The Female Friendship Industrial Complex trap How the cultural industry has transformed female friendship into a product to sell on Instagram

It's Friday night. You're on the couch in your pajamas, you're scrolling through Instagram like an automaton. You see a photo of four friends on vacation: glasses of wine, sunset, hair moved by the wind and a caption like “same girls, different city”. You look at it and think: I would like something like this too. Then you look up from the phone. You're always on the couch, always in your pajamas and you realize that you're always watching the same TV series where four friends sit at a table, laugh, tell each other everything and interrupt each other because they've known each other for so long that they've finished each other's sentences. You raise your head and, again, you ask yourself: but why not me?

Female friendship in pop culture

Become aware that you are now addicted to the ideal of female friendship promoted by pop culture. It's not enough to have a few friends with whom you go out every now and then to go for a walk or eat a pizza; you must have a united group always struggling with memorable adventures. We want to be transported into a scene from Sex & the City, How I Met Your Mother, Friends, Girls... in short, into a sitcom set in New York. It's an image so clear and familiar to us that we don't even notice how constructed it is, how unreal it is. A fantasy. Friendship in general, but especially female friendship, has become a narrative model, a theme to focus on. Sex & the City has given us four women who have transformed their friendship into an alternative family. Then came The Bold Type, Broad City, Insecure and an infinite amount of TV series in which relationships between women became the real emotional center of the story. And it's not hard to see why we like them so much.

Female solidarity as a hope for emancipation against romantic and patriarchal relationships

For centuries, culture and society have told us that the highest relational aspiration in a woman's life was the romantic one. Love, Prince Charming. Then we began to glimpse the glimmer of an alternative, realizing that, perhaps, the most important (or the only) person in your life is not necessarily the one with whom you can dream of children and marriage. It's a beautiful and liberating idea but the problem is that, by dint of telling it, we have built a sort of mythology around female friendship. A mythology in which friendships are deep but never really complicated, long-lasting and indestructible. Where there is always someone to call and always someone ready to answer. In which five people mysteriously manage to always find an empty table, a fairly large house and a week's vacation at the same time. And, of course, an inexplicably unlimited economic availability.

If female friendship becomes a product to be sold, the Female Friendship Industrial Complex is born

And this is where female friendship begins to become a cultural product ready to be sold. The brunch with friends, the girls' night, the adult pajama party. We are being sold not only the ideal concept of friendship but also the promise of a life in which we are never alone. Again, great idea. Impossible. Because then we turn off the television, open WhatsApp, driven by the motivation to see our friends again and find a conversation started three weeks earlier and then abandoned. As you grow up, friendship ceases to be something that happens on its own. We are no longer at school, at university, in the same neighborhood. We don't have the same people around every day anymore. We move, we work, we start relationships, we have less time and more things to do. And that's how you can have people you love deeply and still feel deeply alone.

You didn't do anything wrong. You don't have to always leave your comfort zone and go to a pottery course, tantric yoga or a shibari masterclass for beginners to finally find your girl gang. It depends on the very trivial fact that building and maintaining adult relationships requires time, space, places and opportunities that we often don't have. And while in real life friendship becomes increasingly difficult to organize and cultivate, movies and TV series continue to tell us about it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It's the female friendship industrial complex.

If human relationships become a fantasy

The problem, clearly, does not lie in the fact that there are too many stories about women and their friendships, but in the way in which we have transformed a human relationship into one of the great fantasies of contemporary life. We are obsessed with female friendship and large cohesive and intimate groups because, in a world where it has become increasingly difficult to build community, we have transformed the idea of being surrounded by the right people into our new fantasy of escape. And then to that initial question, “why not me?” , we can answer with brutal ease: because we live in the real, individualistic world and not in a glossy TV series that shines with economic boom or millennial positivism.