Why I take “Kevin Can F**k Himself” so personally

When you don’t get to see very many stories that represent your anger, you get pretty damn protective of the ones that do

If you aren’t familiar with “Kevin Can F**K Himself,” then this article won’t be of interest. I don’t want to waste space explaining what it is or setting the scene. I just want to write into the anger I feel when I read reviews that are critical of a show over which I apparently feel quite protective. I’m interested in that desire to protect a television show, a story.

Over on Vulture, writer Roxana Hadadi questions Allison’s spurning of her boyfriend, Sam, in the finale, saying it’s rushed. It didn’t seem rushed to me. She doesn’t want to step into the narrative of being saved by a man who literally just told her one episode back how broken he thinks she is. This is a show about rejecting tired narratives about female characters. It made complete sense, and resonated fully, that in a moment that could easily tip in the stereotypical direction of man-saves-broken-woman, Allison would instead call bullshit, and go another way.

People are always trying to write our stories for us. Of course, Allison is a fictional character who literally needs people to write her story for her. But in another way, she’s real, and she’s a weapon in our arsenal, as women —a sharp tool piercing the sexist…