By Megan Bell

TW: sexual assault, drug use

‘I have a horrible feeling I am a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.’ This quote from Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s hit show Fleabag (2016-2019) boldly captures a moral dilemma among Western women. A childless, single, thirty-three-year-old sex addict, Fleabag’s character is one example of a trending female stereotype in British contemporary drama – the Messy Modern Woman.

When you think about it, she’s everywhere. From Áine in This Way Up (2019) and Arabella in I MAY DESTROY YOU (2020), to classic 2000s icon Bridget Jones. These women are working professionals (go second-wave feminism!) yet something is always amiss: Fleabag’s failing café, Bridget’s embarrassing PR job, and Arabella’s procrastination on her new novel.

As well as consistently being presented as childless, socially inept and hopeless in relationships, the Messy Modern Woman is problematically associated with poor mental health or trauma. These are women characters beyond the white picket fence lifestyle – the husband, kids, dog and the mortgage (a lifestyle I neither problematise nor shun) – but why is the Messy Modern Woman the default representation of women who chose another way of life?

What are the origins of this trope? Why, as viewers, are we so addicted to her? Think of the male gaze; think of the Girl Boss and the hypocrisies women face as 'work-centred' women. Before second-wave feminism, it was expected that most women would marry young and sacrifice their careers for the home. The second-wave movement aimed to place women in leadership positions after generations of inequality and was also defined by women's bodily autonomy with abortion rights and reproductive healthcare coming to the forefront. For the first time in Western history, the traditional male positioning as the breadwinner was questioned.

I believe that from this history, the Messy Modern Woman was initially created as a response to historical limitations women have experienced. Yet this trope has now warped powerful women characters into creatures of chaos, further pushing the idea that women can’t have it all.

Bridget Jones is an early pop-culture example of the Messy Modern Woman with her unapologetic, confessional character arguably influencing a new female writing style. Bridget’s endearing personality is a product of millennial modernity; she is a liberated woman who brazenly declares insecurities! Despite this, the plot follows Bridget navigating loneliness and her character has become the zeitgeist representation for unmarried, childless, working women. Though she is well-written and very funny, the gift of hindsight shows how Bridget’s anxieties about being alone and shelved as a thirty-something spinster are patriarchally influenced.  

Bridget Jones’s Diary sets a precedent for the mainstream, highly commercial women’s icon. Yet I question why there are so many comedies about women requiring a narrative based around their lack of self-worth. Writers need to stop associating their leading women protagonists with self-deprecation or crippling mental health that stops them from functioning as human beings, as seen in Fleabag and This Way Up. Repeating presentations of women who are either tightly wound or at destructively loose ends infers a dangerous and unfair assumption about women who choose their own paths away from traditional, heteronormative lives.

Dysfunctional relationships and meaningless sex are a common screen trope for the Messy Modern Woman. In Fleabag, audiences follow Fleabag’s gradual decline into desperation as she distracts herself with sex in an effort to ignore her rising shame and disgust with herself. (Spoilers: she slept with her best friend’s boyfriend, and then said best friend died). Fleabag is a pretty bad person, but with her character consistently breaking the fourth wall to share her comedic inner narrative, the self-sabotaging sex with Arsehole Guy and Bus Rodent is funny. Dark humour is a coping mechanism for the unresolved trauma Fleabag carries, implying that both Bus Rodent and Arsehole Guy are vessels to drown out negative feelings by beckoning further emotional chaos into her life. Typical Messy Modern Woman behaviour.

Similarly in This Way Up, Áine’s cynical personality is a mechanism to help navigate her life after experiencing a nervous breakdown, though this has the effect of her character becoming aspirational to audiences, with self-mockery, resignation and defiance so commonly used to present female trauma on screen. When Áine tries to have meaningless sex with her rehab partner, Tom, she exasperatingly asks, ‘Do you ever just wanna feel something for five fucking minutes?’ as a justification for her actions. It’s built into the programme’s DNA that trauma informs not only character and narrative content but also the thematics, aesthetics and structural logistics of the storytelling.

I question how and why this narrative of self-destruction, avoidant emotion and boundary-less sex became the romanticised, singular experience for modern women, and why they are only presented as heterosexual and white. How can these narratives encapsulate an entire women’s experience and be titled ‘feminist’ when they are far removed from intersectional storylines?

But there is hope for change. Michaela Coel’s powerful show, I MAY DESTROY YOU, approaches the presentation of the Messy Modern Woman differently. Through the protagonist, Arabella, I MAY DESTROY YOU explores how society views chaotic women, discussing where the blame is placed when exploring sexual assault and consent, and problematising the narrative we see on screen.

In the first episode, Arabella is spiked and later raped. This is clearly an experience that is blamed on the man responsible for drugging her, yet the build-up towards this scene shows Arabella snorting cocaine with her friends. Similarly, in an episode set before the rape, Arabella leaves her drink in a club, losing her friend in the process, and dances with strangers. Both indicate that Arabella is irresponsible and vulnerable, perhaps fuel to blame herself for being raped – a common excuse used to warp the blame of sexual assault onto the victim.

As a Black woman commenting on this theme of assault and trauma, I MAY DESTROY YOU has been applauded as artistically ambitious in its critique of how victims are treated in a patriarchal world, going back to the ‘good’ women vs ‘bad’ woman theme. The Messy Modern Woman is chaotic and frustrating, but her poor decision making should not be a justification for being exploited. Instead, we should be delving into how these attitudes came about (I’ll give you a hint: men).

This character that has appeared over the past twenty years is burdened by problems that are systemic and social, implying that there is a wider problem with perceptions of ‘messy’ women. Bridget Jones’s Diary introduced the Messy Modern Woman as a surface figure to our screens, yet Fleabag and This Way Up warped her into a shell of the woman we once knew, altering her into a romanticised chaotic identity of women with a choice beyond patriarchal expectation.

While the trope began as a comedic, post-feminist adaptation of a modern female experience, the storylines of the Messy Modern Woman struggling to live unburdened by trauma has turned repetitive and ingenuine. I no longer find myself entertained by meaningless sex/spiralling mental health stereotypes when there is so much more variety to a woman’s experience. One can only hope that British drama will introduce a new woman character to grace the screen, much like Michaela Coel has already proposed. I hope that whoever she is, she does us justice.  

 Megan Bell (she/her) is a graduate of the University of Brighton with a BA in Creative Writing. Feminism, queerness and mental health are explored in her work. With professional experience at Penguin Random House as well as having work published in The Phare and Heroica, Meg is optimistic about future opportunities.