You Catch Less Flies Being a Honey
How "Nobody Wants This" + our dated concepts of gender roles still reigns, and I’m over it
This summer, I found myself in a fly-casting class for women in Freeport, Maine. It was my partner who had gifted me the class. “We’ll be fly-fishermen together!” he lovingly wrote in the card. I thanked him and told him that I expected an invite to the next guys’ fishing weekend. We both laughed, until one of our kids called our attention away.
Inside the little farmhouse classroom where the LL Bean Outdoor Center sits beside a handful of casting pools, the women in my class went around in a circle introducing themselves and shared why they were there. An older woman told us her husband and three boys all fished, and she wanted to feel a part of the family again. A woman in her early thirties, around my age, said she wanted to go on an epic trip to Montana with friends and didn’t want to look “lame.” A woman in her seventies told the class, “All of my husband’s friends are dying, so I told him I’d keep him company.” I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh, so I did both, along with the rest of the people in the room. When it was my turn to introduce myself, everything I planned to say disappeared from my mind. Instead, I found myself saying, still on the verge of tears, “I want to keep up with my 4-year-old daughter, who often fishes with her dad. I want it to be our thing, too.”
I had always been interested in fly-fishing ever since I watched “A River Runs Through It” as a young girl. When my husband and I moved to Maine in 2019, we both expressed that we should channel our inner Brad Pitt as soon as we could. Fast forward to today, and Ian can confidently call himself a passionate fly-fisherman. He has his own gear and group of buddies he fishes with. Today, his angling and fly-casting life takes up a huge portion of his extra-curricular time, and he has amassed an enviable amount of knowledge about Maine’s lakes, rivers. And my rod? It’s brand-new packaging now has dust on it, and I still can’t tell you the difference between tippet and a leader.
As we moved through our casting lessons, I tried to trace back to when exactly Ian had started to progress with his fishing life and where mine sputtered out and died. The truth is, I have had opportunities to learn via workshops and could pick up a book on the sport anytime, but I kept falling short on something Ian had abundance of: friends who were eager to jump in a boat and just get after it. Could it be that crudely simple? Male friends fish on the weekends, and girls go out for dinner and drinks? I couldn’t be living that much of stereotype, could I?
I left my questions to stew for a few weeks until this week, when I finally watched the wildly popular Netflix series Nobody Wants This. I was expecting a rom-com escape with my teenage heartthrob. Instead, I was thrown right back into the reality of my post-kid life.
Nobody Wants This is the most popular tv show on Netflix right now. Adam Brody, of “OC” fame, plays Noah the Hot Rabbi opposite Kristen Bell’s Joanne, who is an equally good-looking lead. Joanne and her sister Morgan are successful podcasters with big Call Her Daddy vibes. The show was originally supposed to be called Shiksa, which is the role in which Bell was cast: very blonde and decidedly not Jewish. (For a more in-depth discussion of the long and complicated history of the word, I recommend Menachem Kaiser’s LARB piece on the subject.) But it’s not the relationship between Noah and Joanne that stood out to me the most, but the strictly gendered lines drawn between the men and the women in the show that struck me hard.
It's episode seven when Noah goes to the playoffs with his beer-league basketball buddies, and Joanne’s goal is to win over his female friends. But they aren’t his female friends necessarily (in fact, Noah isn’t shown speaking with any of these women at any point in the whole season). These wives are in a way, accessories, and, in Noah’s words, only attend the “big games.” Oh, Joanne realizes: These are the amateur versions of WAGs, the wives and girlfriends of professional athletes. Noah then tells her that in order to win each of them over, she needs to know the one secret to their entire personality. He then boils each of these women down to a single trait:
- Wife 1: Talk about her wedding
- Wife 2: Talk about breastfeeding
- Wife 3: Talk about her jewelry line
- Wife 4: Talk shit about other people
These women are given no agency of their own. As Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own, “I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. ... They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men.”
I suppose these women are also seen in relation to Joanne (Kristen Bell), but the ultimate goal in this storyline is for her to befriend them, on order to get the man.
Joanne’s edge as the leading woman is that she isn’t married or a mother (yet). Instead, she’s able to easily mingle with the guys, impressing them all with a tray of whisky shots. We are led to laugh and mock alongside her who, after hearing that wife 2 is still breastfeeding her five-year-old, barely makes out through a fake smile: “You’re obviously a very good mom.” At this point, I rewound and watched the women on the bench again, and imagining them before they were cast under this light. I wondered if any of them wanted to fly-fish too. As I often do when I see women—especially mothers—representing poorly on the screen, I thought of my own.
As a young girl, my mom used to tell me that men are more fun to have as friends while female friends were not to be trusted. “One or two girlfriends are fine, but start to accumulate and you’ll eventually get into trouble,” she told me. “Jealousy. Stealing boyfriends. And if that doesn’t drive you nuts, talking about purses will.”
Re-reading my journals from high shows just how much I took her tough-love advice. Even though I claimed to be a ride-or-die kind of friend to everyone, it doesn’t take a magnifying glass to see that my unquestionable devotion was pointed in a male direction. With the very few girls I was close with at 17, I mostly judged them, tore them apart, and nitpicked every little thing they did. If the guys made a joke in poor taste, I was the first to laugh; if my girlfriends gossiped, I called them drama queens. “Guys don’t gossip,” I wrote in one entry, “They just tell it like it is.” And that’s how I found myself, a timid Chinese girl whose early dream in life had been to be an elf in Lord of the Rings, in mosh pits with a bunch of dudes with mohawks and sleeves, a tray of whisky shots never far from reach.
As I moved on from high school to university and then to living as a young professional in various cities, my friend groups have always had a decent dose of testosterone—that is, until recently. Ever since getting married and having two girls of my own, I’ve noticed that the males in my life are mostly partners of friends. Recreationally, I see the men in my life mostly when the spouses are present. That’s a big part of why my dream-list of hobbies (fly-fishing, surfing, clay shooting, camping—activities considered not especially feminine) was getting left in the dust compared to my partner, who easily found company on evenings and weekends.
When my mom was the same age as me and Joanne (mid- to late-thirties), she had a lot of friends, both male and female. She hung out with men and women all the time, and her interests, sense of humor, and experiences were diverse. She was the one walking though the bar with shots trying to get all the WAGs and the husbands to play nice. Unfortunately, in my mom’s case, that type of ice-breaking became her downfall. In addition to struggling with alcoholism, my mom also fell prey to the same narrative we all expected might happen. Even though it was never spoken about with our family, my mom crossed the line with one of her male friends. In high school, so did I. These leaps into the “see, this is why we don’t do that,” territory is fodder for almost all romantic dramas from the 90s until now.
Is the answer to this question so simple? The fear of cheating is so magnificent that we render an entire demographic un-friendable?
In that same episode #7, Noah’s brother Sasha drives Joanne’s sister Morgan home. (Mild spoiler alert here: They’ve been flirting the entire second half of the season.) She makes a comment about it was weird he drove her home. He asks her why. Doesn’t she have any male friends? She says no, and retorts, “well how about you?” To which he replies, “I had one, and then I married her.” There’s a beat, and then he adds: “I had other female friends, but Esther said they couldn’t come around anymore.”
I thought about my mindset at 17, and how limited my beliefs were when it came to trusting other people. I thought about those boys in high school as men today. If we were still in touch, would we go fishing? Would their partners mind if we spent weekends and evenings alone together? If I’m so hellbent on crossing these social norms, why haven’t I asked any of my male friends to go fishing?
A few weeks after those fly-casting lessons, I’ve been asking some of my girlfriends if they want to start learning with me. There is so much interest and yet, I still haven’t found many women who already know how to fish or navigate Maine’s waterways. This means we have to start at the beginning, paying for lessons or guides. At least in my relatively large network of people I know here, there aren’t too many trips being planned for the wives of fishermen (barf!) Wouldn’t it be simpler if the people we invited on fishing weekends included anyone interested in the sport? (I’m looking at you, too, girls’ nights and bachelorette parties).
I had two instructors in Freeport that afternoon. One identified as male, one female. One was a Coast Guard veteran, one a hunter. They were both fun and kind, and knowledgeable anglers. I would happily venture into the wild streams and rivers of Maine with either of them. I hope that I would bond with whoever I lassoed trout with. I hope that whoever they were partnered with wouldn’t mind that I spent the afternoon with them. I hope that when I was introduced to new couples at parties or daycare pickups, I wasn’t always ushered towards the women but that either spouse might be a viable friend down the road. Our understanding of gender has grown and progressed so much in the last ten years, so why do we still fall prey to shows like Nobody Wants This. When will we stop commodifying the cool girl persona, and why is their only goal to find love? I wonder if this show were to fast-forward five years, would Joanne be sitting on that bench as Wife #5, all her cool-girl traits whittled down to, oh I don’t know, a reality tv obsession. When will the entertainment industry realize that a woman get married or pregnant isn’t the only way to cue the credits?
I hope that when my daughter is old enough, she won’t be asking us any of these questions at all, leaving more time to put her waders on, tuck a map in her back pocket, and get after it.
