Societal impressions of people and their pain are shaped by interlocking oppressions, such as racism, sexism, misogyny, colourism, capitalism, ableism, and much more.
To open this reflection with lyrics from indie band Metric’s 2008 song “ Help I’m Alive ”, it’s “hard to be soft…tough to be tender”. The first two words of that song encompass the scariness or trepidation that can be part of vulnerability, openness, and, ultimately, softness: “I tremble…”
The film Hard Truths (2024), often referred to as a comedy-drama, has sparked commentaries concerning softness, hardness, depression, mental health, and the different ways that people who are in pain are (not) understood and cared for. Written and directed by Mike Leigh and starring the stellar Marianne Jean-Baptiste in the role of Pansy, Hard Truths focuses on the experiences of a “middle-aged” Black woman who is perceived as angry and lashing out at people. As Louis Bayman (2024) describes the film, part of its appeal is that “[t]he abandonment of any prohibition to bite one’s lip provides a pleasing image of what social life would be like with the mask of civility torn off”.
Hard Truths’ depiction of whose/what behaviour is deemed difficult in society reflects the realities of how (some) people’s emotions and expressions of alleged free speech are written off as nothing but disruptive outbursts. This point is a particularly pertinent one given the current local, national, and international socio-political contexts that many people are dealing with — from the genocidal actions of governments to state-sanctioned attempts to prohibit work related to “diversity, equality/equity, and inclusion” (also known as DEI). While the portrayal of Pansy in Hard Truths does not deal with the specifics of such contemporary societal issues, it still shines a light on related matters to do with the (lack of) freedom to feel and express yourself.
Written and directed by Mike Leigh and starring the stellar Marianne Jean-Baptiste in the role of Pansy, Hard Truths focuses on the experiences of a “middle-aged” Black woman who is perceived as angry and lashing out at people. As Louis Bayman (2024) describes the film, part of its appeal is that “[t]he abandonment of any prohibition to bite one’s lip provides a pleasing image of what social life would be like with the mask of civility torn off”.
As layla-roxanne hill and I discuss as part of our work, Look, Don’t Touch: Reflections on the Freedom to Feel (2025): “[e]motional ‘eruptions’ can clear space to process feelings and tend to tension. In a sense they can bring relief as well as chaos: times that may be both tender and tough. One person’s concept of abrupt eruption may be another’s step towards liberation…Depending on their use, “breakdown” and “meltdown” can be careless, cruel, and ableist terms.
Surrounding them is the stigma of being (seen as) mentally and/or physically unwell, plus pressures to ‘get well soon’ and ‘put yourself back together (again)’”. Discussing the ways that the film addresses issues and experiences that might be associated with the contentious idea of a “mental breakdown”, Bayman states: “Hard Truths is not a film that tries to emulate the intensity of a moment of breakdown. It presents instead a situation where nothing changes at all”. This is a film that deals with the mundanity of melancholy and the ordinariness of outbursts.
I was moved to tears when I first saw the film’s trailer moments before watching Nosferatu (2024) at the cinema. As the trailer came to an end, it was punctuated by laughter in response to Pansy’s frustrated words, which questioned why baby clothes have pockets: “What do they put in there?”. It was clear that the film featured humourous moments amid the grind of the everyday, and allusions to the need to heal, or at least, the need to receive help. While thinking about that, I wondered whether those who laughed at Pansy’s words were also touched by the trailer. Teary-eyed, I inhaled the 2 hours that were Nosferatu, leaving the cinema mulling over the 2-ish minute trailer that was its lead-in.
Who gets to be soft or access forms of softness and an accompanying sense of care?
During the months before Hard Truth’s release, I read the brilliant Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (2024). A lot in it stayed with me, including how Villarreal illuminates the intricacies of dominant notions of (un)wellness, disability, and distress. In the words of Villarreal (2024): “Posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and ADHD are scientific names for collective narratives, perfectly normal responses to unsurvivable conditions. Trauma is the name individualism gives to a suffering that must stay private, hidden, not part of a collective story” (p. 91).
As Villarreal points out, unlike the imagined manic pixie (aka “mentally ill”, thin, white) dream girl/woman – a staple of 2000s/2010s “indie” pop culture, women of colour “don’t get to be fragile, fucked up, or ‘crazy’ when our labor is the thing that’s valuable” (Villarreal 2024, p. 170). As hill and I have reflected on, “[i]n fact, their/our perceived ‘madness’ is usually deemed scary, not enchanting like imagined and off-kilter white women on film”. This means that there can be distinct differences between the (lack of) empathy and support expressed in relation to different women who are regarded as “unwell”.
Undoubtedly, the concept of the “manic pixie dream girl” can be harmful. But its link to ideas of dreaminess reflects the relative sense of softness, or at least endearment, associated with it. This starkly contrasts with many Black women characters on screen, such as Pansy in Hard Truths, who is viewed by others as embittered, barbed, and, as the film’s title points toward, hard (to deal with, and hardened by life).
In other words, societal impressions of people and their pain are shaped by interlocking oppressions, such as racism, sexism, misogyny, colourism, capitalism, ableism, and much more. The book Bad Sex: Sexuality, Gender and Affect in Contemporary TV addresses a range of related issues.
Across an impressive collection of chapters, the analysis of Jacqueline Gibbs, Billy Holzberg, and Aura Lehtonen covers topics connected to intimacy, tenderness, desire, oppression, cruelty, gentleness, and sex — including the emotional and embodied politics of all that. In Chapter 6, “Beyond the Boundaries of Bad Sex in I May Destroy You”, through their analysis of Michaela Coel’s poignant TV show, the authors reflect on “justice and healing in the wake of sexual violence, pointing out the importance of friendship and infrastructures of care”.
Discussing many details of I May Destroy You, Gibbs, Holzberg, and Lehtonen invite readers to think about the show as a “a complex portrayal of the radical subjectivity of pain and how people deal with it” (Gibbs et al. 2025, p. 132). Alongside that, they consider broader questions related to sex.
In doing so, they deal with the racialised, gendered, and classed nature of perceptions of people and their experiences of sex and sexual violence. This is important for numerous reasons. One of these relates to the potential for this book to aid ongoing dialogue and action within the TV industry, where conversations about sex scenes and their coordination typically occur in ways that are fairly disconnected from conversations about interrelated issues of racism, colourism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, classism and other oppressions (e.g., how such oppressions impact assumptions about what sex on-screen “should” look like and involve).
The Chapter 6 analysis of I May Destroy You, and how the show itself challenges binary ideas about sex and a sense of self, offers insights linked to wider issues of inequality which impact pop culture portrayals and the experiences of those involved in them — whether as actors, intimacy coordinators, or in other roles.
Chapter 6 tackles the show’s depiction of assaults and its portrayal of consensual sex that is “‘bad’ [sex], but in a good way: messy, comical, difficult, but also consensual and intimate” (Gibbs et al. 2025, p. 131) – sex that is free of the fear of “cringe” and bold in its embrace of the different ways that bodies are experienced.
In other words, this chapter and the whole book provide an in-depth account of issues of power, pain, and forms of perpetration, in addition to contrasting experiences of pleasure, the preciousness of connectedness, the vulnerability of intimacy, and the presence of love of many different sorts. Looking at similar matters with hill, I recently turned my attention to media representations of (im)mortality, “monsters”, and “desiring demons” (such as the vulnerability of Black vampires in the TV and film worlds of the Vampire Chronicles books by Anne Rice).
In the process of attending to topics such as sex, sexual violence, and communal forms of support, Chapter 6 of the book Bad Sex draws on a range of writing, including Black feminist concepts of collective care and self-regard. As a result, the chapter provides both an insightful reflection on I May Destroy You and an informative overview of various strands of creative, scholarly, and collective organising-oriented works that powerfully convey both a strength of conviction and a soft sense of tender-heartedness.
That’s to say, throughout the book, the interdependence of feelings and experiences that are often treated as dualistic and oppositional in society is meaningfully acknowledged, and without uncritically romanticising such entanglements.
On the topic of softness and tenderness, Chapter 6’s treatment of the on-screen friendship between Arabella and Terry in I May Destroy You includes recognition of the everyday (even if uneven) ways that they turn up for each other. This includes when, following the devastating revelation that charges won’t be brought against the perpetrator, who Arabella was hopeful would be convicted, Terry declares that they need to leave the police station to “an environment that sparks joy” (Gibbs et al. 2025, p. 134). As the authors note, throughout the TV show, “we see the two growing together” (Gibbs et al. 2025, p. 142).
This specific moment involves Terry and Arabella “turning their backs on the criminal justice system” (Gibbs et al. 2025, p. 134). It is not simply a “fuck you” to institutions that perpetrate and perpetuate violence and oppression. Instead, it is also an “I love you/I love us” moment. It is one friend expressing their committed intention to stay/be with the other, through this and through more, while trying to find ways to support them in feeling other than how they do right now – even if (eventually) feeling otherwise may not necessarily equal feelings of joy.
Essentially, Terry’s words about pursuing an “environment that sparks joy” (ibid.) include the layered love of a friend trying to find or forge moments that might feel “good” for you, or at least bring some relief, reprieve, and space from harshness and harm in life. Terry’s words are far from flippant.
Instead, they are indicative of the intimacy of friendship, within which love-infused levity, and even silly expressions of softness sometimes pierce through immeasurable pain. Indeed, while forms of softness can be mighty in their power, “[m]ore than there being strength in softness, there’s love in it: a willingness to ‘put yourself out there’, while knowing that in doing so you face the possibility of pain…softness is open-heartedness and tender sincerity, even sometimes alongside silliness too. It’s embracing others + being embraced, fully and freely” (hill and Sobande 2025).
The discussion of I May Destroy You in this vital book on Bad Sex deftly deals with themes related to softness, pain, abuse, friendship, intimacy, and more. My brief reflections on that work cannot possibly capture all that the book brings to the foreground and the numerous ways that it contributes to scholarly, industry, and societal conversations and efforts connected to sex and TV.
So, I’ll close this piece by saying that this writing is not only a much-needed book about sex on screen. It is also a book about intimacy in pop culture and beyond, such as the centrality of friendships and different networks of care and kinship in people’s lives. You could say that the book, much like life, is a blend of being part of hard truths and being part of soft hearts.
References
Bayman, Louis (2024) “Hard Truths: Mike Leigh’s bleakly comic take on depression offers no easy answers”. The Conversation, 30 December. Available at: https://theconversation.com/hard-truths-mike-leighs-bleakly-comic-take-on- depression-offers-no-easy-answers-245819
Gibbs, Jacqueline, Holzberg, Billy and Lehtonen, Aura (2025) Bad Sex: Sexuality, Gender and Affect in Contemporary TV. London: Bloomsbury.
hill, layla-roxanne and Sobande, Francesca (2025) Look, Don’t Touch: Reflections on the Freedom to Feel. Edinburgh: 404 Ink.
Metric [Emily Haines and James Shaw] (2009) “Help I’m Alive” [song].
Villarreal, Vanessa Angélica (2024) Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders. New York: Tiny Reparations Books.
