Amy Sherman-Palladino first introduced Rory Gilmore to our screens in Autumn of 2003 as the perfect ‘girl-next-door’: conventionally beautiful and high achieving with the now envied and highly fashionable dress sense of the early 2000s. But it wasn’t really until the 2016 reboot, A Year in the Life, working in conjunction with the rise of social media that the world turned on Rory Gilmore. Whether it be the transition from working class to, sometimes ungracious, privileged private school girl, her general lack of self-awareness in certain points of her life, or the gifted kid to college dropout pipeline, the world is not happy with Rory Gilmore. Articles in recent years have been titled “Why we hate Rory Gilmore” and “We hate Rory.” On the back of this we are forced to ask ourselves whether this hate is justified or if the expectations of women in the media are still incredibly unattainable in comparison to the rest of the world, specifically men.
Many seem to pin it down to a general sense of self-entitlement and lack of consequence that fuels Rory’s behaviour and in turn people’s dislike of her character, the most notable plotline that characterises this behaviour being her dropping out of Yale. With no plan of what to do in the meantime and the subconscious knowledge that her rich grandparents will have her back, Rory abruptly drops out of Yale after the criticism of Logan’s father, a shocking but not surprising turn of events as up until this point Rory has had to spend very little time in rooms of people that she is not academically better than. Rory spends the better part of a season living with her grandparents and helping Emily Gilmore at the DAR, living out the life Emily had hoped for Lorelai/ Rory does not stop to think about the impact of this on her mother and instead acts for herself and herself alone. This lack of self-awareness is something that seems to act as a common theme for Rory, specifically when she sleeps with a married Dean in Season 4. Referring to him as “her Dean”, Rory struggles to see the effects of her actions on other people, in this case Lindsay, a fellow woman who was in an already difficult period of her life. However, when Lorelai sleeps with Christopher while debating breaking things off with Luke, the same backlash does not ensure, instead more grace is given to a grown woman who should know better than a teenager trying to figure her life out. In actual fact that is all Rory was at this point: a teenager, a child, a daughter who is bound to argue with her mother and a student who is bound to fail tests and make mistakes, but has she actually done anything to warrant the ‘monster’ label that society has given her?
This leaves us to question where this influx of hatred has come from if it does not just lie in the all-too-common character flaws of teenage girls. It seems that there is a common understanding that women, both in real life and in TV and film, are only allowed flaws if they are ‘positive flaws’, which in fact are not flaws at all i.e. too nice, too much of a people pleaser. Therefore when they present actual flaws that are common to the human experience they are intensely hated in a way that a male presenting these same flaws would not be. A perfectly apt example of this is Gossip Girl’s Chuck Bass. Chuck is an objectifying misogynist that assaults girls (he even attempts to rape Jenny in the pilot episode) and yet his actions are excused as the series progresses and we get to know ‘the real him’. All over the internet, women thirst over his character not just as Ed Westwick, but as Chuck himself. Is this not clearly an indication of the vastly different standards both men and women in TV are held to?
More so, if not because she is inherently a woman, we must ask ourselves if our dislike of Rory Gilmore is actually a reflection of our feelings towards ourselves. For any Gilmore Girls lover there was some point or another whether we wanted to be Rory Gilmore – her academic success, her extensive reading list, her beauty and the life she lives in Stars Hollow. Rory was introduced to our screens as a character we could trust, someone we wanted to be, someone we project ourselves onto to try and replicate the feeling the show gives you in real life. Thus perhaps there is a sense of betrayal that occurs when the layers start to peel back and reveal Rory’s flaws, and despite them being regular human flaws we feel duped that we were aspiring to be this person that has subsequently let us down.
Whilst it might not be overtly ‘anti-feminist’ to dislike Rory as a character or critique her behaviour when she acts in a way an audience deems immoral, we have to ask ourselves why the same people that ‘hate’ Rory Gilmore don’t feel the same way about far more deeply flawed and abusive male characters such as Chuck Bass.
It does not make you a bad feminist to dislike women when they make mistakes, it makes you a bad feminist to allow men to get away with worse.