera, into us. She can feel the judgement from the audience. She desperately tries to escape but the camera follows her. During this, in a series of flashbacks, it is revealed that the person Boo’s boyfriend cheated on Boo with is Fleabag. Boo found out that he “fucked somebody else”, but never knew that the person was her best friend. This is also a popular trope of pornography where people are seen having sex with a close one’s partner (stepfather, stepmother, best friend’s partner, etc). These scenes are meant to be tantalizing, but we never see the effects of infidelity on the people involved. Here, we hear Boo say that she is going to “get hit by a bike and then hurt her finger, and then he’s gonna have to come and see her in hospital, and be really sorry for what he did”. We watch Boo’s final moments, waiting on the sidewalk and deciding to jump in front of a moving bike. Then we see a disheveled Fleabag walking around with tears streaming down her face while the voicemail from Boo plays in the background, a source of comfort now haunting her. In the morning, she sits by Hilary’s cage in the cafe with a tear-stained face, still in last night’s clothes. She puts food in Hilary’s bowl and pets her. Then she looks around the cafe. Boo told her that they’d never let this place go. She walks out. She is in the same position in front of the same door as Boo before her suicide.

We see her brace herself and walk in front of a car. But the car stops. Fleabag is disappointed. The Bank manager peaks out of the car. In the next scene, they’re inside the cafe. Noticing her distress, the manager tries to comfort her by saying, “Cafés are a very difficult business. You certainly made this one very unique.” She says, “I also fucked it into liquidation.”

She breaks into tears as she continues,

And I fucked my friend by fucking her boyfriend. And sometimes I wish I didn’t even know that ‘fucking’ existed. And that I know that my body, as it is now, really is the only thing I have left and when that gets old and unfuckable I might as well just kill it.

And somehow there isn’t anything worse than someone who doesn’t want to fuck me…That I fuck everything, except for when I was, in your office — I really wasn’t trying to — It was accident —

Either everyone feels like this a little bit and they’re just not talking about it…Or I am completely fucking alone. Which isn’t fucking funny.

The man doesn’t know what to say. He leaves, but comes back with a portfolio. He tells her, “People make mistakes.” Fleabag says, “That’s why they put rubbers on the ends of pencils.” This is something Boo used to tell her. He sits down in front of her and says, “I think we should start your interview again.”

He starts the interview. He makes a joke and she laughs. They smile at each other. The credits roll.

---

At the end, the only person who extended kindness to her was a man trying to recover from his sexual recidivism and become a better person. He understands that her sexuality does not demean her humanity. This is something we almost never see in real-life. The patriarchy gets away with a lot of evil things because of its perpetual hateful campaign against hyper-sexual women. Considering all of this, it is wild how generations of women were groomed into hyper-sexuality within a society that never really held any empathy for such women. Even within feminist communities, hyper-sexual women are often shamed for their “sexual availability”, for profiting off of their bodies, for contributing to the “objectification of women”, but nobody recognizes the harm done to these women. Their sexuality gets weaponised against their credibility, especially when they try to be vocal about their sexual trauma.

Fleabag shifts the tone by establishing the humanity and vulnerability of its hyper-sexual protagonist. There is room to wonder about what led her to become a sex-obsessed person in the first place. Was she always like this? Did sex serve as a distraction from her grief? Did she blame Boo's death on her habits and keep making choice that reinforced that guilt? By asking these questions, we acknowledge her personhood, a privilege that is scarcely given to “slutty” women. We see how pornography and her obsession with sex ruined her relationships, her self-esteem, her relationship with her body, etc. Her sexual experiences are portrayed in ways that follow the formula of pornographic scenes. The sex scenes are shown in the middle of the acts. No verbal consent or conversations about sex are included, which are typically absent from pornographic contents as well. Even the name of the protagonist, which is never revealed, is similar to the women in pornography who are “barely-legal teen”, “busty milf”, and many other things, but rarely a person with an identity. Porn's influence on her leads to trauma, loneliness, shame, and guilt. But despite that, the show wins by making Fleabag a living, breathing human being with complexities and contradictions, something porn has never allowed women to be.

Resources:

1. Waller-Bridge, P. (2019). Fleabag: The Scriptures. Ballantine Books.

2. Dworkin, A. (1983). Right-wing Women. Perigee Books.

3. Garza, E. (2018). Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction. Simon & Schuster.

---