From private pleasure to erotic spectacle: Adapting Bridgerton to female audience desires

Here's the abstract:

In this article, we look at how medium and genre shaped the Netflix adaptation of the first two Bridgerton novels and mediated the depictions of sex and desire to fit medium-specific expectations surrounding sexual content made for women. The showrunners for Netflix’s Bridgerton (2020–present) articulated a desire to depict sex from a female perspective, and with a ‘female gaze’, but the series is also instrumental in defining that perspective in ways that often differ from the approach of the novels’ female author. The contrast between the original and the adaptation reveals social norms and beliefs about content that excites women as well as stark differences in print and television norms. In attempting to use a female gaze, the adaptation also constructs the female gaze as distinctly separate from what is depicted in the novels and as limited to specific forms of ‘looking’. We first explore how this is implicated in choices that were made about the adaptation of violent or aggressive sex for the show. Bridgerton avoids depictions of aggression present in the novel and falls back on traditional depictions of appropriate feminine desire. Secondarily, we discuss depictions of sexual consent in the novel and the series with a particular emphasis on the implications colour-blind-casting has for the depiction of violations of consent.

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Explicit sex in Regency romance novels is nothing new, but in the adaptation process Bridgerton went from private pleasure reading to public erotic spectacle. It also shifted from the norms of romance publishers to the constraints of two prominent media brands. In this article, we look at how the adaptations of the first two Bridgerton novels confront expectations surrounding sexual content made for women and how medium and genre shape these expectations. The contrast between the original and the adaptation reveals how social norms and beliefs about the content that excites women, and what sexual pleasure looks like for women, vary across media forms. (8)

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The first two Bridgeton novels seem to fall in line with romance novels in general. Despite being virgins, the female characters easily achieve vaginal orgasms during sex. Season 1 of Bridgerton follows suit, with Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) often orgasming from intercourse in 60–90 seconds. Both seasons include female orgasms from cunnilingus and multiple scenes of cunnilingus as foreplay. However, as one critic put it, ‘[t]here are so many penis-in-vagina (PIV) montages in Bridgerton that it leaves little room for realistic female pleasure’ (Kirkbride 2021: n.pag.). Season 2 director Cheryl Dunye, who directed Episodes 7 and 8, said she wanted the sex scenes to be from Kate’s (Simone Ashley) perspective and include less focus on intercourse (Konstantinides 2022). Contrasting Kate with Daphne, she described the character as more knowledgeable about sex and more capable of asking for what she wants. Dunye wanted Kate to continue to exhibit ‘empowerment’, ‘satisfaction’ and ‘control’ during intimacy. Lizzy Talbot, the intimacy coordinator, said that to that end the climactic sex scene in Episode 7 explicitly avoided penetrative orgasms. While romance novels seem to centre women by portraying more orgasms from intercourse, the show attempted to do so by slowly moving away from intercourse as a primary source of sexual pleasure.

One element that is present in both seasons of the show, and not in the books, is the female protagonists masturbating. (9-10)

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The characterization of the show as sexually explicit became more controversial when, in January 2021, news outlets began reporting that Netflix was scrambling to get scenes from the series removed from porn sites (Hermanson 2021; Jaworski 2021; Sharf 2021). It is interesting that in June 2022, a casual search for Bridgerton on Pornhub and YouPorn produces no videos, but a search for ‘Bridgerton Sex Scenes’ on YouTube produces almost all the sex scenes from the two seasons of the show. The effort to get the scenes removed from porn sites was about distinguishing the show from pornography. (11)

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The adaptation removes most of the aggressive sexual behaviour present in the novels and the role it plays in foreplay, disruption of romantic progress and pleasure alike. (12)

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The romance novel trope of male sexual aggression as part of seduction and desire for men, and an ‘acceptable’ way for respectable women to engage in pre-marital intimacy, is present throughout Kate and Anthony’s relationship in the novel. This is complemented by an ongoing entanglement of violence, fantasizing about violence and conflict and arguments interlaced with moments of desire. Indeed, arguing is marked explicitly as something that Anthony finds pleasurable in his relationship with Kate, and arguments pepper their crucial moments of intimacy, indeed they argue during the first time they have (fully consensual) sex.

The show’s creators, in interviews about Season 2, said that the goal of the Second Season was to be much more focused on female sexual pleasure with foreplay, female leadership and the female gaze heavily emphasized. Yet the Netflix adaptation also defines what ‘female sexual pleasure’ is expected to include, and in its revision of the novels excludes threat or surprise as sources of pleasure and forms of foreplay. For instance, in the adaptation, Kate and Anthony’s first kiss takes place in a chapel, after they profess their feelings to one another, with a cross on the wall between them, visually sanctifying the pairing. Rather than leering at her rakishly, Anthony looks at her beseechingly, almost in pain. Instead of an argument resulting from her perceived violation of his space, an argument designed to threaten her, they profess their affection for one another and their pain at their inability to act on it. In the novel Kate is framed nearly as prey, although she becomes caught up in the moment. In the TV series, however, Kate makes the first move towards Anthony, and they meet in a kiss. (14)

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The series, unlike the novels, rarely asks the viewer to actually perceive things from the female characters’ perspectives and share their pleasure; instead it asks the viewer to witness female characters’ desire and pleasure. This is pleasure under scrutiny, and it is also evidenced in the kinds of pleasure depicted in the series in contrast with the more complicated, and sometimes darker, dynamics in the novels. The pleasure on display in the series is ‘clean’, tied to professions of affection, requests for consent and attention to women’s sexual knowledge as a gateway to sex, whereas these scenes in the novel are often messy, with pleasure defined by surprise and discovery that is borne of a lack of sexual knowledge and muddled with anxiety, relief and desire that is shadowed by aggression. The attempts to cleanse female sexual pleasure in the series, while in part responding to positive shifts in cultural norms around consent for women, also narrow the options for that pleasure significantly. (15)

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the series gives little substantive consideration to the sexualization of race and, more troubling, behaves as if the showrunners are naïve to the ways in which casting an actor or actor of a different race may bring new dimensions and implications to plot points from the original novel. (16)

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The addition of narratives of deception to storylines of characters who were cast with non-White actors is starker still when taking into account that Daphne in the novel exaggerates the likelihood that might have been seen in order to convince Simon to marry her, but in the television series it is made explicit that they were in fact seen by someone who would want to harm Daphne.

The series’ ‘colour consciousness’ often fails to be clearly conscious of the way in which the eroticization of bodies is influenced by race. The eroticizing of Page’s Black body takes on additional significance when the series deals with the rape scene from the source novel. In talking about the rape scene here, it is important to address the differences in the scene from the novel to the series, the way the scene was responded to in the novel and the significance of Page’s casting in relationship to this storyline. (16)