March 9, 2025 • 15 mins
In today's episode, I will take on the negative reviews given to Season 3 of the Netfix show, Bridgerton, those reviews that found Penelope undeserving of a whirlwind romance with Colin just because she is short and voluptuous and does "not look the part" of a typical heroine.
Of course, it won't be a podcast episode of mine if I did not infuse it with my personal experiences and obervations... so brace yourselves for a brutally honest reality check on the matter of weight and on looking different.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello there and welcome to Quite So, the podcast that used to be called Casual Fridays.
(00:08):
We are now in season two after having successfully recorded 31 episodes for the first season
last year.
Now today's episode is titled On Bridgerton Season Three, but before we get into that,
I want to remind you that you can find the audio of this podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts,
(00:30):
Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, rss.com as well.
You can find the video of this podcast on Patreon for a subscription.
So let's get into our episode for the day.
Now, I don't know if you've seen Bridgerton Season Three or not, but don't worry.
(00:50):
Even if you have not, you will understand what I'm talking about today.
Now, I am a fan of Bridgerton and I've been following the seasons one and two and three.
And of course, it was a delight to me to see that Penelope, who is a young protagonist,
she is a short, overweight, voluptuous woman with red hair and greenish eyes.
(01:15):
She's actually a beauty to me. The way I see her is she's really cute.
She's attractive. She can be sexy when she wants to be.
She used to dress in very horrible colors in the first two seasons.
They were the colors of their house, so to speak, and mainly in yellows and oranges.
(01:36):
But in season three, she switched to green and really matched her complexion and her hair color.
And throughout the first two seasons, we see Penelope pining for Colin,
their neighbor, who is about her age.
And Colin was someone who was still young, wanted to experience the world.
(02:02):
So around season two, he went out to travel around,
and he went to Paris and different places in Europe.
Now he comes back at season three, and of course, Penelope is still pining for him.
But he sees himself now as this worldly fellow who is very attractive to the ladies,
(02:23):
who has a way with the ladies.
So he is busy getting all the women he can, just flirting here and there, enjoying his time.
At some point, Penelope asks Colin for his help in finding a suitor.
She asks him to coach her how to flirt with men.
(02:44):
It seems, however, that society had other thoughts on the matter,
because it seems that even though they are just friends, supposedly,
it was a scandal that Colin was helping Penelope find a suitor.
So at one point, she was kind of ruined, and she goes to see her,
(03:05):
and she asks him to kiss her, because she did not want to die never having been kissed,
or just become the spinster for her whole life without having been kissed.
Of course, for those of you who like to read romances,
you are not new to this type of situation where a woman asks a man to kiss her for whatever reason.
(03:29):
But the thing is that they do kiss, and Colin feels something for Penelope
at that particular moment in time.
However, he does not really act upon it.
I will get into the reasons that I find why Colin did not act upon his feelings for Penelope
(03:50):
since that moment, and almost immediately, but we'll get to that later.
I want to just say that eventually they do get together, and what surprised me
with the reviews and the backlash from society, and from people who watched Bridgerton,
not everyone, of course, but there was a good percentage of people who were criticizing
(04:16):
the fact that Penelope was a voluptuous, slash overweight woman who deserved,
or who had her moment in the spotlight and actually found love.
They were critical of this idea, saying mainly that, oh, are we now encouraging women to gain weight
and letting them feel that even though they gain weight, they will find love in their life
(04:40):
as if anyone who looks anything different than a model in a magazine does not deserve love
or a normal life, of course, knowing me and knowing the way I look, you are going to
agree with me that I was shocked with such an outburst from people because I, for one,
(05:03):
go about living my life normally.
I wake up in the morning, I brush my teeth like everybody else.
I have my breakfast like everybody else, and I go out my day.
I go to work, I socialize with people, I go to cafes, I have friends, I have boyfriends.
(05:25):
So this is life for me.
I mean, it's something that I never really thought of as an obstacle or as something
that would retract or detract from my life in any way.
And I don't know why people would feel at any point that someone who does not look like
(05:46):
a model does not deserve to live a normal life.
I mean, to each his own, you can look the way you want to look.
You can dress the way you want to dress, whatever your appearance is, is for you alone.
But this does not mean that there are people who look different from you.
Is this how we are going to build our society today?
(06:09):
That you have to fill a checklist and if you fulfill the checklist, then you deserve a good life.
You deserve to be happy.
You deserve to find love.
But if you don't fulfill the checklist, no, you are sidelined.
You are just punished in a corner.
(06:30):
Is that how it's going to be now?
And before I go back to this Bridgerton story, because there's a lot I want to say about
it as well, people think that it's just a love story, but it reflects a lot of what society
believes in as well.
So we're going to dig deeper into that.
But before I say this, you know, I've always thought that I wanted to live my life in a way
(06:53):
that was not defined by the way I looked.
I also, when I started, you know, on social media, I did not want to talk about my being overweight.
Because I felt that, you know, I will just do my thing and I just through doing my thing, I will
(07:13):
show people that you can look whatever way you look and still, you know, have an audience, still
have a following, still have people who want to listen to you, still be liked and even loved by
people, you know?
I mean, of course, I want everybody's cup of tea, but it's probably not because of the way I look
only. I mean, I know I have a personality that is cutting edge at times.
(07:37):
People don't want to listen to what I say because, you know, I'm sometimes controversial.
So there are many things that make up who I am.
And unfortunately, you know, things come up in society and on social media and, you know, they
come to my attention.
And I felt that at some point I have to talk about this because the worst thing for me,
(08:01):
is seeing certain traumas that I lived through in my childhood being repeated in teenagers today.
I mean, I'm 47 years old and I see someone who's 17 or 18 years old going through the same exact
treatment at home by society, by others.
(08:22):
And that's really sad.
You think that society evolves and is supposed to change and supposed to embrace change.
And yet, is this, I don't know, is it just an illusion?
I don't know. It just saddens me that when you think that people are supposed to be more aware of
things these days, that they are not and that the same thing is happening again and again and again.
(08:48):
I'm not going to go into all these things today, all these issues, because that's something for
another day. So today, the episode is on Bridgerton.
But I just want to make this particular point before I continue.
Anyway, now the thing is, why did Colin not act upon his interest in Penelope right away?
(09:11):
I mean, definitely when he kissed her, he felt attracted to her.
So why didn't he act upon this attraction automatically?
It took actually the fact that she was courting another man and another man was interested in her.
It took that to stir up his jealousy and to actually make him act and want to jump forward
(09:33):
and move in and claim her as his love. And I will tell you why.
And it shows actually, if you watch this season of Bridgerton, he actually cared about what society
thought of him. And of course, in general, society would not expect him to, I mean, him,
(09:57):
the worldly man, the man who's been to all of Europe, the man who can have any woman he wants,
you know, he is not expected to go out with a woman like Penelope, who looks like Penelope.
And so you see in Bridgerton in that, I mean, very, very slightly, they put this message through.
(10:19):
And it's basically shown mainly when they talk, when she tells him that in the previous season,
season two, he tells his friend that he would never ever think of Penelope as anything other
than his friend. She had overheard him and she was actually sad and upset with him for a while
because of that statement. And she told him in season three, what, am I not good enough for you?
(10:41):
What's wrong with me? Of course, he didn't say his words exactly, but you get the gist of it.
And it is sad, but true that a man who wants a woman that looks different from the acceptable,
normal look of a woman in the society, this man has a tough decision to make because
(11:04):
he will be criticized by his family and by his friends. And he has to have the backbone
to actually tell them, hey, this is the woman I want. And this is one of your business.
And it is not easy because many men care about their status in society. And you've heard of the
trophy wife, of course, the idea that a man who has made a life, who, a business man or whatever,
(11:33):
who has made it in his career, he would want to marry this model woman, whatever, the trophy wife,
so that he can go anywhere and take her on his arm and make him look good. And he'd be envied,
you know, and so forth and all that. But again, this is so shallow. I'm sorry to say that,
(11:55):
but this is so shallow. And that is why there is such a high rate of divorce. That's why so many
men cheat on their wives and so many wives cheat on their husbands. The relationships are broken
because people aren't true to themselves and they're not true to what they want. When it comes to
attraction between a man and a woman, it is not the physical that matters. OK, you can tell me,
(12:19):
yes, I can see a woman wearing a short skirt and, you know, she makes me horny. Sorry for that word.
OK, yes, you can watch porn and get aroused or excited. You can, of course, yes, the physical
as an appearance. Yes, I understand that it could be arousing. It could be something appealing.
(12:43):
But we're talking here about intimacy between a man and a woman. When two people come together
physically, the emotions and the connection that is the spiritual connection is not found easily.
For you to kiss somebody and feel that your soul is soaring and kind of like, you know,
(13:04):
connecting on a different level and you feel like you're literally flying out of your body.
This does not happen with everybody. And if you find that you've been idiot to let it go
because this is true attraction. Now, is this the basis for a successful marriage?
No, because this is the beginning of something beautiful. And then, of course, you have to have
(13:30):
two people who are willing to work on a relationship, who want this relationship because A,
they are physically attracted to each other and B, they are compatible and they want to make this
work. And of course, any relationship takes two people as they say, it takes two to tango.
(13:52):
It takes two hands to clap. Right. So two people are needed to make a relationship work.
Now, going back to the people's comments about, you know, how undeserving penalty is to find love
because of the way she looks. If a man and a woman were just stripped out of society,
(14:13):
a man does not care how a woman looks. A man doesn't care how a woman looks. He just cares
about how a woman makes him feel. And in fact, if you look at society and interactions between
people in general, whether between two women, two men at work, in the supermarket,
you remember the person who treats you kindly. You remember the person that does something
(14:38):
beautiful to you or you remember the person who mistreated you and who taught you a lesson
and who was really mean to you. You remember people by the way they make you feel.
And here I rest my case. I mean, society has its, you know, rules. Society has its beauty,
definitely. But for me, it should not interfere in people's choices of who they love. And so all
(15:04):
those who criticized Gertrude and season three for allowing Penelope a normal life, a chance at a
normal life at least, to fall in love. I'm sorry, you have no rights. You have zero right to interfere
in anyone's choices, even if it's a character in a show. I decided to post the podcast on a bi-weekly
(15:31):
basis this season on Sundays. So I will see you in a couple of Sundays. Take care.
Hello there and welcome to Quite So, the podcast that used to be called Casual Fridays.
(00:08):
We are now in season two after having successfully recorded 31 episodes for the first season
last year.
Now today's episode is titled On Bridgerton Season Three, but before we get into that,
I want to remind you that you can find the audio of this podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts,
(00:30):
Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, rss.com as well.
You can find the video of this podcast on Patreon for a subscription.
So let's get into our episode for the day.
Now, I don't know if you've seen Bridgerton Season Three or not, but don't worry.
(00:50):
Even if you have not, you will understand what I'm talking about today.
Now, I am a fan of Bridgerton and I've been following the seasons one and two and three.
And of course, it was a delight to me to see that Penelope, who is a young protagonist,
she is a short, overweight, voluptuous woman with red hair and greenish eyes.
(01:15):
She's actually a beauty to me. The way I see her is she's really cute.
She's attractive. She can be sexy when she wants to be.
She used to dress in very horrible colors in the first two seasons.
They were the colors of their house, so to speak, and mainly in yellows and oranges.
(01:36):
But in season three, she switched to green and really matched her complexion and her hair color.
And throughout the first two seasons, we see Penelope pining for Colin,
their neighbor, who is about her age.
And Colin was someone who was still young, wanted to experience the world.
(02:02):
So around season two, he went out to travel around,
and he went to Paris and different places in Europe.
Now he comes back at season three, and of course, Penelope is still pining for him.
But he sees himself now as this worldly fellow who is very attractive to the ladies,
(02:23):
who has a way with the ladies.
So he is busy getting all the women he can, just flirting here and there, enjoying his time.
At some point, Penelope asks Colin for his help in finding a suitor.
She asks him to coach her how to flirt with men.
(02:44):
It seems, however, that society had other thoughts on the matter,
because it seems that even though they are just friends, supposedly,
it was a scandal that Colin was helping Penelope find a suitor.
So at one point, she was kind of ruined, and she goes to see her,
(03:05):
and she asks him to kiss her, because she did not want to die never having been kissed,
or just become the spinster for her whole life without having been kissed.
Of course, for those of you who like to read romances,
you are not new to this type of situation where a woman asks a man to kiss her for whatever reason.
(03:29):
But the thing is that they do kiss, and Colin feels something for Penelope
at that particular moment in time.
However, he does not really act upon it.
I will get into the reasons that I find why Colin did not act upon his feelings for Penelope
(03:50):
since that moment, and almost immediately, but we'll get to that later.
I want to just say that eventually they do get together, and what surprised me
with the reviews and the backlash from society, and from people who watched Bridgerton,
not everyone, of course, but there was a good percentage of people who were criticizing
(04:16):
the fact that Penelope was a voluptuous, slash overweight woman who deserved,
or who had her moment in the spotlight and actually found love.
They were critical of this idea, saying mainly that, oh, are we now encouraging women to gain weight
and letting them feel that even though they gain weight, they will find love in their life
(04:40):
as if anyone who looks anything different than a model in a magazine does not deserve love
or a normal life, of course, knowing me and knowing the way I look, you are going to
agree with me that I was shocked with such an outburst from people because I, for one,
(05:03):
go about living my life normally.
I wake up in the morning, I brush my teeth like everybody else.
I have my breakfast like everybody else, and I go out my day.
I go to work, I socialize with people, I go to cafes, I have friends, I have boyfriends.
(05:25):
So this is life for me.
I mean, it's something that I never really thought of as an obstacle or as something
that would retract or detract from my life in any way.
And I don't know why people would feel at any point that someone who does not look like
(05:46):
a model does not deserve to live a normal life.
I mean, to each his own, you can look the way you want to look.
You can dress the way you want to dress, whatever your appearance is, is for you alone.
But this does not mean that there are people who look different from you.
Is this how we are going to build our society today?
(06:09):
That you have to fill a checklist and if you fulfill the checklist, then you deserve a good life.
You deserve to be happy.
You deserve to find love.
But if you don't fulfill the checklist, no, you are sidelined.
You are just punished in a corner.
(06:30):
Is that how it's going to be now?
And before I go back to this Bridgerton story, because there's a lot I want to say about
it as well, people think that it's just a love story, but it reflects a lot of what society
believes in as well.
So we're going to dig deeper into that.
But before I say this, you know, I've always thought that I wanted to live my life in a way
(06:53):
that was not defined by the way I looked.
I also, when I started, you know, on social media, I did not want to talk about my being overweight.
Because I felt that, you know, I will just do my thing and I just through doing my thing, I will
(07:13):
show people that you can look whatever way you look and still, you know, have an audience, still
have a following, still have people who want to listen to you, still be liked and even loved by
people, you know?
I mean, of course, I want everybody's cup of tea, but it's probably not because of the way I look
only. I mean, I know I have a personality that is cutting edge at times.
(07:37):
People don't want to listen to what I say because, you know, I'm sometimes controversial.
So there are many things that make up who I am.
And unfortunately, you know, things come up in society and on social media and, you know, they
come to my attention.
And I felt that at some point I have to talk about this because the worst thing for me,
(08:01):
is seeing certain traumas that I lived through in my childhood being repeated in teenagers today.
I mean, I'm 47 years old and I see someone who's 17 or 18 years old going through the same exact
treatment at home by society, by others.
(08:22):
And that's really sad.
You think that society evolves and is supposed to change and supposed to embrace change.
And yet, is this, I don't know, is it just an illusion?
I don't know. It just saddens me that when you think that people are supposed to be more aware of
things these days, that they are not and that the same thing is happening again and again and again.
(08:48):
I'm not going to go into all these things today, all these issues, because that's something for
another day. So today, the episode is on Bridgerton.
But I just want to make this particular point before I continue.
Anyway, now the thing is, why did Colin not act upon his interest in Penelope right away?
(09:11):
I mean, definitely when he kissed her, he felt attracted to her.
So why didn't he act upon this attraction automatically?
It took actually the fact that she was courting another man and another man was interested in her.
It took that to stir up his jealousy and to actually make him act and want to jump forward
(09:33):
and move in and claim her as his love. And I will tell you why.
And it shows actually, if you watch this season of Bridgerton, he actually cared about what society
thought of him. And of course, in general, society would not expect him to, I mean, him,
(09:57):
the worldly man, the man who's been to all of Europe, the man who can have any woman he wants,
you know, he is not expected to go out with a woman like Penelope, who looks like Penelope.
And so you see in Bridgerton in that, I mean, very, very slightly, they put this message through.
(10:19):
And it's basically shown mainly when they talk, when she tells him that in the previous season,
season two, he tells his friend that he would never ever think of Penelope as anything other
than his friend. She had overheard him and she was actually sad and upset with him for a while
because of that statement. And she told him in season three, what, am I not good enough for you?
(10:41):
What's wrong with me? Of course, he didn't say his words exactly, but you get the gist of it.
And it is sad, but true that a man who wants a woman that looks different from the acceptable,
normal look of a woman in the society, this man has a tough decision to make because
(11:04):
he will be criticized by his family and by his friends. And he has to have the backbone
to actually tell them, hey, this is the woman I want. And this is one of your business.
And it is not easy because many men care about their status in society. And you've heard of the
trophy wife, of course, the idea that a man who has made a life, who, a business man or whatever,
(11:33):
who has made it in his career, he would want to marry this model woman, whatever, the trophy wife,
so that he can go anywhere and take her on his arm and make him look good. And he'd be envied,
you know, and so forth and all that. But again, this is so shallow. I'm sorry to say that,
(11:55):
but this is so shallow. And that is why there is such a high rate of divorce. That's why so many
men cheat on their wives and so many wives cheat on their husbands. The relationships are broken
because people aren't true to themselves and they're not true to what they want. When it comes to
attraction between a man and a woman, it is not the physical that matters. OK, you can tell me,
(12:19):
yes, I can see a woman wearing a short skirt and, you know, she makes me horny. Sorry for that word.
OK, yes, you can watch porn and get aroused or excited. You can, of course, yes, the physical
as an appearance. Yes, I understand that it could be arousing. It could be something appealing.
(12:43):
But we're talking here about intimacy between a man and a woman. When two people come together
physically, the emotions and the connection that is the spiritual connection is not found easily.
For you to kiss somebody and feel that your soul is soaring and kind of like, you know,
(13:04):
connecting on a different level and you feel like you're literally flying out of your body.
This does not happen with everybody. And if you find that you've been idiot to let it go
because this is true attraction. Now, is this the basis for a successful marriage?
No, because this is the beginning of something beautiful. And then, of course, you have to have
(13:30):
two people who are willing to work on a relationship, who want this relationship because A,
they are physically attracted to each other and B, they are compatible and they want to make this
work. And of course, any relationship takes two people as they say, it takes two to tango.
(13:52):
It takes two hands to clap. Right. So two people are needed to make a relationship work.
Now, going back to the people's comments about, you know, how undeserving penalty is to find love
because of the way she looks. If a man and a woman were just stripped out of society,
(14:13):
a man does not care how a woman looks. A man doesn't care how a woman looks. He just cares
about how a woman makes him feel. And in fact, if you look at society and interactions between
people in general, whether between two women, two men at work, in the supermarket,
you remember the person who treats you kindly. You remember the person that does something
(14:38):
beautiful to you or you remember the person who mistreated you and who taught you a lesson
and who was really mean to you. You remember people by the way they make you feel.
And here I rest my case. I mean, society has its, you know, rules. Society has its beauty,
definitely. But for me, it should not interfere in people's choices of who they love. And so all
(15:04):
those who criticized Gertrude and season three for allowing Penelope a normal life, a chance at a
normal life at least, to fall in love. I'm sorry, you have no rights. You have zero right to interfere
in anyone's choices, even if it's a character in a show. I decided to post the podcast on a bi-weekly
(15:31):
basis this season on Sundays. So I will see you in a couple of Sundays. Take care.
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