I’m updating this since I feel like we’re getting a little caught in a miscommunication: I believe the show unambiguously depicted this scene as rape and spent a significant amount of time on the consequences. Justifying that position was the main focus of my original article. You can obviously disagree with me about that, but the rest of my comments are reliant on that argument. I do understand your point of view if you believe Bridgerton treated the subject callously. That’s not my position, so I think that’s where we split on this.

Anyway, my first response to you is below. I apologize if it’s a bit snippy; I don’t have a lot of sleep right now.

I have no objection to vilifying Daphne. I’d personally read her as more morally ambiguous considering she’d just been violated herself, but Daphne as a villain is a very reasonable take to me. I object to vilifying Bridgerton for its characters’ actions.

The show condemns Daphne. She herself clearly admits that she violated Simon’s consent in the same scene this happens. The only reason the series doesn’t use the phrase “sexual assault” is because it’s set in the Regency. The entire conflict for the remainder of the show revolves around the fact that Daphne committed sexual assault. Nobody watching the show in good faith can possibly miss that Daphne did something awful at minimum.

Now, there will always be trolls and idiots, but Bridgerton seems to have remarkably little of those. The overwhelming consensus correctly notes that this was sexual assault, in turn raising awareness for the problem of male sexual assault. Bridgerton handled this scene well. It successfully told a complex story about serious issues.

It has been attacked because people assume that a glamorous rom-com depicting something terrible must be glamorizing that terrible thing. And that simply is not what happens in the plain text of the series. It is a fundamental failure to treat Bridgerton seriously, the same way that male-driven shows are treated.

Yes, a small minority routinely objects to the violence in male driven stories. I’m in that minority more often than not. But it’s a small minority that doesn’t form the cultural narrative about those shows.

Now, here is one of the few major TV series to try handling violence in a sensitive manner. But Bridgerton’s nuances are ignored because it’s considered a shallow fantasy for women. Because people don’t consider it equivalent to all those male-driven anti-hero stories I mentioned. And those people skim over complex character arcs, just see the rape scene, and then ignore all the care put into placing that scene in context.