It happened in Dublin. A journalist tried to praise actress Nicola Coughlan for her portrayal of Penelope Featherington in the third season of the series The Bridgertons“You’re very brave,” he told her. Anyone who hasn’t seen the series might think that the actress had to face some thrilling action scenes, swim with sharks or face a major physical challenge. Nothing of the sort. The only (and serious) danger that Penelope Featherington faces is that of not being thin. “It’s difficult,” Coughlan responded to the journalist’s fat-phobic comment. “Because I think that women with my body type, women with perfect breasts, we don’t get to see ourselves on screen enough.”
Coughlan said the thing about the perfect breasts because in the highly anticipated and recently released fifth episode of the third season we have seen her naked. Before sleeping with her beloved Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton), Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) takes off her clothes in a scene that was the idea and choice of the actress, who has defined it as “the biggest fuck you to all the conversation around my body”. The series, based on the novels of Julia Quinn, has become a mass phenomenon – it has been the most watched on Netflix in any language – and is, apparently, a soap opera that vindicates the macho and classist romantic ideal of a lifetime. For example, in the scene of the perfect breasts, the young Penelope asks the young Colin for sexual instructions. “Tell me what I should do”. She knows nothing about sex, he knows everything. It seems like the same old story, but there are subtle changes. For example, before touching her he asks her permission and only when she consents does he start masturbating her: penetration does not seem to be the man’s goal. “Why did you stop?” she asks. “Are you ready?” he wants to know. “Is there more?” the young virgin answers, canonically ignorant. “It might hurt,” Colin announces. “I can’t help it, I swear. But it will only be this first time.”
The scene is the same as always, and yet we had never seen it before. Those of us who grew up reading the adventures of Julian Sorel (Red and blackby Stendhal) and the young Heathcliff (Wuthering Heightsby Emily Brontë) we learned that the romantic ideal, like education, is capable of overcoming social differences. What the canon never promised was that love could overcome the social stigma that punishes the bodies of lovers, especially female mistresses.
I started to see The Bridgertons trying to decipher the success of a sexist soap opera among modern young women around the world. And I discovered that what is stimulating is not only its luxurious aesthetics, the violins to the rhythm of Billie Eilish or its racial diversity. The best thing is the irony it deploys to represent the romantic ideal before placing a bomb in its entrails. In the third season, that bomb is called Nicola Coughlan. That is why when Penelope reaches orgasm while having sex with Colin in a carriage and the violins play Give Me EverythingIn Pitbull’s , the audience feels that normative bodies are no longer the most exciting and explodes with pleasure. We believed that the narrative had to be changed, but that is of no use without first changing the bodies.
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