Girls 103: Is this about the scarf?
From my Girls recap of “All Adventurous Women Do” over at Press Play:
He walks off to enjoy being That Guy and wearing his blazer collar turned up. Marnie rushes inside, locks herself in a bathroom, and masturbates. …Girls, please. It’s not that a line like that has never worked, but the entire sequence felt, to me, like a man’s take on what Marnie needs, i.e., “That filly wants breaking to harness!” Yes, people should stand up to Marnie, but 1) I don’t care for the idea that that’s a result of her gender, or that the opposite gender is what’s required to “take her down a peg”; and 2) snideness and pat line delivery do not a man make in the first place. Maybe I’m overthinking this, but the cure for uptight-bitch-itis is not necessarily cock.
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Tags: Congratulations: You're That Guy Girls sexism TV writing
That line felt off to me, too, because I was thinking of how I would react to a guy saying that to me- I think I settled on hysterical laughter as most appropriate, but probably wouldn’t be able to maintain that much reaction in the moment, what with being so distracted by all the blaring red lights and horns in my head announcing what bad news he is- and how much it would bomb by offending me on multiple levels at the same time.
Overall, I read the scene less as taking Marnie down a peg, and more as, here’s this character who pushes all her buttons by being the exact opposite of Charlie, but all that makes him is a douchecanoe who’ll just break her heart because he doesn’t care and she does. And since all the characters on this show seem to be contractually obligated to make the worst of all possible choices, you just know she’s going to jump right in (BEFORE she dumps Charlie).