Imperfect Women Wasn’t About Friendship

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Lies between friends. Maybe not just the lies between each other, but the lies you keep to keep the relationship intact. Because some friendships aren't actually built on honesty. They're built on roles. I just finished watching this series Imperfect Women. And it is beyond just a drama. It is a case study how power and racialized power shapes intimacy between women. We really like to believe that our friendships are shaped outside of the constructs of race and power, but they aren't. They often absorb it and then hides all of the damage of it under the language that we call love. Guys, if you haven't already, go ahead, subscribe to my channel and let's get into my notes on women's intimate relationships inside racial hierarchy.

[00:01:04]The show makes something very clear from the very beginning that black proximity to privilege is not the same as truly possessing it. You can grow up in the same spaces with the same resources and in the same social circles and still be outranked, outpositioned, and outprotected.

[00:01:24]Because whiteness does not just operate through wealth, it operates through priority. So even when the black friend exists in the same class position, a poor blonde girl still outranks her when protection is needed. That is not about money or class. That is about hierarchy.

[00:01:45]Carrie Washington's character Eleanor falls right into the role of how black girls and women are expected to behave in high class powerful social circles.

[00:01:57]She does it over and over again throughout the series seamlessly. And that is not natural. That is training.

[00:02:06]She is over and over again the emotional container for everyone else. She is the moral anchor for their depravity. And somehow she is the one who can handle it all. And while other people who are supposed to have the same equal relationship get to stay soft, protected and untouched by consequence. And the show doesn't hide this. From the very beginning, they are dumping their personal problems on Carrie Washington's character while trying to somehow protect the other friend. How Carrie Washington is seen to others isn't as important as how they are perceived.

[00:02:50]Like one of the friends, um I'm trying not to give too many spoilers, but one of them is smoking a cigarette, but she doesn't want anyone to know that she's smoking. She sees her family coming, hands the cigarette over to Carrie Washington, and she carries the consequence of being the dirty smoker.

[00:03:08]Now, this is not innocent.

[00:03:12]This is exactly how hierarchy hides in relationships. It is literally transfer, transfer of risk, transfer of consequences, and transfer of imperfection. And Carrie Washington's character, Eleanor, accepts all of that willingly and over and over again as part of her training in this friend group. You see, the system does not need to announce the role. It just needs for you to accept it. And once you do, the relationship starts to feel natural, even if it's not equal. If one friend is the only one who can be seen as flawed and the other one remains clean, that is exactly how hierarchy maintains itself, not through big dramatic betrayals, through small repeatable transfers of risk. And one one of the realizations Carrie Washington's character had that I don't actually think she realized it in the way that I perceived it is that while she has been carrying all of their risks, consequences, their dirty deeds, and keeping their secrets from one another, they've been keeping a secret from her. The secrets that they keep from her are their secrets about her.

[00:04:36]While they have been allowing her to carry the risk and consequences and allowing her to absorb the cost of having clarity, they have their own secrets about who they think she is. Do you see how unequal and unclear this love between everyone really is? Being the moral shock absorber in these relationships with social and racial hierarchies never provide a full depth of love that you really deserve. Carrie Washington's character kept wanting to believe in these relationships. She had gotten so used to absorbing small little microaggressions over and over again in these relationships that instead of letting them redefine the quality of the people and the value that they had in her, she just stayed quiet. She absorbed how they saw her as imperfect because her personal life was messy. Carrie Washington's character, Eleanor, function within the system as the moral corrector and absorber of all of their secrets and indiscretions.

[00:06:01]Her secrets were used against her.

[00:06:04]Everyone knew that she had a longstanding crush on her friend's husband. Problematic enough. However, hierarchy come hierarchy meant that Eleanor needed to step aside for the poor blind girl who needed protecting. And she knew that she was more unlikely to be chosen in these circles anyway. And Eleanor did have protection. She just didn't like what protecting a black girl in these spaces looked like for her. The machine, the system used her secret for her to absorb blame that was coming down on a poor white man and she willingly stepped in position to make that possible. They used Eleanor's bodily autonomy, sexual freedom, and independence with her secret to help to help reframe a narrative that protected a white man. And then all of her life choices become into question. Why isn't this woman married? What does her sexual freedom really mean? She's kind of messy already because her position and a woman's bodily autonomy is always negotiated through perception. And the more control that a woman has over herself, the more the system wants to frame that control as instability. And that is exactly how the machine started working against Eleanor. And I think the uncomfortable truth when you start understanding these dynamics and how long these women go through this, the question isn't just why are they doing this? Why are they treating her this way, but why does she remain so available for them to do so? And this is how growing up in these hierarchies teach women what the cost is to have relationships, what normal looks like.

[00:08:16]Because you learn to love people based on what you have been taught to tolerate. People stay because they don't see the imbalance. So a lot of people don't leave these hierarchies not because they don't understand what's happening but because leaving means losing history, losing identity, losing the version of yourself that existed inside that dynamic, losing what you always thought was love. And that is why the system is so effective. It doesn't just structure relationships. They structure who you believe you are within them. And for a lot of people, losing that identity of who they created inside of these these systems will feel like a collapse of everything. This show works because it shows something very real, something that black women who have been navigating proximity to whiteness have experienced. There is an expectation.

[00:09:20]They need to be the strong one. the understanding one, the one who just gets it, but they're often deprioritized, overexposed, and underprotected by those same people. I think this show asks another question that we don't examine enough. What is love when it exists inside of hierarchy? Because if your relationship in a role is fixed and you're always the absorber and your protection is always negotiable, then what you're experiencing might not actually be love. It might just be dependency structure, a part of a function. Imperfect women isn't just about imperfect friendships. It's showing perfectly functioning hierarchies disguised as intimacy. and it is reflecting all of the racial social hierarchies that you experience in white supremacy social circles. And what's really scary is that same as in this show, everyone involved think that this is real. So, it's interesting to watch this these relationships and these interactions because they say that they imagine their whole lives together that this is love. Their souls were interconnected but they have so many secrets not just between each other but about each other. It just questions what love really means inside hierarchies.

[00:10:51]What is required of a relationship to keep certain loves intact? Maybe we don't really even have friendships in these things, just structure. Guys, if you haven't already, go ahead, subscribe to my channel. I'm planning on doing a indepth character relationship analysis um that I am going to post for members that I'm going to start that hopefully this week. So, um I'm really looking forward to diving deeper into these characters and sharing that information with you. And I have some other ideas that will just be membersonly things for a while. So subscribe to the channel and uh I look forward to the discussion in the comments. So chow chow for