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

by Anna Bogutskaya

Because to me, likeability means palatability. And specifically, how palatable these characters are to a patriarchal world that in many cases still like its women—both fictional and otherwise—to be supine and silent.

We are to be nice. To be good. To be soft and yielding. To say we like it when we absolutely don’t. To be grateful and gracious. To swallow our anger and resentment. We aren’t to resist or fight, attack, or confront. We shouldn’t violate the social codes and norms that have offered a blueprint—really, a straitjacket—for women for generations.

“Proper” or “ladylike,” among other gendered terms, are concepts imbued with the multitude of unspoken rules that women are expected to learn and abide by. You should be pretty, primped, and polite. Read: be fuckable enough to merit attention, but don’t enjoy the attention too much.

You should wear makeup and take care of yourself. Caution: not too much, lest you appear to be vain and superficial. You should be smart and well read. But beware: never disagree or have opinions that contradict or are more informed than any man’s. Be approachable and have a personality, lest you be branded basic. But, you know, not too much of a personality. Be girly—but not too feminine, because then you seem vapid. Be ambitious—but not so much that it makes men uncomfortable. Be nice—because, more than anything, you need to be liked. Smile—because you look prettier that way.

With every personal and professional rejection, every disappointment, every failure, I’d think of my perceived lack of likeability. Of course I was failing—I’d literally thrown away the rule book and failed to learn the rules.

The silent implication of being unlikeable is that it’s a free pass to be dismissed, disrespected, and disempowered. If you are deemed unlikeable, you have refused to be a part of the machine of femininity, so you are fair game. You can, and perhaps should, be punished, taught a lesson, put in your place. Unlikeable women—we are told by decades of pop culture—need a valid excuse to be so unlikeable, or else they need to be punished for going against the rules. Only a woman’s intense suffering can justify her unlikeability.

“There have been unruly women for as long as there have been boundaries of what constitutes acceptable ‘feminine’ behavior: women who, in some way, step outside of the boundaries of good womanhood.” While Petersen is talking about women in general, and women in the public sphere in particular, this applies to women on the screen too.

Movies are fantasies. They are, and always will be, an imaginary retreat. They’re a place to relax when I’m tired of trying to fit in. How can we relax, though, if even movies are feeding us a superhuman ideal?

We seek out the stories that validate us, that move us, that make us feel just a little bit better about our place in the world. When we see ourselves being punished onscreen, we take this as a lesson. We get used to seeing our suffering, and we internalize what we need to do to avoid it. Even though I threw away that rule book on how to be girl, I couldn’t escape the rules. Pop culture is the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. It’s our folklore. The manner in which cinema and television are made and received by audiences is a cultural thermometer, a reflection of a time and a place. It is also our framework for deciding what is acceptable, or normal, and is vital in forming our ideas of behaviors and social norms.

Pop culture has created and perpetuated the platform for these tropes and stereotypes to coalesce—but they are never set in stone. These tropes are in constant evolution, both fueled by and creating ideas around “acceptable” womanhood. They are cultural constraints placed on womanhood, supposedly for our own good, so we’re not led astray by “bad role models.”

Throughout the history of pop culture, we’ve seen the rise of unlikeable female characters, their demonization, and we are now living through an era of cautious acceptance, even trying to monetize the very idea of unlikeability in the same way pop culture monetized feminism. This rise is contemporaneous with an increased number of female creators (screenwriters, directors, producers, showrunners), an increase in the visibility of female critics (professional and amateur alike), and a new form of online fandom (social media, memes, merchandise). We’re just getting used to seeing unlikeable female characters take center stage and propel the narrative forward instead of being relegated as the supporting characters to difficult men.

The screen industries have been mostly dominated by men and whiteness; this means that male characters are considered to be the relatable ones and that whiteness is assumed to be the universal experience. Everyone in the audience who is not a man (and by “man” I mean, ordinarily, a white, cis, able-bodied, straight man) is meant to project themselves onto the screen, to find an entry point to connect to the story, all at the expense of their own experience. While flawed male characters have been rewarded and praised, entering the pantheon of cultural immortality, female characters plagued with flaws have been outliers.

These words I’m using are confrontational. Some of them are downright ugly. All of them have been used as insults, specific and gendered attacks designed to put down, dehumanize, and minimize women, to diminish our sense of self. I have been called some of these words myself, and I understand the weight they carry and how they are wielded against us, day in, day out. I chose these words deliberately to illustrate character archetypes that have tried to do the same.

This is not an act of reclamation but one of acknowledgment. Each of these tropes describes a woman who is stepping out of the norms of moral acceptability and appropriateness.

“Likeability,” as a term, is intrinsically linked to the entertainment industry and is quietly gendered. It’s not sexist in an obvious way, in a way that needs to be caveated with a side note on its “problematic” nature. And yet there are no synonyms for it that carry the same invisible weight. It’s not usually applied to men unless it’s as a positive. But when a woman is characterized as “unlikeable,” there’s a cold shudder of recognition. A little side-eye wrapped in fear. Like a secret code, the word “unlikeable” causes a specific tenseness. The word itself may not be gendered, but the layers of implications and connotations it carries are.

burden of likeability had so far been shouldered mostly by the female characters, and while the male protagonists were praised for their problematic or extreme complexities, complicated women were villainized, punished, or used as cultural warning signs.

Movies and television have a distinct pathway into existence that needs more than one voice. They are not ever the work of a sole person, no matter how much the auteur theory tries to convince us otherwise. Films and shows are made by committee; need to be sponsored by the industry in order to reach as many people as possible; feed from and into the star system; get press coverage, eyeballs, and awards; and garner other markers of success that will then enable their makers to move on to bigger things with more resources and more creative freedom. In the best-case scenario, there is an overarching creative visionary (usually the director, or the showrunner in the case of television), but it is nigh impossible to determine who is actually responsible for each individual choice that makes a film possible.

Narratives led by antiheroes make our relationship with the work that much more complicated—and that much more delicious. It makes the whole process of watching a piece of work an active conversation, a negotiation with ourselves as to what we’re willing to accept, what we relate to, and what it says about us. While the attributes that make up a hero are generally universal and aspirational—courage, honesty, integrity, selflessness—the antihero is a slippery figure who is both the hero’s opposite and also much more human.

Much has been written about the rise of the antihero over the last twenty-odd years, during which time TV series became prestigious cultural mainstays that hold a quartet of series featuring difficult men as their kingpins:

These shows would, in turn, inspire a whole slew of high-budget prestige shows like Ozark, Dexter, Mr. Robot, True Detective, House, and a pick’n’mix of other wannabe antihero-driven shows. But I’m not here to add to that conversation; there are plenty of excellent books and articles written about them and I don’t need to write more words about men who’ve got enough Reddit threads and podcasts dedicated to them.

But while their fictional hubbies were elevated to iconic status, there were hardly any pins or T-shirts being made with the likeness of Carmela Soprano, Skyler White, or Betty Draper. While entire books were written about the protagonists, the female characters in those shows were either dismissed, disliked, or downright hated.

It has always been quietly fascinating to me that while the big bad husbands (who were liars, cheaters, drug dealers, or straight-up murderers) became beloved pop culture icons and Funko Pop figurines,1 their wives, girlfriends, or partners were judged and smirked at. Was it because the evilness of the male antiheroes was too abstract, too big and dramatic to be seen as real? Or maybe it was because we wanted them to be bad, because being bad meant they were interesting and watchable? And yet, the reaction to their female counterparts seemed to defy this logic. If they stepped out of line, they were lambasted by audiences for allowing, accepting, or indulging the bad behavior of their partners. Why was it so much easier to hate the more quotidian immorality of the antiheroines? While audiences hope that the male antihero might eventually improve, their female counterpart is irredeemable. As these totem shows have continued to expand their reach beyond their original runs, especially once they arrived on popular streaming services, these characters have also been revisited and reappraised as richly flawed antiheroines, trapped in some ways, complicit in others.

have embraced the antiheroine, the unlikeable female character, and, in fact, increasingly build narratives around her. Female unlikeability has become a marketing tool. The once negative tropes have been expanded and deepened to create memorable, complicated, intensely human characters. Bitches, Trainwrecks, and Sluts are dominating pop culture. Creators have embraced the messy reality of being a woman, expanded on distinctively gendered shades of cruelty, and run with it, telling stories placed in fantasy worlds, contemporary scenarios, and imagined alternatives to our world.

The 2010s did not invent unlikeable, unruly women. There were plenty before. But we did, finally, develop the language to understand and articulate what social tensions these characters were tapping into, and we had the access to platforms to voice this.

The early days of Hollywood were dominated by women. It might be surprising to hear this now, after years of dismal statistics about the representation and well-being of women in the screen industries, but initially a good number of early Hollywood screenwriters, editors, and directors were female. Women wrote almost half of the outlines of all the scripts produced in early Hollywood.

There was a desire among performers to choose and control the material they were working with, how they were presented to the public, and how much money they were making from it. When the stars were dissatisfied with the roles that were written for them, they wrote the scripts themselves (or hired other women to do it), directed, and even started production companies.

Hollywood was being forged, with women right in the thick of it producing stories and attracting crowds to this new, exciting place called the cinema. Film stars were goddesses of the silver screen, and the newly formed industry was just figuring out how to use them. Clara Bow, an early silent film star who made a film called It, became the first “it girl.”2 The blond Jean Harlow was the first bombshell of the screen. Joan Crawford was a star created by and for the public (literally, her name came from a magazine competition), and her public persona evolved as she aged to satisfy her public.

Silent Hollywood stars like Pola Negri and Theda Bara embodied the vamp persona that was alluring, dangerous, and always presented as female. They were sexually dominating, their sexuality overpowering and even (“vamp” being short for “vampire”) deadly.

Hollywood imported actresses like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich and explicitly capitalized on their sexuality, their European je ne sais quoi, their every move flirting with queerness and implying that they were more hedonistic than their American counterparts. Hollywood made their natural beauty otherworldly with strategic lighting and leveraged the acceptable exoticism of their lightly accented speech.

Code, a literal list of all the big no-nos of cinema, was predictably obsessed with sexual purity, traditional values, and marriage, and deeply informed by racism and misogyny. The rules stipulated the subjects that could not, under any circumstance, appear onscreen, including profanity, sexual perversion, and ridiculing of the clergy.4 The Code existed to enforce a very limited idea of morality whereby any character who dared to transgress any heteronormative ideas around gender, sexuality, family, and morality could only be shown onscreen as a cautionary tale.

Of course, writers and filmmakers would find ways to include subtext in their work, but the damaging legacy of this Code cannot be overstated. Even beyond film scholarship, it doesn’t take much to see how the banning of any display of nonheterosexual love or attraction had a ripple effect that persists to this day, when we still have headlines that praise film studios for “introducing their first gay character.”5 Consider why we are still having debates about whether it’s okay for a female character to show sexual agency onscreen, whether it sets a bad example, whether talk of lubrication is too dirty for public consumption (but cum jokes are A-okay6).

With the Code being enforced, Hollywood films entered an era of symbolism and subtext. The forties and fifties would birth the femme fatale trope, an untrustworthy woman who used her beauty to seduce, trick, and even murder men for money. The femme fatale is synonymous with film noir, a term devised by French film critics to amalgamate the postwar thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s that centered morally complex detectives, devious women, and dangerous criminals. These films were visually moody, as morally ambiguous as the times that spawned them. They were tragedies masquerading as potboilers, and in their darkest of hearts were questions about goodness and morality, these notions having been put through the ringer during World War

These characters would be immensely sensual, mysterious, and alluring. They often posed as distressed or put-upon to attract the help of the man they were targeting, weaponizing their femininity. The idea of a devious woman who uses her beauty for nefarious, greedy, or murderous purposes is one that has been traced back to early myths:

The femme fatale was always coded as a warning sign to other women: this is how you’re not supposed to behave, and this is the punishment you’ll endure if you cross the line. It visually coded female sexuality as something fearsome—at best contained, and at worst punished.

These women didn’t want a man; they wanted success and recognition. Their punishment was loneliness or insanity, or both. These women were driven mad by wanting too much and, pointedly, by aging. They had passed their shelf life of social and sexual relevance, so they must either fit inside their designated box or be driven mad. Interestingly, only a few decades later a new genre would rise, alternately called “hagsploitation” or “psycho biddy,” which would give a second wind to the lagging careers of some of classic Hollywood’s greatest actresses in genre films of varying quality that all had the same premise: old women are scary.8

Continuing the tradition of pathologizing horniness, there were characters who, despite the so far well-enforced Production Code, were telegraphed as deeply sexual beings whose desires overwhelmed them and often led them astray.

Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola all made their name with raw, angry films anchored by frustrated antiheroes. These films didn’t really care much for their female characters. They were often paragons of virtue, objects of desire, or helpless victims, there to be saved to redeem the morally compromised protagonist.

In her book Backlash, Susan Faludi talks about these films as portraits not of female madness but of the crumbling of an old-fashioned institution: “Marriage, not the woman, is the patient under analysis in women’s films of the seventies, and the dialogue probes the economic and social inequalities of traditional wedlock.” The Hollywood formula was coming undone, as were the female leads in these films. While the fallen women of the previous decades were still clinging to the illusion of respectable womanhood, driving themselves insane trying to live up to it, the madwomen of the seventies were showing a raw vulnerability.

And so, the nineties were the second golden age of unlikeable women. It was the high point of the erotic thriller, wherein sex and death were intertwined (usually in the form of a gorgeous and dangerous woman). It was the era of the neo-femme fatale, now with a much more explicit sexuality. Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) was the bisexual writer who may or may not also be a murderer in the box office smash Basic Instinct (1992). Bridget Gregory (Linda Fioretino) is the greedy, ice-cold femme fatale who goes on the run with a big stack of cash in The Last Seduction (1994). Madonna played a woman who gets sued for being so good at sex that the men she sleeps with literally die of pleasure in Body of Evidence (1994).

Thanks to the boom of indie filmmaking in the nineties, we had a wide range of heroic female characters, both on television (medical doctor and FBI special agent Dana Scully in The X-Files; the formidable warrior Xena on a path of redemption in Xena: Warrior Princess; Buffy the cheerleader chosen to fight vampires and other ghouls in Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and on the big screen (the rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling, who manages to connect with suave serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs).

Part of the independent filmmaking boom of this decade was in radically feminist filmmaking. Although a lot of these titles did not become cultural mainstays in the way that Reservoir Dogs (1992) or Desperado (1995) did, they pushed the boundaries of the sort of women films were being made about.

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).

The noughties were a battleground for actresses whose offscreen identities blended with or contradicted their onscreen roles, with new millennium bombshells like Megan Fox being equated to Sluts, former child star Lindsay Lohan mocked and ogled as a very public Trainwreck, and way before we started to reconcile just how ingrained this internalized misogyny really was, we relished any coverage of Britney Spears’s mental health troubles. Pop culture at this time loved to relish, profit from, and mock female entertainers for sport—but it had a real problem with any unlikeable women onscreen. Being messy, it seems, was only profitable if it was off-screen.

It’s tricky to look back at that decade in film culture because so much of it seems be a swirl composed of the last breaths of nineties culture and the nascent stages of the dominating form of filmmaking of the 2010s onward, that is, superhero franchises and IP-based filmmaking. The romantic comedy—which experienced a cultural and qualitative heyday in the nineties, with stars like Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan dominating the genre before passing off the baton to Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, and Jennifer Lopez—favored a successful, clumsy, but lovable protagonist, very much the “girly girl” with girly professions and girly concerns.

This millennial brand of badassery was in stark contrast with the other character staple of this decade: the manic pixie dream girl. Perhaps in direct contradiction to the buxom videogame vibe of the action heroine and the midtier rom-com protagonist, the quirky female lead was intended to be feminine but not girly, an adorable oddball, a side character elevated to main character status.

The manic pixie dream girl became, much to Rubin’s chagrin, a trope that would dominate “alternative” noughties culture. Instead of latching onto the inherent misogyny that Rubin was pointing out, it became an aesthetic.

The manic pixie dream girl was designed to be a pliable, likeable throwback to polite, docile femininity presented in new, quirky packaging.

“Unlikeable” is code. It’s code for “fair game.” If a woman is unlikeable, she is stepping out of bounds. Which makes it fair game to decimate her socially, emotionally, or physically. Likeability gives us permission to annihilate women who don’t bend to its rules. At the worst, our reaction to unlikeable female characters is one of disgust, rejection, and even violence. At its best, it’s empathy and understanding.

Likeability onscreen is a tightrope that writers, directors, producers, and (mostly) actors must walk on. It’s also a catch-all term that is used to describe all those female characters who transgress as much as one rule of polite femininity.

The entertainment industry is built on monetizing people’s desire to watch other people. As with many things in the entertainment industry, likeability is actually code for marketability. The real question beneath “Is she likeable enough?” is “Can we sell her to people?” We measure this with money and viewership. Box office, audience numbers, and press coverage are the industry’s markers of success.