Jenn Tran Gets A Love Story
Does it STILL matter who gets to be an American Princess?
“You seem like someone very up on culture, I thought you would have known that movie,” my friend said amid a rousing and loud kitchen conversation at our last dinner party. I had not seen nor heard what she was alluding to.
If you have known me in the flesh for a long amount of time, this becomes apparent. I have this pop cultural gap that spans the time my parents were being educated at a Bible college and when I was a homeschooler.
My mother, Trinidadian, and from a religious tradition that didn’t even go to the cinema, is not exactly a rolodex of American pop culture to have learned anything from.
That said, some stories make the rounds even if you never watch say, the Bachelor or the Bachelorette on ABC. Those are the stories that hit your self-esteem and what kind of life and world you accept for yourself. I grew up with little to no TV and was quite confident as a child, but I got the message that someone would have to go out of his way to marry me.
That could be you too if you don’t take a double zero in clothes, or on the other end fill out a dress like someone on TV, or don’t feel like Barbie today, or are categorized as the “Loud” girl or you have been divorced.
That has to do with the way media carries its message, about what is good, bad, normal, abnormal, and desirable and undesirable. We watch these things, or other people watch these things, and we get ideas about who or what should be desired. We think about what we can expect to want and what maybe we should settle for.
It is how someone like Jenn Tran, who is so beautiful you would probably run into a pole while talking to her, can find herself on national television weeping angelically at how she “has never been the center of attention before and she’s never felt this cherished before”.
It would have been touching if that was the only thing she said as the network’s first-ever Asian American lead in 20 years.
But no, there were other firsts for Jenn in store! She explained how she felt like she was the main character in her own love story and gasped over just how excited the eligible young American men were in talking to her as a potential wife! The mother of their children! Their life partner and best friend!
All filmmaking and editing are about a choice. The choice to leave in or leave out a moment in time. The decisions on how to frame any given person or scene. The order and the sequence in which the people are presented, how they are presented, and if the editors want you to root for or boo off real humans.
The competition element of shows like this lays bare the competition we are in with less obvious producers. We like to think of ourselves as making choices about our partners and our futures alone and independent of framing. That there is enough diversity casting now to rectify everything that has ever happened to women in America.
I didn’t grow up watching this show. But I grew up around girls who I expected to have love stories, and girls I figured would not.
There is a reason up until now the networks didn’t choose to point their camera in the direction of an Asian American woman. There is a reason they didn’t place her at the center of a love story.
They didn’t think a woman like her could have that, and they didn’t believe that the audience would buy it as real.
This is not because we think women like Jenn and the four Black women who preceded her ( Rachel Lindsey, Tayshia Adams, Michelle Young, and Charity Lawson) do not exist. It is not because we don’t think older women, like the ones selected for the Golden spinoff don’t either.
They are not wild unicorns. This has to do with last week’s dispatch about how Black women in America became permanent sluts through old racial ideas that supported the legal framework of White Supremacy. The old ideas reworked themselves in a world in which the legal oppression of women of color, divorced women, or single women wasn’t so easy.
Asian women and Black women have been heavily represented in media for a very long time! The research of Carolyn M. West at the University of Tacoma found that they are all over pornography, framed in stories of exoticism, submission, and aggression. These stories match up with older narratives about who these women are and what they deserve.
Carolyn M. West discovered that viewers ( of which there are many) used this media and these websites to acquire sexual scripts, activate themselves to see this as normal through repeated exposure, and then apply these sexual scripts to their real lives.
The majority of children and adolescents she interviewed and studied reported that they used pornography to educate themselves. In her study, Carolyn M. West was able to see how producers and media sites were disseminating old racist and sexist tropes on unequal levels to new generations. And West was studying children of color, who themselves were learning to see themselves and others through this lens.
So much of what we think is normal or simply personal preference is related to exposure. It’s why it’s easier to accept a woman who looks like Kamala Harris as a professional porn star but not a president.
It’s why we’re not ready for a woman president but we find these women just fine for entertainment. It’s why Jenn Tran cries that someone might want a serious real-life romance with her. It’s why people said yes women past 24 are people who can fall in love too. That’s why some people will accept a partner who low-key hates them.
I think there is a reason people turn to make AI porn of women who get cast as leading ladies or run for office. It’s a way to put women where we are most comfortable with. Perfect and programable. There to advance the plot, and then be tucked away. It’s the framing that puts certain people back in control, where they don’t have to deal with the reintroduction that women are constantly doing in the 21st century. It’s how to bring her back to what you want her to do when she dares leave you in search of something better.
And there is a reason it works. Why it can run women out of campaigns and shut down their futures in a moment. It reminds viewers where they belong, and how having been seen in that light, are no longer whole people.
And as long as that works, it is worth nodding when a Black woman gets cast as the princess, or Jenn Tran gets her chance to run and jump into 25 men’s arms. I know some people say it is enough already, but I don’t agree.
There is so much ground to cover, so many more images yet to add to the canon, to even get close to touching the lesser ones that have been made of us.
I will keep doing that little shimmy I do when I see three Black women on the Olympic podium, 45-year-old White divorcees dancing in their backyards in peace, or the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants getting to choose a man who won’t buy her.
all hail.