'Gilmore Girls' has a problem with Rory's sex life
- "Gilmore Girls" repeatedly connects Rory Gilmore's professional successes and failures to her sex life.
- When Rory isn't having sex, she's successful, but when she's sexually active, she fails.
- The connection sends the message that good girls don't have sex, making women's success and worth in society dependent on their intimate lives.
- The message also undercuts Lorelai as a positive role model within the show.
As the daughter of a single mother, I worshipped at the "Gilmore Girls" altar. I watched the show religiously when it aired from 2000 to 2007, and I still revive it constantly today, with the mother-daughter dramedy serving as the background noise for the mundane moments of my life.
"Gilmore Girls" mostly holds up with a modern lens, and the relationship between Rory and Lorelai Gilmore at the heart of the show is just as compelling in 2020 as it was in 2002.
But like any widely loved show, "Gilmore Girls" has its problems, and one of its biggest ones is its fixation on Rory's sex life.
Throughout the series, Rory's goodness is explicitly connected to her sexual activity
When Rory isn't interested in boys or isn't having sex, she's successful. When a physical relationship is her priority, everything else falls apart.
It's an easy jump to assume the dichotomy is designed to contrast Rory to her mother. Lorelai was a teen mom, so Rory's supposed to avoid sex to be successful; the key to living up to her potential is for Rory to remain chaste.
The device works plot-wise, but it also reduces all of Rory's achievements and failures to a direct result of her relationships with men, which sends a harmful message to female viewers about the limited ways sex can function in their lives.
For example in season three, episode 16, "The Big One," Paris Gellar, Rory's longtime frenemy, confides in Rory that she had sex with her boyfriend for the first time. Lorelai eavesdrops on the conversation, hearing Rory tell Paris that she has never had sex.
Lorelai is elated at hearing her daughter is a virgin, and literally says to herself "I've got the good kid" after hearing that her daughter hasn't had sex.
Despite Lorelai's reaction, Paris' decision to be intimate with her partner shouldn't be any indication of her morality. Yet, later in the episode, Paris finds out she didn't get into Harvard, her dream college. In a dramatic speech, Paris says, "I'm being punished. I had sex, so now I don't get to go to Harvard."
"She's never had sex, so she'll probably get to go to Harvard," she adds, referring to Rory.
The comment seems like a line added for shock value, but Rory finds out soon after the incident that she did, in fact, get into Harvard, as well as the other Ivy League institutions to which she applied.
Doubling down on the message that the acceptance has something to do with her sex life, Lorelai tells Rory "you must be the biggest virgin in the world" when she sees her daughter's acceptance letters.
The message is clear: good girls don't have sex, and they are rewarded for their chastity
That message is reinforced when Rory finally does have sex a year after the debacle with Paris.
Her first sexual partner is Dean Forester, a married man. The affair leads Dean to get divorced, and it causes a rift between Rory and her mother. The adulterous action and conflict with her mom makes sex an inherently bad thing in Rory's life, and it continues to be as she dates Dean, with the couple repeatedly struggling to find places to be intimate together.
Plus, Rory runs away to Europe with her grandmother for the summer as a result of the affair, which ends up putting her behind in her career as a journalist. She continues to struggle professionally until she ends her relationship with Dean, getting into a groove as a writer for the "Yale Daily News" when they start growing apart.
The plotline sends the message that sex is something Rory shouldn't be doing, and she's better off when she's practicing celibacy.
We see the same pattern in "Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life," the show's revival that came out in 2016, through Rory's relationship with her ex-boyfriend, Logan Huntzberger. Rory stays with Logan and has sex with him whenever she is in London, despite Logan being engaged to someone else and Rory having a long-term boyfriend.
At the same time, Rory's life path is unclear.
She isn't sure where her career is going, she doesn't have a permanent residence (a recurring joke throughout the mini-series is that she cannot find her underwear), and although she regretted having an affair with Dean when he was married, she's repeating the same mistake with Logan and seems to feel no guilt over it.
But everything in Rory's life suddenly falls into place when she ends her relationship with Logan.
As soon as she breaks off their arrangement, she miraculously starts writing a memoir about her life with her mother that she seems to know will be a success. After struggling with writer's block for months, Rory has a purpose.
In both examples, viewers are told that Rory is at her best when she isn't having sex with anyone, and that her relationships with men will detract from her career trajectory. The narrative forces women to choose between personal and professional happiness, and it reinforces sex as an act that harms women's purity rather than it being a fun or intimate moment between two consenting adults.
The message is even more problematic when you consider the issues Lorelai has in her relationship with her parents that stem from sex
It's common "Gilmore Girls" knowledge that Richard and Emily Gilmore saw their daughter Lorelai's teen pregnancy as a sullying of the good Gilmore name and a total destruction of her future.
In response, Lorelai repeatedly goes out of her way to demonstrate that she's successful despite — and because of — the young age at which she became a mother during the course of the show. She eventually owns a business after working her way up from being a maid, and she makes clear that she and Rory have such a strong bond because they're close in age.
Lorelai has the potential to function as a positive model for young female viewers in "Gilmore Girls." She could show them that the decisions they make about sex have nothing to do with personal and professional success, but the show's treatment of Rory completely undercuts the groundwork laid in Lorelai's character development.
She instead becomes the exception to the rule, while real "good" girls remain chaste for as long as possible.
Ultimately, the show's approach to Rory's sexuality is reductive of not only her success but also Lorelai's, painting women as either the bad teen mom or the good virgin. The show doesn't offer an in-between, short-changing a generation of fans who looked to Rory and Lorelai.
"Gilmore Girls" could have ascended past overused tropes about women's sexuality simply by choosing not to connect Rory's sex life to her success, but instead we're left wondering what could have been.