The Mindy Project: Asymmetrical Boobs, Knee Fat and Sex Without Nudity

Tuesday night’s Mindy Project included a brief mention of the show’s long-awaited partnership with dating app Tinder, but the meat of the episode was devoted to Mindy Lahiri’s admission that she’d never let a boyfriend truly see her naked before.

Unless the show plans to do another episode about Tinder this month, the one joke about Tinder – about how Mindy uses it the wrong way – seems like it’s all we’re going to get from the Mindy Project/Tinder mashup (unless you use Tinder and would like to run into these characters during your quest to get laid/meet your soulmate).

But the rest of the episode was far more interesting anyway. As seen set up in the clip above, Mindy’s anxiety about her boyfriend potentially seeing her in a bikini means that she ends up working out with Danny, which of course results in them accidentally seeing each other naked (actually, he sees her naked twice). While seeing any coworker naked accidentally is mortifying – especially if you harbor secret sexual tension with them – Mindy gets particularly upset because she misinterprets Danny and thinks he has criticisms about her body.

Mindy and Danny’s banter culminates in Mindy admitting that she doesn’t want Danny to give her feedback about her body because she’s heard it all before:

For the record, there is nothing you can criticize about this situation that I haven’t already heard from every mean girl for my entire life…I know that I could lose 15 pounds. I know that I don’t have this perfect skinny hot body like all the girls that you date. I know that one of my boobs is crazily bigger than the other. I know that I have upper knee fat. And I know that I have a scar on my back that looks like a swastika. You don’t think that’s come up every single time I’ve dated a Jewish guy?

But Danny clarifies that he wasn’t going to say anything critical. “I get it, you’re self-conscious,” he said. “But you have no reason to be. All I was going to say is don’t suck in your stomach so much. It makes you look nervous and frankly, a little constipated.”

“You’re a woman and that’s good, look like a woman,” he added.

Mindy’s excess of confidence is the thing about her that people hate or love; some find it unrealistic and annoying, while others think it’s refreshing to have a female character like her on television. Whatever your stance, it was nice to see a softer side of her. It’d be unrealistic for her Hollywood-obsessed character, who often defends her curvier body, to not ever be hard on herself. It was also a big deal for Mindy – a woman who won’t even let her boyfriends see her naked – to hear positive things about herself from a man she’s clearly attracted to. So while we don’t need her to turn into someone who bemoans the sorry state of her ass all the time, her having a touching moment with Danny that also gave her personality some depth was a pleasant surprise.

This type of character development could have come by way of a different growth experience, but the fact that it was about her body – which she and others often remark on – was a choice that made sense. It was also a welcome change for a show that, until recently, often felt like it has no real purpose or directive.

Also we learned that Danny is a fan of a full bush, which Mindy remarks is “very European” especially “for a man that hates Europe.”