By Lily Indie
for History of Television
During the 2016 presidential debates, Donald Trump accidentally gave modern feminists one of the most iconic monikers of the decade: the “nasty woman.” Originally intended to be a quick jab at Clinton, her supporters almost immediately repurposed it as a term of empowerment and solidarity, with tags like #NastyWoman and #IAmANastyWoman leaping to the top of Twitter’s trending page. Megan Garber of The Atlantic uses this cultural moment to point out that this was far from the first time “nasty” has been used within misogynist or feminist rhetoric; its uses can be traced from William Shakespeare to Janet Jackson. A nasty woman is loud and unruly. A nasty woman refuses to be cast into the roles laid out by men. A nasty woman is a sexual being. A nasty woman is a powerful being. A nasty woman is in control of her own being.
But there’s one interpretation that hasn’t been glamorized so much by the poets and pop stars of the world: the nasty woman is just plain gross. She poops. She farts. She bleeds once a month. And while these acts of feminine nastiness seem far less interesting or important to represent in media, their implications cannot be ignored. For women, to be revolting is to be revolutionary. No television program has tapped into this idea more adeptly than Comedy Central’s Broad City. MTV’s Dani Blum summed up its strategy best: “The grossness is more than a ploy for a quick laugh. Bodily fluids are the shows propulsive mucus.” Creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer take the comedic concept of the female grotesque and milk it for all it’s worth, painting a detailed portrait of the new and nasty American dream, and how it reflects on women in terms of stratum, stability, and solidarity.
Women’s bodies—and human bodies in general—have always been doing gross things; however, there had to be a cultural shift where we started viewing these universal human acts as something to be repulsed by. Jane Arthurs documents this shift in her essay for Women’s Bodies: Discipline and Transgression. During the medieval era, bodily functions would often be carried out publicly and shamelessly, but moving forward, these acts grew increasingly private. These changes aligned directly with solidifying class barriers. Members of the civilized upper-class had the sensibility and luxury to tend to themselves in private; meanwhile, “unrestrained indulgence in the pleasures of the body became associated with a subordinated culture of the people” (Arthurs 139). The indiscretion of one’s bodily acts became a shameful marker of one’s low ranking on the social stratum.
If anything screams “unrestrained indulgence,” it’s Broad City, but the show doesn’t carry a lick of the shame history suggests it should; the girls are proudly low-class in every sense of the word. Abbi and Ilana behave as their uninhibited selves, whether they’re at work, on the train, or attending high-brow events. When they do carry out acts in private, they intentionally find ways to bring them into a more public sphere, like when Ilana video calls Abbi during sex, or sings her iconic “I shit” song in the restroom at work so all her coworkers know exactly what’s going on. The fact that this is a televised program brings even more power to these efforts to publicize privacy, best illustrated by the cold open of its season three premiere: a two-minute montage of everything Abbi and Ilana do in their respective bathrooms, whether it’s shaving, smoking, having sex, changing tampons, or straightening their pubes. Whether it’s through the canon of the show or the medium of television, the dignity of the private sphere is eradicated, as is any pretense that these girls are anything less than loud, proud, carefree, working class New Yorkers.
Part of the reason it seems so taboo to celebrate life in this way is how antithetical it is to the classic American dream, especially as it has been represented in sit-coms. For past generations, the American dream, when stripped down to its most basic elements, has meant a stable home, career, and family. If the characters don’t have these things, they’re usually at least trying to attain them. What makes Broad City different is that the girls are usually actively trying to avoid these institutions, and often, this is done through methods of the grotesque.
Ilana, queen of non-commitment, is the clearest example of this, especially with regard to relationships. In Broad City’s final season, she sits down at a fancy dinner with Lincoln, her long time “sex friend,” to discuss the future of their relationship. Lincoln practically offers her the American dream on a silver platter: a suburban home in Maryland with a dentist’s income and a couple of kids. She declines. For a moment, they’re sad. Then, the tension drops, and they begin literally stuffing their faces with twelve courses of pasta, which they proceed to fart for the duration of the cab ride home. Ilana doesn’t take more than three seconds to mourn the loss of her longest monogamous relationship; instead, she celebrates her choice to remain a “polyamorous queen.”
Abbi demonstrates a similar concept in the work sphere. Over the course of five seasons, intentionally or not, Abbi’s nasty-womanness loses her each and every job she holds, whether it’s her outspoken disdain for Trey at Soulstice, her raucous impersonation of Ilana at the grocery co-op, or accidentally killing her boss’s cat while high on shrooms. Most notable is her season five firing from Anthropologie. She decides to go vigilante, bringing her artistic ambitions to her day job and crafting a new window display for the storefront... out of hoarder trash and a dead rat. She admits Anthropologie probably had just cause. But this messy mishap is also a catalyzing point in her path as an artist: she commits to creating time and space in her life to enhance her craft.
Both instances illustrate what the American dream has become for young women today: a stable instability. Or, more glamorously phrased by Anne Helen Petersen’s Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, “‘fucking around’—wasting time, in this case, better spent navigating toward marriage and children and domesticity” (Petersen 66). It means being just well enough off to have the luxury to give up secure careers and relationships in the name of figuring yourself out, allowing yourself to stop taking everything so seriously for a moment or two.
Nastiness allows us to alter the way women are perceived by the world, but it also pushes women to alter how they see each other. Kathleen Rowe describes Medusan film theory in her infamous book, The Unruly Woman. We take a female character, a laughing “Medusa,” and perpetuate the idea that she’s a disgusting creature—dripping fangs, snakes for hair — that should never be looked at straight on. This caution applies not only to the men who try to vanquish her, but to women as well, setting a dangerous precedent: “As long as women do not look at each other straight on, they can only see distorted reflections of themselves” (Rowe 10)
Broad City challenges women to look at one another straight on, in all our nasty glory. It’s the ultimate act of female bonding. In the show, it’s even the capstone of Abbi and Ilana’s friendship: at the very end of the final season, the girls are in a fight so fierce it looks like the end. Then, Abbi does the one thing Ilana has ever asked of her: she shows her poop. Their relationship is instantly healed, maybe even stronger than before. The gravity placed on this moment forces us to realize this moment—like Broad City’s humor in general—is so much more than a poop joke: “it's a form of radical honesty and transparency: they simply talk about all the things that happen to women and few dare to say aloud, let alone on television” (Petersen 52).
This radical honesty, this ability to look at one another face on, is a powerful coalescing bond between women. It tells us that we are not alone, that we are valid and supported. In this light, we all become broads—by Glazer’s definition, “a full person,” with “unruliness as the completion of personhood, not a perversion of it” (Petersen 55). Nastiness is just one means by which female characters can be just as fully realized as male ones.
The nasty woman cannot exist without literal nastiness. Through its reflection of social stratum, stability, and female solidarity, we see that the American dream is to be gross, because the American dream is to be everything a man can be. And while the Clinton campaign has come to an end, the nasty woman lives on. #IAmANastyWoman because I announce my farts, I pick acne, I don’t shave. #IAmANastyWoman because sometimes I forget to pause Broad City on my phone when I go to the bathroom (something I like to believe Ilana Glazer would be personally proud of me for). And we are all #NastyWomen because we are women, and for that, we refuse to apologize.
Works Cited
Arthurs, Jane. “Revolting Women: The Body in Comic Performance.” Women’s Bodies: Discipline and Transgression, Ed. Jane Arthurs and Jean Grimshaw. London: Cassel, 1999.
Blum, Dani. “Broad City Proved Women Could Be Just As Disgusting As Men (Finally).” MTV News, Viacom International, Inc., 24 Jan. 2019, www.mtv.com/news/3110400/broad-city-radical-grossness/.
Karlyn, Kathleen Rowe. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. University of Texas Press, 2005.
Garber, Megan. “Sorry, Donald: 'Nasty' Has Long Been a Feminist Rallying Cry.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 25 Oct. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/10/nasty-a-feminist-history/504815/.
Petersen, Anne Helen. Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: the Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman. Plume, 2018.