Bridgerton has returned, and with it so have oblivious straight people with zero media analysis skills.
I do not know whether all of these people are straight, or whether their friendship groups and families are really socially aware and liberal or whatever so they just cannot relate to the situation she's in, but... I need to tell you people, as the only lesbian in a big Catholic family in a postindustrial town in the North East:
Eloise Bridgerton does not need to give space for other perspectives from women who have "chosen" the socially acceptable (or should I say socially enforced) path. She does not.
Her whole world is other perspectives. She is a single, individual needle in a haystack full of amatanormative, heteronormative, socially and legally enforced patriarchy. It is everywhere she goes and colours all of her interactions with everyone because that's what socially enforced prejudice is like when you're the only person outside of it in your social circle.
And for all the early-season frustration from people that her feminism was anachronistic, what feels even more out of place in the flippant criticism her admittedly extremely one-note and limited ideology gets is people arguing that she is not making enough space to be a feminist for women who Choose Marriage.
No woman in this series is "choosing" marriage!! They are actively legally channelled into marriage? They are literally the product of society's grooming them into believing that they're only worth something if they get married?? Anthony Bridgerton, Viscount Bridgerton was going to aid and abet his own sister's marital rape because that's how fucking marriage-centred the lives of these women are. None of these women know what sex is before they get married!!
People get so angry about her tone, about her personal inaction in developing feminism as an ideology, about the way she's all talk.
But I need to be honest, people, as someone who faced astronomical pushback and familial pressure and shame just for cutting my own hair as a grown adult in my 20s, as someone whose mother cried when at fifteen I said I wanted to wear a suit to my prom, and so I chickened out and now for multiple family members across town the only photograph they have of me up is the one where I'm wearing my capitulation dress: sometimes. When it feels like the whole world is literally against you. All you can do is vent and lash out.
The day I realised I could make my family as frustrated as they made me was a happy one. The day I realised I could rain on their parades, that I could make myself as relentless, as incessant and persistent for them as their own bullshit had been for me was the day I was liberated from feeling as if I was crazy.
Because Eloise is right! Women are a systemically oppressed group! Even the ridiculously wealthy ones! They can't vote, they can literally be banged up by their husbands on a whim! Their husbands can knowingly give them STIs that kill them and not face any repercussions!!! And she is being actively gaslit by society, by her whole family and everyone around her who tells her they care about her that, no, actually. This kind of dehumanising ownership is fine and romantic with the right person.
Marital rape. Is legal. In this society.
Eloise is abrasive and unpleasant and annoying and persistent in complaining even though she doesn't do anything about it (because she can't, because the problem is legal and systemic and societal and so all she can do on her own is kick back but who cares, tone policing all the way down). She's unpleasant to Daphne because Daphne is in a horrible situation. Why is Daphne in a horrible situation? Oh, because of the social problems Eloise constantly draws attention to. Daphne's solution as described in their conversation is to submit to social expectations and encourage that behaviour in everyone else. It is actually not teenage Eloise's job to coddle her sister through this compliance.
Eloise is rude and abrasive to Hyacinth. As if her having to chaperone Hyacinth this season isn't, like, a punishment from her mother for being the most milquetoast kind of GNC the regency has to offer. As if she doesn't spend all of her time literally beset on all sides by "alternate perspectives" (read: society's terrible evil norms). "Don't look down on other women" is not an applicable sentiment to the fucking nineteenth century. Eloise in all of her one-track-mind, privileged-as-she-is ill-vocalised rage is not the problem of the oppressor here.
(tho I do think it is very... True to life shall we say that one singular woman pointing out that women are being oppressed by patriarchy is viewed by others as a kind of oppression. "Let me enjoy things!" Girl your human rights.)
I know this can seem juvenile or annoying or whatever but please, I beg of you. Try to comprehend the kind of weapons-grade gaslighting that is being experienced here. Of course she's being unpleasant! Her whole experience as a person is a dysphoria-inducing nightmare!
Like it might seem like I'm projecting here, but I promise you that the writers have unintentionally put on screen the most vivid example of something that is experienced by a lot of queer people, which is the horrible, empathy-shattering experience of knowing that if you were not related to them, your family would actively dislike you.
There's a whole other post to be made about Eloise as a character, that is: about her existence as a narrative tool for the conveyance of theme to an audience, and how her existence as she is makes Bridgerton like quite a bit more insidious than it is trying to be, but this is about the way people treat her as she is.
The way people tone-police and make the perfect the enemy of the (not even trying to be!!) good when it comes to GNC women, as well as any kind of activists or even just social critics of all stripes while ignoring the much worse offences of those in higher positions of material power whose personalities are more paletable or those who have decided to make their peace with horrible society and go along with (and subtlety enforce!!!) the oppression they face.
Basically what I'm saying is: be worse!! Rage, Eloise! Rage against the dying of the light! Do not go gentle into that good season 5!!
