It's a role inhabited by and projected onto women with complicated and troubling consequences, says our columnist.
And so television serves us the latest incarnation of that familiar female role: the "hot mess". Yes, Jessica from Love Is Blind, the Netflix reality show, is so often filmed reaching for a refill of red (afterwards, panda-eyed and slurring her intimate pieces to camera), that even fellow contestants refer to her as "Messica". For the uninitiated, Love Is Blind is the No 1 trending show in the US, and its format is a deranged mashup of Blind Date, Love Island and Arranged, in which participants are stripped of access to the outside world (reality), sit in "pods" (cells), flirt through a wall and decide to marry each other "sight unseen". It's Pyramus and Thisbe set in an asylum.
But one can only imagine the clasped hands of delight when the producers encountered Jessica in the casting process: a swishy, hair-flicky blonde who, in her own words, needs to ease up on the booze. "Something I need to do better at knowing when to cut myself off," she said. (No doubt prompting cries across the British Isles of "Same!")
Initially the focus was on the mouth-full-of-helium voice she used to talk to men and an arresting habit of allowing her labrador to lap from her wine glass before returning it to her lips. But was it sinister that, in scene after alcohol-soaked scene, the bottle of champagne/wine/whisky/vodka slid into accessible reach? Or that she was interrogated at points when she had lips blue and pallor grey? The entire show is built around her hot-messy humiliation.
And what about the constant reminders that Jessica — at 34 — is the oldest of the group, with the strong implication that anyone unmarried at 34 must be either a commitment-phobe or defective, and that there is a 10-year age gap with her partner, Mark? And what about the number of close-ups to remind us of that? I wasn't surprised to read that Jessica thought, having watched the final edit, that she had been deliberately portrayed as "one-dimensional".