This article contains spoilers.
We internalize what we watch. The sentiment came to me while watching the season finale of the hit Hulu series “Tell Me Lies” two weeks ago, as a dysfunctional college friend group came to terms with the reality of their undergraduate years in a time-jump sequence five years later.
While my television watching has waned in college, I remain a big fan of TV shows. Most people, as far as I can tell, watch shows and movies with the intention of seeing themselves in the characters. In middle school, like most girls my age, I watched “Gossip Girl” and “Gilmore Girls,” wanting to grow up to wear outfits like Serena van der Woodsen and attend Yale like Rory Gilmore. And as is the case for most people, I gained more perspective as I grew older, ridiculing shows like “Ginny and Georgia” and “Outer Banks” for their cringeworthy portrayals of high school life and 30-year-old actors playing teenagers.
But inevitably, I am impacted by the media I consume. Not only television, but movies, literature, music and the people around us are innately influential to how we view the world. We are susceptible to how media is received not only by ourselves, but by those around us.
Few of my close friends watch “Tell Me Lies,” so after finishing the finale, I turned to social media to gauge fan reactions. The show takes place at Baird College, a small East Coast liberal arts college not unlike Colorado College. In the last episode of season three, the main character Lucy is expelled after lying about being sexually assaulted by a fellow student, an event referred to by fellow characters as “destroy[ing] her life.”
Fans agreed. Across forums for show discussion, predominantly TikTok and Reddit, “Tell Me Lies” viewers coalesced in their anger toward Lucy, arguing that the other characters did little to protect her and, in fact, contributed to her expulsion. The false accusation storyline was perhaps more nuanced than most; Lucy lied to protect her friend, Pippa, who actually was assaulted by the alleged rapist, so that she wouldn’t have to come forward after choosing not to report him.
Fan reactions, however, were anything but nuanced. Watching recaps and reading through threads, I was taken aback at the unity with which viewers expressed frustration at Pippa for letting her friend take the fall on her behalf and indignation at Lucy’s misfortune.
These responses reverted to the exhaustive trend of victim-blaming in situations of sexual assault. But it also raised questions about the arguably more complex issue of reporting sexual assault.
It feels remiss to solely fault Lucy for her expulsion. Yet it is far more detrimental to blame the actual victim of sexual assault for the actions of her friend. And stepping back, if looking to assign blame, it may all come back to the actual rapist in this storyline.
These complexities cannot be wholly understood by fans, especially when the material presented does so poorly. “Tell Me Lies” does not, in a way that meaningfully translates to viewers, explore the all-too-common reasons why Pippa chooses not to report sexual assault. It does not explicitly demonstrate the secondhand trauma that Lucy faces in the aftermath of the assault.
It is especially incapable of doing so within the context of a storyline that, on its face, is about a false accusation of rape. As author of “Boys & Sex” and “Girls & Sex” Peggy Orenstein wrote to me regarding the show, “That in itself is a way for the show to appear transgressive or contrarian while supporting the status quo: that idea that women lie routinely about rape so we better be on the lookout for that, that that is the ‘real’ problem.”
According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, the prevalence of false allegations is between two and 10 percent. While Lucy’s expulsion may have been upsetting to fans, it should be far more jarring to face the real-life facts that 20 to 25 percent of college women are sexually assaulted during university, and over 90% of these cases go unreported. In the United States, universities suspend just one out of every 12,400 students enrolled each year for sexual misconduct.
The issue of false allegations, contextualized with the pressing issues regarding campus sexual assault, is simply not deserving of the attention “Tell Me Lies” has given it. This disproportionate focus does not exist in a vacuum; high-profile sexual assault cases in the news are distinguished by an air of skepticism that omits most other crimes involving less polarizing issues like theft, violence or drugs.
Media, particularly fiction, shapes how we interpret the real world around us. In a sociopolitical climate characterized by polarization and distrust of facts, it is increasingly detrimental to present these issues as fact, untouched by statistical reality and nuance.
I first watched the ultimate comfort show “Gilmore Girls” in middle school. I also grew up in a strongly Democratic household, with parents who are firm supporters of Planned Parenthood. But as I rewatched the show recently, I was struck by the complete aversion to any mention of abortion. Among three separate unintended pregnancies across seasons, the characters gradually and reluctantly grew less wary of the idea of having children, despite not having planned to do so.
I watched “Euphoria” in my mid-teenage years, and while I could generally gauge the unrealistic nature of each storyline, I was also impacted, like most other young women watching, by the violent (and downplayed) erotic asphyxiation scene in the first episode and the ongoing portrayal of young adult sexual violence throughout the show.
It is this media we consume at early stages — college years included — that impacts us far more deeply than we may realize or intend.
Victim blaming does not take the same form it used to. As Orenstein described, “When I wrote ‘Girls & Sex,’ people — including girls themselves — were still debating whether it was a girl’s own fault if she was assaulted while she was drunk. I can’t believe that was a discussion. Maybe sometimes people still say that, I’m sure they do, but it is not the default position anymore.”
Few “Tell Me Lies” viewers are explicitly stating that it was the survivor’s fault that she was assaulted. But victim blaming took a different form in fan reactions, assigning the character blame for her friend’s expulsion and for not coming forward to report.
These sentiments bleed into our own reality, when the question may not be whether she was “asking for it” but rather comments of “He’s such a nice guy, though,” and “He was drunk when he did it.” Victim blaming and the perpetuation of rape culture have shifted to an absence of blame on the perpetrator entirely; they remain in their fraternity or sports team, in good standing socially and excelling academically or professionally.
The way issues are portrayed in media like “Tell Me Lies,” “Gilmore Girls,” “Euphoria” and virtually every other series targeted towards younger generations is exceptionally impactful on real life. It is part of what makes victims of sexual assault increasingly wary of reporting, what makes abortion feel like a shameful choice in an unwanted pregnancy, what stops women facing detrimental violence during sex from feeling empowered to say no.
However educated our perspectives may be, we are internalizing both the media we consume and how those around us respond to it. Recognizing the flaws in the topics at hand and the ulterior motives for their inclusion altogether is imperative to escaping the attitudes of acceptance that media continues to reinforce.