The “babygirlification” or “teenage-girlification” of characters such as Kendall and Roman Roy, Tom Wambsgans, Tony Soprano, Christopher Moltisanti, Don Draper, Pete Campbell, and Jesse Pinkman, while funny, is also a signifier of the genre’s woman problem. I understand that much of this trend is rooted in irony and I too as a 21 year old woman often say “He’s just like me” when referring to the aforementioned characters. But language trends are often revealing and given the lack of leading women in this genre, I think it reveals a lot. I find it ironic that people are more than ready to use “female language” for these characters when highlighting how sympathetic they are, but don’t lend that same sympathy toward their actual female counterparts. There’s clearly an understanding that being those things— a teenage girl, a babygirl, a girl in general— is hard and can cause a lot of pain, but somehow this understanding doesn’t translate onto the women on screen who actually go through this.
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A woman is supposed to be impossibly good. She is meant to be your doting daughter, your loving wife, and your nurturing mother. When she falls out of line from any one of these things, she’s a bitch. A man could kill someone (this could be referring to a plethora of our beloved prestige TV male protagonists) and he’d still receive sympathy from viewers. For some reason (the reason is quite obvious) when women are morally grey, subtlety is completely lost.
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