Why Does Baby Reindeer's Martha have to be Fat?
A few—possibly controversial—reactions to the hit Netflix series
Content warning: This post discusses sexual assault, stalking, harassment, abuse, and also contains all the spoilers.
Sigh. I started watching Baby Reindeer on Netflix with a great deal of trepidation. Given the central story—a fat woman stalks, harasses, and abuses the protagonist—and the character it centers—the protagonist is a thin white cis man played by series creator, Richard Gadd—a lot could go wrong. A lot does go wrong. But it’s even more morally complicated than I had anticipated.
I want to begin with what Baby Reindeer—named for the moniker given to the protagonist, Donny Dunn, by his stalker, Martha Scott—gets right. The middle episode (episode 4) is a veritable masterpiece, exposing the insidious and hideous nature of grooming. A younger Donny, his sights set on fame and fortune in the comedy world, is befriended and validated by a high-profile comedy producer, Darrien. Darrien begins inviting Donny around to his London flat to do an alarming array of extremely strong drugs. Donny is beguiled by Darrien’s promises and flattery; he is deeply uncomfortable with his unwanted touching and, quickly, outright sexual abuse—including while Donny is unconscious. Donny awakens multiple times to find Darrien touching him intimately or with Darrien’s saliva on his genitals. But he keeps going around there. Finally, in a harrowing scene, Darrien rapes Donny while he is having a bad acid trip. Donny stays for several days, continuing to work for Darrien for free—and feed his cat, a poignant, pitiful detail.
This episode felt so important to me in its quiet, unvarnished revelations about the nature of male-on-male sexual abuse—including the experience of adult male victims, who are sometimes silent or left out of these conversations entirely. This may have as much to do with their being reluctant to talk about humiliating experiences as their being in the statistical minority of victims of sexual abuse. Richard Gadd, who based Baby Reindeer on his real-life experiences (more on that later), is to be honored and celebrated for testifying artistically to the reality of his grooming and sexual assault by a more powerful older man who manipulated and exploited him.
The morally difficult part of the series, for me, is at least threefold. This middle episode is sandwiched by three episodes on either side depicting Dunn’s victimization by Martha. And Martha is a fat woman, which does double duty in the series. First, it helps explain why Dunn feels sorry for her, giving her a cup of tea and later diet cokes on the house of the London pub where he works, even going some way toward befriending her. (Agreeing to go out on a picnic for her birthday, and then—realizing the scenario is too romantic—taking her out for coffee instead, and saying he is “serious” about their friendship.) Second, Martha’s fatness codes for the fact—without it even needing to be said—that Dunn would never see her as a viable romantic partner. (All of his partners in the series, romantic and sexual, long-term and short-term, are thin.) Dunn screams at her at one point that he would never want her; in fact, he does, at least in one episode, masturbating repeatedly to a photo of her in her underwear that she sent to him, and fantasizing about running to her house to have sex with her. But it is very clear throughout that he would never be in a romantic relationship with this awkward, fat, older woman, whom he initially feels empathy for, and is loath to draw boundaries with. This becomes all the harder for him to do after Martha sexually assaults him, groping his genitals, triggering traumatic memories of being raped by Darrien.
Why did Martha have to be fat? In some ways this is just lazy story-telling, a nudge-nudge wink-wink to an audience that can be relied upon to channel fatphobic tropes of fat women as unfuckable, or at least, unloveable. But this sly elbowing of the audience into viewing Martha through a fatphobic lens does more than this too: it centers Dunn’s empathy for her, rather than inviting anything approaching empathy on our part for her character. And she is very hard to empathize with for other reasons too: she is depicted as having a history of criminal stalking behavior, and as being mentally unwell in a way that maximizes stigma. She is crude, violent, and clueless; and of course, she is also a sexual assailant.
So I think it’s fair to say that Gadd has contributed in Baby Reindeer to perpetuating noxious stereotypes about fat women: that we are sexually aggressive, to the point of being violent, perhaps having been unhinged from reality and morality by a world that denies our sexual and social worth. These notions are belied by the facts. There is no evidence whatsoever that fat women are more likely to commit sexual assault; there is some evidence that fat women are more likely to be sexually assaulted, and the perpetrators excused and sympathized with for so doing.
A second worry: superficially, the idea of a female stalker and a male victim is a gender-role-reversing script that might make for a good story. It’s unusual; it’s striking. Interestingly though, it’s been done, most recently by best-selling Australian author Liane Moriarty, in her hit novel The Hypnotist’s Love Story, and the subsequent TV show. Then there are classics like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Fatal Attraction and, for a female-on-female variant, Single White Female. A male victim was also the protagonist in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. It is hard not to worry that such narratives, given a relative dearth of gender-role-congruent ones, belie the reality that the vast majority of victims of stalking are female; the vast majority of perpetrators, male. (Much as the proliferation of female murderers on television and film belies the reality that they are much rarer than male ones.)
Of course, an individual artist is not responsible for representing a statistical truth accurately. They’re just telling one story. It’s really at a cultural level that the problem arises: when we collectively fixate on the exception, not the rule, we create misimpressions and end up effecting something like himpathy partly by omission (as well as himpathy for the empath). That is: we villainize women and minimize or ignore male perpetrators with respect to certain kinds of wrongdoing. We also, characteristically, fail to center female victims. I can’t help but feel some kind of way about the fact that Baby Reindeer is a number 1 viral hit, while Michaela Coel’s breathtaking I May Destroy You was overlooked by many people, and missed out on award nominations (to the outrage even of some writers on other series). Do we collectively want to hear the true story of a Black woman who was drugged and raped, to bear witness to her pain? Seemingly much less so; I find that fact heartbreaking. And, unfortunately, predictable.
But I think this is even more complicated in the case of Baby Reindeer, which brings me to my third, most tentative worry about the series. Although Gadd doesn’t claim that his version of events in the series is perfectly accurate—he acknowledges he took some artistic license with the narrative arc for dramatic effect—he says it is “100% emotionally true” and “a very true story.” That may be right. And yet… when you add up the things he said and did to Martha throughout the series, there’s kind of a lot there. From her perspective: he followed her home from coffee and peeped in the windows of her flat; he told her he would “hang her curtains” (a crude sexual euphemism); he propositioned her for anal sex (via email); he asked her to send him a sexually violent email about what she wanted him to do to her. When the police present him with this evidence—apparently she recorded all of their interactions—there is a plausible explanation for it all that the viewer has been privy to, alleviating the suspicion that we might otherwise have that Donny was sexually aggressive toward Martha too. (He just wanted to see where and how she lived; the sexual comment was just pub banter; a coworker took his phone and sent the email against his wishes—which he never tells her; he was trying to trap her into sending him an email as evidence of her ongoing stalking.) True, Gadd is emotionally honest—to the point of being self-flagellating—about encouraging Martha at certain moments, and feeding off her attention, due in part to his history of trauma. But the series is clear in depicting her as the sole sexual aggressor, and him as her victim.
Recently, a woman claiming to be the real-life Martha (whom I won’t name) came forward, claiming there is more to the story: that Gadd victimized her, that the show is part of this ongoing victimization, and that he did far too little to protect her identity (by making both women disgraced Scottish lawyers with a proclivity for certain easily searchable endearments, for example). She expressed an intention to sue for defamation, and said in an interview: “Richard Gadd has got “main character syndrome.” He always thinks he’s at the center of things. I’m not writing shows about him or promoting them in the media, am I? If he wanted me to be properly anonymous, he could have done so. Gadd should leave me alone.” This makes for a very tricky situation, ethically and epistemologically speaking. The philosopher Miranda Fricker has famously theorized the notion of “testimonial injustice,” where (roughly) we unjustly fail to believe people because of facets of their social identities or positions that make them appear less credible than they are (or ought to be taken to be, more precisely). For example, we fail to believe the victim of sexual harassment who speaks out because she is a woman, whom we therefore regard as untrustworthy and hysterical; or, alternatively, we fail to believe the victim of a sexual assault who speaks out because he is a man, whom we unjustly regard as invulnerable to such crimes. As this brings out, the slogan “believe women” and similar generic claims may be helpful initial guidelines but are often too simple in reality—they don’t take into account intersecting forms of privilege, power, and positional complexities. My own rule of thumb is closer to this: when it comes to an X said/Y said scenario, where one has a choice between believing one person, X, who directly contradicts another, Y, about what transpired between them, believe the person who has the most to lose and the least to gain by testifying as they do. Oftentimes, in practice, this means believing women over the privileged men they accuse of wronging them.
Here, however, no such heuristic will help; the alternative of a certain amount of agnosticism may be the only fair option, at least for now, about the extent to which the series is morally accurate. And we should remember that it’s entirely possible that they’re both telling a partial truth: in other words, that when it comes to Gadd and the real-life Martha, the victimization may have to some extent gone both ways. (This would be very different from either blaming him for or dismissing his claim to having being victimized by her, as the police seem to have done.) I don’t expect that a resolution to this ethical and epistemological quagmire is on the cards. And maybe it will be resolved entirely in Gadd’s favor, given obvious potential worries about the real-life Martha’s credibility. I will just say that we should be careful of order effects dictating our reaction to the narrative, and automatically believing Gadd’s account over that of a woman who was more powerful than him in some respects (in being twenty-five years older than him, for example), but remains much less so in others (in being female, mentally ill, and poor, both in the series and according to reporting). I hope we can find a way to listen to her story, told responsibly, somehow. I am not holding my breath for this. And I fear that, if not done with the utmost sensitivity, it could do serious further harm to two clearly vulnerable people.
There is so much more to say about Baby Reindeer than I can do justice to here: validation as a kink that often presents differently in men and women and intersects in interesting ways with sexuality; the mess constituted by norms of hetero masculine friendship; the way inapt moral self-criticism, like a victim’s self-blaming, can be used to pre-empt valid critique; the ethics of stigmatizing depictions of mental illness; and, perhaps most of all, the complexities of the romantic relationship between Dunn and the magnificent Teri, a trans woman. (I am so here, as several of my friends have remarked, for the Teri spin-off.) But I have to add just one more, to me, rather bitter fact: if the woman who came forward recently is the real-life Martha, she is not very fat, and was on her account even less so when these events transpired. I loved the actor, Jessica Gunning, who played Martha, fiercely. But this is not the kind of fat representation that I, along with other fat women, have long been seeking.
A special ask: if you enjoyed this post, please consider buying or borrowing and reviewing my recent book Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia. Goodreads and Amazon reviews (regardless of where you bought it from) both help greatly to get the good word out there. Thanks, friends.
I haven't watched Baby Reindeer yet, and might not. I'm wary of these "gender-reversed" stalking stories for many of the reasons you mentioned. I think the proliferation of that narrative plays really neatly into stereotypes of women as crazy, obsessive, or incapable of emotional control. Stories of male violence, harassment, stalking, etc. have the distinct disadvantage, in the eyes of patriarchy, of exposing men as emotional creatures too. If we never tell that much more realistic story of an angry man stalking a woman, then we never have to confront the idea that our perceptions of men as logical, rational, unemotional might be wrong. Anger is an emotion too. It's much easier and more comforting, then, to tell a story that slots women (and especially fat or otherwise marginalized women) into their pre-determined role as uncontrollable threat.
Thank you for this careful articulation of some major issues I also had with this work. The show is tremendous and yet the impact of watching its use of a fat woman's body as shorthand for pitiful and disgusting triggered one of my most intense mental health relapses in a good while. It's validating to read that my concerns aren't off base.