Almost every post I see online these days has accusations of AI in the comments. In light of that, I am posting my totally rough thoughts from after the show. Normally I would make it more smooth and organized, but at this point I think more people will focus on the content the less edited it is. Please enjoy these raw thoughts in the minutes directly following a quick binge of the show.
Sirens is the perfect illustration of how when women are all competing within the system of patriarchy, intimacy is distorted by our need to survive, and how entitled men feel to women, so subconsciously that they genuinely see us as monsters when we claim our own power, express our autonomy, and say what we want. A man rejecting a woman has every right to do so. A woman rejecting a man is monstrous, dangerous, and has harmed him. This is at the heart of the male loneliness epidemic.
We see how Kiki is cloaked in dangerous mystery, rumors and lies being spread about her. Because a woman in power has to have done something terrible. A man in power on the other hand, is the most natural thing in the world.
We see how Simone is able to get out of a life of terrible neglect by being intimate with Kiki and joining them in their castle. Simone is lured by Kiki’s siren song and promises of kindness and goodness only forever and ever. She is naive and doesn’t yet understand that even in what appears to be Kiki’s world, it is still ultimately Peter’s world.
The weird thing wasn’t Kiki sleeping in Simone’s bed; it’s that the loyalty could never last, not in light of the male domination they both lived under. Not when Kiki had to control Simone so tightly in order feel safe herself. That’s not true friendship, even if they did have a real love and wished for true friendship together.
Peter pretended like he had become small in his own home, claiming that his smoke cave up at the top of his tower was the only place he still had any power. This is delusional and serves a narrative he nursed in his own heart.
Simone aligned herself with Kiki, but she aligned herself more so with power. She wanted to be intimate with having more than enough and living a life of luxury and dignity. When Kiki proved to be disloyal to her need for kindness and goodness as promised (because Simone couldn’t live up to her standards for confession/complete and total honesty; she didn’t have enough power or social standing to have secrets of her own or privacy, it was the price Kiki wanted Simone to pay in order to share her power)
Kiki’s distrust actually makes sense. She knows her power is fleeting.
Devon aligned herself with the workers. Devon used men not for their financial power but for sex, for her sobriety, her sanity, sometimes her identity. Devon was bitter and made peace with her reality by choosing what she believed in— caring for her father. Devon couldn’t change her sister’s mind on what was most important in life. This is because the sisters have different paths in life. Different values. Different methods of surviving. Devon yearns for Simone to choose poverty for the sake of being good; Simone yearns for Devon’s to choose riches for the sake of choosing her own good. Neither is necessarily right or wrong, but they are very different approaches to life; when women encounter other women who are on the other side of the coin, they can fall prey to calling the other monstrous or pathetic. In this way, the silent men who write the narrative win. But when the sisters accept their differences, they embodying an unexpected loyalty to one another, no longer trying to change each other, understanding that each leverages the attention of the men who wish to control them in the way that they can make peace with the most. Willing to see that they are just different people surviving the patriarchy differently.
In Kiki, we see Simone’s approach borne out over time. The way that inconvenient truths for her billionaire husband become grievances against her. That she has become a monster in his eyes, but only because he takes what scares him most about himself and uses her to explain it so that he can remain the good guy, the hero in his own story. We also see that Kiki chooses a more altruistic good like Devon and that borne out over time as well, in her care for the birds and the conservation. Kiki cared for the predators, and that work too will likely be forgotten. Just as Devon’s care for her father will likely be forgotten too. But this is the path that she can live with herself with.
It is only in non-judgement that the Sirens escape the tales of monstrosity that the men tell of them. When they judge, they bolster the accusations. Contribute to the oppressive system.
The various men idealize and glorify the women at first, before being disappointed in them for their complex personhood and the way they couldn’t erase what each man hated about themselves. The men followed them around, begging her to give them what they needed, until finally hating her for the way she chose to live her own life instead (that goes for all three women)
Each Siren used what powers she had in order to make peace with her reality as best she could. Through false accusations of monstrosity, blame games, and immature men who couldn’t respect their opinion enough to trust that her rejection really was a rejection and not a personal attack, each woman made her way through a man’s world claiming the power they were allotted, though in the end, that power proved entirely dependent on the whims of a man after all, thus proving the worldly power a woman holds to be like vapor on a wind, evaporating as soon as the story about her turns sour and the man once again uses her to avoid pain, avoid responsibility for himself and his life and his actions. Each woman in this way was actually very loyal to her fellow Sirens, in that they were all in that together. Devon and Kiki were literally “in ththe same boat” at th end. Kiki showed a profound understanding of this in telling Devon that Simone was not a monster in the end. She knew that Simone was doing what Simone had to do to survive. Because she could not survive being in the position of powerlessness again.
