Bridgerton announced their sapphic season and now all the wlws are crying (because the straight women are shouting at us).
The news of Bridgerton’s Season 5 announcement with leads Hannah Dodd and Masali Baduza playing Francesca Bridgerton and Michaela Stirling is about four weeks old now but blame my coursework for that and not the little gay girl who wants to see pretty women in pretty dresses kiss, okay? Also there are about one million better and more articulate and educated think pieces and videos on this topic, some of which I’ve put down below, if you want more (better) discussions!
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ID: screen grab of Bridgerton with Michaela and Francesca sitting in library with news style graphic with text: NEWS | Hoes mad // Stay maddd Idgaf |
Until this year I maintained a pretty tenuous relationship with Netflix’s global phenomenon Bridgerton. I had a less than typical introduction which certainly gave me a less passionate appreciation of the show. I watched the first season fast forward-ing through Daphne flicking the bean and the rest of the ton getting freaky at age 14; squished next to my mother in a hospital bed too small to be comfortable whilst surrounded by 5 year olds crying and a teen complaining about her insulin pump (no shade to her though, I would have been complaining too).
The next season came out after I had, and you bet I was watching to support everyone’s favourite English gay man, Jonathan Bailey — debate on this is very welcome, although I’m not budging on Alan Cumming being the best queer Brit overall. Then came season three: no one liked the Polin chemistry but I’m sure none of that was due to the female protagonist being bigger than a size 1.
Season four was released this January/February and, well, the girls were gagged. The acceptably queer Bridgerton sibling’s season had all the Heated Rivalry fans quaking in their seats, with Benedict finally tying the knot and putting an end to his sexually deviant rake era. However platonically entranced I was by Luke Thompson’s portrayal of the second son, I was of course lesbionically distracted by one Miss Michaela Stirling and her cousin’s wife, Francesca. Of course, my condolences for the passing of John Stirling and therefore Victor Alli’s contract termination, but thank fuck Michaela’s total screentime can advance past 45mins or so total*.
I became fully caught up in the Bridgerton whirlwind as it got me through the end of a dark, dark winter (my shutters kept getting jammed shut), and when Hannah Dodd shared a photoshoot of her and Masali Baduza announcing the pair as season five’s leads, I entered a state of shock. That a show with 6.2 million followers on Instagram and an audience of tens of millions could possibly centre a lesbian love story seems to me entirely impossible. Part of me is waiting for the announcement that it’s all a big prank. It is pretty much completely unbelievable that one of the world’s most mainstream romance shows is getting a queer season. Centre-stage lesbianism embedded in some of the straightest television I have ever dared to watch? Someone please pinch- no slap me, because this just has to be a comatose dream.
Once I awoke from the dreamy reverie of the announcement, I consumed every scrap of content on season 5 production that came my way; and with that came the slap I’d been waiting for. My little bubble of joy was aggressively popped by the thick swathes of comments riddled with homophobia, lesbophobia and misogynoir. And of course I am so privileged to be able to largely forget that homophobia exists in the grand majority of my life but it doesn’t make the comments hurt any less. I mean, duh, my algorithm swung positively, but not one corner of Bridgerton's online empire could escape the sprinklings of hate.
Every bit of me lit up seeing Francesca’s look of disappointment after kissing John. Each part of me was set alight after her stuttered introduction to Michaela at the end of season three essentially confirmed every tentative theory I’d made. Dodd’s character had been growing on me throughout the eight episodes and when this highly feminine woman showed signs of lesbianism I pretty much couldn’t believe it. This frenzied mix of intense joy, endless hate comments and (psuedo-intellectual) video essays got me thinking. We all know the age old story of a sapphic Netflix show! This season is so good! I hope it’ll get renewed! to CANCELLED less than ten episodes and two months of airtime later. Oh and obvi they’ll need to remove it from the streaming service catalogue entirely. I mean you’d be insane to think a show like the SHE-RA reboot made by and for Netflix wouldn’t be taken off its own platform to disappear forever after years of healthy fandom engagement. And oh, you were assuming that the same thing would happen to similar shows centering mlm romance? DON’T BE STUPID.They get the full vip experience of box office success in comparison. Why wouldn’t Young Royals get three seasons? Why would a success like Red, White and Royal Blue not get a sequel? I mean, haven’t you watched Heated Rivalry ? First Kill, The Wilds, Willow, and Feel Good had to be cancelled – why would you want anything more than seven seasons of Orange is the New Black, that’s dyke-y, right? These lesbians don’t need to take over an entire season of the world’s favourite romance show.
The audiences of these achillean shows are often buoyed by straight women clamoring for romances and dramas where sexuality is explored without the threat that straight male characters tend to contain, whether physical or emotional (I’m not an expert on a male love interest, but a lot them scare me in at least some way). Looking to fanfiction, the lofty foundation of romance one could say, on Archive of Our Own (AO3) (one of the biggest, if not the biggest, fanfiction websites), mlm ships are the most written about relationship and on top of that, women are the majority of writers and readers on the site. The beauty of AO3 is its lack of censorship and complete free range, meaning the works can be as freaky as the writers dare. You do the calculation. So many of the romance novels published from the mid 2010s onwards were based off of (female authored) fanfiction: we’re thinking about The Love Hypothesis and we’re thinking of (you might have guessed it) Heated Rivalry. These women may be the main consumers of mlm romance and even make up a good percentage of its writers and creators, but I struggle to see the activism and support for the gay community that should surely go along with this consumption and production. Furthermore, I so rarely see a similar appreciation of any media focusing on the rest of the LGBTQ+ community.
To attempt to be clear, I don’t hate straight women (I’m not heterophobic! My twin’s straight!) but when I saw a TikTok clipping a woman stating that Heated Rivalry was “about gay people but not for gay people”, that made my blood boil. We are talking about two very different shows set in very different time periods with very different characters. Yet, I have seen more than a couple comments theorising that the straight women who love ‘Heated Rivalry’ and the straight women who hate franchaela venn diagram is in fact a circle. And it stings. Yes, this is all online and we should all go touch grass or whatever but in the same week as I’m researching for this article my friends have been called f-slurs walking out of Tesco and I heard a straight (sorry, assuming) woman walk into PRIDE BOP muttering “it’s so zesty in there”. THE QUEERS ARE TIRED HUNNNYYY.
To keep the examination of hetero women’s love for mlm and hate for wlw going, we simply must question its societal and psychological reasoning. As discussed in the response to the “gay stories for straight women to consume” TikTok above and this reel (forgive me, I was on a self-implemented TikTok ban at the time), straight women, who may be either unconsciously or determinedly questioning their orientations, will often consume homosexual romance to explore the spectacle of queerness. They can insert themselves (INSERT HIMSELF? INSERT HIMSELF WHERE?) into the narrative via one of the two men and so try out a queer existence, or just get off to two hot guys getting it on (not judging). This two-step approach to experimenting with queer identities frees these women from actually interrogating their own. It’s more comfortable to see two dudes kissing and believe it’s more okay than two dudettes when women have been conditioned by hetero-patriarchy to centre male pleasure over the female (including their own). As Koay explains, “sapphic stories force us [women] to confront our internalised misogyny.” The lack of a male gaze within a narrative causes discomfort for the male-centric reader. To paraphrase, lesbian content, such as sapphic love stories, necessitate a confrontation with internalised misogyny because they remove the “crucial” masculinity needed for pleasure to be okayed by society at large. It is allowed because the straight woman now feels threatened with two women to compare herself to rather than one, because now there is no room to shy away from femininity and female-centered pleasure.
I fear I have now been talking for far too long and if you made it this far, omg thank uuuuu. Yes, I am beyond thrilled that Francesca Bridgerton is queer and we’re getting a whole season centred on her exploration of that, but I know I will be watching (when I’ve graduated with the rate that they’re putting them out holy shit) with the weight of straight women’s disapproval thrust upon my shoulders.
xoxo, Rebecca
*that is a guess, trust me i tried so hard to find any sort of statistic
Other Franchaela and queer media videos and essays <3
justice for franchaela: screaming about queer fetishization (substack essay)
You don’t actually support all the letters.
Sis Flicks pod on season 5 (insta reel)
Straight-Keeping Problems (youtube video)
ppl hate sapphic women and bs5 proves it (youtube video)
theory on why the straight women hate franchaela (substack)
'Franchaela' and the girl-on-girl paradox (substack essay)
hoes mad, hoes mad, hoes mad: on franchaela, sapphic stories, wlw and the like (substack essay)