Critic Sophia Gilbert’s Girl on Girl is a well-researched and occasionally damning exploration of women and feminism in current pop culture. At times, the critique falls into “Barbie movie”-level feminism (that is to say, the commentary feels ten years too late), but the book is worth it for a salient argument Gilbert may or not know she is making except for when she names it herself: art written by women or that prioritizes female characters most often fits the description of the female confessional narrative. Prime examples of the female confessional narrative include Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, in which the title character frequently breaks the fourth wall to make snide comments to the audience directly and unbeknownst to the other characters on the show, and HBO’s Girls, in which Lena Dunham participates in seemingly every definition of bad sex imaginable. Other contenders include the independent web series-turned-Comedy Central show Broad City, endless trauma-heavy memoirs by comediennes, and the new rise of the female indie pop singer, with lyrics so reminiscent of a teenage girl’s diary entry as to occasionally turn stomachs over or make listeners wince. Gilbert dubs this phenomenon “the confessional auteur.” Girl on Girl is itself a female confessional narrative, much to the author’s tepid chagrin.
The success of the female confessional narrative plays on the voyeuristic inclination most people possess. It offers the audience an opportunity to peek behind that ever-sought-after beaded curtain hanging in every older sister's bedroom doorway. We see how much work, discomfort, and unattainable wealth goes into being seen as desirable. Being beautiful is gross and boring. As a result, we find it wholly undesirable. This is comforting.
Succession is not reality television, but it fits Gilbert's definition of it: “a genre [...] defined by two almost chaotically oppositional impulses: a desire to examine humans through a sociological lens and the more crucial imperative to make money.” Like the women of the Housewives franchise or Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, or Lindsay on Lohan Island, the Roys are to be pointed and laughed at, and the wealth they have amassed is not aspirational, but almost embarrassing. Of all of the Roys, Roman Roy is most willing to own his place as the simultaneously enviable and derisory modern nepo-baby. Roman is rude, he loves alcohol, his career is failing before it ever began, his relationship with his mother is tenuous, and he isn’t getting laid. Roman Roy is a hot mess, and we love it. When viewed through the lens of Roman Roy, Succession is almost undoubtedly a female confessional narrative, and if Succession is a female narrative, Roman Roy is a woman.
I'm not sure I believe writers Jesse Armstrong and Georgia Pritchett, among others, consciously wrote Roman to be a woman; rather, the writers of Succession tripped and fell into a pastiche of women for the screen in a postfeminist world. My thesis is not that Roman Roy is actually a woman, or queer even, though I understand that reading of the character and think there is plenty of evidence to support it. My thesis is that for the purposes of the show, Roman is a woman.
In her collection of personal essays, So Sad Today, Melissa Broder writes, “One way to feel isolated is to unintentionally develop an odd sexual fetish at a very young age. Next, spend your adolescence reinforcing that fetish through masturbation, until you can only reach orgasm in relation to that very specific fantasy. [...] Eventually, you might want to let a few sexual partners know of your fetish, but definitely downplay it."
Broder's personal fetish is vomit, but Roman's fetish, we know via his sexually nebulous relationship with Gerri and the fact that he brings it up constantly in public company, is playing the family dog.
Roman is desperate to be included in affairs of business and family; however, after failing time and time again to insert himself into either, he instead implicates his siblings in his own private fetish. His siblings refuse to play along. In the official episode scripts, Kendall, whose one of many fatal flaws we know is his inability to disengage when appropriate, occasionally humors him. While Roman and Kendall are discussing their vision for their contemporary media empire in “The Munsters”, Kendall rebuts an insult from Roman with, “Well, you're the bitch, because you eat dog food and get hard to dog porno.” In “Living+”, Kendall instructs Roman to, “Be a big dog and bark for us.” Neither line made it to the aired episode.
At Tom’s bachelor party (“Prague”), Roman tells Sandy in Kendall’s company that his siblings used to lock him in a cage as a child and make him eat dog food. Kendall replies that he needs to shut up. Sandy doesn't find Roman's fetish charming. Sandy excuses himself, and while Roman reveals the hours he spent locked up as a child with the intention of making his siblings look callous, his siblings recognize that it is just as humiliating for Roman to look back on the family dog game with fondness than to be the one imposing it upon him. After Sandy leaves, Kendall confronts Roman about his social faux pas and denies making Roman the family dog. When pressed, Kendall tells Roman he enjoyed it.
“There was a bowl that was filled with chow, and I couldn’t leave the cage until I finished it,” Roman says, and sarcastically, “I enjoyed being in a cage with a leash around my neck?” Pissed, Roman walks away to confer with Connor.
“You liked it,” Connor confirms. “You asked to be put in that cage.” Roman asks about the dog food, and Connor tells him, “I think it was chocolate cake.”
What child doesn’t like chocolate cake and the attention of an older sibling? Roman recognizes that his situation is not as sympathy-inducing as he has privately made it out to be. Still searching for validation, or at least pity, Roman confesses to wetting the bed and implies that he was sent away to military school to avoid being seen as an embarrassment to the family. Connor corrects him: “No, Rome. Dad sent you to military school because you asked to go.”
Minutes later, while egging Tom into taking a fresh female acquaintance, Tabitha, up on her offer for a pre-nuptial blowjob, Roman says, “You get off and you eat the shame for dessert.” Chocolate cake, indeed.
Playing the family dog allows Roman to construct an elaborate fantasy in which he is provided for just for offering his own company, solely for existing. Roman wins by becoming the ultimate victim. By asking to be punished, Roman retains some agency he is not otherwise afforded. This is congruent with a common trope in stories revolving around women, especially in the horror genre where the boundaries of acceptable violence are mutable: when put in situations in which they are powerless, the women resort to begging the men oppressing them to abuse them physically.
The pages of Kier-La Janisse's horror movie meta-slash-autobiography House of Psychotic Women are scattered with women asking the people in their lives (usually a sexual or romantic partner, and most typically a man) to hit them. The scenes go like this: the woman asks to be hit, and the man responds with either confusion, outright refusal, or sometimes worse, sympathy. The woman feels that this is another insult secondary to whatever had preceded the ask, and her demands become more forceful. Eventually, the man hits her, with few exceptions, to the great satisfaction of the woman. Once the scene escalates to physicality, the man is the indisputable villain, and the woman the victim. We are rarely shown a regretful woman in the aftermath. Now she can hate him with reason. As readers and viewers living in the real world, we may conclude that none of these women have a true or primal desire to be hit; the wish is a result of their social conditioning as part of a male fantasy world, but in the language of fiction, this may not be relevant. The point is that these women have manipulated a scenario in which they maintain agency.
In Italian director Mario Bava’s gothic picture The Whip and the Body (1963), Bava’s female protagonist Nevenka intentionally provokes a man with whom she has an extramarital relationship into beating her for her sexual pleasure. That night, she murders him by stabbing. She regrets it; her means of achieving sexual ecstasy are gone, and it’s her own fault. Overwhelmed by her complex feelings about the killing, Nevenka begins to embody the man, believing she is him, and in a suicide reminiscent of a twisted Romeo and Juliet, she stabs him to death once again. Of course, this time, she kills herself. The film is an adept blend of traditional Italian giallo and gothic fiction translated for the screen. The Catholic influence is heavy-handed.
Let’s put aside the obvious modern criticisms of the film: Bava’s treatment of his female protagonist is cruel and misogynistic, fetishizes violence against women, and confuses consensual sadomasochistic relationships between adults with partner abuse. Janisse theorizes that, for the purposes of the horror genre, female masochism is synonymous with female sexuality. In her analysis of The Whip and the Body, Janisse writes, “[Nevenka] wants to remain chaste [...], and she wants to suppress her desires because women of good family aren’t supposed to have any. The attraction to this relationship is that it is guilt-free sex [...]. She is simultaneously aroused, sated, and punished for the sin of entertaining sexual thoughts, and purified in the process. It’s an amazing package deal.” The argument is not that Nevenka is not oppressed. She is. In the film, she loathes her husband but has no means to escape him. Within the boundaries society has put upon her, Nevenka creates and consents to a masochistic extramarital affair, which we infer she believes to be a more desirable alternative to submitting to a marriage she despises. Further, she transcends her marriage and societal stature through death— and guilt-free!
The first time Roman is hit on screen, it’s by Shiv, after Roman expresses his reservations for taking advantage of Marcia to secure control of the company by the siblings and implies that Shiv’s refusal to sign the trust papers contributed to Logan’s stroke (“Shit Show at the Fuck Factory”). Shiv shoves him backward, Roman slaps her back, and the siblings catfight. Episodes are riddled with mentions of Roman enduring physical abuse at the hands of family members, though most often Logan. In “The Summer Palace”, Shiv reminds Logan, “Dad, you beat Roman with a fucking slipper in Gustav until he cried for ordering lobster, remember?”
At her wedding in “Chiantishire”, Caroline admits that she should have had dogs instead of children, and tells Shiv, “[Your father] never saw something he loved that he didn’t want to kick to see if it would still come back,” an indirect confession that Logan’s abuse toward Roman is a sick, male method of telling Roman he loves him.
In the scripts for “Prague”, Kendall asks, “How is [Dad]? Still using your fragile self-esteem as a punching bag?” shortly before he shoves Roman out of his way whilst getting off the elevator, though the line never made it to the screen. We see this actualized when Logan hits Roman in the face on behalf of Shiv in “Argestes”. Afterwards, Roman does not want an apology from his father. In the car with Logan later, Roman cannot even subject himself to the humiliation of admitting that it happened at all and instead resorts to comforting his father. The abuse has become a comfort to Roman, and proof that he is at least man enough to withstand it.
In the penultimate episode of the series, “Church and State”, Roman (understandably) loses his composure at his father’s funeral. He is ashamed of himself for his public display of vulnerability, and as punishment, Roman walks into a rowdy post-election demonstration and is struck in the face after provoking a protester. Much like his days playing dog, he asked for it. The difference is that by engaging with the protesters, Roman steps outside of the safety of his family unit. The physical abuse he endures at home and the game of dog he plays with his siblings is, in some ways, predictable. With his father dead and his siblings unwilling to indulge him in his self-deprecating behavior, Roman seeks it elsewhere. He is lucky to escape with only a black eye and two cuts on his forehead, held together with stitches and easily concealed by Band-Aids. With some clever camera work and lighting, we hardly see Roman’s bruised face until the final shareholder vote in “With Open Eyes”. It is revealed in close-up when Kendall gives him a hug, and Roman acts as if Kendall has hit him, and again when we see Roman for the last time, drinking Gerri’s signature martini. The irony is this: for all of the crimes the Roy children have witnessed or perpetrated, the consequences, though real, remain small. You can hardly say he didn’t deserve it.
Historically, media made for the masses does not show women participating in sex, even in heterosexual relationships—much less enjoying it. We assume Roman does not engage in sex with women because of his own hangups, but we know he’s capable of arousal from the plethora of masturbation scenes littering the show. Despite the masturbation scenes and the relentless crude jokes and jabs, Roman is entrenched in purity culture traditional to the screen. In fact, even with the show’s mature rating and constant sexual references and cussing, there is very little nudity or pure sexuality in the show. We see a few scenes in which the leading men are shirtless, a few moments of transition between foreplay and presumed intercourse in Shiv and Tom’s sexual affairs with each other and outside of their relationship, and the brief fling between Kendall and Naomi and Kendall and Rava; otherwise, sex in the show is individuated and lonely. Characters are occasionally sexy. No one is sensual. Sex is, at best, an afterthought in relationships that are based primarily on convenience and upward momentum. Roman follows this to its extreme conclusion.
The first example of this is Grace, who is introduced at the very beginning of the show as being Roman’s long term girlfriend or maybe wife (Kieran Culkin can be seen wearing his real-life wedding ring in early episodes). She has a child, presumably from a former relationship, because Grace asks him bluntly after Roman breaks up with her in “I Went to Market” citing “irreconcilable differences,” “[Do] you want to talk about how we only fuck once every six months?”
He can’t be shown fucking, so instead, Roman turns to a sort of “proxy sex,” in which he engages a partner (or two) in foreplay, only to retreat to masturbation when it is time to go through with it. Grace is also the first example of this in “Sad Sack Wasp Trap”, when she touches him through his dress pants in the bathroom, and Roman shrugs her off in favor of brushing his teeth. She leaves, and Roman undoes his pants to masturbate and is instead distracted by his phone and a nude photo of Shiv's boss's husband.
The same happens with his next girlfriend, Tabitha, who we understand to be a sexually liberated woman in the most 2020's sense. She is beautiful, blonde, and bisexual, and she and Roman meet at Tom’s bachelor party in “Prague”, where she gives Tom a blowjob with Roman as the “peeping Tom.” She is not afraid of her own sexuality or discussing it. She brings up their lack of sex life or her sexual encounters with other characters almost every time they are on screen together, to Roman’s disgust. In “Pre-Nuptial”, Roman asks her to marry him before Shiv’s wedding (after only four dates). She turns him down and explicitly tells him they have no sex life. When Roman argues against this, she concedes, “You, like, kind of jerked off near me, once.” Tabitha enjoys Roman’s companionship alone, a foreign concept to the Roy children. She recognizes this and asks of the proposal, “Is this some sort of tax scam?”
“There’s almost no sex in the show,” Culkin said in an interview with Esquire. “I did have a sex scene with Tabitha where she had to be a corpse, which shows you the kind of sex scene we’re talking about in the show.”
It’s true; Tabitha has to play dead for Roman to fuck her. At the Pierce family home in “Tern Haven”, Tabitha mentions being a surrogate for another couple and incidentally reveals that she and Roman aren’t sexually involved. Her assessment is lighthearted, calling them “eunuch besties,” but she has embarrassed him in front of his Waystar Royco family, particularly Logan and Gerri, and the Pierce family. The relationship is unsalvageable from this point on, but back in their room, Roman tries to initiate. Tabitha kindly refuses his advances, and a candid discussion follows, in which Roman admits he needs the sex to feel taboo to be interested. What he really wants is for her to be insulting but cannot inspire her to do so; she is not a real Roy and cannot be cruel. Tabitha plays along with his necrophilic fantasy, but Roman is selfish and abrasive. Rightfully offended, she deems him “Professor Can’t-fuck” and retreats to the bathroom to supposedly masturbate via her electric toothbrush. Much like Tabitha, the relationship is dead.
In the episode scripts for “Pre-Nuptial”, Roman makes an effort to fuck her after his satellite launch, teasing, “Want to go try to launch my rocket?” We aren’t privy to their attempt at fucking, only Tabitha’s review of the experience; she calls him “fine,” then “an occasionally enjoyable way to pass twenty minutes,” and eventually, “a lousy lay.” The scene didn’t make it to the released episode, so in canon, Roman and Tabitha never fuck.
Roman and Tabitha’s relationship feels tragic, especially alongside the other floundering partnerships occurring simultaneously: Kendall is divorced, Shiv and Tom are doomed from the beginning, and the affair between Shiv and Nate is quickly losing its novelty. Roman and Tabitha seem to be genuine friends: they share a sense of humor, Roman is (mostly) comfortable sharing his life and feelings with Tabitha, and the Roys like Tabitha. To her enormous credit, Tabitha tries to make the best of the situation. Perhaps the relationship could have been salvaged had they come to an agreement similar to Tom and Shiv’s open marriage, but we’ll never know; Tabitha’s desires for the relationship are uncentered, unspoken, and ultimately unrealized. The show, much like the Roy family, doesn’t spare Tabitha. Roman’s sexual detachedness is the terminus of their relationship, and Roman trades Tabitha for Gerri.
Now back to Broder's vomit fetish: she continues, “Never invite any sexual partners to render your fetish real, or to engage your inner world through role-play, thereby cordoning off a very important piece of you from ever knowing true sexual intimacy for the remainder of your life. Trust me, it works.”
Previously, when Roman calls Tabitha excited about his first day at the corporate training program in “Safe Room”, Tabitha is about to get into the bath, and Roman is initially willing to try phone sex. The phone provides enough distance to placate Roman’s reservations, but he is immediately turned off by her (frankly, tame) descriptions of her body. Another candid and somewhat vulnerable conversation ensues, and he tries again and says flatly, “I’m fucking you hard.” His disinterest is transparent. Tabitha is insulted.
“What are you doing next, changing your water filter?” she replies, and peeved, Roman tells her he’s ejaculated and hangs up on her to call Gerri instead.
Gerri is willing to engage with Roman’s game of proxy sex in real time. When Roman masturbates with Gerri's voice on the phone, he invites her to cross the threshold into his inner world. Gerri, who has become powerless in her own way over her years employed by the Roy family, accepts his offer; thus, Gerri becomes the most sexually intimate relationship Roman has ever had, at least that we see on the show.
During an interview with Vulture in which he was asked to play a game of “fuck, marry, kill” with the Roy siblings, actor Nicholas Braun (Cousin Greg) summed it up nicely: “Well, you can’t fuck Roman. He’s unfuckable. He doesn’t fuck, so maybe marry Roman?” On top of acknowledging Roman’s gaping lack of sexual intimacy, Braun recognized Roman’s almost connubial loyalty to his Waystar Royco family. Once Roman is involved with Gerri, she is it: he is singularly devoted to her for the rest of the show. When he appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air to discuss the series finale, show creator and writer Jesse Armstrong called Gerri the “quasi-love of [Roman’s] life.”
Just after revealing her vomit fetish in So Sad Today, Broder writes, “My mother, who wasn't the traditional nurturing type [...] cuddled me and gently bathed me. [...] Now, not only did I know that my mother really loved me, but she loved me at my most vile. When you have low self-esteem, to be embraced at your most vile is a marvel.”
For whatever reason, Gerri entertains their unprofessional relationship until the show’s end. Viewers may conjecture that Gerri feels Roman is motherless, feels forced into the relationship because of her status as an employee of Waystar Royco, or gets off on it herself; regardless, Gerri accepts Roman as he is, and beyond that, Gerri understands him. She has watched him grow up and therefore, like a mother, has an insider’s knowledge of Roman’s psyche. Gerri understands that to love Roman is to make him feel both disgusting and desired. She engages him and insults him simultaneously, a feat Tabitha was never able to accomplish. Roman confesses this to Tabitha the morning after the failed affair between them in “Tern Haven”. When Tabitha asks if he had done anything fun the previous night, Roman answers, “Just sent some emails and jerked off in Gerri’s bathroom. Nothing too crazy.” Even better, Gerri expects nothing physical of him.
The masturbation scenes and the relationship between Roman and Gerri are indicative of Succession’s understanding of female sexual exploitation in art and in pornography. Amateur videos of women masturbating are titillating and inviting. Professional pornography filmed for male satisfaction is often filmed to show as little of the man as possible, allowing the watcher to project himself onto the male participant. Men want to be in competition with other men and they want validation from other men; they don’t want to see other men fuck. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but Succession puts the viewer in the role of the everyman consumer of pornography. Even before Gerri, another person was privy to Roman’s solo pleasures of the flesh—the viewer. Gerri and the viewer are synonymous: the distance and lack of physical intimacy pacifies Roman’s hangups, and the validation encourages Roman to expose himself to us frequently and with great satisfaction. We continue to engage, so Roman continues to put himself on display, even when it harms his reputation or sense of self. In the end, Gerri and the viewer both abandon him. Since he has no real place in the company, without Gerri or an audience, Roman is made useless, and we are left to conjecture alongside Roman what he will do next.
He can’t be shown fucking on screen, but it doesn’t matter; Roman Roy is always getting fucked. After the cold open in “Lifeboats” (only the third episode in the series), in which Tom kneels in front of Shiv eating breakfast to converse with the zipper of her slacks, we see Roman on the floor of a fitness studio with another man. His personal trainer is assisting him with some floor stretches, in an unmistakable caricature of the first few tantalizing minutes of a gay porno. It's all there—their size difference, the aggressive sexuality and palpable lack of chemistry, the shot of Roman's face, groaning, and the trainer's thick bicep in the foreground.
Roman’s displays of traditional (and sometimes toxic) masculinity are always punished. Situations transpire sometimes seemingly only to reinstate Roman’s place at the bottom. When Logan puts Roman in charge of the satellite launch in Japan in “Austerlitz", Roman decides to move up the launch date. Roman chooses to launch the satellite "prematurely" as a means of earning respect from his father and his peers, including his siblings. Kendall is unimpressed. When Roman interrupts Kendall’s conversation with Sandy in “Prague” and attempts to bulk up his authority by mentioning his recent promotion to telecoms and the launch, Kendall laughs at him and tells Sandy, “[Roman’s] doing satellites like it’s 1985. Dad’s got him holding the plastic wheel in the back and telling him he’s driving.” Feeling ignored, emasculated, and illegitimized, Roman wants the launch to coincide with Shiv's wedding, but in the wake of Roman and Tom's dick-measuring contest over Tabitha at the bachelor party, Shiv refuses. She calls it out explicitly: “No phallocentric bullshit. I don't want a big fucking dick blasting off at my wedding.”
In spite of her wishes, Roman calls for the launch. Hunched over his phone in the bathroom, Roman watches the livestream of the takeoff. The explosion of the satellite is immediate. In short, he “blows it.”
Each time Logan tricks his underlings into believing he might actually give up his position as CEO, Roman makes his plea case to Logan alone, without an audience. To beg for it in front of his siblings and his father's employees would be too much humiliation even for Roman. But Logan hates a groveler (see, his disdain for Tom, and by extension, Greg, too), and Roman rarely takes action which would lead viewers to believe he really wants to be CEO, or that he wants any role at the company at all. Again, what he really wants is validation. “Turns out he loves it when I do the daddy dance," Roman says to Shiv in “Too Much Birthday”, “But I guess that's just because he loves me. He loves fucking me and he won't fuck you.” You can't get much more direct than that.
Seniority is everything in Succession, and Roman is punished more often for being the youngest son than Shiv is for being the youngest or the only female sibling. Shiv refuses to be seen as the little girl of the family. It would be incorrect to call Shiv's body masculine, but especially in later seasons, Shiv trades sundresses and sweaters for suits that accentuate her broad shoulders, cuts her hair into a sharp bob, and wears heels to make herself appear taller. In contrast, Roman is short and slight and often dresses effeminately. He wears pink shirts and tight pants, hair greasy with mousse. The insecurity Roman feels about his body is perfectly communicated by Culkin’s physical acting: the hunched shoulders, dismissive gestures, and the many times Culkin leans away from the other actors in a scene. Viewers get the sense Roman wishes to shrink himself, or even become invisible. “I think he has a closeted eating disorder,” Culkin said about his character in his interview with Esquire. “He orders [a nice big steak and some mashed potatoes], picks at it, and then goes home and checks his waistline.” Because a patriarchal world always needs a bitch to take down together, someone has to replace Shiv, and Roman does. In taking Shiv’s place and becoming the daughter of the family, Roman becomes the target for traditional workplace sexism.
To Logan, Roman is only useful as bait, little more than an unbuttoned blouse and a pushup bra. Logan frequently dismisses him as stupid and incapable, only to bring him back when he needs to seduce a business acquaintance for the purposes of closing a deal. “You act the fuck-knuckle, but people like you. He likes you. You can do it,” Logan says in “DC” when he sends Roman to secure money from billionaire Eduard Asgarov. His siblings are only an extension of this. After Logan becomes incapacitated at the beginning of the series and documents are found naming Roman as Chief Operating Officer in ”Shit Show at the Fuck Factory”, and the second time, in “All the Bells Say”, his siblings are quick to dismiss this as unbelievable.
“Dad wasn’t thinking straight,” Kendall says. “You, the Chief Operating Officer? [...] If that’s not a sign he was loco in the coco, I don’t know what is.”
Shiv says, “Dad's not going to choose you, Rome, because he thinks there's something wrong with you.”
Logan also sends Roman to engage with Mencken to gain leverage in the GoJo deal after Roman enterprises a sort of camaraderie between them in the bathroom of a political campaign party in “What It Takes”, but much like his sexual opportunities, Roman can't go through with it. He almost does, after falling back on a “merger of equals” concept, but then fucks himself when he sends nudes intended for Gerri to Logan during a meeting in “Chiantishire”. The metaphor of Roman exposing his penis to his father, sister, and substitute mother via Gerri is almost intolerable; one might find their suspension of disbelief shattered if the situation wasn’t so believable for Roman, a liberal distributor of incestuous jokes. The women are quick to fuck Roman over with his own dick, and Logan closes him out of the deal.
Throughout the series, Roman is the chasing woman. In our first introduction to their dynamic, Gerri turns down Roman's offer to make her CEO in “Shit Show at the Fuck Factory”. He later asks Gerri to marry him (“Dundee”), and mirroring his proposal to Tabitha, Gerri is quick to dismiss it. Being second in command works for her. This is one thing she and Roman have in common, but Gerri is not Roman's equal.
In Succession, every major player has a counterpart. Some are conjugal and business-like (Logan and Marcia), some platonic (Kendall and Stewy), and some built on pure survival (Tom and Greg). Like everything else in the show, these relationships are in a constant state of tug-of-war, power plays, and extreme wins and losses, but over the span of the show, average out to relatively equal. Gerri and Roman’s relationship is part mother and child, part boss and protégé, and part whore and propositioner. In the end, Gerri is more devoted to her own upward climb than she is Roman, and Roman’s fondness for Gerri is punished. When Logan tries to close the siblings out of the GoJo deal at the end of “All the Bells Say”, Roman asks Gerri for help. She doesn't say no, but she doesn't say yes either. Much like he had tried with his father only moments earlier, Roman tries to inspire her with the obligation they have to each other. “I trust you,” Roman says. “I fucking like you.”
“I'm focused on whatever outcome serves the best financial interests of the shareholders [...],” Gerri says. “It doesn't serve my interests. How does it serve my interests?”
If Roman has any equal, it’s in Shiv, but Shiv's loyalties are fickle. Often she is torn between Kendall and Roman depending on who offers her the greatest chance for upward momentum at any point in time, but it is difficult to dispute that even within the siblings’ clan, Shiv and Roman are their own private clique. Their relationship is the most playful out of the siblings’, full of gratuitous jokes about Roman's maladaptive sexuality and Shiv’s ever-tenuous adherence to her principles and politics. In “Sad Sack Wasp Trap”, Shiv and Roman have a frank discussion regarding a nude photograph of her boss’s husband, which Roman is studying in detail. Much of the third season is spent with Roman and Shiv theorizing about their father's sexual relationship with Kerry, his secretary, and unpacking their fractious relationship with their mother. Other than Gerri, Shiv is closest to seeing Roman's Freudian sexual hangups for what they really are. “I'm Roman, I'm a rebel,” she teases in “Too Much Birthday”, “Except where is Big Daddy? Please rule me, please punish me!”
In the end, Shiv chooses Tom, who has groveled his way to the top when Shiv was not willing. Tom and Roman are in near-constant battle for Shiv’s attention, and in fact, Tom is often the only person Roman dominates (he insults Greg, too, but again, Tom is Greg and Greg is Tom) without consequence. After Tom’s bachelor party, Roman gets the girl, a rare moment in which Roman’s masculinity is upheld. Behind Tom’s back, though, Roman is frequently reminded that Tom was more successful at fucking Tabitha than he is. Roman loses Tabitha, and worse, Tom gets Shiv. Roman can't even win at groveling. He is the second biggest loser. Isn’t that what being a woman is all about?
The deep sexism of the early to mid-aughts was so naked it almost inspires nostalgia; may the skinniest woman win (America’s Next Top Model, anyone?) Gross misogyny isn’t so simple anymore. In a culture deeply informed by the Internet and the illusion of choice via constant consumerism screaming “more is more,” femaleness is now defined almost entirely by image and wealth. Girlhood is synonymous with Hayley Bieber’s lip gloss line; womanhood is a subscription-based Pilates class only offered between the hours of nine and five. Gilbert’s raw confessional auteur is as alluring now as she has ever been."
Abjection for women in [the era of the confessional auteur] was also an assertion of their primacy and value as a subject,” Gilbert writes in Girl on Girl. “As Jessa says to Hannah [in Girls] when she’s complaining about the success of a rival whose trauma memoir has become a cult success: ‘Your boyfriend should kill himself! You deserve it!’” For those confused without the context, Jessa is telling Hanna that a boyfriend’s suicide would at least give her something interesting to write about: a man, who she can then exploit for her own personal gain, a touching demonstration of feminism for the modern artiste. Gilbert postulates, “But to be celebrated for all the ways in which one transcends the role of victim can become just another form of creative oppression. [...] The genre [of the female confessional narrative] was reckoning with [twenty-first-century postfeminism].”
Critically acclaimed dramadies such as Girls and Fleabag make the female confessional narrative feel interesting and intellectual, but the oft-scorned reality television series like the Housewives franchise or the spin-off Vanderpump Rules are the fringe extremes of the genre. Bravo’s Housewives and the short-lived series Gallery Girls are damning exposés of wealthy women obsessed with upholding their reputation and their careers, frequently bankrolled by men with generational wealth and fueled by their own egos. The entitlement is unrelenting. On the screen, their wealth does not protect them from humiliation. On Ru Paul’s Drag Race, men dress as women for the purpose of being judged on their heavy makeup, feminine costuming, and sexuality. The show is both a celebration of queer culture and a jab toward the state of social progressivism. The absurd has entered the popular culture.
About her auteur, Gilbert continues, “So much of the work that appeared in this era seems to me now to have been exploited in one way or another—for attention, for clicks, for the age-old project of turning women’s pain and degradation into entertainment. [Writer] Cat Marnell’s columns about her drug addition [...] were utterly unglamorous, and yet the editors commissioning them seemed to have understood them as the journalistic equivalent of the reality show.”
Succession blends dramedy and reality television with so much grace and so much love that it is almost invisible. The show offers a refreshing new form of Greek theater revealing that to win is to lose, and to exploit is to be exploited. The show sympathizes with the celebrity fantasies of the everyman and everywoman, the voyeur, and the modern plebeian aloofness toward the shocking. The show understands the irony of exploitation in a post-ironic and postfeminist world. The line between amateur and masterful art has been so distorted and become so disorienting that the role of the critic is, to some, dead. So is any critique of the new, postfeminist ideals circulating in the news media, in fiction, and in online spaces.
Succession’s vision of the female confession offers a new level of absurdity, going so far as to make their leading woman a man. Welcome to the club, Roman.