Guess what? It’s The Bold Type! The Bold Type is back!! We’ve made it through a year without these women on our screens and now they’re back, with more drama and more Kadena! Let’s get into it.
Part 1: Feminist Army
This episode is titled after the name of Jane’s new vertical at Incite, which, spoiler alert. doesn’t go well. Jane wants to profile a woman named Emma Cox, who started a menstrual cup company that donates one cup to homeless shelters for every cup sold. The Incite editor, Victoria, does not find this story very compelling because cups are so last year, but she lets Jane have it. Unfortunately for everyone, it turns out that the donated cups can’t be used because they need to be sterilized between uses to prevent infection, and many homeless women just don’t have access to the tools they need to do that. Emma claims she’s working on a prototype cup that doesn’t require sterilization, but in the meantime she needs the money to keep coming in so she can fund that research. Caught between a rock and a hard place because of a pretty dire mistake, Emma still markets the social justice angle of her product. Jane can’t bring herself to write an entirely positive article about the business or Emma, but neither can she bring herself to do a take-down. She ends up writing about the complicated nature of wanting to do good and running into problems, but Victori spins it into an exposé.
Meanwhile at Scarlet, anti-sexual harassment training reveals that a new dating policy put in place by none other than Richard will be implemented. The policy would make it ok for people within Scarlet to date as long as they sign consent forms with HR. Kat has a comedic field day with how obvious it is that this policy now exists specifically so he can be above-board with dating Sutton. However, Sutton is in a patriarchal pickle. (Sorry). The fashion interns think Sutton gets special treatment (aka more styling credits) from Alex because she slept with him, and this upsets the heck out of her (obviously). She decides not to keep it up with Richard because of what an open relationship will do to her reputation- she chooses her career over him even though she is more than aware of the double standard that forces her to make that choice.
Kat, meanwhile, spends her first day back at Scarlet schooling the board of white guys about how to be more edgy to up social media engagement. She feels on top of her game, and on top of that, she’s super excited to be an out queer woman now and wants to show off Adena every chance she gets. It’s cute, but Adena isn’t on the same page when it comes to posting everything on social media and PDAs. When Kat comes home from work to Adena and a home-cooked meal, she asks/tells Adena to come to a Scarlet cover reveal party that night. Adena reluctantly agrees, but at the party she finally admits that she doesn’t feel like it’s fair to parade her around as Kat’s girlfriend when Kat still hasn’t even gone down on her. Yikes! Luckily this little bump in the road actually leads to something extremely wonderful: a coupla queer women communicating very clearly about sex and what makes them comfortable and uncomfortable and why. Thank you, Bold Type! Communication and consent (and positive representation) are key! We then also get a sex scene for the ages.
Part 2: Rose Colored Glasses
First of all, let’s take a moment to acknowledge that Kat really loved going down on Adena, and also loved gushing about it.
Anyway, in this episode, Jane calls Emma Cox to apologize for her piece and leaves a voicemail. A few hours later it’s been put on the internet and gone viral. She tries to deal with the fallout by going on live TV to defend Incite, but gets herself fired because she *will* die on this hill of telling nuanced stories.
Meanwhile, the fashion assistants are really getting to Sutton, who gets the assignment to style a bunch of “regular guys” who are I guess great feminist allies for a piece about “good” men? That’s a hill Jacqueline will apparently die on, but it still seems incredibly important to have all these male feminists be conventionally “hot.” Her boss assigns her the job because “men like her,” which, yeah, is a pretty shitty reason to give someone for why they should do their job. I am not about this storyline, even when Jacqueline pops up and does her best Cat Grant to make the point that actually Sutton is a people person and men are people, so therefore she’s inherently good with men. Or something. This was a misfire in my opinion.
But this pep talk does inspire Sutton to be assertive with the assistants and point out how petty it is to slut shame people, so that was good… then she drags all these male models regular feminist human men to get drinks with her, Jane and Kat. She sets one of them up with Jane and then the three of them (where’s Adena?) dance and all the men smile at them. Let’s move on.
As the new social media department head, Kat needs to write a bio for herself to give to Jacqueline, which sparks a racial identity crisis after a conversation with Alex about how important it could be to write that she’s the first black female department head at Scarlet. Kat is very hesitant to mention her race, and when we meet her parents we find out that as an interracial couple, they have their own struggles with what racial labels mean. So they never really talked about it with Kat; they raised her with “rose colored glasses” to reject racial labels, but now she’s realizing how important those identities can be. Adena, who proudly owns Muslim lesbian labels, at first doesn’t see why Kat isn’t automatically proud of who she is, but they have a great talk about it and they’re just so cute! They’re so cute.
Also Adena meets Kat’s parents and they’re, like, not all the way into her, mostly because of this label-owning thing, but they also seem like they’ll all get along.
Oh yeah, and there’s a new board member at Scarlet: a woman named Cleo, who built a digital empire making fitness videos for moms, and it sure seems like she’s going to be stepping all over Jacqueline’s toes.
That’s it for this week! Despite a little bit of ridiculousness (which, this is FreeForm after all), this was a solid premiere with some great content. Can’t wait for the rest of the season!
Editor’s Note: As of 6/15/18, article has been edited to reflect the accurate label for Kat’s sexuality as ‘queer’ or ‘woman loving woman’.
