Season 2, Episode 8 - Shout, Part 2

Original Airdate - November 10th, 2022

Content warning - discussions of sexual assault

It’s my favorite kind of two parter! Linked in content but each part has a contained part of the story. Make sure you check on part 1 if you missed it, and while you’re at it, do you remember the origin of PMS? Ashley, Paige and Terri’s season 1 girl group? Everyone caught up? Let’s go.

Paige is struggling. She’s having nightmares about Dean and it’s not getting any better. She’s trying to distract herself and move on, and Terri is here to help. She thinks it’s time to bring PMS back together. Pantene is doing a song contest, and the winners get a trip to LA to perform for record executives.

It’s a big enough prize that Paige is convinced to get the band back together, but she does not want Ashley in the mix. Hazel will take over on vocals, and they can use Terri’s poem for English class as the lyrics.

That poem is, unfortunately, very bad. Also bad, Terri’s streetwear styling now includes cornrows. Paige is already unsure about this PMS reunion, and can’t help but clock how good Ashley’s poem is. It’s called Poor Thing and is about losing your friends. Paige is moved.

At practice, it’s clear that this is going to be a very different PMS. Paige admonishes Terri for wearing last year’s outfit. Pop princesses are out, moody girl bands are in. Thank god Paige learned to play guitar and Terri can play the bass. But Paige is in no mood for mediocrity, and storms out of practice as Hazel croaks Terri’s terrible lyrics.

She goes to Ashley’s house to ask her to come back to the band. Ashley is hesitant. She does not want a repeat of last time, where Paige and Terri turned it into something frivolous. But Paige assures her that she was genuinely touched by Ashley’s poem and she wants PMS to sing songs about real things. Ashley can tell that something about Paige has changed, and she agrees to come back.

Before school, they gather to practice and Ashley throws Paige a curve ball. She was inspired to change Poor Thing from a song about losing friends into a song about rape. So many girls, even girls their age, deal with that! Paige is not amused. She tells Ashley they have to use the old lyrics and isn’t interested in arguing. A song about rape is never going to win this contest.

Ashley finds Paige staring at the lyric sheet. It’s clear to us that Paige is resonating with something, but Ashley can’t see that. They fight and Paige says it’s not okay that Ashley wrote about something she’s never experienced. Ashley says she can imagine and Paige shuts that down.

After school, at practice, Ashley sees her way to win. Hazel has lost her voice due to over practice, and Ashley is the best singer they’ve got. Ashley will take on lead vocal, but she’s only willing to sing the lyrics about rape. Paige storms off and Ashley follows her.

Ashley defends her knowledge about rape from her internet research. She says, “I know a lot more about this than you do.” Paige breaks down crying and Ashley is smart enough to figure out why. She comforts Paige, urging her to go to a counselor, but Paige just wants to forget. She’s just not ready to sing a song about sexual assault, and Ashley acquiesces. They’ll do the original lyrics.

The competition is taking place at a local mall, and PMS is nervous but ready. They start their song as Paige scans the crowd. And she sees Dean. She thinks she may be imagining him, but he’s real. She freezes and turns to Ashley for support. But then, her courage finds her, she takes over the lead vocal and sings the rape version of Poor Thing. Dean slinks off with his tail between his legs.

The girls don’t win. Paige was right about a rape song not being a crowd favorite. But they’re proud of themselves, and even Ellie is impressed. Plus, singing was cathartic for Paige, and she’s finally ready to talk to her guidance counselor about what happened.

Meanwhile, in Grade 8, it’s time for a Media Immersion PowerPoint presentation project. This one is supposed to be a biography of a personal hero. JT has chosen Hugh Hefner, his idol in getting girls. Toby thinks he should really go for someone they know is interested, Liberty. JT brushes that off, but finds himself in the spotlight. It seems Liberty chose JT as her Power Point topic, and got childhood pictures of JT from Toby. JT feels embarrassed.

He confronts Liberty and does a mean impression of her which hurts her feelings. She storms off. But later, when he picks at her again, she fights back. They argue, and when JT calls her boring, Liberty snaps. She grabs a permanent marker from his hand and vandalizes his locker. JT feebly tries to remove the marker with his hand.

He chases her down to demand her help when Raditch grabs him. Raditch thinks JT did the graffiti himself, and the red marker on his hand is the smoking gun. JT tries to explain, without naming Liberty, but Raditch doesn’t believe him. In Ms. Kwan’s class Toby says this is really bad. JT’s mom is super strict and promised to send JT to a private school if he got in trouble again.

Liberty comes clean to Raditch and accepts her punishment. She apologizes to JT and he says it’s water under the bridge. They have a nice moment, and it’s clear this ship is leaving the harbor.

I have lamented before about how I think the advice to “write what you know” often gets turned into a tool of exploitation and exposure, but there is another side to this advice that I think requires much more nuanced consideration. It’s the side that causes Ashley’s conflict with Paige. Is it bad for a writer to write about things they haven’t personally experienced?

I’m going to split this up into a two different categories and then (spoiler) come to mostly the same conclusion about both of them.

First up, demographics and identity. Can straight people write about gay people? Can white writers feature Black protagonists? Can an able-bodied artist incorporate disability into their stories? Yes. But.

I think it’s great, important even, that we create a permission structure for someone to explore an identity that isn’t their own. That’s empathy and empathy is good. Just like audiences should seek out characters from outside their own experience, writers shouldn’t limit their work to characters who are just like them. I think it would be actively bad if everyone I wrote about was an invisibly disabled, neurodivergent, cis, white, gay man. It wouldn’t reflect the world, and it would make my work very flat.

I think the danger comes when a writer seeks to write a story that is fundamentally about an identity that is not part of their personal experience. I do not know enough about the experience of being Black to write a story about it, and I never will. There is no truth for me to unearth in my own work about Blackness. It’s not my story to tell.

But that doesn’t mean that the identity of my characters should not be a part of the story. To continue with the same example, Black characters I write about should have the experience of being Black. This is especially true if you’re writing in the modern day, but I encounter this a lot in science fiction too. Race and racial history have evaporated without explanation in humanity’s journey into space. That’s not good writing, because that’s not based on an honest observation of the world.

Seeking to honestly reflect the world, whether literally or metaphorically, is the heart of good storytelling. When it comes to identity, reflecting the world means including a diversity of backgrounds and incorporating those backgrounds into the story. When writing outside of your identity, the best thing a writer can do is seek to learn more by listening to the personal stories of those with that identity.

This is why the idea that a writer is obligated to write about characters outside their identity cannot become an excuse to remove writers whose identities are not privileged from the conversation. Fiction is a great creative morass of inspiration. I need writers of color, female writers, even straight people in that mix so that I can be inspired by their experiences. And when working collaboratively, like in a writers room, there is no reason to not include someone who reflects that identity.

The other category of this is literal experience - writing about things that haven’t happened to you. Ashley wants to write about assault, but never has been assaulted. I find myself often writing about the loss of a parent when I have never lost a parent myself. I’ve never been to space!

The same basic rules apply. A writer should be capable of the empathy and imagination required to write about experiences they haven’t personally had. A writer should seek insight from those who have had the experience. A writer should tread carefully in centering too prominently an experience they can’t directly speak to. Writers with authentic experiences should be invited to the table and their work should studied.

And sometimes, there is value to an external perspective on a situation. Ashley probably should have done more than some internet research before engaging on such a serious topic. It’s fine, she’s 14. But even then, her words resonated with Paige. And Paige was able to add her authentic emotion to the song.

Curiosity is one of the great tools of a writer. Curiosity should include seeking out and championing people with different experiences and identities than your own. You can write what you don’t know, but you should probably try to learn something about it first.

But demanding that a writer only engages with topics they have intimate familiarity with squashes that curiosity. And with it, you lose imagination. And with that, you lose empathy. And with all of that gone, what’s the point of writing fiction in the first place?