By VIVIAN KOPKA

As the final episodes of “The Summer I Turned Pretty” are released, many followers of the series have turned against the main character, Isabelle “Belly” Conklin. 

For those of you who don’t know, “The Summer I Turned Pretty” is a three-season series based on the books by Jenny Han where Belly, the main character, gets entangled in a love triangle with two brothers whom she’s known since birth. Beach house drama, familial death, and awkward love scenes ensue. 

Now, I want to preface this article by saying that the story I’m talking about is just blatantly misogynistic. The whole show is about a girl who gets pretty and learns that worth and confidence are directly related to male attention. Han doesn’t purposefully create a story that puts down women, but revels in a dream world that is a result of the society we all live in: one that is male-dominated. 

Anyways, the Belly hate. My friends hate her. The thirty-year-olds on Instagram hate her. She makes some bad decisions, but so do the other characters. So why do Belly’s actions provoke such a visceral reaction? 

Women are often viewed as confused and unsure. We saw it just recently with Betty Who, who decided to “hold space” for Renee Rapp, a lesbian, to fall in love with a man years down the line. People–all genders alike–hold preconceptions about groups of people. It’s how humans survive. 

Conversely, since women and men are characterized as opposites, men are the absence, or the antitheses, of feminine traits. Belly and her feminine self can’t decide, but Conrad can’t decide what to do either. Since Belly is a woman, though, her behavior is more emotional and indecisive as compared to Conrad. 

When Susannah, the boys’ mom, passed away, my Instagram showed me memes about how Belly “took advantage” of two grieving brothers, as if she is all-manipulating. As if Belly herself wasn’t grieving over the woman that, next to her own mother, raised her. 

In a 2023 Her Campus article by Alexa Byrne, titled “Team Connie Baby or Team Jellyfisher? What about Team Anti-Belly?” Byrne talks about all of the ways that Belly is problematic. “I mean come on, a girl who grew up with two family friend brothers, both of them clearly have major feelings for her, and for a whole two seasons all she does is go back and forth with them, kissing both of them and playing with their feelings, and all because she cannot make up her mind? I can only sympathize with Belly so much.” 

It’s easier to see women as “femme-fatales,” sexually experienced women who can easily manipulate men, especially when men succumb to adultery or sexual desires. It’s easier as a man to say she was a tease, that he couldn’t help it. Just like Conrad and Jeremiah couldn’t help getting manipulated by Belly because of their vulnerability.

While the author of the article has a point about Belly’s recklessness, it is too dissective and judgemental of Belly’s behavior and lacks consideration of any other character. For one, it’s important to acknowledge that since she was a child, Susannah told Belly that she would end up with one of her boys (another BIG misogynist issue in the story). If one puts an idea like this into a young and malleable mind, of course she’s going to make a mess and romanticize everything!

It’s important to look at history. Think about Eve and her apple and Pandora and her box. The fact that sin is repeatedly feminine or derived from femininity in classic literature isn’t unrelated to how we see women today. We should all be that “woke friend” and realize how much patriarchy affects the way we look at and interpret life. For centuries and across many different cultures, the feminine has been viewed as a source of evil. Let’s combat this by watching our silly little shows and thinking about the bigger picture. 

Featured image: Vivian Kopka’27