Is The Queen's Gambit Anti-Feminist?

What’s the deal with Beth’s lowest moment in Netflix’s new mini series? I have been hearing a lot about The Queen’s Gambit across the internet, and lately I have stumbled across a few folks saying that the portrayal of Beth’s rock bottom is a male-fantasy-infused concoction of impossible fictions and misogynistic tendencies to sexualize women at any given opportunity. The posts about it are meant to catch your attention, and they certainly caught mine.

I saw an Instagram story a short while ago (unfortunately there was no way for me to find this again to source it, but believe me I tried) that was criticizing the way that the writers of The Queen’s Gambit portrayed a mental breakdown of its main character, Beth Harmon.

The posts show Beth in an expensive hotel room, made up very glamorous and in the middle of a drug- and alcohol-induced bender with mascara tears staining her face, a cigarette in one hand, and a cocktail in the other. Out of context, of course this seems a little bit ridiculous. Anyone reading this who deals with depression or anxiety knows that hitting rock bottom can most often look like crawling in bed for days at a time, not changing out of your dingy pajamas, and all around looking like you’ve never seen the light of day.

The key piece here, though, is that this scene is taken out of its original context. This is an important lesson in media literacy: in order to really understand any kind of media, you have to take into consideration its entire context. That includes author/writer, time period, genre, method of delivery, character traits, and of course, the entire body of work.

So what happens when we put that bizarre rock-bottom scene into the entire context?

Beth is a prodigy chess player who is orphaned as a young girl in the 1950s. She spends the next 6 years or so of her childhood in an orphanage for girls under the strict eyes of director Mrs. Deardorff, who removes any sense of identity Beth had left after her mother died by cutting all her hair off and burning her clothes. Beth is also subject to the ethically questionable medications given to her by Mr. Fergusson, who administers daily tranquilizers to all the girls in the orphanage before the state mandates they discontinue the medications.

Under all of these circumstances, Beth becomes withdrawn from people and begins to find comfort in the drugs. As a child with no real parental figures and budding mental health problems, there wasn’t much else for her to do.

These problems follow her into adulthood, and we see the consequences of drug and alcohol use begin to become more severe. I won’t continue on with details so as not to spoil anything for those who want to watch, but needless to say it is extremely obvious what kind of character Beth is from the get-go. She has an addictive personality and struggles with feeling cut off from those around her.

Put into the context of a few more episodes, we see that her breakdown is inevitable, and the manner in which she handles it is spot on with the way she behaves in every other moment of the show*.

It can be so easy to fall onto the bandwagon of “man wrote female character, man must be misogynist” thinking. Certainly we still see examples of that left and right, but ascribing that kind of thought onto a piece of media without fully understanding what the media is can be dangerous.

It can lead to accusations that are baseless and inflate the heads of people who are wildly off in their theories, and when those theories get attention like that Instagram post, they teach people that a one-size-fits-all approach can be applied to anything. But the truth is, men can write female characters just fine. Sure, there are instances where the writing gets over-sexualized or the character is objectified beyond belief; and those instances should be called out. With evidence and understanding as to why they are inappropriate, of course.

But when you hear that a man wrote a woman character, you don’t need to raise the red flags and buckle up all your body armor before you even take a look. Consider that when you’re watching your next show or reading your next book. For example, if an author has written a character who has a specific severe mental illness, don’t take giant leaps to the conclusion that the author has no experience with neurodivergency. Instead, try looking up some information on the author, their background, things they’ve studied and written about before, and put it into context. You never know what you might discover.

Needless to day, it benefits no one when people react first and learn later.

*There are also some folks out there who have pointed out that Beth is quite clearly coded as Autistic. I am not Autistic and don’t have much expertise on the matter, so I won’t be offering my opinions on that. I encourage you to do some research and check out more on that though!