I'm at Joan's

I don’t know how to process my anxiety about the world right now so, like every Black femme of a certain age right now, I’m binge watching Girlfriends.

I used to watch this show senior year of college. We lived in a wood frame house on campus and I would come home from class around 5 and watch it in syndication.

I think right now there is a tendency to pretend that all Black pop culture in the early 2000s was received fondly, but I remember thinking Girlfriends was kind of a square show. From Joan’s complete meltdown after accidentally tripping on MDMA (she ends up in the hospital somehow???) to the retrograde lesbian jokes (more on that later) the women of Girlfriends, when I watched it back in 2003, felt like all the things the wider culture told me Black girls couldn’t do or be interested in or think about. I watched it and would get annoyed and then college was over and I didn’t have a tv anymore and it drifted to the back of consciousness.

But re-watching it on Netflix, I have such admiration. I love that this show talks frankly about class—Joan is clearly upper class but she has made friends with her assistant, Maya, who rightly calls her out on being “classist and egregious.” That phrase becomes a running gag on the show. The four women and William date and make friends with men and women across the economic scale and the question of class is always paramount in relationships. Toni, the resident diva (god, remember in the early 2000s when every Black woman in popular culture was called a “diva”? ) is extremely frank about her desire to marry a rich man and her white Jewish fiance’s debt is a major plot point for a season. Girlfriends has an understanding of the relationship between money and romantic cis-het love and it doesn’t judge it’s characters for it. Plus, the truest romance is reserved for Maya and Darnell—high school sweethearts who got pregnant at 16 and are just at the start of the series figuring out who they actually are as people, apart from their relationship.

It has been amusing to watch Gen-Zers watch this series in real time over social media. It is the fact that there are no real lessons on Girlfriends. Toni is a narcissist who says terrible things, finds redemption in one glorious episode with Donnie McClurkin singing “We Fall Down” in the background but be back on her bullshit within six weeks, as is the case in life. Gen-zers frustrations with this is fascinating. Girlfriends is about difficult women, past the point when those difficulties are cute or quirky. But the show never seems to argue that those difficulties mean they are unworthy of love or attention. Toni may not be redeemed, but over the course of the show, as we learn about her struggles with colorism and her abusive, alcoholic mother, she is at least explained.

Joan, in particular, is infuriating. From her insistence on a three month rule of no sex, which, fine. But it is so rigid, almost punishing and wrought with angst. Toni, too, we find out later, has only had six orgasms in her life and prefers to lie completely still during sex. In Toni and Joan, I see an acknowledgement of a very particular type of hysteria around sex amongst Black women. When the world has hypersexualized you from birth, there can sometimes be the tendency to swing so far in the other direction that you cut off a piece of yourself rather than feel any pleasure.

The way the show treats Lynn, the one character who actually enjoys sex, is probably the biggest tell that this was made in the early 2000s. Lynn is the resident freak and the running joke is that she might be—gasp!—a lesbian. Watching these “jokes” reminded me of my old boss around that time who was fond of the phrase “strictly dick-ly.” There was such a widespread lesbian panic in the early 2000s—gay men were hip but lesbians were thought to just be gross. Girlfriends traffics in all that casual homophobia and it’s probably the thing that has aged worst about the series. That and the jokes about police brutality.

I could write about Girlfriends forever but I am aware you are receiving this via email so I will keep it brief and say if you had told me in 2003 I would be nostalgic for that era nearly 20 years later I would never have believed you. But here we are. Let me barge into Joan’s place and demand she make me a pfeffernusse.