The Wilds and the Duplicity of Girl Boss Feminism
Spoiler Warning for The Wilds on Amazon Prime and Content Warning for discussion of sexual assault and mention of bulimia and homophobia.
In Episode 7 of The Wilds, a show about a group of teenage girls intentionally stranded on a deserted island as a social experiment called the “Dawn of Eve,” we find out the full backstory of “Jeanette” aka Lynn, who died in Episode 1. Though there are significant hints that Jeanette was already in the know about the experiment, we finally find out that not only was Jeanette one of two plants within the group, but she was an adult PhD student who took on the undercover identity of the teenage girl “Jeanette Dao” to help accomplish the head of the experiment, Gretchen Klein’s, goals. Lynn, traumatized after being sexually assaulted as a teenager, and enticed by Gretchen’s speech of changing the world into a more equal society through the experiment, signs on board.
Though Gretchen warns Lynn that the experiment will be even more tough and triggering than she could possibly imagine, Lynn is unable to predict the reaction she will have to seeing Leah’s unconscious body aboard the boat that will take them to the island. Reliving her own assault, Lynn attempts to stop the experiment, only to trip on the dock and severely injure herself. Though she hides her injuries and forces herself to go through with the experiment, Lynn’s injuries are fatal and she dies barely 10 minutes after coming ashore after being “rescued” by Leah. Though Gretchen and her team are deeply disturbed by the her death, they continue on with the experiment, Gretchen trying to rally them by saying it will make Lynn’s death “mean something.”
Lynn’s death at the beginning of the series, though meant to lure both the audience and the other girls on the island into a false sense of awareness and trust about what is happening, is emblematic of the numerous problems not only with Gretchen’s experiment but with her ethos. Like “Jeanette,” Gretchen is not all as she appears on the surface. Though viewers are made aware early on that the island is an experiment being puppeteered by Gretchen, unlike the girls whose backstories are revealed almost entirely one episode at a time, Gretchen’s reveals come slower. At first, it is just that Gretchen was fired from her former job. Then, we learn her job was at a prestigious university, where she was respected and accomplished in some kind of social science. By the end of the season, we learn Gretchen was expelled from her job after her son killed a boy, Quinn, while hazing him for a fraternity. Gretchen, like when Lynn dies, shows little personal responsibility for the death — instead, when the girlfriend of Quinn (Nora, the twin sister of Rachel, who Gretchen’s smooth-talking also manages to convince her to willingly join and become the second plant) shows up, she talks about how she told her son about consent and took him to the Women’s March. It’s the patriarchy, that shadowy element in all our lives, rearing its ugly head and turning her son bad. It couldn’t have possibly been her fault in any way.
To be clear, Gretchen didn’t directly kill Quinn or Lynn herself. However, that is beyond the point. Gretchen, like many older white feminist women I’ve encountered, cannot comprehend a world where she is at fault. She is a victim of this system as a woman, after all. She did the work — she believes in feminism and drilled it into her son’s head. She’s running a whole social experiment on building matriarchy! If something goes awry on her watch, it is because someone couldn’t get with her Sisters-Doin’-It-For-Themselves-program. Don’t they know how insidious the patriarchy can be? Don’t they see what she’s trying to accomplish on behalf of all women? Don’t they understand she is a Girl Boss?
“Girl Boss,” despite the term nearly being ironic at this point, is Gretchen’s entire core. The spirit of Girl Boss Feminism seems innocent enough on the surface — relatable, career-minded women empowered by feminism to stand up for themselves and carve spaces in the professional world for other women like them. We’re Girl Bosses! We do serious work, have cocktails together, wear cute outfits, ask for raises, and post cute photoshoots with our kids and hot husband on Instagram! Being a Girl Boss promises to preserve all the soft, fun, flowery textures of femininity while attaining masculine power. Except, rarely do Girl Bosses actually carve out space for anyone but themselves, and rarely, are Girl Boss figures anything but wealthy white women. The most present “Girl Boss” that comes to mind is Ivanka Trump, caught in this video talking to world leaders about the “male-dominated” military, all the while her father blames military women who are sexually assaulted for entering into service at all. Can’t you see, though? Ivanka is a Girl Boss who cares about feminism, she was advocating for military women after all! How could her actions not all be for feminism when she’s a woman in an important position? Her father’s actions aren’t hers and were totally out of her control. She’s still trying, however minimally that might be.
Gretchen embodies the same sly condition, working for herself at whatever cost it takes while claiming it is for the greater good of women everywhere, no matter who gets hurt in the process. Gretchen, clearly an expert in psychology and sociology, is able to artfully master this form. She says all the right things — when Lynn asks her if she hates men, she says no, not all at, and in fact, she’s “loved some of them very deeply.” When Lynn points out that all of Gretchen’s work is about women and their power, Gretchen interrupts her to correct, “Yes, but not over men.” Girl Bosses can’t hate men, because being a Girl Boss is all about equality and being relatable. How can you be relatable if you say you hate men, even a single man? You’ll have to be a boss over some men too, no matter how much they clearly act or even just say they hate women, so how would that be equality? That’s not being diplomatic, which Girl Bosses are always supposed to appear to be. Gretchen, though pretending to listen to her team and even letting one throw a drink in her face because he is angry at her decisions, never actually does anything diplomatic. All decisions go through her; all decisions start and end with her.
Lynn has a much different answer to this question, a very un-Girl Boss answer: yes, she does hate men. She hates the way men laughed while they assaulted her, and how they passed the video of her being assaulted around without shame. Gretchen, while sympathizing with Lynn, pivots to the overarching cause of those men’s behaviors, patriarchy. Gretchen understands what Lynn wants very clearly, which is certainly to heal through revenge of some sort, and she offers her it in the form of joining the experiment. Though Gretchen should understand, as someone who extensively studied and taught social science, Lynn’s trauma excludes her from being able to successfully participate in such an intense study (nevermind the fact that the experiment Gretchen watched Lynn in when she met her, she failed to follow directions due to being triggered). However, that thought never comes to Gretchen’s mind, as Lynn was always meant to be another cog in her personal mythos. Strong enough to do what Gretchen needs her to, weak enough to be manipulated successfully into it.
Being a Girl Boss is never talking about the hard emotions and feelings that come with the horrible violence of patriarchy, because that means the veneer of empowerment would fall through. Girl Bosses are not subjects of violence, at least on the surface, because being a victim of violence is as far away from being a “boss” of anything as a woman can get. Girl Bosses empower by disempowering those around them; they are the only ones ever allowed to be truly in control. Depending on the woman, this is either a response to their need for control after their own trauma from violence, or simply a narcissistic urge, of which Gretchen most likely makes up the latter. This is revealed perfectly in Gretchen’s mock pitch about Dawn of Eve. Towards the end of her monologue, she says she is throwing away her script and just speaking freely to her audience, in a moment that we are meant to see as Gretchen losing some of herself to the cause; a moment she is supposed to be at her most genuine. She pours her all into describing the dream of those who support the experiment achieving “gynotopia” against apocalypse, with silhouetted images of women on the beach triumphantly holding hands with each other behind her. Revealed afterward is the act; the artifice that is at the center of Gretchen. She doesn’t even remember she’s supposed to take questions, and when her nameless worker-bee gives her a hypothetical one about what happened to Lynn, Gretchen’s corruption is bare-faced: Lynn is “giving it her all out there and we’re very proud.”
And at the core of it all, we have the experiment itself. While it’s obvious Gretchen has no governmental or parental approval for it, as she is shown telling parents their daughters are in Montana and paying off pilots to stop an official rescue team from finding the girls, it is also clear she could never possibly get any legitimate approval for it if she was being honest about it. The experiment is poorly executed at every turn and deeply unethical. The girls are clearly in mortal danger every second they are there despite any planted supplies, hidden camera monitoring, or undercover plants. This is proven time and time again when the girls starve, contract such bad food poisoning that two of them nearly die, fall in quick-sand, are exposed to the elements day in and day out, and attacked by a shark, not to mention the danger that their fellow humans pose as morale and supplies slip. The crux of Gretchen’s hypothesis is that women are less violent and therefore more capable of running a peaceful society once patriarchy is stripped away. Unlike any competent researcher, Gretchen doesn’t even entertain the idea that her hypothesis is incorrect and her experiment could fail even if all the girls survive, nor the idea that the results could be widely discarded by society once the full details of how they were obtained are revealed. This isn’t even to discuss the fact that the understanding of sex and its relationship to gender is on a much more sophisticated spectrum in modern day than Gretchen seems to take into account when planning, if at all.
It is shown Gretchen personally selected many of the girls for their individual traumas, making the experiment even more unstable as traumatized people are forced into pure survival mode, often a place where violence occurs despite gender or sex. But again, Gretchen attributes these traumas to the overarching patriarchy, despite many of them being complex and nuanced responses to environment. Rachel’s bulimia, Leah’s statutory rape, Fatin being punished for outing her father’s cheating, Shelby’s internalized homophobia, Martha’s inability to understand the sex abuse inflicted on her as a child despite support from her parents, Toni’s deep anger issues because of her mother’s drug addiction and father’s absence, and Dot’s need to become the caretaker for her sick father are more complicated than Gretchen seems to give them credit for. They all have elements of patriarchal influence, however, many of them also involve personality, belief, access to resources, physical ability, and internal family structures. Gretchen, like in her own life, believes she can level the playing field on all these elements while also maintaining complete control, two completely opposing forces. To Gretchen, their lives are not actually about the complicated, beautiful young women they are, but rather, the potential they have to offer her to personally ascend to a position of matriarchal control.
Right as an injured Lynn gets on the boat with an unconscious Leah, she spends one of her last moments alive holding Leah’s arm tightly in support. This simple act of love for her fellow woman in one of her most vulnerable moments is not only a gesture of healing for Lynn, but actual, genuine feminism. Lynn, despite not knowing Leah, still loved her simply for being another woman in it with her. In Lynn’s search for revenge against the men who assaulted her, she had enough love to try to give that to the other women through her protection of them in this experiment. While I am ardently excited for Season 2 of The Wilds, I am even more excited to see these girls, and not Gretchen, make Lynn’s death really mean something.
