In some ways, True Detective is a great love story. At the beginning of True Detective , we are introduced to Marty's first mistress, Lisa Alexis Daddario , a court reporter who, as Rust later observes, pretty much looks like a younger, bustier version of Mrs. As critics have argued all over the 'net, True Detective is either infuriatingly, brutishly misogynistic The New Yorker or purposefully misogynistic, and therefore, thoughtfully dismissive of its female characters Slate.
Regardless of intention, creator Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Fukunaga have made a blanket statement regarding their purview on female sexuality. And it's pretty judgmental. A woman seeking sex is playing with fire. Over the course of the show's blistering eight episodes, we see a a variety of sexual situations, but none that resemble a realistically intimate moment. On True Detective , a woman who succumbs to sexual advances or seeks physical satisfaction is asking for humiliation, dismissal, or emotional ruin.
If she wasn't asking for it, the show seems to suggest, she shouldn't have worn such a short skirt. Whether we're privy to a spectacularly nubile young woman throwing herself at the paunchy, married Marty or a mentally disturbed woman begging her own deranged half-brother to "make flowers" on her, the women of True Detective have a uniformly peculiar relationship with the opposite sex.
Even Maggie—who, based on her interactions with Detectives Gilbough and Papania has enough agency to withhold information, use deductive reasoning, and even drop the occasional feminist pronouncement regarding the uniform idiocy of men—falls victim to a familiar male gaze sex trope.
After she's all but gotten a confession out of her philandering husband, Marty begins to whimper about being "all fucked up. Fucked up things. He's having a hard time reconciling his professional life and his work life. He's just, hell, he's just having a really hard time, Maggie! She can see the hurt in his eyes, and the evidence of too many long nights on the underarms of his threadbare wife beater, and feels compelled to soothe his pain with a flurry of passionate kisses.
