Rory Gilmore Let Me Down

I have a confession to make. 

My love for Gilmore Girls is all-consuming. 

Instead of doing the (mountain and a half) of homework I had this week, I decided to rewatch sixty episodes in six days with my parents.

This is not my proudest moment. 

For those of you that don't know, Gilmore Girls is a television show (now streaming on Netflix!) following a mother-daughter duo (Lorelai and Rory Gilmore) as they navigate through Rory's high school years and later, her time at Yale. 

And not to make an extreme pivot, but re-watching Gilmore Girls, this time old enough to understand the Jack Kerouac references, forced me to think about our representation of women in media. Rory Gilmore was one of the few "smart girls" portrayed on screen that truly was laser-focused on academics for all of high school; the show regularly devotes large chunks of its episodes to her studying, or preparing for debates, or reading on a park bench (don't believe me? Check out this Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge). For the first three seasons, there's nobody I wanted to be more -- witty banter? Boyfriends who read all the Ayn Rand you recommend? Endless fast food and free coffee? What's not to love?*

*Admittedly, the witty banter is the more than half the reason I watch the show.

But by season four, Rory has become insufferable: cheating with married men, dropping out of Yale because one guy told her she didn't "have what it takes", stealing a yacht, spending the night in jail.... is this what smart women amount to? Flash forward ten years, she's in a relationship with a man engaged to someone else, living with her mother, plan-less, and worse: not bothered by it.

Life isn't easy, nor is it linear. I know that. But I can't help but think that the show-writers are punishing Rory for her early ambition, her big dreams, and her audacity to chase them by keeping her in the one town she always wanted to leave, not letting her have the one job she worked her whole life for. While most 90s sitcoms end with fairytales and rainbows, every character getting what they want (if only in an indirect way), Gilmore Girls ends with Rory...lost. Arguably moreso than she was in the Pilot. 

It's also worth noting that Rory's emanating white privilege is the only reason she is allowed to be this confused: she adamently insists that she's "nothing like" the elite, private-school kids, yet... she went to a finishing school? And then Yale? Became a debutante? Paid for none of this because she has millionaire, old-money grandparents? Her education didn't cost her anything, so it's easy to understand why she values it so little. 

All this to say, I tried to explain this all to my poor father this week, ranting about how Rory failed a generation of supernerds, and he was mostly confused (and slightly concerned). I realized how much of the way we watch/read/consume media is affected by who we are -- my father didn't understand why it was disappointing to have the only smart woman on screen be a train wreck because he didn't live vicariously through her the way so many young girls did. I remembered that Readers Identity Worksheet we filled out, and how I noticed that I was hyperaware of slights against women and POC because I fit into both of those categories, and, admittedly, how quick I was to judge those that aren't as critical of/sensitive to these specific microaggressions. When, in World History, I learned that the ancient Greeks developed a school of thought known as Sophism, I laughed at how egotistic it sounded to measure the universe with ourselves as yardsticks. 

But, 2000 years later, we're still kind of doing that, aren't we?