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

by Anna Bogutskaya

It’s a flawed formula that’s rooted in bias—and the history of pop culture has shown us who’s allowed to be perceived as difficult, unruly, or unlikeable and get away with it. With the sheer absence of unlikeable women of color until quite recently, being unlikeable is still mostly the territory of cis, skinny, conventionally attractive white women. The anger or wit of Black women has been routinely transformed into comic relief or used to feed the damaging stereotype of the Angry Black Woman.

The unlikeable female character is the antithesis of the strong female character. The strong female lead is perfect—and perfectly boring. It is a gilded cage used not just by films themselves but by the industry who tried to capitalize on the rise of pop culture feminism. The love for this trope, which underpinned mainstream pop feminism, is almost gone now. The strong female character is another reflection of a ridiculous binary of good and bad, empowering or disempowered, that erases all nuance and shades of gray. Women are complicated, and we want our characters to reflect that, to be allowed space to breathe. Guide books on how to be a “good” woman belong in the bin, along with the repressive, overidealized versions of womanhood that have been fed to us for decades through our screens, our books, and our music.

While the industry has worried about whether they can make money from them, unlikeable female characters have revolutionized pop culture. They have opened the door to the gamut of human experiences. They are always too much in one way or another: too horny, too ambitious, too loud, too smart, too drunk, too messy, too crazy, too sad. Seeing them onscreen opens up the possibility of women being more than just the #strongfemalecharacter. They can be flawed, malicious, self-serving, ruthless, hapless characters—but ultimately unlikeable female characters are liberating, because they are not meant to be seen as morality lessons within their stories. They are not perfect, perhaps they are not even good, and they don’t need to be—because the expectation for all women to be good, to be strong, to be nice is an oppressive one.

There is something awe inspiring about a truly coldhearted woman onscreen. It’s the contradiction of desires that makes her so appealing and reviled, simultaneously. She’s everything you’ve been told not to be—but presented in the gorgeous wrapping you’ve been told you should aspire to. Women, we’re told, are—not should be, but are—naturally warm, giving, kind, and understanding. What should we make, then, of the beautiful aberration that is a cold, blackhearted bitch?

This type of character has always been shocking, not so much unlikeable as immoral, but she has always had agency and been the driving force of the narrative. She is self-serving and willful and ruthless in the pursuit of her own agenda. She is confident, proud, and in control, calculating, and not above harming others in the pursuit of her own goals.

The Bitch really burst on the scene in 1930s Hollywood, before the Production Code took away all the fun.

Watching the restored, uncut version of Baby Face today, it remains striking. It doesn’t fit into a neat box of empowering narratives around women, and it wrestles with being a text about a woman’s self-determination and a cautionary tale of how mercenary working-class women can be. It’s impossible, and unfair to separate the film from its context.

Every single trope, every single unlikeable, antagonistic, or unruly female character owes a debt of gratitude to Bette Davis. With a career spanning six decades, Davis became known for playing difficult women onscreen and cultivated a legendarily prickly offscreen persona. Trained as a stage actress, after moving to Hollywood she worked consistently, never quite breaking through and being constantly reminded that she was not (sigh) hot enough.

In each of these roles, the femininity of the character—whether it was a tool or being questioned—was a key entry point into the role. While Hollywood didn’t quite know what to do with her, Davis’s fearlessness in portraying so many shades of womanhood made her adept at portraying women who were, in their most basic interpretation, deliciously bitchy but fundamentally trying to navigate a life intent on reducing them to the status of “woman” and little more.

The Bitch is acutely aware of her status as a woman and where she stands in the social landscape. She understands the limitations and implications of her womanhood and the inherently unfair rules of a patriarchal society—and she plays the game to get what she wants. These women know they live in a world designed for men. They’re not trying to change the system, they’re just trying to play it to their advantage. The Bitch weaponizes traditional notions of femininity and is able to use men’s desires against them. There is no room for collective thinking in her—she’s never pursuing a greater good or the betterment of her situation

for other women—it’s all entirely self-serving.

This self-interest can take the form of greed or pride. In Milos Forman’s 1988 adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons, the Marquise de Merteuil, played gorgeously by Glenn Close, is fully aware of the rules of power and high society—and how they play out differently for men and women. From the very first moment we meet her, she is admiring herself and displaying great self-control and self-satisfaction, saying all the right things and fooling everyone around her. She revels in her power over men and the stupidity of others.

“Women are obliged to be far more skillful than men,” she says. “You can ruin our reputation and our life with a few well-chosen words. So of course I had to invent not only myself but ways of escape no one has ever thought of before. And I’ve succeeded because I’ve always known I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own.”

Marquise de Merteuil is a virtuoso of deceit. Her control extends to her body, how she presents herself, and her voice. She has invented herself, skillfully, quietly, in full view of others. She listened and learned, playing a game that she has rigged in her favor.

Watching Close play her is like watching a python wrap itself around its prey, waiting until the right moment to squeeze the breath out of it. It’s electrifying and erotic. The shift is almost imperceptible until it’s right there on the screen, aflame in Valmont’s face. When Valmont challenges her, pinning her against the wall and demanding sex, she reminds him: “I’m better at this than you are.” The Marquise never marries (“despite a bewildering amount of offers,” she says, flexing) because she cannot tolerate being ordered around by a man. It’s the only time she raises her voice.

Like the Marquise de Merteuil and Bridget Gregory, the Bitch is an expert at playing with people’s expectations of her, and of women in general, to her advantage. However, there is also a tradition of punishing onscreen bitches in order to show that their behavior is inappropriate at best and immoral at worst. Bridget is one of the rare examples of an unlikeable, unrepentant female character that gets away scot-free after conning and manipulating her way out of every sticky situation.

Her machinations, her bitchiness, have been revealed. She takes in all the boos, then silently and softly turns around to leave, stumbling briefly. In the last shot of the film, the camera slowly zooms in on the Marquise’s face. It is quiet; there’s no music, no booing. It’s only the Marquise and her reflection, her poise intact but shaken, taking off her mask literally and figuratively. Her jewels come off, then her makeup. Her eyes are downcast, and her face fades into black. While she is alive, the Marquise has been socially annihilated, and she knows it.

It’s very difficult for us to accept self-interest in women. It’s deeply tied to the notion of surviving and prospering in a man’s world. Because of this, the Bitch is often presented as a morality lesson. An ambitious woman is a greedy woman, and an ambitious woman is any woman who wants more than what she’s been doled out by the men around her. She must be punished for her greed and willfulness.

In women, ambition and greed are interchangeable and equally dirty words. Writer Julianna Baggott writes about female ambition as “suspicious,” “selfish,” and “ugly.” If a woman is ambitious, she’s “going against society’s virtuous goal for her: motherhood.” If she’s a mother and ambitious, then she must be sacrificing her children’s well-being to serve herself. That bitch.

There is a long-running tradition in cinema of punishing female ambition. Or at the very least, of taking it down a peg.

Miranda Priestley, the film tells us, for all her power, is still to be pitied because she failed as a woman.

The film is structured as a mockumentary, forefronting the dark comedy, but Nicole Kidman’s central performance is chilling in the way she turns her seductiveness on and off depending on what she’s trying to get. Roger Ebert wrote:

Her clothes, her makeup, her hair, her speech, her manner, even the way she carries herself (as if aware of the eyes of millions) are all brought to a perfect pitch. Her Suzanne is so utterly absorbed in being herself that there is an eerie conviction, even in the comedy. She plays Suzanne as the kind of woman who pities us—because we aren’t her, and you know what? We never will be.

The real bitch in both these films isn’t the boss from hell, it’s capitalism, and the idea that women must compete against one another if they ever dream of succeeding. These scenes are betrayals. I want to see my bitches prevail. Perhaps this is why the Bitch is so watchable, because she lets us live out our most ambitious fantasies. Fantasies of busy, glamorous lives, of movie professions that seem out of reach—and that are always presented as a choice: you either want the glamorous career, or you want to be happy. You can’t have both.

It’s on TV that female ambition has been allowed to thrive, with characters that are doctors like Christina Yang (Gray’s Anatomy), lawyers like Patty Hewes (Damages) and Diane Lockhart (The Good Fight), high-powered consultants like Olivia Pope (Scandal), or TV producers like Quinn King and Rachel Goldberg (UnREAL). The extended timeframe of television allows these characters to become three-dimensional beings, with their ambition explored in its many thorny angles. Most of the pop culture images of successful women we see show us their ambition as the source of their failings elsewhere.

Female ambition has never been more de rigueur than it was in the period between 2014 and 2017, when the term “girlboss” rose to brief pop culture prominence as a millennial take on girl power rhetoric, packaged, merchandised, and hashtagged in chalky pink and neon before being spit out shortly after as white feminism’s attempt to make bare-faced capitalism seem like social activism.

While the real-life phenomena is rooted in powerful business women’s aspirational rhetoric that’s only slightly more complex than “You can do it, bestie; be your bossy self,” the girlboss era started and ended with the same story: Sophia Amoruso’s memoir #Girlboss and the Netflix series based on said memoir.

Ambitious women need not always be successful—or even particularly talented—either. Just look at Shiv Roy, the evolution of the Bitch into a new, deliciously entertaining arena: the female flop. In Succession, Shiv (Sarah Snook) is the only daughter of media mogul Logan Roy, and at the beginning of the series appears to be disinterested in the succession war that’s going on between her father and her brothers. She believes herself to be the smartest of the siblings and, at first, we’re led to believe that too.

Shiv is never presented to us as a good person (everyone on Succession is objectively a terrible human being; it’s a sliding scale of awfulness), but compared to her brothers (the screwy Kendall, knucklehead bon vivant Roman, and deluded aspiring politico Connor), she seemed, at first, the most level-headed of the Roy clan. However, Shiv is just as much of a flop as her brothers. Smart enough to see her own mistakes, but not smart enough to avoid making them, her job throughout the first season is, ironically, to manage the likeability of a female political candidate.

While the first season sold Shiv to us as the most liberal and progressive thinking of the Roy clan, perhaps untouched by their moral murkiness, she shows herself to actually be just as corrupt when she helps cover up decades of shady dealings and rampant sexual abuse at Waystar Royco, tapping into the exact same language of victim blaming that is synonymous with wider rape culture. When needed, Shiv performs a welcoming, understanding version of herself: she approaches the whistleblower cautiously, takes her shoes off, complains about her father (Shiv Roy, she’s just like us!). The character in itself is a take on the girlboss narrative that had been sold to us only a few years prior. Shiv’s femaleness both hinders and aids her. Despite being born and raised in an environment of rampant greed, wealth, and power, Shiv is still expected to put other (men’s) interests ahead of her own.

As she fully enters the corporate rat race, confident that she is going to be the successor, the punishment for her ambition takes on an egregious, nasty taste. At no point are we meant to like Shiv, but I can’t help but recognize the particular flavor of the microaggressions directed her way. Even her father’s (relative, very relative) patience with his fucked-up sons is significantly more than he has for her. On the surface, and on the surface only, she is getting all the things she wants. She is anointed the smartest child by her father. She gets a fancy-sounding job, president of domestic operations. She gets to ride the private jets and, on occasion, even has her father’s ear. Yet she is mocked for being overeager and chastised by Logan for being annoying (“Stop buzzing in my fucking ear!” he yells at her). Shiv’s abasement at the hands of her father, her brothers, and other Waystar executives cannot be separated from her femaleness.

It’s a clever devolution of the Bitch: she appears to have the drive, self-confidence, and agency, but she fails at everything she sets out to do. Shiv’s downfall becomes her own hubris and lack of self-awareness, her desperate need to be the smartest person in the room, which makes her overlook everyone else’s interests.

The most important thing about the Bitch is agency. These characters are not passive participants in the story but rather initiators of the action. They plot, they scheme, they make the moves and are drivers of the story—whether we know from the beginning or not.

In any other show, at any other time, Shiv would’ve been a character in the vein of Alexis Carrington or Theresa, a powersuit-wearing shark. The layered, caustic writing of the show and Sarah Snook’s performance—the devastating detail of each smirk, each wince, each eye roll—elevate Shiv Roy into one of the most fascinating antiheroines of recent pop culture by letting us spend so much time next to her and by allowing her to be a failure, a Bitch in her flop era. Her ambition is not her downfall, her arrogance is. Shiv, just like her brothers, craves power so much that she doesn’t actually wield the power she already has.

Unlikeable characters fuck with the audience. They’re constantly asking us: Do you like me? Do you fear me? Do you want to be me? Do you want to get rid of me? These roles, when embodied by women, play on the star persona and screen charisma of the actress more than with male performers. It’s not surprising that many actresses refuse to play unlikeable, or unredeemable, characters—even if successful, it might be damaging to their careers. There is an industry-wide awareness of how strangely difficult it is for audiences to separate the woman from the character. Other actresses, of course, seek these types of characters out (Davis, Stanwyck, Fiorentino). They are meatier roles. And this is why the Bitch is inextricably linked with the power of the performer who embodies her.

Because it’s always a question of power. Despite talent, beauty, and success, actresses have to consciously tiptoe around the old-fashioned expectations of likeability both onscreen and off. There is spitting distance between being a bitch onscreen and being branded “difficult” offscreen.

it. Fiorentino, like many other actresses before and after her, was branded “difficult” and that was that. She’s never spoken publicly about what really happened or why she stopped acting, whether the roles dried up or there were industry politics involved. The label of “difficult woman” is notoriously, painfully obtuse. But once it’s there, it’s almost impossible to unpick. Lopez continues: “The ‘bitch’ persona started to take hold, situating her as an actress men would have to break down or chip away at.”

Lena Headey (who played Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones from 2011 until 2019) has spoken about the bile poured on her by fans of the show. Talking to Time magazine in 2017, she explained about how this reaction changed as the seasons of Game of Thrones progressed: “I get people saying what a great performance, and that’s obviously a very nice thing to hear. But it’s changed a little bit, because at the beginning, people were like [in American accent] ‘Oh my God, you’re such a bitch!’”

WHO GETS TO BE A BITCH There’s been something that has permeated the examples I’ve brought to the forefront so far: these women that play the Bitch, most of them are young and all of them are white. Most of the time, they are also rich (or aspire to be).

“The prevalence of straight white women serves to highlight an ugly truth: that the difference between cute, acceptable unruliness and unruliness that results in ire is often as simple as the color of a woman’s skin, who she prefers to sleep with, and her proximity to traditional femininity.” Petersen is not talking strictly about film and TV here, but the same notion applies.

It would be on television, though, and not the big screen, that a Black woman would be first allowed to be as nasty as her white counterpart and benefit from it. Circling back to Dynasty, alongside Alexis, her archnemesis Dominique Deveraux and the actress who plays her, Diahann Carroll, are incredibly important. In a filmed interview from 1984, Carroll declared in no uncertain terms: “I want to be the first Black bitch on television.” Carroll called her manager and got them to “get the word around and call Aaron Spelling” to ensure her casting.

Eartha Kitt’s take on Catwoman was one, a character who continues to be one of the most influential comic book villainesses, a recurring foe (and often romantic interest) of Batman. Kitt would be the first but not last Black woman to play her, in the series’ third and final series in 1967.7 It was deliberate casting on the part of the show’s producers (they called it “a very provocative idea”), and despite only portraying the character for one season, Kitt’s artistic choices can be felt in every subsequent iteration of the character.

Cookie Lyon on Empire, Annalise Keating on How to Get Away with Murder, and Olivia Pope on Scandal have marked an evolution, each a complicated protagonist with equal amounts of admirable and unlikeable traits. Cookie (Taraji P. Henson)—whose over-the-top antics and power player costuming owe much to the styling of Alexis, Dominique, and a dash of Joan Crawford—is a devoted wife and mother who did time in prison in order to protect her husband Lucious.

Cookie is outrageous in her ferocity but never falls into stereotypes. Instead, she explodes them (“You step between me, my artists, or my family again, you won’t even hear the knock on the door”). She’s competitive and commanding but has the talent-spotting and producing skills to back up her bravado. The soap opera stylings of Empire favor her OTT (over-the-top) outbursts, and there’s many a scene of Cookie walloping her ex-husband, his girlfriend, or their grown sons; there are catfights and trash talk scenes aplenty, but Cookie’s volatility is underpinned by a fierce defense of her family and their, and her own, legacy.

Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), the media fixer and crisis manager at the center of Shonda Rhimes’s Scandal is, at her best, an endlessly watchable moral conundrum. She is always immaculately dressed; lives a bougie, high-end lifestyle; owns her own business; and has a team devoted to her. She operates at the highest levels of power, holding her own with people who make up the very system that is designed against people like her (as her villainous father constantly reminds her, she has to be “twice as good as them to get half as much”). Olivia’s professional instincts are flawless and highly in demand, but the work itself is murky business.

Her moral compass is constantly being negotiated—within herself and with us. This dance around what is good and what is necessary is symbolized throughout the...

She is in many ways the opposite of an unlikeable character: she is so likeable that we forgive her her moral transgressions, whether they be lying, cheating, manipulating, or even murder. It’s never quite clear where Olivia’s self-preservation ends and her villainy begins. The stakes throughout Scandal become comically high—the show evolves from a crisis-of-the-week format to include political subterfuge, murders, secret spy organizations, and a long-standing affair between Olivia and the president of the United States—but it never lets us off the hook with this main question: Is Olivia Pope a good person doing bad things, or is she a villain who has convinced herself she’s a good person?

Annalise, a successful defense attorney and university professor, elicits the same kind of dogged adoration from her team as Olivia does from her “gladiators.” Yet, while Olivia’s messiness is covered in layers of cashmere, there’s a rawness and self-loathing to Annalise. While Olivia’s murkiness and power grow as the seasons of Scandal progress, Annalise is broken down to the very raw parts of herself, her imbalances seemingly excused by a history of mental illness, her ambition treated not as a weapon but almost as a curse.

Annalise starts off as high powered, in control, and unwavering in her judgment of others, but as her backstory is revealed, the show seems to revel more in the damage she has incurred so that her unlikeable qualities become—again—excused by formative trauma.

Both characters are differently hued explorations of the Strong Black Woman stereotype, and how liked they are because of or in spite of their messiness is what sets them apart. “You judged me immediately, just like a white man in a boardroom, because my hips are too wide and hue too dark,” snaps Annalise at Olivia as they sit in a hair salon. “Your skin tone and measurements are not why people don’t like you. It’s you. You, Annalise Keating, are a bully who insults people and then wonders why they won’t help you.” Olivia Pope chose likeability, while Annalise Keating chose self-awareness.