What do women want? Confused misogynists have been asking this question since time immemorial.
What do men want? That’s a simpler question. Men want territorial expansion, the fires of war, the re-formation of the 1970s glam rock band Slade, flattering corduroy trousers, three to five sausage rolls on a Saturday and the yellow Lego castle, set number 375, from 1978. That’s it, really.
But what do women want? Until very recently this was unknowable. According to Shonda Rhimes’ adaption of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels the answer is clear: women want nice frocks, good sex and, most importantly, the exploitation of the working class. They want sexy feudalism, basically.
Interesting, says you. What is the condition of mankind under sexy feudalism?
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Mankind under sexy feudalism is in want of a wife.
Fascinating, says you. And what is the condition of womankind under sexy feudalism?
The condition of womankind under feudalism is … jaunty. They wear elaborate multicoloured costumes and are accompanied everywhere by pizzicato string motifs. They attend masquerade balls in hot pursuit of Regency hunks and when they acquire one they engage in sexy high jinks while a poor beleaguered footman stands at the door.
Intriguing, says you. What is the condition of the worker under sexy feudalism?
The worker under sexy feudalism knows his or her place. There are servants all over the gaff on Bridgerton, dutifully obeying the whims of our romantic heroines. Although there are pamphleteers on the streets of Bridgerton Britain, they are concerned less with fomenting revolution and the organisation of labour than they are with the copulative high jinks of the upper classes.
That said, the main pamphleteer is old-lady cosplayer and narrative device Lady Whistledown, aka Penelope Bridgerton, aka Ireland’s own Nicola Coughlan, who I can only assume is a United Irishwoman engaged in some sort of psy-op to bring down the sexy empire from within. To which I say, good woman yourself, Comrade Coughlan.
Season four of Bridgerton takes its main plotline from Cinderella. Cinderella is a charming fairy tale that is also an endorsement of labour exploitation and should really end with the servant class rising up and seizing the means of production. Instead one member of that class is elevated to the upper classes with the help of a magical relative and a secret birthright rather than because she joined a union.
And while I’m ruining your childhood, all three of the little pigs would still be alive if they’d pooled their resources and formed a government housing agency; the ugly duckling wouldn’t have been so miserable if not for outmoded avian beauty standards, and Hansel and Gretel should probably have given that “witch” (aka “feminist wise woman”) the benefit of the doubt before brutally murdering her and eating her house. (Edible houses are probably part of Progress Ireland’s favoured housing policy.)
Anyway, to quote my younger relatives: “Please don’t let Uncle Patrick read us our stories again.”
In Bridgerton’s version of the Cinderella tale, lady’s maid Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha) gets all dressed up for a masquerade ball where she beguiles the rakish, attractively alliterative Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson), a man who prefers hanging out in a bawdy houses, quaffing ale and sleeping with all manner of harlots.
In an actual 19th-century novel he would end up riddled with syphilis and dying as the governor of some far-flung imperial outpost, and there’d be a statue of him on a horse somewhere in Ireland.
As is the case with many men, however, Benedict’s mother is intimately involved in his sex life and she insists he attend this particularly shindig, for she is its host.
At Benedict’s mam’s party we see sophisticated men and women wearing costumes and dancing and engaging in witty repartee, much as I did myself in Co Kildare’s premiere nightclub, Nijinsky’s, when I was in my prime (also in an earlier century).
Queen Charlotte is there. She is an elaborate grump with architecturally complicated hair, and she seeks gossip from Comrade Coughlan, our woman on the inside.
Benedict meanwhile encounters and is charmed by the masked stranger. “You are perhaps the most intriguing person I have ever met,” he tells her, possibly because she cannot talk about herself because of her big secret – and not being able to talk about oneself is deeply attractive to a certain kind of man. She is also so full of wonder that she seems slightly concussed.
Then, on the chime of midnight, she rushes home, where we learn that she is a put-upon housemaid, the sidelined daughter of a nobleman, now kept in drudgery by her evil stepmother and morally ambiguous stepsisters.
Luckily, she is enabled in having notions by her fellow servants, who are aware of her highborn origins and so have the supportive personalities usually given to sentient teapots and talking bluebirds.
It’s possible that this series ends with aristocratic heads on pikes and Bridgerton House declared an autonomous workers’ collective, but somehow I doubt it. I suspect its moral is going to instead be something like “Be nice to your servants”, the platform of many centre-right organisations from Fine Gael to the British Labour Party and the US Democratic Party.
It’s fascinating how a programme that can imagine an alternative version of history with fewer racial barriers still sticks to a pretty traditional script when it comes to notions of class and luxury.
In fairness, Bridgerton is always good, escapist fun. And, to be perfectly honest, I get it. It’s hard to imagine sexual fulfilment without the exploitation of the working class. That is The Irish Times’ motto, after all.
Speaking of sexual fulfilment and the exploitation of the working class, Netflix also has Take That, a new documentary series about celebrated boyband turned manband.
Celebrity documentaries on streamers have, in recent years, degenerated into hagiographies that all follow a set template: hopeful rise, anxious fame, triumphant return.
This series isn’t much different. It’s appealingly made – built entirely around old footage, with voiceovers from the band members – and it’s entertaining to watch if you lived through these years and had a Stockholm syndrome-style relationship with the songwriting of Gary Barlow. (I believe that Back for Good is the best song of the 1990s, but I’m not sure if that’s me speaking or my Manchurian Candidate-style programming.)
On the other hand, it doesn’t really go too far beneath the surface. The recent Boyzone: No Matter What (Sky Documentaries) was spikier and more revealing about the heedlessness of the music industry and the perils of fame. The subject matter also feels strikingly like it’s from another era entirely. (Did we all wear chainmail codpieces or was that just a Take That tour costume?)
The supremacy of boybands has, K-pop notwithstanding, been usurped by woman solo artists in recent years. In many ways, like Bridgerton, the Take That series comes across like sexy costume drama. For the modern erotic imagination, however, there probably isn’t enough feudalism.
