The White Lotus is Giving … Oppressed Bitches!
This season of The White Lotus is a gift to me from Mike White. While the online consensus seems iffy (a range of podcasts and substacks I subscribe to from Hung Up to The Pop Style Opinionfest to Vibe Check are … unimpressed), I am savoring and devouring every moment. Aubrey Plaza plays Harper on this season, a character that you can only understand if you have an advanced degree and have had to get dinner with a partner’s friends, relatives, or some group of people that you would never voluntarily choose to hang out with. Which is to say, Aubrey Plaza is playing me on this season of The White Lotus!
She had me at, “I don’t watch Ted Lasso,” squinting behind stylish sunglasses with a whiff of vague annoyance. She only watches documentaries, she wants you to know. This, of course, gratified me because, being president of the Hoult Hive, I haven’t forgiven Jason Sudeikis for winning that Emmy. And sure, my cold dead heart is just as warmed as the next by Ted Lasso, but it’s not, like, the best writing or acting on TV, okay?
Her disdain is only ever barely concealed for Cameron and Daphne, the couple her boring husband made her go on vacation with. And Harper’s refusal or inability to act right in front of her husband’s friends has me pondering … is she an oppressed bitch? Admittedly, oppressed bitch is a vague term that holds very little real meaning. But essentially what I am yearning for when I yearn for oppressed bitch representation are stories where women live in the actual patriarchal hell dump that is reality but are neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally villainous. Women who are not filtered through the male gaze. Women who live, laugh, love out loud.
But these rules are also loose because Florence Pugh’s character in Lady Macbeth is certainly villainous and perhaps exceptionally so, but she is also definitely an oppressed bitch. So it’s not that I want women to occupy some kind of middleground. Rather, it’s that I want women characters to respond to the realities that they’re living in as themselves, not as some kind of allegory of female empowerment or feminist-lite moralizing.
A key character trait for Aubrey Plaza’s Harper is her intelligence, and by extension, her opinion of her own intelligence. She also evokes a general anxious affect, to which I think the terminally online and your average coastal yuppy can probably relate. I don’t know that the show is that interested in what it means for Harper to be a woman living under patriarchy, surviving misogyny. She manages a horror-movie-esque sequence of vaguely threatening, horny Italian men leering at her in Noto. She mentions in the same episode that the last time she took an edible, she began tripping out on “being a woman.”
Initially, Harper seems to be the prototypical frigid bitch. The childless liberal woman who froze her eggs, who worries about bringing a child into such a fucked up world. The kind of woman that JD Vance thinks you shouldn’t be. Cameron forcefully tries to get her attention, changing in front of her, sneaking up on her in the ocean. But Harper seems unimpressed until after Ethan lies to her about what happened the night she was in Noto.
When we meet Harper, she seems to manage men like Cameron by being smarter than them and unimpressed with them. Perhaps “tripping out on being a woman” for Harper has something to do with the disjunction she experiences between feeling men as a menacing presence and finding herself, on some level, turned on by this brash, raw sexuality. After all, she brushes Cameron’s hand away at dinner, but she also seems interested in the prospect.
In an early episode, Daphne speculates about Harper that “some women like to cut off their husband’s balls, then wonder why they’re not attracted to them anymore.” It’s a conventional right-wing narrative. Women want to be in charge, but when they are in charge, they don’t even like it. Men can’t be manly when women are empowered. Men can’t be sexually virile when women are intelligent and unimpressed. And to a certain extent, I suppose Harper does feel this. “Tripping out on being a woman” means tripping out on the confusion of this system in which her personal sense of worth, safety, and power comes at the cost of her sex life.
The show is not interested in patriarchy in the way that The Handmaid’s Tale or Stepford Wives is interested in patriarchy. It’s not necessarily interrogating structures or even representing them with that much focus. It’s more interested in staging characters whose lives are shaped by these forces but in ways the characters themselves may not even be aware of. Megan Fahy’s Daphne, at first seemingly blissfully unaware of these realities or perhaps even happily accepting their strictures, serving her husband as a loyal, happy, domestic wife and mother, becomes more darkly complex with each passing episode.
Harper is the kind of woman who would be on her alma mater’s Feminist Student Union instagram as a notable alumnus. You could imagine the college newspaper doing a little profile. She’s an impressive lawyer in her field. She probably makes a great face for a firm dedicated to fighting labor violations. There’s a sense in which Harper, resident frigid bitch, is very much not oppressed. She runs the marriage! She doesn’t want to order fish that’s too fishy! And when she finds out that Ethan is messing around behind her back, lying to her and doing molly with Cameron, Mia, and Lucia, she decides to do a bit of messing around herself.
I find Harper compelling because I connect with her, with this disdain for people that you don’t find serious. Harper represents a significant portion of the show’s fanbase. Harper is a college-educated voter who votes, who reads, who perhaps only watches documentaries but who has a certain cultural literacy that likely resonates with a person who chooses to pay for an HBO subscription. To an extent, I think Harper is beginning to act out certain uncouth fantasies that the highly-educated, blue-state woman she represents would choose to suppress. Like Daphne, in the face of her husband’s lying, Harper chooses to do what she wants.
This impulse is perhaps another cornerstone of oppressed bitchery. It’s about desire and power. And a blanket assertion that you do what you want in the face of your rich husband’s serial cheating is not, like, a feminist serve. Perhaps this is why I’m so interested in articulating what “oppressed bitch” means as an archetype. An oppressed bitch is a woman who does what she wants.
Doing what you want is not necessarily a revolutionary political act, though it can be. I like these characters because they make me think about desire. Oppressed bitches exhibit a total disregard for the acceptability of their desires. And perhaps that is radically progressive. Not because it’s a good thing to disregard the impact your desires may have on other people, but because concerning yourself with the acceptability of your desires doesn’t constitute liberation either. The rules of acceptability don’t exactly correspond to a practice of communal care that accounts for harm when enacting one’s desires. A woman who does what she wants with relish and abandon is unconstrained by patriarchal rules of acceptability. That doesn’t make her a hero. And I guess I kind of like that.
