I’m Re-Watching Popular Early 2000s TV Shows And As a Woman, They’re Tough to Watch
We’ve come a long way, baby.
It’s jarring.
You stick on Scrubs / Gossip Girl / Gilmore Girls / Friends for a hit of nostalgia.
Then they come. The words you’ve not heard on TV — or if you’re lucky, in real life — in a long time.
Slut. Skank. Uggo. Fatso.
The way women are treated on these shows is difficult to watch, especially if you lean toward feminism. Words and themes jolt you.
Maybe you used them yourself back then.
But not now. Not for a long time.
Only it wasn’t that long ago. Sometimes, between the Incels, the stripping of abortion rights and the whole mess that is online dating, it’s easy to forget that feminism has come a long way culturally.
The aughts was a feminist hellhole. Just ask Britney, Jessica Simpson and Janet Jackson.
The aughts were also the decade that shaped me as a now 38-year-old woman. All of us of a similar age had to unlearn so much from that time. Many of us are still unlearning.
If you’re worried that feminism isn’t progressing fast enough (you’re right, it’s not), you need only press play on what may have been some of your favourite 2000s shows to see how far we’ve come.
They made me believe all child-free and single women are miserable
Why did all the shows during that time look like freaking Disney?
They spent season after season with a will-they-won’t-they plot, only to have the characters marry off or give birth at the finale as if it’s still the 1950s and Cinderella had just hit theatres:
Ross and Rachel in Friends — get together, already have a kid.
Lorelai and Luke in Gilmore Girls — get together.
Dan and Serena and Blair and Chuck in Gossip Girl — married with children flashforward.
J.D and Elliot in Scrubs — married with children flashforward.
Penny and Leonard in The Big Bang Theory — pregnant.
These endings are extensions of what I call Disney’s Happily Ever After Effect—the idea that we will only live happily ever after if we find a man and settle down.
They conveyed to us that marriage and children were the only way to happiness. This was reinforced by the fact that most family-based sitcoms of the time featured nuclear families.
If you grew up in a progressive household, you may have had parents who told you that this is not the way to feel all warm and fuzzy inside. But if you grew up in a household that upheld societal norms, all these TV shows did was confirm them.
That was me. That was all of my friends.
Granted, the kids-and-marriage = happiness trope isn’t dead and buried just yet, but with an increasing number of women remaining child-free and marriage on the decline, it’s better.
As TV tends to reflect the social norms of the day, that means fewer Disney-like endings making you feel terrible for being child-free and /or single.
Which is great for me and my empty uterus.
They made me believe nice guys are possessive, jealous, and manipulative (all in the name of love)
The finale of Friends took place when I had just arrived at college. My new friends and I gathered in our dorm, to watch Rachel and Ross finally get it together at the expense of Rachel’s career.
There were tears in the dorm that night. We were all swept up in the romantic notion of finding a guy that’s so right for us, we’d give up everything for him.
For many people growing up in the Friends-era, it was a blueprint for love. Ross and Rachel, especially.
Except Ross was terrible to women. He gaslighted and cheated. He lied and manipulated. He was jealous and clingy.
But culture said Ross was the good guy. He was the geeky underdog we were supposed to root for.
The same was true of Dean in Gilmore Girls. We all believed he was the perfect high school boyfriend, especially in the early seasons.
This was supported by adult characters like Lorelai, who believed he was a great guy even though he treated Rory appallingly. And we all believed everything Lorelai said because she was the cool mum we all wanted.
But again, he was jealous, angry, and honestly kind of scary.
Ted Mosby in How I Met Your Mother? Another “nice guy” with a sexist, fat-phobic heart.
It’s only recently that the world has questioned the intentions of the nice guy. Back in the early noughties as a teenager? Not so much.
It’s a miracle any of us ended up with well-adjusted, healthy relationships in our adult years.
They made me believe being fat was the very worst thing I could be
Friends’ Fat Monica is the famous fat-phobic character of this time but there were more digs at women’s weight than you can count.
Like when Rory Gilmore says a fellow college woman has fat thighs.
Or when Ted Mosby in How I Met Your Mother broke up with a girl because she used to be fat.
Or the fact that not a single character on any show of this time was wider than a Twiglet.
When it comes to weight, the noughties were a cesspool of fatphobia. There was no body-positive movement back then, just groups of girls silently (or not so silently) judging their friends’ bodies in clothing store changing rooms.
Many women I know in their thirties and forties have not yet forgotten this.
It’s as if it seeped into our developing psyche and stayed with us, reminding us to diet, heavily exercise, keep our bellies flat, and booty round. Even though we know we no longer have to succumb to that cultural ideal.
It was all fueled by what we watched.
They made us believe slut-shaming was a normal thing to put women through
In my school, being called a slut was the worst thing that could happen to you. And if you slept with more than one or two people, that’s exactly what you were called.
Shows of that time did nothing to help.
There was the slut-shaming of Jen Lindley on Dawson’s Creek. The liberal use of the phrase “bar skank” on Scrubs. The way Monica in Friends calls herself a slut just for losing her virginity.
And the double standards were so obvious it’s hard to understand how producers / directors / actors didn’t see it themselves.
I’m looking at you, Barney in How I Met Your Mother / Chuck in Gossip Girl / Joey in Friends.
The most interesting thing to me about slut-shaming is how many women in the noughties tried to reclaim the word if they enjoyed sleeping with multiple partners. They’d laugh at people who called them sluts in a hell yeah, I’m a slut kind of way.
But it wasn’t a word to reclaim. It was a word to chuck in the cultural trash can.
As a word, slut is taking a long time to disappear. Its peak use was, surprisingly, in 2016. As recently as 2014, feminist sites implored women to stop using the word in everyday parlance.
Slut-shaming itself may still be a thing, but it ain’t got nothing on what we had in the early noughties.
They made me believe women are supposed to be crazy
Joey and Chandler? Funny and happy-go-lucky. Monica? Neurotic and whiny.
Elliot and Carla in Scrubs? “Crazy.” J.D. and Turk? Amusing and relaxed.
The list goes on. Marshall vs. Lily in How I Met Your Mother. Blair vs. Nate in Gossip Girl. So many shows upheld the crazy woman trope, the antidote being the chilled men around them.
I’ll never forget watching Scrubs in University when Carla says:
Look, I think, with men, you just have to hold out until they’re invested enough they won’t run away at the first thing that spooks them.
I remember my friends and I laughing about the fact that we all did that with our boyfriends. We all believed we were crazy and that we had to dole it out in small portions so as to a) not “scare off” our laid-back boyfriends and b) not fall prey to the crazy girl stereotype.
I’m pretty embarrassed at admitting we all fell for this particular brand of internalised misogyny. But we knew no better and TV shows of the time did nothing to inform us that we weren’t crazy, we were just opinionated.
We weren’t crazy, we were just overburdened with the expectations society puts on women.
We weren’t crazy, we were just experiencing normal human emotions.
We’ve unlearned so much in such a short time
Gossip Girl was still on our screens 11 years ago. How I Met Your Mother finished just nine years ago.
It’s not a long time to unlearn everything we were taught during the noughties. And there was a lot to unlearn.
Many of us have. People I know who used slut, skank and whore as insults 20 years ago would be horrified to hear that now.
Those of us who would compete for the highest number of ass-pinches in a club in 2002 would now be outraged by any guy who goes anywhere near our bums.
Friends, Scrubs and Gossip Girl and the like — shows that upheld early noughties sexism — now feel laughably outdated, despite them not being that old. We’re not talking about the 1960s here.
It’s true that feminism is an embarrassingly long way behind where it should be. Sometimes it feels like the world is going backward. You may be called fat in 2005 as a size 6, but at least you could legally get an abortion.
But now, we have the body positivity movement. We have #metoo. We have women finally sharing their stories about rape and abuse at the hands of an inordinate number of famous men.
TV has come along with us for the ride. There has been a big increase in movies and TV shows passing the Bechdel test, which is a measure of how women are represented in films.
Shows reflect female-forward attitudes, from putting women at the front and centre to less focus on the nuclear family.
From the Gen Zs I’ve spoken to, it’s hard for many of them to comprehend what we accepted as normal just 10–15 years ago because things have changed. They watch Friends and are mortified. Jennifer Aniston herself has commented on how Gen Zs find the show offensive.
Just as they should do.
Just as many of us in our thirties and forties now are.
I might watch shows of this time for nostalgic purposes, but I’m delighted they’re no longer what younger generations want to watch.
Because when it comes to their treatment of women, they stink.
I get what you mean. The mean girl / ugly girl trope is so yesterday. Or, is it? The ugly girl becomes pretty and then everyone loves her. That is also damaging.
I just watched Ugly Betty beginning to end for the first time, on the recommendation of a YouTuber I like who is into fashion, and MY GOD, the way Betty's "friends" treated her. She becomes friends with thin, pretty white coworkers who bully the everloving shit out of her at the beginning . . . and they CONTINUE to say mean, awful things about her looks, her weight and the way she dresses right up until the end of the show. And she just takes it because it shows how "plucky and optimistic" she is. But all I kept thinking is that these people should be fired for harassment.