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Bridgerton wants to explore consent while it ignores its own glaring consent issue.

Bridgerton, Shonda Rimes’s first collaboration with Netflix, may be a sumptuous, scandal-laced frolic through Regency London. But like many Shondaland series, it has plenty of dark and disturbing moments, and the show’s first season leaves us with more questions than answers. Chief among them: Does the creative team realize how badly they handled the rape scene?

Romance novelist Julia Quinn wrote the novel series on which Bridgerton is based, starting with The Duke and I in 2000. The first season, written by Shondaland veteran Chris Van Dusen (Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy), follows The Duke and I fairly closely — including one scene that’s central to the plot but that has been called out repeatedly by romance readers over the years as a rape.

In the two decades since the book’s release, much of society has become more aware of what is and isn’t consensual sex, and the show deliberately made changes to the scene to make it less explicitly nonconsensual. That indicates to me that Van Dusen and his fellow creatives knew the problems with the scene they were adapting. But the version of this scene that ended up in the show is still nonconsensual, despite the tweaks. And although it’s framed as a serious violation of trust between consenting parties, it passes without any explicit acknowledgment on the show’s part that what just occurred was a deeply disturbing violation of consent.

Bridgerton is thematically concerned with the dynamics of informed consent, which makes it even stranger that this scene was left unaddressed; indeed, if there are any lasting repercussions for the victim of the assault or their dynamic with their rapist, we don’t actually see them.

Because it happens pretty quickly and the narrative moves on immediately from the specifics of the sexual encounter itself, I’m not sure everyone will judge this scene in the same way I do. But that’s why we should discuss it. 

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Our hero has a secret that sets the stage for everything

Bridgerton is a historical romance set during London’s Regency era, a period of whirling 19th-century ballrooms and high-society intrigues. Our story revolves around gorgeous debutante Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) and the fake courtship she arranges during her debut on London’s “marriage mart,” the upper-class ritual of social functions that help eligible ladies and gentlemen make a match.

Despite coming from a powerful family and making a splash at her debut, Daphne is having trouble attracting suitors — so she bets (correctly) that faking a courtship with a very eligible duke will reignite the attention of other gentlemen. Her choice of bachelor: Simon, the hunky Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page), a Black man whose family was recently elevated to the peerage. Simon is trying to avoid matrimonial plots because he’s sworn off marriage, due to his solemn vow never to father children in order to let his entire family line, title and all, die with him. It’s a promise he made in order to spite his abusive late father, who emotionally abused Simon all his life and cared more about his dukedom than anything else.

The relationship ruse is mutually beneficial for Daphne and Simon, as it allows him to avoid seriously participating in the marriage mart. But of course, in between bickering and pretending to be in love, the two fake lovebirds soon develop a very real romance. Through an unlucky turn of events involving epic misunderstandings, secret love trysts, and a duel — y’know, the usual — the storyline scoots Daphne and Simon into a hastily arranged marriage. This leads to lots and lots of sex scenes because they’re a hot couple who are hot for each other. But their newfound love also creates a whole new set of problems arising from Simon’s vow never to sire a family — a vow Daphne knows nothing about.

This subplot contributes to Bridgerton’s most interesting thematic idea, if one it ultimately squanders: the relationship between scandal, secrets, and informed consent. The plot revolves around Simon’s choice not to tell Daphne that he has vowed not to have children. Instead, he only tells her that he “can’t” have children, a clear difference from “won’t.” This deception places her in a doubly vulnerable position: Daphne’s in the dark about sex generally, as a woman who’s had no sexual education, and since she’s getting most of her tutelage from him directly, she has no way of knowing that he’s hiding things from her about his sexual health and practices.

Simon’s duplicity is, to some extent, unwitting — he doesn’t intend to trap Daphne into marriage, but when events conspire to make marriage a necessity, he goes along with it, spinning a story that implies his inability to father children rather than tell her the truth. The narrative treats the difference between “can’t” and “won’t” as a crucial distinction, one that fills Daphne with horror and bitterness when she realizes it. It’s an interesting turn because Bridgerton frames Simon’s deceptive phrasing as deliberate, along with his choice to continue lying to her by omission. This deception placed Daphne in the position of being unable to give informed consent, either to sex or to their entire relationship.

The problem is that she only figures this out by raping him.

Let me back up. (Warning: This is about to get pretty graphic and gross.)

The rape scene is brief and disturbing, but it’s not treated as a rape

Daphne knows nothing about sex when she gets married. Her mother, too embarrassed to give her the specifics, sends her off to her marriage bed completely unprepared. Meanwhile, instead of telling his new wife what’s up, Simon enjoys ravenous sex with Daphne but adopts the ol’ tried-and-true contraceptive method of pulling out every time. Eventually, Daphne figures out that there’s some connection between Simon never completing the act and his insistence that he can’t have children. Determined to figure out whether he’s capable of it, she takes control during sex and positions herself on top of him so he can’t pull out.

When he realizes his predicament right before orgasm, Simon looks alarmed and tries to stop — he cries out twice for Daphne to wait — but it’s too late. Once she’s achieved her goal, she stops, and he processes what just happened in shock.

The strangest thing about this moment is that I’m not sure the show’s writers consider this scene to be a rape scene. Daphne is immediately furious with Simon for lying to her, and the show then focuses on her betrayal and rage; she even has a semantic speech about the difference between “won’t” and “can’t.” It’s clearly intended to spell out the intricacies of informed consent, but none of Simon’s duplicity justifies the way Daphne pulls his secret — and, to be clear, his semen — out of him. One bad moment of uninformed consent does not justify a moment of nonconsensual sex. And depriving Simon of his consent to both sex and fatherhood, even at the moment of climax, is still rape.

If the show had really explored the idea that Simon’s lie led to another similar violation of consent, that could have resulted in some really interesting narrative choices involving the two of them dealing with the fallout of both their betrayals and learning to communicate more clearly and carefully and sensitively.

But the show doesn’t dwell on Daphne’s choices, or on any long-term aftermath from that moment. The incident doesn’t seem to impact Simon’s ability to trust Daphne in bed. Instead, the show turns toward Daphne’s distrust of him for lying to her, dwelling on Simon’s need to win her forgiveness and give up his vow for the sake of their happiness.

I should note here that an even more nonconsensual version of this scene also occurs in the novel. Quinn clearly wrote the scenario as a violation: “Daphne had aroused him in his sleep, taken advantage of him while he was still slightly intoxicated, and held him to her while he poured his seed into her.”

Since the book was written, countless romance writers and readers have inserted productive commentaries on the role of rape (and tropes of dubious consent like “forced seduction”) in romance fiction. But according to Quinn herself in a reported recent exchange with romance vlogger BooksandKrys, the consent issues in that scene flew under the radar at the time The Duke and I was published. “Yes, it was shocking, but no one seemed to feel that Daphne had done anything morally wrong,” she told BooksandKrys. “It was only as years passed and we gained new understanding of ‘consent’ that people started to question her actions.”

Quinn offered some perspective on the dynamics of rape as early as 2003; speaking then to Time, she commented, “I can’t imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him ... I can’t think of anything in my books that any feminist would find objectionable. ... And I consider myself a feminist.”

Yet by 2010, the scene was being discussed among readers as an example of sexual assault and lack of consent. By 2015, readers were dissecting the scene to point out its disturbing dynamics.

That the show’s creatives included this scene while making it less broadly, but still explicitly, nonconsensual, suggests they knew it needed fixing. But it seems like they failed to see how badly they ultimately handled it. Without signaling more effectively that Daphne’s choice was just as violating for Simon as his secrecy was for Daphne, Bridgerton undermines its entire experiment in exploring the boundaries of consent.

Through this moment, the show also undermines its central relationship, causing us to question the whole foundation of Daphne and Simon’s affection for each other. Because Bridgerton doesn’t make an effort to depict Daphne’s rape of Simon as a huge issue that must be addressed for them to heal their marriage, we don’t really have much way of understanding whether their mutual trust is really fully repaired in the end. And we’re given no assurance that she won’t violate his trust the next time she decides he might be lying to her.

It’s also frankly a giant gaslight; even as I write this, I’m wondering if maybe I’m wrong and that the scene wasn’t rape — or if, perhaps, maybe this is the one time in history where somebody gets raped and it’s just not that big a deal, so it’s just kinda okay that the show glosses over it and moves on and Simon seems totally fine afterward.

Obviously, these are horrible takeaways for a show to leave us with. The dynamics of consent are complex and often frustrating and confusing, but one thing is almost universally certain: Rape is a big deal, and it often hugely impacts and alters both the rape survivor and the rapist. For Bridgerton to ineffectively convey that Daphne raped Simon and then treat it like it was a minor side note to the much bigger issue of him lying to her makes it more difficult for audiences watching it to understand what consent looks like.

The fact that the rape victim here is both male and a person of color makes it even more egregious that the show is glossing over the incident. Men are often considered silent victims of sexual assault, and Black men in particular are often made scapegoats for sexual violence, which further erases the status of Black male victims of sexual assault. In this context, the show’s emphasis on Simon as the instigator of Daphne’s choice basically paints him as being responsible for his own rape. This aligns with the broader cultural gaslighting of Black men and the shifting of blame away from the white men and women who enact violence upon them.

Bridgerton has drawn its fair share of rave reviews as, among other things, “delightful trash.” As a huge, lifelong lover of the sorts of romance stories Bridgerton is adapting, what I hate most about this summation is that it implies that the ingredients of this story are a part of the inherent nature of the raunchy, racy historical romance. Not only is that a condescending attitude toward a genre that is frequently very literary and very serious, but it’s flatly wrong: Rape, especially unacknowledged rape, is by no means a feature of historical romance writing, nor was it going unaddressed and undebated back when Quinn wrote this story 20 years ago. Countless romance writers have done better than this. Bridgerton could and should have followed their example.

In the US, Jews have been eating American Chinese food on Christmas for over 100 years.

For over a century, American Jews have eaten American Chinese food on Christmas. The annual feast is a holiday tradition that is likely to go on as usual this year, even in the midst of COVID-19 — albeit in the form of delivery or takeout. This pastime has evolved to a near-holy tradition, parodied on Saturday Night Live, analyzed in academic papers, and reaffirmed by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.

Perhaps the foremost expert on the practice is Rabbi Joshua Eli Plaut, PhD, executive director of American Friends of Rabin Medical Center, rabbi of Metropolitan Synagogue in New York, and author of A Kosher Christmas, the premier (and only?) comprehensive study of what Jews do at Christmastime.

I spoke to Plaut about Chinese food on Christmas, and why he used to sit on Santa Claus’s lap. 

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Both Jews and Christmas have existed for a while. When did Jews first ask, “What should we do on Christmas?”
It has been a question for as long as Christmas has existed, because Jews have always felt like outsiders. But how they felt specifically was really a function of their status in society. In Eastern Europe, for instance, Jews were not very assimilated. Christmas was a night of possible pogroms and violence, with so many celebrants, often drunk, going from house to house. Jews did not go to the synagogue to study. They stayed at home for physical safety reasons. If they did anything, they might play cards or chess.

In Western Europe, after the French Revolution, Jews were more assimilated. There, they had more freedom to wonder, “Do I bring a Christmas tree into my home? Do I have a holiday meal? Do I give out gifts?” The early Zionist Theodor Herzl was a secular Jew, and he had a Christmas tree in his salon. After the Chief Rabbi of Vienna came to visit, he wrote something in his diary like, ”I hope the Rabbi doesn’t think less of me because of this. Then again, what do I care what he thinks?”

Okay, so tell me when eating Chinese food on Christmas first comes into the picture. Is that a Jewish-American tradition?
Yes. It begins at the end of the 19th century, on the Lower East Side, where Jewish and Chinese immigrants lived in close proximity. The very first mention of American Jews eating in a Chinese restaurant dates to 1899, when the American Hebrew journal criticized Jews for eating at non-kosher restaurants. By 1936, a publication called the East Side Chamber News reported at least 18 Chinese tea gardens and chop suey eateries in heavily-populated Jewish neighborhoods. All of these were within close walking distance of Ratner’s, which was then the most famous Jewish dairy restaurant in Manhattan.

Jews would go out for Chinese food on Sundays, when they felt left out of church lunch. It was a gradual transition from the traditional diet of Eastern Europe, to eating American Chinese food, to eating other pan-Asian cuisines, like Indian food. I like to say that, within a hundred years of arriving in New York, the average Jew was more familiar with sushi than gefilte fish.

In the last 35 years, Chinese restaurants on Christmas have really become this sort of temporary community where Jews in the United States can gather to be with friends and family. It’s a secular way to celebrate Christmas, but it’s also a time to shut out Christmas and announce your Jewish identity in a safe environment.

Was there any reason, beyond proximity, that Jews wound up eating Chinese food, as opposed to some other immigrant cuisine?
In terms of kosher law, a Chinese restaurant is a lot safer than an Italian restaurant. In Italian food, there is mixing of meat and dairy. A Chinese restaurant doesn’t mix meat and dairy, because Chinese cooking is virtually dairy-free.

In Chinese-American cooking, if there is any pork [which is not a kosher food], it is usually concealed inside something, like a wonton. A lot of Jews back then — and even now — kept strict kosher inside the home but were more flexible with foods they ate at restaurants. Sociologist Gaye Tuchman wrote about this practice. She described [the plausible deniability of non-kosher ingredients] as safe treyf. [Treyf is the Yiddish word for non-kosher.] A lot of Jews considered the pork in Chinese food to be safe treyf, because they couldn’t see it. That made it easier to eat.

In your research for this book, did you come across anything about Chinese food and Christmas written from a Chinese-American perspective?
I actually found a citation from 1935, in the New York Times, about a restaurant owner named Eng Shee Chuck who brought chow mein to the Jewish Children’s Home on Christmas Day. If you were to interview Chinese restaurant owners, they’d tell you that Christmas is their biggest day of the year, outside of probably the Chinese New Year. If you want a more thorough understanding, though, you should probably go talk to some restaurant owners in Chinatown.

Sometimes my family eats Chinese food on Christmas, but we always go to the movies. When did that become an established Jewish Christmas tradition?
When Jews began to settle on the Lower East Side of Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1920s, they were poor immigrants. They worked in sweatshops and lived in tenement housing. In their time off, they would go to the newly opened nickelodeons. For between one cent and five cents, they could see a very early form of a movie. By 1909, there were 42 nickelodeons adjacent to the Lower East Side and 10 uptown in Jewish Harlem. Christmas was just another day off, so these early movies attracted big crowds.

We know from the Yiddish press that Christmas became a popular day for the opening of new Yiddish theater productions. It was a day off from work, so what do you do? You can stay home, or you can go to the nickelodeons, or the Yiddish theater. Eventually, decades later, you could go have a meal in a Chinese restaurant.

What do you usually do on Christmas?
For many years I was researching this book. This year, I’ll be with my family in a small town, where there are no real restaurants open. We will probably play a board game or watch Netflix.

What did you do on Christmas growing up?
I never went to Chinese restaurants. We’d go skating in front of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, and then we’d have hot chocolate with marshmallows. I have great memories of Christmas. My mother would take me to sit on Santa Claus’s lap. When I was writing this book, I asked her, “Why did you take me — the son of a rabbi! — to sit on Santa Claus’s lap?” She said, “Everybody in America does it, so why shouldn’t we?” She knew I was secure in my Jewish identity.

It’s the holiday pick-me-up you might need right now.

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This Christmas has felt different.

Normally I find myself eagerly anticipating the end of the year — I look forward to the presents, the well wishes from friends and strangers alike, the time off from work. It’s a chance to look back over the year that was and prepare for the year to come. The world changes, but this time of year, these remaining holidays, we try to keep as similar as possible. We like these little islands of time that change a bit more slowly than the rest of our lives.

In 2020, however, it’s harder to appreciate that island of time when time has ceased to have meaning. Each day blends into the next, and as I write this (on December 23), it’s hard to believe that Christmas is just two days away, even though looking at my calendar will tell me that it is. I still haven’t put up my tree. I’ll get to it when I get to it, maybe on December 27 or something.

YouTube, as always, has stepped into this void I’ve felt. Some of my favorite channels for creating “ambience” — soundscapes meant to replicate particular real-world experiences, usually with slightly animated visuals to match — have gone all out this holiday season, creating Christmas atmospheres that are lovely, festive, and aching reminders of the world that used to exist.

Particularly popular are “Christmas coffee shop” settings. There are seemingly thousands of these (though it’s probably only “dozens”), and they tend to feature the same elements. There’s a coffee shop decorated for the holidays, steaming hot drinks on the tables. There’s soft Christmas music (and often a crackling fire). There’s snow peacefully falling outside. Here’s one specifically set at Starbucks.

A friend and I will sometimes gather on Zoom, pull up one of these videos on screen share, then talk about how we wish we were sitting in a very real coffee shop, talking face to face. For now, this is a substitute.

What’s slightly eerie about these videos is the fact that none of them have any people, not even a bored barista behind the counter. These are Christmas coffee shops devoid of humans (though one of my favorites occasionally has someone walk by on the sidewalk outside). Watching them, it really does feel like the world is waiting for us to come back to it, as though these cheery holiday spaces are still out there somewhere, if only we could find them.

But that emptiness also makes it easier for my friend and me to project ourselves into those spaces. If nobody else is here, maybe we can grab a cup of cider or hot cocoa and sit down together without worrying about everything worth worrying about right now. It might be an idealized space, and it says something about 2020 that it’s easier to imagine an idealized coffee shop as an empty one than ever before.

YouTube is lousy with Christmas and winter soundscapes, which I turn to every year, because California Christmas will always be just a touch disappointing to a Midwestern girl raised on drifting snow. I love this visit to a Christmas-y apartment in 1950s New York, this check-in at Santa’s office, and this peaceful mountain cabin in the middle of a blizzard. Or consider this look at a Christmas party seen from outside of the house where it’s being held (look at all those people inside; wouldn’t you like to join them?). Or this Victorian Christmas storefront? I could go on.

The point is, we might feel unmoored in time right now, but the promise of finding this one tiny island where everything is the same and nothing has changed is intensely appealing. I don’t know if there are so many Christmas coffee shops on YouTube this year because we’re all missing the trappings of the season or because those of us who spend time on YouTube’s ambience channels keep watching them, but those two hypotheses are kind of the same thing. Christmas is best shared with other people. We can’t do that right now, but until we can, we can at least pretend.

Ambience channels are all over YouTube. Some of my favorites are Calmed by Nature, Autumn Cozy, and Ma Ambience.

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