People, Trojan Horsing and more Fleishman Is in Trouble Content

5 min readFeb 22, 2023

February 21, 2023, 10:53 pm
Filed under: art, feminism, TV, writing | Tags: Dahlia Lithwick, feminism, Fleishman Is In Trouble, Lady Justice, Lizzy Caplan, people, The Patriarchy, Trojan Horse, women, women’s stories

Probably because I have now written TWO pieces about Fleishman Is in Trouble, my friend sent me Lizzy Caplan’s interview where she talks about the show, and her role as Libby. My friend figured I’d be interested and he figured right! Lizzy Caplan explains that the writer (Taffy Brodesser — Akner) created the novel as a kind of Trojan horse, a way to trick people into reading/watching a story about a woman. (Tricksy! Didn’t I tell you?) Caplan says, “Libby discovers in our story — that people don’t seem to care about her stories if they’re written about a woman. They care about them if they’re written about a man. And so Taffy manages to kind of Trojan-horse the real story into this — you know, you think that you’re watching this story about a man getting divorced, figuring it out, dating apps, and you’re really not watching that story at all. “

And I am sympathetic to this problem. I write women’s stories and I can confirm, a lot of people aren’t interested. “People” may, in fact, need to be tricked into caring about women’s stories.

It’s these “people” that I am suddenly curious about. Who are these people who only read stories or novels if they are about men? Who are these people who will only watch shows if they are a man’s story? I doubt anyone would cop to being one of those people. Most people don’t like to think of themselves as being so biased. But I also can’t argue with the assertion that men’s stories are the preference of most people. Both men and women. It’s not shocking, given the media diet most people grew up on. For a very long time, the prevailing idea has been that girls will read stories about boys but boys won’t read stories about girls, so most stories had boy protagonists to have the widest appeal. (Thank you, The Patriarchy!) I’d hoped that might be changing but this sense of the “people” makes me fear that we’re no better than before.

The thing is, while I can’t argue that the majority of “people” seem to prefer stories about men, there are a lot of us who are very keen on women’s stories and always have been. Are we not people, too? If you went and hung out at, say, the Feminist Press — you’d find that pretty much all the people there would prefer a woman’s story. If you sat in the editorial office of Bust or Bitch or Ms magazine, I think you would choose a woman’s story first.

But some people still need to be tricked into reading or watching a woman’s story, I suppose. I was reading the first chapter of Dahlia Lithwick’s Lady Justice, which is full of stories about women in the law, and she talks about how a law professor wondered why she’d “waste time and credibility writing a ‘pink book about the law.’” That guy would clearly need to be tricked. But the people who made Lady Justice an instant bestseller didn’t require any tricking.

This is the part that feels key to me. Who are you trying to talk to? If it’s the guy who feels you’ll lose credibility by talking about women, yeah, you’re going to need to trick him into paying attention to women’s stories. I have nothing to say to that guy — and yes, maybe that DOES mean that “people” don’t want to listen to me — but also, that guy sounds like a dick. I don’t like to think of people as irredeemable but I can’t imagine what I could say to reach such a person. Nor do I want to.

I guess “people” are usually the population of the Patriarchy and of course the Patriarchy prefers stories about men and if you are trying to please the Patriarchy, you will have to resort to some trickery to be heard on the subject of women. I’d just as soon the Patriarchy went and fucked itself so I’m not so keen on the trick. I mean, if I were going to Trojan Horse the Patriarchy, I’d go all the way and hide our best feminist warriors in a wooden horse’s belly and bust out in the middle of the night to create havoc and burn the Patriarchy down. (Then dance in the moonlight over the dying embers with my sisters.) But “people” don’t like that.