Essay by Evie Jones
Love, Intimacy, Friendship.
Fleabag.
The Cage of Intimacy.
When Fleabag premiered in 2016, it arrived at a cultural moment marked by what Phoebe Waller-Bridge described as audiences being "exhausted by seeing women being brutalised on screen."1 But rather than offering empowerment narratives or aspirational femininity, the show gave something far more unsettling: a woman who brutalises herself by performing her own abjection with sardonic detachment, all while inviting us through direct address to the camera to witness her spectacular failures at intimacy. Fleabag has become a touchstone for discussions about contemporary femininity, intimacy, and what Seresin has termed "heteropessimism”, a performative disaffiliation from heterosexuality that nonetheless remains trapped within its affective structures.2 This essay examines how Fleabag both challenges and reinforces intimate norms around heterosexuality and coupledom. I argue that Fleabag reveals intimate norms as compulsory not through explicit prohibition but through the structuring of desire itself.
Fleabag follows its eponymous, unnamed protagonist through two six-episode seasons that chart her attempts to navigate intimacy in the wake of devastating loss. Season One, which will be the focus of this essay, charts Fleabag's chaotic navigation of casual sexual encounters, family dysfunction, and mounting financial crisis. Fleabag's guilt over the betrayal of her best friend and sudden death structures the entire season, materialising in self-destructive behaviour cloaked as sexual liberation. All the while, Fleabag breaks the fourth wall to address us directly, offering sardonic commentary that casts us as her primary intimate, the audience as the only witness to her performance, who sees through it.3
Fleabag's heteropessimism is part of a key emerging trend within contemporary culture that contests heterosexuality while remaining stuck within it. What, then, are the material conditions producing widespread female disaffection with heterosexuality? Hochschild's "second shift" concept provides the important context.4 Whereas women joined the ranks of the paid labour force in growing numbers from the 1970s onward, the amount of domestic labour apportioned out did not adjust correspondingly. Their research demonstrated that married women spend much more time in unpaid childcare and housework after completing paid work, creating what they call a "leisure gap."5 Wives work substantially longer total hours per week than husbands and are chronically exhausted, while couples create narratives that mask awareness of this unfairness. The promised revolution toward gender equality stalled, Hochschild argues, due to three factors - women's continued responsibility for unpaid domestic work, workplaces designed around ideal workers without caregiving responsibilities, and inadequate public policy support.6 While men's participation in housework increased somewhat through the 1980s and 1990s, mothers still perform two to three times more routine housework and spend more time alone with children. The result is a generation of women told they could "have it all" who discovered that "all" means working multiple shifts simultaneously while male partners maintain substantially more leisure time.
This material reality creates the affective conditions for heteropessimism. Holzberg and Lehtonen define heteropessimism as the performative disaffiliation from heterosexuality, women who vocally express disappointment with heterosexual relationships while remaining unable to imagine or pursue viable alternatives.7 Building off of Berlant's "cruel optimism," they define this as maintaining attachment to objects that actively obstruct one's flourishing.8 The heteropessimist woman continues tethering her desires in relationships that are incapable of meeting them despite all contrary evidence. Crucially, heteropessimism represents structural compulsion rather than individual failing. The disappointment lies in the continued belief that this time, this relationship will be different, that structural problems can be overcome through the right individual choice. Holzberg and Lehtonen note how heteropessimism marks a new post-feminist sensibility which operates within an imagination that is pessimistic but strictly heterosexual in a way that forecloses more radical alternatives.9 This move from optimistic to pessimistic postfeminism is noteworthy. An earlier postfeminism, as represented by Sex and the City, focused on individual success and positive attitude, including the idea that the right combination of career, consumption, and romance would deliver fulfilment. Contemporary heteropessimism recognises that these promises have not been fulfilled, but rather than searching for structural solutions or other intimacies, it substitutes pessimistic attachment for that optimism, critiquing heteronormativity while remaining “enamoured with its affective tug”.10 The result is a sensibility that throws subjects back on themselves, saying that while we can identify gendered confines, ultimately, little can be done to change them.
Fleabag embodies this sensibility in response to intimate norms with such remarkable precision. While Fleabag herself is not performing Hochschild's literal "second shift", as she has no children, no husband, no domestic partnership requiring the management of competing work and care demands, the emotional labour of heteronormativity nonetheless saturates her existence. According to Holzberg and Lehtonen, Fleabag illustrates how heteropessimism functions by fostering a return to "white, middle-class heteronormativity" while repudiating "viable feminist and queer alternatives."11 Over the course of Season One, Fleabag moves through an unsatisfactory succession of sexual encounters with men (and less frequently women) none of whom provide her with satisfaction or even simple politeness. Still, she pursues these encounters with what seems like compulsive resolve. As Holzberg and Lehtonen argue, whether Fleabag pursues women, feminine men, or masculine men makes no difference. Fleabag's sexual partners of all genders become "just as disappointing" as one another, since the dissatisfaction originates not in "the object itself" but in "your own optimism."12
This dynamic is perhaps most starkly illustrated in a scene where Fleabag has anal sex with a man she met at a work event. Woods analyses how the scene is constructed through Fleabag's continuous acknowledgement of the audience.13 Initially, Fleabag looks directly at the camera with a smile while on top of her partner. The camera then shifts to show her from the side, her body and gaze oriented toward the viewers, while her partner continues behind her, unaware that he's being observed. Woods notes the man's enthusiasm about her intoxicated agreement to anal sex. Throughout the encounter, Fleabag maintains steady eye contact with the camera, keeping viewers engaged as witnesses to the sexual act even as it progresses. The scene is neither erotic nor straightforwardly comedic; it produces what Wanzo calls the "hybrid affect of discomfited pleasure"14 characteristic of precarious-girl comedy. Fleabag offers her body as a commodity, performs pleasure she doesn't feel, and invites us to admire her detachment even as that very detachment reveals profound disconnection from her own desire. The compulsive quality of these encounters is central to understanding Fleabag's heteropessimism. Fleabag knows these encounters won't satisfy her; she tells us as much through her sardonic commentary, yet she persists in seeking them. Thus, as Holzberg and Lehtonen contend, Fleabag illustrates that heteropessimism is constituted via "an ongoing sense of 15, characterised by anxious attachments"16 to the very structures being critiqued.
The show's value lies in its refusal to resolve these contradictions, its dogged insistence on depicting a woman who intellectually sees the failures of heteronormativity but remains affectively attached to it. This is, of course, a limited defence, and the show has rightly received major criticism for the particular subject position it privileges. The show has been criticised for exemplifying what some call "dissociative feminism",17 a privileged response to patriarchy available mainly to white, middle-class women who can afford to treat their oppression as a source of ironic amusement rather than an urgent political problem. As critics have noted, the impulse toward dissociation and withdrawal reflects a privilege reserved for white, wealthy women who can afford to disengage, unlike marginalised women who cannot simply opt out of confronting their oppression.18
Fleabag's specific social position enables her particular brand of heteropessimism. She is white, middle-class, able to fail professionally without becoming homeless or destitute, and able to treat her body and sexuality as sites of experimentation without facing the kinds of racialised violence and precarity that marginalised women navigate daily. Her ability to vocally critique heterosexuality while remaining safely within its bounds is enabled by race and class privilege. Waller-Bridge herself comes from an upper-middle-class background, attended elite schools, and had access to cultural and economic capital that facilitated her career. Heteropessimism, hence, only becomes a formation available to women whose whiteness and class position grant them certain freedoms of experimentation and ironic distance.
There is, moreover, a risk in treating Fleabag as representative of contemporary feminism more broadly. Critics contend that contemporary feminist works such as Fleabag display an alarming trend in which thin, white female leads withdraw from engagement with the world while embracing their patriarchy-inflicted suffering. To position these texts as "where feminism is heading"19 erases the ongoing feminist organising and activism led by women of colour, queer and trans women, and working-class women who cannot afford the luxury of dissociative irony. When material conditions demand survival strategies rather than aesthetic ones, heteropessimism's arch performance reads as fundamentally unserious. Holzberg and Lehtonen address this critique, while complicating it. They say heteropessimism should not be read as advocating this position but rather naming the cultural formation that exists and requires analysis.20 The point is not to celebrate this sensibility but rather to understand how and why it operates, what conditions produce it, and what it forecloses.
The formal innovation of the show, its use of direct address to the camera, is inseparable from its thematic engagement with heteropessimism, operating simultaneously to challenge and reinforce intimate norms. Wanzo theorises the "precarious-girl comedy" as a genre characterised by self-aware portrayals of women and their failures, generating uncomfortable yet pleasurable responses that transform millennial female alienation into comedy.21 These shows mark a deliberate departure from the aspirational postfeminist aesthetics that dominated earlier narratives like Sex and the City.
Fleabag's direct address heightens this genre's signature effect. In Season 1, Episode 2, Fleabag gives an extended monologue seated on the toilet, musing casually about her pleasure in the performance and awkwardness of sex. Woods contends that Fleabag's camera-facing technique amplifies the precarious-girl comedy's emotional intensity, enveloping audiences in heightened anxiety as they brace for the uncomfortable scenes ahead.22 The camera becomes Fleabag's primary intimate relationship, more consistent than any human connection, always available, never demanding the emotional vulnerability required by friendship or romance. This direct address functions as that "dissociative feminism", a coping mechanism that allows Fleabag to participate in heteronormative structures while maintaining ironic distance from them. As Clein describes it, this is about women "interiorising our existential aches and angst, smirking knowingly at them, and numbing ourselves to maintain our nonchalance."23 The camera enables Fleabag to be simultaneously present and absent, to perform participation while remaining fundamentally detached. Yet this formal strategy underlines a paradox at the heart of the show's engagement with intimate norms. The camera relationship challenges intimate norms insofar as parasocial connection might be more satisfying than the mutual vulnerability required by embodied relationships.
The show reveals intimate norms as compulsory, not because alternatives are forbidden, but because they are rendered unimaginable, inaccessible, or fatal. The queer possibilities remain unexplored. Female friendship is positioned as the lost ideal, accessible only through nostalgic flashback and structured around heterosexual betrayal. The audience offers only parasocial pseudo-intimacy. What remains is cycling between positions within heteronormative scripts. The power of the show lies in its demonstration that recognising one's entrapment does not itself reveal the exit. Fleabag sees the cage, describes its dimensions to us in her witty asides, yet when she reaches for the door, she finds only more cage, this one painted to look like freedom. What does this, in turn, reveal about the nature of intimate norms themselves? First, they are remarkably resilient, surviving even direct and sustained critique. Second, that intimate norms operate not primarily through prohibition but through the structuring of desire and imagination. Fleabag reveals that intimate norms rely on the foreclosure of alternatives. The show positions female friendship as the lost ideal, accessible only through nostalgic flashback and structured around heterosexual betrayal. Queer possibilities are gestured toward but never seriously explored.
Fleabag problematises heterosexuality, reveals its disappointments, and exposes its compulsory nature. Whether it accomplishes the more difficult task of moving beyond that affective lure—whether it offers anything more than sophisticated diagnosis—remains ambiguous. What remains undeniable is that Fleabag has touched something in contemporary culture, a widespread recognition of the gap between feminist critique and lived experience, between knowing heteronormativity disappoints and being unable to desire otherwise, between seeing the cage and being unable to leave it. That recognition, however uncomfortable, is itself revealing of how deeply these norms structure not just our behaviours but our very capacities for desire and imagination. The show's heteropessimism might not offer a way out, but at least it insists we look directly at the walls.
1 BBC, “Fleabag Star Speaks about Her Fear of Being a ‘Bad Feminist,’” BBC, March 10, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-47515753.
2 Asa Seresin, “On Heteropessimism,” The New Inquiry, October 9, 2019, https://thenewinquiry.com/on-heteropessimism/.
3 Fleabag (BBC Three, 2016).
4 Mary Blair-Loy et al., “Stability and Transformation in Gender, Work, and Family: Insights from the Second Shift for the next Quarter Century,” Community, Work & Family 18, no. 4 (October 2, 2015): 436, https://doi.org/10.1080/13668803.2015.1080664.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Billy Holzberg and Aura Lehtonen, “The Affective Life of Heterosexuality: Heteropessimism and Postfeminism in Fleabag,” Feminist Media Studies 22, no. 8 (June 15, 2021): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1922485.
8 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
9 Billy Holzberg and Aura Lehtonen, “The Affective Life of Heterosexuality”, 10.
10 Ibid., 12.
11 Ibid., 3.
12 Andrea Long Chu, “The Impossibility of Feminism,” Differences 30, no. 1 (May 1, 2019): 64, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-7481232.
13 Faye Woods, “Too Close for Comfort: Direct Address and the Affective Pull of the Confessional Comic Woman in Chewing Gum and Fleabag,” Communication, Culture and Critique 12, no. 2 (April 12, 2019): 194, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz014.
14 Rebecca Wanzo, “Precarious-Girl Comedy: Issa Rae, Lena Dunham, and Abjection Aesthetics,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 31, no. 2 92 (2016): 27, https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-3592565.
15 Billy Holzberg and Aura Lehtonen, “The Affective Life of Heterosexuality”, 12.
16 Billy Holzberg and Aura Lehtonen, “The Affective Life of Heterosexuality”, 12.
17 Emmeline Clein, “The Smartest Women I Know Are All Dissociating,” BuzzFeed News, November 20, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmelineclein/dissociation-feminism-women-fleabag-twitter.
18 Ibid.
19 Shannon Keating, “Is There Any Hope for Straight People?,” BuzzFeed News, December 31, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/shannonkeating/straight-romance- heteropessimism-marriage-story.
20 Billy Holzberg and Aura Lehtonen, “The Affective Life of Heterosexuality”, 9.
21 Wanzo, “Precarious-Girl Comedy,” 27.
22 Woods, “Too Close for Comfort”, 195.
23 Emmeline Clein, “The Smartest Women I Know Are All Dissociating,” BuzzFeed News, November 20, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmelineclein/dissociation- feminism-women-fleabag-twitter.