Fleabag

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Back when I was a grad student I thought someday I’d have a tenure-track job and I’d be teaching popular culture courses so I need to keep up. I was so dedicated to this mythical tenure-track job that I sat through films that bored me silly. I’m talking to you, Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. I never got that tenure-track job and, furthermore, popular culture splintered like a dropped mirror. When I was a kid, families watched movies together. Suddenly pop culture was a prison; each inmate occupied his own cell sealed off from society. Two people could live in the same home and dance to different music, laugh at different jokes, fear different monsters, and never have any idea what the other person is feeling.

The splintering of pop culture coincided with the West’s increasing rejection of traditional beliefs like Judeo-Christian morality. A newly Paganizing, newly splintered pop culture knew it could break all the rules. I remember the first time I heard the F-word in a broadcast, and the first time I saw the F-word in print. Do I say all these bad words? Sure. Do I want them in my cultural products? Not unless they are needed. Somehow Sophocles, Shakespeare, O’Neill and the Marx Brothers never needed any of them . Movies like Saw include scenes that I do not want inside my head, or anybody’s head for that matter. Splintered media now includes niche markets for the death-to-America demographic, the school-shooter-wannabe demographic, the torture-porn demographic.

I would insist to my students that studying film, fairy tales, and internet memes is every bit as important as studying physics. The movie someone watches, and the internet memes someone shares, are a “royal road to the unconscious.” Have you ever lost a friend because of the meme she shares? I have. I liked Gert a lot. Then I saw her social media memes. So sexually graphic they could illustrate an anatomy lecture, but always sadistic and always disseminating some deadly conspiracy theory. I learned more about Gert from her memes than from eating lunch with her. Goodbye, Gert.

Do cultural products create reality or do they reflect reality? Does a TV show become popular because it is telling audiences who they are, or do media puppet masters jerk the audience’s strings and manipulate behavior? It’s a feedback loop.

A few years ago I began to hear of something called Fleabag; Fleabag is a groundbreaking feminist masterpiece, cultural arbiters wanted me to know. Fleabag was telling women who they are, who they should want to be, and who they should become. The sources telling me this are sources that are hostile to women like me, and they are sources that promote art that I find worthless. So I avoided Fleabag during its run, 2016-2019.

The other day, 47-year-old Irish actor Andrew Scott appeared on the NPR talk show Fresh Air. He mentioned that he’d played a character named “Hot Priest” on Fleabag. And I thought, okay, I have to watch this show. I’ll never get that tenure-track job, but I’m still interested in how popular culture depicts Catholicism.

Fleabag was written by and stars Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It was produced by Amazon and BBC Three. There are twelve episodes of about half an hour each. Fleabag is a “dramedy” about the sex life and family life of a woman named only “Fleabag,” played by Waller-Bridge, who was born in 1985. Fleabag was a critical and audience darling. It won Bafta, Emmy, and Golden Globe awards. Fleabag enjoys a 100% professional reviewer score on Rotten Tomatoes. In comparison, Lawrence of Arabia, one of the greatest films ever made, has only a 94% professional reviewer rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian and even First Things, a Catholic publication, slathered superlatives all over Fleabag. Fleabag was telling big, big TRUTHS about womanhood that no one else dare tell. First Things, which declares itself “America’s most influential journal of religion and public life,” blesses Fleabag as “brilliantly-crafted, inventive, and witty.” “Fleabag‘s’ soliloquy on menopause is the best three minutes of TV ever,” insists Mary McNamara in the L. A. Times. Yeah, that moon landing, Walter Cronkite announcing Kennedy’s death, and Whitney Houston singing the National Anthem, just can’t compete.

Fans love Fleabag, too. Reviews at the Internet Movie Database, Rotten Tomatoes, and Amazon rhapsodize. Quotes from a few: “Never have I seen a show that is so ruthlessly honest;” “I emailed BBC3 to thank them for airing it;” “Non-stop laughter;” “Not afraid of being real … raw and brave … Seeing roles like this for women, written by women, is amazing.”

I “binge watched” all twelve episodes in two days. When I finished, I felt sick. I wanted to take a shower – literally. I went out to dinner afterward and I said to my companion, “Listen, I just saw something disturbing and I need to get it off my chest before I can unwind.”

Fleabag champions the lifestyle of a borderline-personality-disordered slut. We are not supposed to be “judgmental.” To mention Fleabag’s BPD symptoms is to “pathologize” her, and to assess ourselves as “normal.” Both are big no-nos. The very idea of “normal” is demonized in contemporary ethics. “Normal” is a white, male, oppressor word. Inge van de Ven is a media studies scholar at Tilburg University. Van de Ven writes that to “pathologize” Fleabag is to imply a false dichotomy, “a clear boundary between the ‘pathological’ character and the supposedly ‘normal’ viewer.”

We are also not supposed to use the word “slut.” Waller-Bridge says, “I felt really strongly while writing Fleabag that there was no such thing as a slut, and I was just going to erase that from the equation … Being proper and sweet and nice and pleasing is a f—ing nightmare. It’s exhausting. As women, we get the message about how to be a good girl.”

“Slut,” “normal,” and “personality disorder” are all words that mean something, and rendering their use a thought crime limits our ability to talk about what these words refer to. A slut is a woman who has one-night-stands with many men whom she doesn’t like or even know. “Slut” is an unhappy and ugly word for an unhappy and ugly lifestyle. She’s not even a prostitute; she’s a pathetic amateur giving it away for reasons she doesn’t understand.

Sluts don’t represent feminist anything. Sluts tend not to have a lot of female friends. That’s because the slut lifestyle is self-destructive, and self-destructive people are unpleasant to be around. “Normal” means something close to “average” and according to the CDC, which provides a variety of statistics, most women have had fewer sex partners in their lifetime than Fleabag has over the twelve episodes of the series. So, no, Fleabag is not normal.

Waller-Bridge is a tall, slender, handsome woman with huge eyes, a great head of hair, ivory skin and toothpaste-ad ready teeth. She wears clothes as well as a model. She speaks with a posh British accent. Waller-Bridge is of the “landed gentry” Waller-Bridge line. A few of her relations, going back to the Victorian Era, have their own Wikipedia pages.

Boy does this lucky lady know how to whine. Every episode of Fleabag, in spite of the pervasive sex, the attempts at humor, the shock, the cringe, is Fleabag pitying herself, begging for your pity, and simultaneously insisting that she is above it all as the only sane person in an insane world. Her promiscuity is an expression of her unique sanity. So, therefore, Fleabag doesn’t have to change her ways to make her life less pitiable. The world must change to accommodate her. The world refuses to change, so please keep up the pity along with the praise. The real life Waller-Bridge insists that she is a feminist and that her character’s promiscuity and antisocial behavior are expressions of feminism. The character, Fleabag, also self-describes as a feminist.

Waller-Bridge’s superb teeth distract me. I grew up poor, among other poor people. One of my friends now makes six figures but he still suffers from the Dickensian poverty of his childhood. Both his lungs and his teeth were permanently damaged by lack of appropriate medical attention. One of my friends, a single mother of four – she had a husband; he turned out to be a psycho – refers with dark humor to her infrequent trips to the low cost “medieval dentist.”

Waller-Bridge isn’t satisfied being posh and pretty. Her voracious, aggressive narcissism demands that she be the feminist messiah who instructs the rest of us on salvation through antisocial behavior and potty-mouthed, humiliating sluttery. A model-attractive, “landed gentry” Brit with perfect teeth is lecturing vulnerable female viewers, and probably not a few male voyeurs, that sluttiness is what feminism is all about. It’s what Susan B. Anthony sacrificed for and went to jail for.

Waller-Bridge gripes that women are taught to be “proper,” taught to be a “good girl.” Many of us are “good girls,” and are glad that someone taught us the facts of life about women’s relative vulnerability, and how men’s sexuality differs from ours. We aren’t “good girls” because we were brainwashed by oppressive men or oppressive religion. We are “good girls” because that is our instinctual tendency. Modesty and sexual continence feel comfortable and natural to us, and they are also our survival strategies; they benefit us.

Waller-Bridge, as a very attractive child of a “landed gentry” family, would probably never have to pay the price for slut behavior that a poorer or minority girl from a bad family, or simply a more sensitive girl, would have to pay. Waller-Bridge is peddling a poison her greater socioeconomic power, and her harder heart, render her largely immune to, but that will hurt others, specifically vulnerable women and girls. How are women and girls hurt by personality-disordered and / or slut behavior? Harms include jail, public humiliation and ridicule, broken hearts, long-term trauma, eating disorders, addiction, loneliness, partner violence, crisis pregnancy, abortion, isolation, poverty, STDs and cervical cancer. Advocating for all that is not feminism. That’s the signature cutthroat personal ambition and greed of a drug pusher.

There’s an odd feature of Fleabag that its fans never seem to notice in their online reviews. Fleabag is as hermetically sealed as a locked ward. Brexit, Trump, Me-Too, Climate Change, migrants flooding into Europe, subsequent New Year’s sexual assaults in European cities, Harry and Meghan, none of the outside world is alluded to, never mind mentioned – except of course for the scene where Fleabag masturbates to Barack Obama. The entire world revolves around Fleabag. In twelve hours of video, not a single character is allowed to have a significant scene apart from Fleabag.

Fleabag, the otherwise unnamed main character of Fleabag, is a thirty-something café owner in London. She comes from money. Her father (Bill Paterson) is a befuddled white male patriarch who can’t finish a sentence or love his own daughter. He is under the sexual spell of his second wife, an insincere, catty, wicked stepmother (Olivia Colman). The stepmother, father, and several other characters have no names. This felt like an affectation meant to communicate Fleabag’s lack of recognition of others’ full humanity.

Claire (Sian Clifford) is Fleabag’s economically successful sister. Claire has a spacious corporate office. Her success is condemned as a sellout. Claire is meant to be anally retentive and uptight. She tells people that she “buries” and “bottles up” her emotions. Of course people who really do bottle up their emotions don’t announce this publicly. Clifford is not a convincing actress and her performance as tight-jawed Claire is painfully forced.

Clarie is married to Martin (Brett Gelman), an American Jew. Martin is the most villainous character. He is loud, threatening, needy, smarmy, and obnoxious. None of the other characters, including his own wife and child, like him. Gelman has long, curly, black hair and a dense, bushy black beard and mustache. As Martin, Gelman looks dark, greasy, and unclean. Fleabag has an almost totally white, posh, English cast. In this marshmallow world, Gelman’s Martin is inescapably an antisemitic stereotype. He’s a hipster version of Shylock.

Fleabag steals, lies, drinks, smokes, and has sex with men she doesn’t like or respect. She steals the credit card of a man she has sex with. She steals toilet paper from a home she visits. She steals wine from a store. She steals an artist’s artwork from her studio. She steals from café customers by shortchanging them. Asked to cater her sister’s work event, she steals the canapes she serves. She steals her sister’s sweater. Her successful sister finally steals something and Fleabag praises this as the “coolest” thing her sister has ever done. Fleabag’s “uptight” sister is honored by being tapped to present a prestigious award. Claire leaves Fleabag alone with the award for mere minutes. Fleabag immediately smashes the award to bits.

Fleabag initiates violent encounters with others. She punches her brother-in-law in the nose, sparking a restaurant brawl. She shoves her step-mother in the chest. She releases a housecat onto a city street, thus, of course, hurting the cat owner’s feelings and endangering the pampered house pet. She invites a virtual stranger, who has just confessed to her that he has been disciplined for repeatedly groping a coworker, to grope her breasts. She jokes that being murdered would be okay if one could be raped first. Fleabag’s philosophy of life: “People are shit.”

Fleabag owns a café. That is one of the odder choices of Waller-Bridge the writer. Her character, Fleabag, is not the type who would choose to feed and please others. When customers order food, Fleabag goes to a nearby store and grabs, perhaps steals, microwave versions of the dish the customer ordered. Fleabag’s former business partner, Boo, is seen in flashbacks. Fleabag had sex with Boo’s boyfriend and Boo, brokenhearted, committed suicide. Fleabag keeps the guinea pig she inherited from Boo in a tiny cage with no exercise equipment.

Fleabag’s café is failing. She goes to a bank and asks for a loan. She flashes her breasts at the loan officer (Hugh Dennis, very good here). Her tells her to leave. During a breast exam, she attempts to flirt with the doctor, who is offended and tells her to stop. Apparently Phoebe Waller-Bridge would have found the whole Larry Nassar sex scandal, where a doctor used exams to molest young girls, a real laff riot.

Fleabag breaks the fourth wall. Fleabag, the character, turns to the camera and makes running commentary on the action. The running commentary serves the character’s, and the creator’s megalomania. Though the show depicts its main character as a personality-disordered creep who ruins other people’s lives, the running commentary manipulates the audience into interpreting Fleabag as a heroine, and everyone around her as inferior.

Fleabag, the running commentary insists, is the only smart person in the room. The only honest person. The only one in touch with real issues. Everyone else is a hypocrite. The family patriarch is a fumbling aphasiac, sister Claire is a repressed, robotic neurotic, Martin is a smarmy bottom feeder, the loan officer and the physician are spoilsports who refuse to appreciate Fleabag’s breasts, and every man Fleabag has sex with is contemptible. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is not going to allow non-Fleabag characters to have any good lines, to express any insight, to win any argument, to have any moral code, any more than she allows the hapless actress Jenny Rainsford, who plays dead best friend Boo, to look like anything other than something the cat dragged in – see here. Claire is plain. She wears minimal makeup and her clothes are drab. The stepmother is plump and older. Waller-Bridge always looks perfectly turned out.

Critics use the word “cringe” when referring to the experience of watching Fleabag. Critics insist that the show is “honest” and “brave” and that is why audiences cringe while watching it. Audiences are too “oppressed,” too “good girl,” too “normal” to appreciate Fleabag’s “honesty” and “insight.” Flattering spin. Fleabag is nihilistic, sadistic, and misanthropic. Its contempt for humanity made me cringe.

While Fleabag is having sex with men, she mocks them in her fourth-wall monologues. She attracts men with her sunny smile, even as she turns to the audience and makes disparaging comments about the man. She turns back to the man and, again, smiles her eager-to-please smile. The disconnect between her inner contempt and her outer doormat eager-to-please smile is not feminist. It is diabolical. An adult woman knows how to say “No,” to sex she does not want. Fleabag doesn’t have that capacity or discernment. Beyond that, Fleabag contributes to misogynist stereotypes of women as vampiric teases who use men while secretly hating them.

Fleabag’s boyfriend Harry (Hugh Skinner) is depicted as having the maturity and physical presence of a nerdy high school sophomore. He’s very thin. He cries repeatedly. He cleans the apartment for Fleabag whenever she dumps him. While they are embracing, she runs her finger on a dusty bedside table and tells Harry she’s dumping him. She is confident that, after he cleans, he will return when she summons him. She takes him back so she can have sex, even though she doesn’t love him. While in bed with him, she masturbates to video of Barack Obama.

At least Harry has a name. Fleabag’s other sex partners are reduced to “arsehole guy,” “bus rodent,” “hot misogynist,” and “hot priest.” These men are made to say inane things that make them sound like complete idiots. “Hot misogynist,” for example, keeps repeating, “I’m really good at sex.” When Fleabag needs a man to have sex with; she walks down the street, looking beautiful; a plump man approaches. She says that “chubs” stands no chance with her.

Fleabag, through its promotion of sluttiness and its contempt for the men with whom Fleabag has sex, actively encourages its audience, not just to throw away conventional concepts of the dignity of a woman’s body, but to throw away even just conventional respect for another human being, including human beings with whom one risks the ultimate vulnerability of sexual intimacy. Fleabag the character humiliates her sex partners; she reduces them to tears; she invites them to the brink of personal ruin. And our response is supposed to be, “Oh, how honest; oh, how edgy; oh, how feminist.” That reaction relies on Fleabag the show’s refusal to see full humanity in anyone except Fleabag the character. Fleabag sees people and depicts people the way a personality disordered person would. People are mere possibilities for temporary personal satisfaction. Fleabag sees a man on a bus who looks handsome. She signals sexual interest. He smiles and shows bad teeth. She immediately reduces him to nothing but the butt of jokes.

Again, splintered culture and the rejection of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and its replacement with neo-Paganism, invited us to reject the imago dei / B’tselem Elohim / image-of-God foundation of our previous worldview. The belief that each person is made in the image of God enriched our art. We learned to see even average people, not just the Pharaoh or the demigod Achilles, as worthy of attention, of artistic representation, of story. Rejecting that concept vitiates our art. Even the worst person has some backstory, some motivation, some spark of the divine; it’s because of that spark that even villains engage our intellect. We want to understand how something so good could go so wrong. Even the toughest, most atheistic, God-mocking woman suffers when she does not protect her divine essence from the cheap assaults of a slut lifestyle. In Fleabag, women are interchangeable orifices to be filled at random, and men are nothing but jokes it hurts to laugh at.

Flawed people living flawed lives are the mainstay of culture. We need Cody Jarrett shouting “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” as he self-immolates. Culture made that villain fascinating and unforgettable, but it didn’t flatter him. The Catholic-Church-influenced Production Code demanded that there be others around Jarrett who were more mature, more psychologically coherent than he, and while enchanted by Cody’s charisma, we also recognized that he was failing at basic steps in maturation. Lina Wertmuller’s 1974 film Swept Away includes graphic scenes of rape, battery, and S&M. Swept Away is great in a way that Fleabag never approaches. Swept Away is honest about Raffaella, a rich snob, and Gennarino, a poor Communist and macho Italian. We see their ugly side and their best sides. Raffaella and Gennarino are both allowed to lose contests. We laugh, we shudder, and we cry. Swept Away’s honest probing earns all those reactions.

Fleabag allows no such challenges to Fleabag’s superiority; she never loses a contest. There are aborted challenges in a couple of scenes.  The Irish actress Fiona Shaw gives a masterful performance as a therapist who isn’t taking any guff from Fleabag. She doesn’t laugh at Fleabag’s jokes. She invites Fleabag to confront her own self-sabotage. But then Fleabag asks Shaw what exactly it is that therapists do. I’ve never been a therapist but I know the answer. Therapists help make unconscious self-sabotage conscious so that clients can change their patterns from self-sabotaging to life affirming. But Waller-Bridge won’t allow Shaw that basic reply. Powerful Fiona Shaw, who has played both Mother Courage and Richard II onstage, is reduced to a wounded retreat. Waller-Bridge orchestrates a narrative where her character gets the last word, and the last word is that Fleabag is smarter than everyone around her, so her worldview of sluttiness and personality disordered dysfunction must be correct.

The so-called “Hot Priest” invites Fleabag to read the Bible. She says she can’t respect the Bible because God creates light before he creates the sun. The Hot Priest looks defeated. “That’s ridiculous,” he is forced to concede. In fact the creation of light before creation of the sun is one of the profound truths in the Bible. Light was light before the sun was the sun. In any case, a quick Google search reveals pages of exegesis exploring the question of the order of creation and these pages are rapidly available to anyone with a search engine and humble curiosity. Fleabag pretends that she is the first – really, really smart! – person ever to have asked that question. And, again, as with the therapist, she allows herself the last word. “Ridiculous.” Fleabag is desperately in need of both psychotherapy and God, but, in the script she herself wrote, she manages to insist that she has no need of either.

Ironically, both seasons of Fleabag include a scene where Fleabag has a nervous breakdown, and an older, white, male authority figure rescues her. These male rescue scenes are very much not feminist, and they are also something worse.

In season one, the loan officer enters Fleabag’s café by chance. Fleabag has a sloppy and embarrassing nervous breakdown in front of him. She cries and confesses her slut lifestyle and uses the F-word in every sentence, as in “I f— everything.” Most “normal” people would, at most, offer to dial a suicide hotline. But in an unlikely plot twist, the loan officer who had turned her down after she flashed her breasts, suddenly offers her a loan. In season two, Fleabag has a nervous breakdown and blurts out her inner turmoil to a priest, who grabs her and kisses her, making her feel, temporarily, better.

Waller-Bridge thus rewards Fleabag for behaving in a mentally disordered way. This is the kind of manipulative fantasy mental disorders engender in affected people. “If I go really nuts in public, someone powerful will rescue me from myself.” The disordered behavior is seen as a life saver, and a personal asset, rather than as personal deficit, a dead weight dragging the sufferer down. Fleabag needs to overcome her histrionic manipulations. Instead, she indulges them, is rewarded, and fends off any maturation.

Waller-Bridge the writer is manipulating the viewer just as her character, Fleabag, is manipulating the loan officer and Hot Priest. Waller-Bridge has depicted a repellant character. She tries to manipulate us into liking this character because we see her cry and whine. She tries to convince us that this manipulative, histrionic display is a true “breakthrough.” From now on, we are to believe, Fleabag will be a better person. Her emotionality has brought her to full health. I might be convinced of a new, improved Fleabag if she went back to Fiona Shaw and committed to therapy, an end to theft, and sexual continence.

What, then, is “feminist” about Fleabag? Fleabag meets Belinda, a business colleague of her sister’s, for a drink. Belinda delivers a boilerplate, pseudo-feminist rant. She’s angry she received a prize as a “businesswoman.” Such prizes put her in a ghetto; they are the kiddy table. Women carry pain inside, Belinda says. Menstruation is very painful, as is menopause. Men have to go in search of pain. That’s why they invent gods, demons, and wars. So they can feel something and touch each other. When there are no wars, men play rugby. Menopause means “You are no longer a slave.”

I was rolling my eyes throughout Belinda’s self-dramatizing ladies room rant, and I am here to attest that I have had the most painful periods of any woman on the planet. But come on. One of my male friends has scars all over his body from iron work. I have to guess that some of the income-generating, wife-and-kids-supporting work behind those scars hurt as much as my monthly visitor. I’ll never know because he never talks about it.

Belinda is not allowed to exit the plot till she praises Fleabag. “You’re a tonic,” she tells Fleabag. When Fleabag tells Belinda that she stole artwork from an artist’s studio, Belinda says, “Glorious. You did exactly the right thing.” When Fleabag says that she stole the canapes she served at Claire’s event, Belinda laughs approvingly. Theft, to Fleabag and its audience, is a feminist value. Fleabag’s hapless father, who is incapable of completing a sentence, is also roped into the all-praise-Fleabag requirement. He finally completes a sentence to Fleabag, saying, “You know how to love better than any of us.” Um, no, she does not.

And what about Fleabag’s depiction of Catholicism? What about the “Hot Priest” character? Here’s what. There is no Catholicism in Fleabag, and there’s no “Hot Priest,” any more than there is any feminism. The entire show is an exercise in narcissism. The show’s characters are Fleabag and not-Fleabag, that is they are foils for her, there for her to triumph over and humiliate, or to profit from. The Hot Priest is not only not a well-rounded character, he’s not a character at all.

Hot Priest – he has no other name – is Fleabag in a collar. Like her, he is a lost soul; he is sexually incontinent and erotically manipulative; he doesn’t get along with his parents – they are drunks – or his brother – he’s a pedophile; he drinks and smokes too much; and he feels alien from but superior to others, around whom he acts a part. He blurts out TMI – too much information. He uses the F-word to excess; at one point he actually says “I f—ing love Winnie the Pooh. F—.” At a Christian prayer meeting, Fleabag blurts out, “I sometimes worry that I wouldn’t be a feminist if I had bigger tits,” and Hot Priest laughs approvingly. Susan B. Anthony must wonder if it isn’t time to come back and smack some heads, starting with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s well-coiffed noggin.

Again, Fleabag is a mostly marshmallow white world, but Hot Priest and Fleabag share a laugh over the funny, fat black lady with the funny accent, Pam, who is onscreen only long enough to mispronounce words in a way meant to be comical.

That a show celebrating sluttiness made such capital out of a sex-with-a-priest plot speaks volumes. Even those celebrating and emulating Fleabag’s slut behavior yearn for the very boundaries that they badmouth as “oppressive” and “misogynist.” Those embracing the Hot Priest plot want a world where there are rules against casual sex. Since he is a priest, Fleabag and Hot Priest don’t immediately have sex. They have a couple of conversations first. Hot Priest pays attention to Fleabag. Her other partners, like her, are in it only for the temporary scratch of a temporary itch. The other person’s humanity is an impediment to cheap sex.

All of Fleabag’s many problems, her compulsive thefts, her contempt for the men she is sexually addicted to, her constant blow-ups with her family, would be solved by the very qualities she mocks. Maturity, confrontation with the self, discipline of personal desires, compassion for one’s fellow humans, commitment to a significant other and compromise with that other to build a rewarding life and experience, yes, true better sex through true intimacy, would solve Fleabag’s agonies and those of her many fans who insist, “I am Fleabag!”

There are fan fictions based on Fleabag. I’ve read a few. In the ones I read, Fleabag is in a monogamous, tender, mutually committed and supportive relationship with Hot Priest. They can enjoy each other even while just holding hands and watching sappy romantic movies on TV.

Does this pop culture product matter? Ask Psychology Today. According to an April 14, 2023 article, women on social media are self-identifying as Fleabag. They exercise her “slick apathy and unapologetic amorality.” “Emulating her journey or looking upon her as a role model is not a recommended path to mental health and happiness.” Dr. Mark Travers comically understates his red flag warning. Women who identify with Fleabag must stop relationship self-sabotage. “This has to be developed by working on building trust, improving communication, making commitments, and creating an atmosphere of safety, preferably under the guidance of a licensed mental health practitioner … Leaning into a fictionalized character’s destructive qualities might be taking it a bit too far … the character you love is fictitious, and so are the consequences of her actions—unlike yours,” Dr. Travers concludes.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge knows all this. She doesn’t care. Depicting a normal woman struggling to lead a decent life would not win her the acclaim that Fleabag has.

Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery