Editor’s note: This editorial was written by Veronica Walsingham and originally published on Playboy.com in 2019.
If you were to believe the fictionalized female journalists of rom coms, you would think women writers flout ethical standards and capriciously abandon their career ambitions for men on the regular. Shows like Netflix’s House of Cards and Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life featured female journalists sleeping with sources, and in HBO’s Sex and the City and Girls, the female writers often relied on spinning their personal romances into articles and book deals, as opposed to writing about—well, literally anything else. Be it exchanging sex for a quote or disclosing the details of sexual experiences, the majority of fictionalized female writers depend on sex for their stories, thus their careers. To varying degrees of success, Freeform’s The Bold Type rejects the idea that a female writer’s sex life and writing career are intrinsically intertwined.
The show follows three young professionals at Scarlet, a women’s magazine in the vein of Cosmopolitan. Of the three protagonists, Jane Sloan (Katie Stevens) is the show’s journalist, and she is utterly uninterested in divulging the personal details of her love life in her writing. The show, however, doesn’t let Jane off the hook so easily. The first season sees Jane assigned to write about ex-boyfriends and orgasms and Tinder dates. Jane is reluctant, but ultimately executes her assignments due to her eagerness to please her boss. The same season also sees Jane write about a congresswoman, breast cancer awareness and the BRCA gene mutation, a stockbroker-turned-stripper and sexual assault. It’s in this coverage, reported free of source-sex, that Jane takes great delight, as does the journalism community in her work. Before the first season ends, the editor-in-chief stops assigning Jane personal essays, allowing her to cover issues about which she’s passionate. Jane will write one more personal essay on her own volition, but it’s an essay about her relationship to religion, rather than about her love life.
The second season, which recently came to a close, sees Jane in full swing. She covers a menstrual-cup company, gun ownership and motherhood, officially saying goodbye to essays about Tinder dates. Though, Jane does the one thing that so many writers in romantic comedies do: She falls for a source. Well, kind of. To Jane’s credit, she didn’t write the feature on her love interest nor did she work for Scarlet at the time. Instead, Jane’s introduced to this character at a bar, chemistry clear from the start. What muddied the waters was that Jane, unemployed and desperate for freelance stories, decides to profile her potential love interest in the next episode. She doesn’t sleep with him while doing the story but she will go on to date him, and this plot hinders the show’s argument that Jane is a serious, serious journalist. But still, Jane’s commitment to her career in journalism remains more positive than problematic, and that makes her an anomaly in the world of fictionalized female journalists.
Unfortunately, Jane’s ability to navigate a writing career that doesn’t depend on stories about her libido, doesn’t necessarily make Jane an interesting character. In fact, Jane is the least nuanced, least likable of the three main characters. Sutton Brady (Meghann Fahy) pursues a career in fashion while worrying about her financial situation and that she’s lagging behind her friends professionally. Sutton’s relationship with a member of the Scarlet board occasionally falls prey to will-they-won’t-they clichés, yet aptly explores the realities of a workplace romance between two people in vastly different stages of their careers. Meanwhile, technology-obsessed Kat Edison (Aisha Dee) confronts her biracial identity and walks the tightrope of being the magazine’s director of social media at a young age. Both her race and her age are most evident in her semi-regular meetings with the all male and mostly, if not all, white board of directors. This all causes Jane to come off duller than her coworkers.
“Be it exchanging sex for a quote or disclosing the details of sexual experiences, the majority of fictionalized female writers depend on sex for their stories, thus their careers. “
Like Rory Gilmore before her, Jane also lacks an innate curiosity, which is crucial for a career in journalism. This is further highlighted by the other main characters being more hungry to learn and more sexually curious. It should be noted that a female journalist’s reluctance to write about sex doesn’t equate to her not being sexually adventurous, which is an unfortunate statement the show seems to have made. Jane’s lack of curiosity is often excused by her backstory, like when she didn’t want to be tested for the BRCA mutation because of her mother’s breast cancer or when she couldn’t fathom Sutton’s gun ownership because she lived near Columbine High School during the time of the school shooting. As a whole, the show seems unaware that Jane’s repeated stubbornness makes her narrow-minded, even if explained away by painful backstories.
To applaud The Bold Type’s efforts to avoid the disappointing tropes of female journalists in film and television is not to dismiss journalists covering sex and dating. Writing about such subjects is vital in educating people on their sexuality and helping them feel comfortable with it. However, women do not only write about sex, and it’s sometimes men who do the writing about sex. It’s refreshing to see this represented on a television show in which the female writer pushes against personal essays about sex, while a male writer eagerly mines his personal life for articles about how to teach your girlfriend to have sex like a porn star and the like.
This is not to say that The Bold Type is a perfect show or that Jane is a perfect journalist. But Jane’s a refreshing change from television’s previous writers like Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) who, had they not written about their relationships so candidly, career success likely would have eluded.
What remains unfortunate is that Jane’s rejection of the tropes plaguing other fictionalized female writers doesn’t make her a character with depth, or even one that is very interesting. A character’s best qualities shouldn’t simply be what they aren’t, which is the case for Jane Sloan. The rejection of these tropes has left Jane with much empty space, which remains unfilled by other traits or interests. As a result, Jane feels like a deflated balloon, but at least she’s a deflated balloon that doesn’t depend on sexual encounters to make her exploits worthwhile.