I’m In Love With A Monster: Gilmore Girls and Me

Excerpt from “No Blurred Lines: Rape Culture in US American Television”

Originally published April 2017

“If you want to make a young woman feel bad, pulling out the term slut is a sure fire way to do it. The term is so vague and slippery that no one knows what a slut is or no one knows what you have to do to be that. It circulated around, though, so everyone could worry about it being attached to them.” — Elizabeth Armstrong.

If I was describing myself as a pile of traits, I would have to include: my dog Laurence, who I definitely like more than I like you; my family, particularly my nieces and nephews because they’re tiny and call me TiTi instead of Auntie, which is adorable; deep affection for sunflower seeds, pasta, and diet coke; and, of course, television. I wouldn’t be who I am without any of these things as each little trait make up the main components of what I care about and, as we discussed in the first blog post, my cultural framework in which I view and understand things.

I love television and the way it can infiltrate my daily life. I’ve donned the outfits of Buffy Summers (to the deep, deep bane of my parents), the emotional dramatics of Phoebe Halliwell, the honestly excellent music taste of Dean Winchester. I’ve played games that were conceptually founded in quotes from The Office and the “Treat Yo Self” episode of Parks and Rec genuinely rerouted the trajectory of my life. I’ve also started and finished two and a half new series on Netflix in the past week and a half. I really love television.

Arguably, Gilmore Girls (GG) shaped me into who I am more than any other piece of television. My truest experience of love was when Jess Mariano stepped off that bus and entered both Stars Hollows and my heart. Like, I’ve been in actual love and I’m positive that my feelings for Jess were at least as strong, if not as real. Rory’s addiction to academia directly fueled my own passion and Lorelai’s fast talk and eating habits are responsible for a lifetime of being misheard and probably not a small amount of diabetes. I’m incapable of untangling this show from who I am and how I think. You say copper, I think boom.

Because of this, I was anxious about including GG in my project. I didn’t want to know if this show was perpetuating rape culture. It already had flaws that I worked very hard to ignore. (Seriously, Sherman-Palladino? The fat shaming? It’s OOC for the sympathetic and kind characters you’re trying to convince us they are. It’s also disgusting to watch.)

But not wanting to look at it was exactly why I needed to do it. I knew this show affected me and I knew I didn’t want it to influence me accidentally.

And, freaking damn it, I’m forced to report that GG wasn’t the squeaky-clean, RC-free haven I’d hoped it to be. Rather, GG exemplifies one of the most intricate parts of RC there is: slut shaming.

Slutshaming is a “form of social stigma applied to people, especially women and girls, who are perceived to violate traditional expectations for sexual behaviors”. This is intricately woven into our society and greatly assists in the perpetuation of rape myths. Slutshaming can be as straightforward as calling girls names for sleeping around. Or it can be as complex as school dress codes telling young girls that their bare shoulders or legs are too sexual to be allowed in public settings and that their young male classmates are incapable of controlling themselves. Slutshaming judges girls and women for their sexuality and how they use it, whether that is perceived or explicit.

If you want some general information about slutshaming and it’s most obvious infiltration of GG, check out this video I did for my series about rape culture in American television. I only rant about Jess for a little bit. Don’t worry.

I want to dwell a bit on the effects that RC plays on both the characters and the audience. I want to look at the way that, specifically Lorelai’s, slutshaming changes the moral compass of the show, Rory— and not for the better.

Rory is undisputedly the moral compass of the show, especially at the beginning. This isn’t to say she’s the judgemental one, but rather, it’s through Rory’s eyes that things are okay or not. She, and not really Lorelai, change the audience’s opinion on things. When Lorelai doesn’t like Jess, we understand it, but we don’t necessarily, narratively agree. The narrative asks us to see Rory’s judgements of people as the truth and, for the most part, the audience agrees.

This works okay for the beginning of the series. Rory starts out at sixteen years old and, though young, is known for having a good head on her shoulders and being mature. She works as a moral compass because her morals are an even mix of young naivety that believes the best of the world and the trusted awareness that comes from from being deeply intellectual. It’s a nice view of the world that we all want to root for.

But, quickly, we can see the many ways in which Rory fails at being a moral good, even if the narrative paints herself as one. She, like Lorelai, is quick to judge other women and slutshame. Let’s look at a few examples of Rory doing this before we talk about the why. In season 1, Rory judges and openly berates her best friend Lane when she finds out that Lane is a cheerleader. Rory’s main point is that they used to make fun of “girls like that”. Though the girls eventually make up, it’s because she realized that Lane really wasn’t going to change— not that there was nothing wrong with being a cheerleader in the first place.

Later, in season 3, Rory sees Jess, a boy she kissed at the beginning of the summer before she left for a trip, making out with a girl. She is incredibly antagonistic and hateful towards this girl for the entirety of her arc on this show (which spans several episodes), constantly belittling her and making comments about her supposed lack of intelligence, all of which stems from her physical PDA relationship with Jess.

These are just a few examples that pop to mind of Rory being, like, hella judgemental and slutshaming. She’s not a great gal even if she is someone I would fist fight anyone for.

The question is, why would our moral compass protagonist treat people like this?

Well. Let’s just say Lorelai gave Rory more than just her eclectic taste in media and blue eyes.

Rory slutshames because of the lovingly delivered slutshaming that her mother has given her throughout her life. In season 1 ep 9  “Rory’s Dance”, Rory falls asleep at Miss Patty’s dance studio with her boyfriend. There wasn’t anything particularly wiggly-eyebrow about their evening: Dean threatened to beat up the god-awful Tristan, which no one really minded, and they probably PG-level kissed at some point, but no one would even have used the winky face emoji to describe it. Regardless, the panicked memory of her own teenage life bombarded Lorelai both through her own thought process and the screeching of her mother when the two older Gilmore girls woke up to Rory missing. Rory is horrified, knowing what her mother will think and how she’ll be in trouble. Though it makes sense that Lorelai would be very worried about her daughter missing, the main panic and anger doesn’t come from fear of her safety but rather predominantly from the fact that she was out with a boy and the assumptions that come from that. This aggression is one example of Lorelai’s words connecting sex and disappointment in Rory’s mind.

Another example comes in season 3 episode 19 “Keg! Max!”. I spoke about this episode in the video you might have seen, but to briefly summarize: Rory is going to a house party with her boyfriend Jess, Jess is having #troubles, many things ensue. In the episode, Rory isn’t sure what to do with her house key at the party, afraid of losing it. Lorelai deftly plucks the key from Rory, ties it in a loop around her belt, and tells her daughter: “You'll only lose it if you take off your belt, and if you're taking off your belt for any reason at the party, I'm not sure I want you coming home.” This is a clear example of Lorelai reiterating again the connection between sex and disappointing Lorelai. To have any sort of sexual relationship, even with her boyfriend, is bad— a truly don’t-come-home kind of bad. Rory, at this point, is a senior in high school. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect Rory to start having physical relationships with people around this time in her life, yet it’s still treated as something inherently wrong. This is the kind of stigma around sex that causes teenagers and young adults to not be informed, unwilling to talk to their parents or trusted adults, and instead make their own assumptions on how relationships should and do work.

Despite, or perhaps because of, having a daughter at such a young age, Lorelai views sex for her daughter as something damning, disgusting, and morally wrong. Though this makes sense on a surface level because Rory starts off the show as a young teenager, it’s not necessarily lessened as Rory ages. And the judgement is subtly passed on Rory, side characters, and background characters that are shown to be bitchy or dumb if they’re also shown as sexual.

The way that Lorelai treats the relationship between sex and Rory is likely the main reason why Rory herself views sex in such an inappropriate way. Rory’s first time was incredibly traumatic as it was with her married ex-boyfriend (friggin’ Dean, coming at it again with that Asshole Award) and resulted in not just judgement and scrutiny from the town, but Lorelai also barely being on speaking terms with Rory for an extended period of time. Though I’m in no way saying that what Rory did was okay, I am saying that perhaps Rory made a “morally wrong” choice about sex because she was raised to believe that sex itself is already “morally wrong”. It’s like when you’re a kid and you know you’re going to get in trouble for eating a piece of cake. You’re already doing something bad, so why not just finish the cake off and get a soda while you’re at it? The punishment is the same anyway.

Rory’s second hook-up partner was Logan, who is probably the best boyfriend for Rory even if I don’t particularly like him (I can admit defeat in age, but Logan will never matter to me half as much as Jess). Yet, the first time Rory and Logan are physical is at her grandparent’s vow renewal. This is played for both the drama and the comedy when Rory’s mom, dad, and quasi-step-dad interrupt them right as things start getting heavy. I can respect the use of drama in this instance, sure, but to be honest, when I see that scene, I mostly just think: WHY NOW? Rory, babe, please. Just stop, you’ve GOT to be smarter than that. And yet— Rory just wasn’t. She decided to try to hook up with the guy at a place where she was likely to have been missed or interrupted. I’m sure this wasn’t her intention, the same as it wasn’t her intention to ruin a marriage when she slept with Dean: but it was still the most attractive option to her.

We can also take a look at these two guys, different as they are, and see the connection they offer to Rory at the time of her being with them physically: they’re both, essentially, unattainable. Dean is married; Logan doesn’t do “serious”. They are men that she shouldn’t get involved with, knows that there will be serious repercussions for being involved with, and pursues it anyway. This says to me that she connects sex with bad decisions, each time.

(There’s also something to be said about The Chase that Rory finds appealing, which is a trait that Lorelai also exemplifies in her dating techniques, particularly in the earlier seasons. Additionally, now is as good a time as any to point out that Rory's demographics also affect her sociality in correlation with her assumed 'sluttiness' or lack thereof. Rory, like most of the characters in GG, is an upper-middle class white woman, making her more acceptable societally despite incidents such as the affair with Dean. While this is never addressed in the show as a reason for Rory not really suffering social consequences for her actions, outside of one or two interactions with Lindsay herself, it'd be shitty feminism to pretend like it wasn't a factor.)

Now, at this point, you might be saying to yourself: just stop, Emma. We get what you’re saying, but you’re being dramatic. It’s just Gilmore Girls and no one, including Rory, was reading that much into things.

Well, sure. That’s one way to interpret these scenes and the many like them. We can take them as jokes, as relationships, as I have many times before, and not really think about the implications it would have on the viewers or Rory’s IRL counterpart.

But that’s a bit ignorant on the fact that there are implications to the viewers and Rory’s IRL counterpart.

Building from the other blogs in this series, we know that the way we watch television influence the way we think. I think it’s safe to assume that we all know that watching television changes our cultural framework and therefore our lives. But let’s add another layer of that on top by looking at the Users and Gratifications Theory.

In his book “Sociology Of Mass Media”, David Glower says that “the selected way in which people make the media a part of their everyday life [changes the way they are] able to satisfy a variety of social needs and desires.” Combining that with UGT essentially means that people not only have take away from their media, but are actively choosing what media to interact with in order to provide themselves with a specific take away. It places the the audience as an active participate that is in charge of and capable of interpreting the media. Audiences interpret and integrate their media into their lives in order to gain knowledge, relaxation, diversion, escape, or social interactions/companionship. This is particularly interesting when considering one of Baudrillard’s theory that states: the sociality you have is measured by your exposure to media.

So basically: if all our friends watch Gilmore Girls, we’ll watch Gilmore Girls in order to create the same social competence and framework as our friends. Then the messages in GG will become a part of our framework and our friend’s framework and we’ll spread these messages. Then the messages will become strengthened in our framework because our friends think so, too.

Not to mention that because these things are said as jokes, quips, or from the mouths of our favorite characters in a non-serious way, we’re twice as likely to not think about it harshly and instead just accept it. It’s dangerous to have beloved characters say bad things in their regular, common vernacular, because we don’t always recognize it as something to critique. But we have to, because we live in a world where slutshaming and the opinions people have about girls can negatively affect their lives— because we live in a rape culture that is foundationally strengthened by the negative opinions on girls and the idea that they’re not in control of their own bodies.

If you want to follow this series in a visual way, click here for my YouTube series of the same name. The series is a bit lighter but also is still about RC so, really, how light can it get? Bless. ✌🏻