Euphoria and the Tedium of Modern-Day Misogyny

A strange phenomenon is unfolding in Season 3 of Euphoria. For a show where women outnumber men in the main cast, Euphoria doesn’t seem to have a single female character.

It may be important to first define “character.” I define it here as a representation of a personality in media, an aggregate of multiple, complex traits and qualities. In storytelling, characters are paramount: a way for the audience to connect to the story and visualize a representation of their world in a heightened sense. Most art strives for this, conveying heightened emotion, heightened conflict, heightened characters with a clear message about our world. Euphoria fails in this mission. The show has nothing to say that is not already better represented in the real world. As a result, the show resorts to shock-value gimmicks drenched in misogyny to maintain our attention. On the other side, Euphoria’s viewers seem conflicted between disgust and entertainment. I don’t posit any theory on whether or not Euphoria is fundamentally entertaining. Entertainment, if it can even be quantified, is a measure of individual perception and my opinion is likely different from yours. However, those viewers who believe that Euphoria has a daring and necessary viewpoint into sex-work, OnlyFans, addiction, our deteriorating capitalist economy may be well served by examining the realities of these systems and the people affected.

But I digress. The question is simple. Who are the women of Euphoria, if not characters? They are one-dimensional caricatures onto whom sexual fantasies are projected. Each woman can be easily reduced to a one word descriptor and her whole personality is defined only by her relationship to men or sex. Let’s take our main four women (between episodes 1 & 2 of Season 3). You will likely have different words, but mine are below:

Rue: Lesbian

Cassie: Sexy

Maddy: Capitalism (!)

Jules: Lesbian #2

And one more just for fun:

Strippers, drug mules, and crime lords existing in Euphoria’s Purgatory for women: Existent

These words are reductive, yes. But does the show really portray that much beyond these words? Let’s take a deeper look.

Rue: Other than vague references to her past relationship with Jules, we get little to no insight into why Rue behaves the way she does. She begs for a job with a strip club owner who is “in the business of pussy” to get away from Laurie, but also seemingly to be around the beautiful girls that work at his establishment. There is no further explanation for why Rue is so interested in this job. She doesn’t seem to have any real attachment to anything or anyone (again, outside of references to Jules) and she has no real emotional tether to the story anymore. Still, she is certainly the most interesting character on the show, even if she has mostly been reduced to creepily staring at strippers.

Cassie: Honestly, you know what I’m going to say about her. Just fill in the words in your head mad-libs style.

Maddy: One of the cringiest moments of Episode 2 comes when Maddy walks into a restaurant and convinces a talent manager to hire her because she read her Wall Street Journal profile. “I believe in capitalism,” Maddy says. And we in the audience are supposed to…? Applaud? Frown? Nod along approvingly? Or are supposed to grimace because that’s certainly what I did. Maddy’s relationship to men and sex is a little different from the other girls’ because she’s on the other side of the transaction. She sells sex for her own personal gain, which may actually be an interesting perspective if we got insight into any other facet of Maddy’s personality. Unfortunately, Euphoria would rather show us scene after scene of hypersexual and ultimately weird fantasies rather than develop this character into someone with whom the audience can connect.

Jules: To be fair, we don’t see much of Jules in the first two episodes. However, what we do see— that she is a sugar baby to a married family man— seems limiting at best and transphobic at worst. Sure, there is a longstanding history of sugar dating in the trans community. Does Euphoria have anything else interesting to say about that phenomenon or about Jules as a character? No. Sorry, let me be a little more forgiving: not yet.

The conversation surrounding violence against women in media is one we’ve had time and time again. A New York Times article written in 1984 mentions the rise of violent acts against women in commercially released movies. There is discourse abound, both online and academic, about gratuitous rape and torture scenes in media. These scenes are easy to spot and have been less popular in recent years.

I argue, however, that such violence in media of the past has been replaced by a more subtle, modern version, exemplified by the way Euphoria treats its women. Euphoria’s brand of violence against women is more surreptitious. It asks the question, is misogyny still misogyny if it is exercised and perpetrated by women?

Is the scene where Rue and Faye swallow vaseline-covered fentanyl balloons fetishistic and gross if they were ordered to do so by a woman drug dealer in the story? Is Cassie’s parading around in hypersexual costumes sexist if she is doing so of her own will and against her husband’s orders (others have compared this to Sweeney’s own reclamation of her sexuality, though that might be a topic for a different time)? Is Maddy’s capitalistic pursuit of OnlyFans personalities misogynistic (rather than, as the show seems to claim, girl-boss behavior)?

The simple answer is yes. Misogyny is misogyny no matter how it is portrayed or often hidden. The real-world examples of the “characters” in Euphoria—OnlyFans models, sex-workers, addicts, even low-paid assistants in Hollywood—are complex, strong personalities shaped by the broken systems in which they live. Euphoria reduces them to fetishization, made even worse through the male gaze.

Overall, Euphoria self-aggrandizing, misogynistic, and insidiously violent.

Worse, it’s BORING. Every scene is fundamentally tedious when you are searching for deeper meaning or better characters. In earlier seasons, watching the show was possible through a lens of campy, glittery excitement. In Season 3, the sexism inherent in every scene is so blatant that each episode, scene, character, storyline, is repulsive. The stories that the show tries to tell deserve better than the tiresome misogyny through which they are scripted.