Unlikeable Female Characters: Flawed Female Characters and the Power They Hold

by Anna Bogutskaya

In the early 2000s, film got glossy and television went in the opposite direction. The rise of reality TV created strange mash-ups of real people and personas, the “famous for being famous” era dominated by Paris Hilton, who we now know intentionally created a bimbo persona to appeal to a wider audience, including talking in a high-pitched voice an octave above her own and leaning into the dumb blond archetype we’re all too familiar with since Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe (i-D cheekily crowned her “the greatest performance artist of our time”). It wouldn’t be fair to call Paris Hilton an actress, but she certainly put on a performance, which in turn influenced the slick, girly girl style of female heroines we got in noughties cinema, including the subversive bimbo-with-brains Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) in Legally Blonde (2001).