It’s just come to my attention that there’s an Australian ‘satire’ 🤢 about a private girls school. The lead character is a girl played by a middle aged man. WTAF?? How is this ok?
‘… her character is written and acted by a thirty-nine year old man, projecting his own (outdated and dubious) idea of what teenage private school girls are like onto his performance. But whatever the reason for Ja’mie’s portrayal, there is no doubt that she is meant to be someone we cannot feel sympathy for and should not feel sympathy for. Lilley justifies us in laughing at Ja’mie, justifies us hating her. And by default, he opens the doors for us to hate on all teenage girls: the shallow, self-obsessed other to our purported multicultural and progressive society.
I hesitate to call Ja’mie: Private School Girl a satire, because its primary effect is to completely dehumanise and ridicule a single teenage girl to the point of hatred, rather than saying something about the mechanisms and ideologies that make her so revolting. At its best the series is puzzling and somewhat distasteful; at its worst, I think it does damage to the image of the teenage girl that real-life teenagers have to contend with. In a society that already has some very derisive views on what teenage girls are, I think we can do without Lilley’s attempts at satire, and some more novels like Beauty Queensinstead.’