The power of elaine benes from seinfeld

I watch an episode of Seinfeld almost every night before bed. This is a routine that goes all the way back to when I was teenager and there were re-runs every night at 11pm. Something I have been thinking about more recently is why I have always had a particular affection for Elaine Benes. It wasn't just that she was funny. She was funny not in the "female sitcom character" funny way, where the humor comes from being ditzy or lovable in a gendered way. Elaine was genuinely funny. She carried scenes. She took up space. She wasn't there to support the male characters emotionally or narratively.

What I think I was responding to, before I even had language for it, was that she seemed fully herself and not performing femininity in a way so many women on television - and honestly, so many women in real life - are subtly expected to. She was attractive, but didn't seem organized around being attractive. She wanted relationships, sex, and connection, but her life did not seem centered around being chosen. She wasn't trying to be one of the guys, but she also wasn't trying to embody some idealized version of womanhood. She just got to exist as herself. And I think that must have felt quietly radical to me.

As a therapist, I spend a lot of time thinking about how the water we swim in shapes all of us. Women are often taught implicitly - often in their families and certainly in society and culture- that their worth and legitimacy comes from niceness, usefulness, emotional labor, beauty, accommodation, partnership, caregiving. There is a subtle sense that women feel like they have to justify taking up space. Elaine did not seem to operate from that place. Not because she was above insecurity. She was neurotic, selfish, petty, reactive, hilarious, impulsive - fully human. But underneath all of that, she showed up in the world like she already had permission to exist, without apology and without needing to prove herself.

This feels really psychologically interesting to me. She seemed to embody certain freedoms that culture has historically granted more easily to men: the freedom to be difficult, to prioritize herself, to have standards, to take up a lot of space, to not emotionally manage everyone around her. And maybe most strikingly, she didn't seem interested in proving herself. A lot of female characters - especially in the 90's - seemed psychologically organized around "not being enough." Not pretty enough, not loveable enough, not thin enough, not chosen enough. Their inner and outer lives revolved around fixing, improving, securing, or proving themselves in some way. Elaine didn't really have that energy. She wasn't trying to fix herself or become some ideal woman, partner, version of herself. And I think that is why she feels so psychologically freeing to watch. She also wasn't there to make a point, the way some contemporary female characters can sometimes feel constructed around a kind of girl power hashtag.

My main point here is that I think there is something powerful about women, or really anyone, not organizing their existence around proving their worth. And I think that is part of what I was responding to in Elaine Benes.