A single female friend is feeling uncomfortably targeted by Netflix. The content categories the streamer is now offering on her homepage include Grown-ass Women Living Their Best Lives (sample content: Sex and the City) and Sad Girl Fall (Gossip Girl). It feels a bit patronising – like an acquaintance loudly “go girl-ing” your lifestyle choices without anyone asking for their opinion in the first place. It’s pedestrian, too. “Where are my Period Drama Sluts?” she complains. She’s not alone: social media users have expressed their bemusement at being offered Sad Girl Fall viewing.
It made me and my friend wonder whether Netflix gives men similarly dopey, stereotypical suggestions. Snooping at my sons’ Netflix profiles, I was relieved neither is being targeted by any Angry Man Autumn content (though given how much lengthy black-and-white auteur cinema they’ve made me sit through, I doubt they’re enjoying the Watch Together for Older Kids offerings of tween sitcoms). We started brainstorming: I came up with It’s Got Vin In, It’s a Win and It Doesn’t Count As Crying If There’s Sport. She suggested Lasers and Explosions and Art Flicks for Mansplaining. Netflix, call us.
There are apparently more than 36,000 of these secret category codes, ranging from Twisted Christmas to Lavish Reality Lifestyles, so I’m quite offended not to merit any weirdly specific and vaguely insulting suggestions. Where are the Semi-Pornographic Haute Cuisine to Devour As You Fork Up Freezer-Burnt Falafel and Shows Stupid Enough to Pierce Your Hormonal Fog categories I need and deserve?
I think perhaps the algorithm was bamboozled by whoever used my account to watch terrifying horror movies after I failed to log out in an Airbnb last spring. Or possibly my husband impatiently pushing buttons in search of the honeyed tones and chore jacket of his hero, Kevin McCloud, has caused it to default to factory settings? The other, less palatable but more likely, option is that Netflix has decided I am tragically basic. My We think You’ll Love These (subtext: you loser) category is now offering Top Gun: Maverick and a James Blunt documentary. How rude.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
