I marathoned Girlboss in one night and I’ve never felt more empowered

I feel like I could rule the world


13 Reasons Why was so last month: Netflix’s brand new bingeable show is Girlboss. And omg it is fantastic. Literally. I marathoned the entire thing in a night (yes, that is 390 minutes aka 6 and a half hours and no I am not ashamed). Problem is, I was totally sceptical at first. I wasn’t even planning to watch it, my remote broke trying to find Riverdale and Girlboss is just what it landed on. And why was I so sceptical? Because every single person that’s watched it has said it’s awful, Sophia’s a cold hearted bitch and it’s not funny or feminist. Seriously, it’s being called a ‘tone-deaf rallying cry to millenial narcissists’.

To be completely honest, I can kinda see why people are hating on it. The title makes it sound like some feminist, bad ass power girl who is totally awesome. But that’s not what you get. What you get is a real, fully fledged, female character, who is in charge of her own life and is a total and utter bitch. And she owns her bitchiness 100%.

Sophia Marlowe completely embodies the Nasty Gal image that she’s projecting onto her brand, and she knows it. She’s not afraid to admit who she is, even if most of the time she’s not that nice of a person. She’s troubled, slightly damaged (you only have to watch the episode with her mum to work this out), and she begins the series not knowing what the hell she wants to do with her life, and refusing to grow up and lose the excitement of young adulthood. Don’t know about you, but that sounds like pretty much ever 20-23 year old I’ve ever met.

It’s refreshing to see a female character embracing her nastiness, accepting her flaws, and not pretending that she has her shit together. Most of the time when we get a strong feminist character in the media they have to be beautiful, flawless, intelligent, bad ass, and probably have to save the world at some point as well (just look at Divergent, the Hunger Games, Supergirl, need I go on?). Sophia is only two of those things – totally bad ass, and totally beautiful. I can imagine if you don’t watch the show pretty much all in one sitting, you can miss this aspect. Watching it one a week like any normal TV show loses the character development than even Sophia makes.

Sure, she ‘lies, steals and cheats’ – especially at the start when she’s just trying to get by – but she’s trying to be independent. She doesn’t want to accept help from anyone because that feels like failing. And can you blame her, when even in 2006 when the show’s set, the entire media is criticising her generation, calling them snowflakes, unable to achieve anything because they’re spoon fed by their parents, and under the assumption that they should get everything handed to them on a silver platter because they received participation awards when they were 5? Literally in the first 5 minutes of the first episode you have an old lady saying basically that: “You’re generation is so fucked up”.

And yes, she’s a complete and total bitch to Annie, and to her boyfriend at times. But she apologises. She know’s she’s in the wrong and she doesn’t deny it. She owns her mistakes, and tries to make amends. She’s closed off and guarded and she’d rather push people away than admit her true feelings – hence her inability to call Shane her boyfriend to his face. But she knows they’re in a relationship. He knows they’re in a relationship.

Saying she deserved to get cheated on cos of the way she treated him – which, by the way, is how exactly? – is fucking disgusting victim blaming behaviour. They had a massive argument in a hotel room where they were both dickheads, and she refused to fly all the way to Chicago to see him when she had bigger things going on, but that is absolutely no excuse to cheat on someone. No fucking way. And the final episode when she made that perfectly clear to him broke my heart. She knows she’s worth more than him, and that cheaters don’t deserve the time of day, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt like a bitch.

Sophia is a narcissistic, whiny bitch, and there’s no denying that. And yeah, it’s so all about her that the other characters don’t get a chance to develop, which is sad cos Annie is honestly my favourite. But that’s not Sophia’s fault, that’s the show creators fault. And for anyone saying she’s not even remotely feminist, let’s not forget the totally bad-ass speech she had in episode 9: “I am a girl. And that shouldn’t be a bad thing. Girls are collaborative, empathetic, hard workers. Girls are great”.

To be quite honest, what made Sophia the type of person that you love, or you love to hate, or you hate that you love, is her flaws and her ability to accept these flaws. Her sassy attitude, her inability to give up (she literally runs across San Francisco so one of her customers gets her dress in time), her desire to be something more than just ‘a mindless cog in a machine’, and the fact that she set up her own business despite all the hurdles she had to climb is so fucking empowering. And that’s the real message to take away from this show.