She’s charismatic, self-destructive, and increasingly tiresome: from Fleabag through to Everything I Know About Love, chaotic female leads now seem to be the default, one-note expression of womanhood. It’s time to move on
and features in the work of millennial bard Sally Rooney – whose novel Conversations With Friends, recently adapted as a BBC series, is about a confused, insecure university student who embarks on an affair with a married man.Photograph: Craig Blankenhorn/AP
It’s difficult to deny that Messy Millennial Woman seems like a net good. A couple of decades ago, the proudly flawed heroine was not a fixture of mainstream culture – now she rules the zeitgeist. Yet recently, MMW has started to migrate from a bracingly realistic proxy to something fast approaching a reductive stereotype, monopolising comic portrayals of the female experience.
Yet there’s another dramatic justification for MMW’s inescapable presence.
The trope of the women who put the fun in dysfunctional is now so pervasive it is ripe for parody. Last year, the comedian Liz Kingsman staged– a spoof of the all too familiar narrative of an irritatingly reckless woman with a concealed tragedy in her past who is stuck in a web of humiliating nights out, romantic rejection and faux-profundity. . The fact that it was a sellout and critically celebrated sensation suggests audiences are becoming increasingly cynical when it comes to MMW’s charms.
It’s not that the Messy Millennial Woman hasn’t got great appeal – clearly she does – or that she isn’t rooted in reality . It is, rather, that she is ossifying into predictability, becoming the default, one-note expression of womanhood when the very point of her was to diversify the portrayal of female characters on-screen. Then again, she may not be long for this world: the youngest millennials are now 26 and you would hope that generation Z have something else up their sleeve.
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