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

by Anna Bogutskaya

hesitate to call these characters Bitches because they have elevated and complicated the archetype. They have gone beyond the campiness of Collins and Lange. Cookie, Annalise, and Olivia are ruthless, self-assured, and relentless—but they are not cruel.

The word “bitch,” which I’ve been using so sparingly over this chapter so far, is one of the oldest words in the English language. If you’ve made it this far, it may not be offensive, but chances are it’s still an uncomfortable word to hear or read. I’m not ignorant of this tension. I have my own relationship with the word, as I imagine most women do. While I may be comfortable using it, individual reclamations do not make up for the cultural history of the word and how it’s been used.

The word “bitch” may have lost some of its bite, but it’s not lost its power. In all honesty, I’m not sure where I stand on the word myself, even though I use it sparingly with close female friends. I use it as an exclamation point, as a token of affection, to refer to myself. I’ve also been called a bitch without the endearment, and when armed with a different intent, it feels like a gut punch. It’s a word seeping with intention, and depending on who’s saying it, and in what context, it can morph from a term of empowerment to a heinous insult.

The origins of the word lie in the Old English “bicche,” referring to a female dog, and its earliest use as an insult was to refer to a promiscuous woman (the insult “son of a bitch” makes sense with this in mind). The term started being used as a gendered insult in the eighteenth century—when new terms had to be found for actual bitches, meaning female dogs. The generalization of the word has always been tied to culture and politics. There was a dramatic rise in the use of the word after some women got the right to vote in 1920 (the use of the word in newspapers and American literature doubled between 1915 and 1930).

The “bitch” moniker went from referring to promiscuous women to referring to ruthless women via its first attempted reclamation by feminists and turned violent in the 1980s, fitting in with the backlash to feminism that Susan Faludi wrote about, and in the late eighties and early nineties, the “bitch” became a battleground in music and politics. Third-wave feminists tried to reclaim the word using music as a battleground, with female rappers at the forefront:

Since the 2010s, the expression “resting bitch face” (or RBF) has permeated pop culture, becoming a widely used term understood to denote a woman’s blank facial expression.10 The stupidity of this concept has been much parodied, but it is yet another microweapon to use against women on a daily basis. If you’re not smiling, you’re not amenable. If you’re

not projecting a welcoming presence, you must “fix your face.” When a word is historically rooted in discomfort with women gaining any power, it’s going to need a bit more than a catchy tune to untangle all the hate it carries. The nineties turned the word “bitch” into a girl power brand. Alison Yarrow writes about it in her study of nineties media culture: “‘Bitch’ and its villainous corollaries became a bad-girl identity to sell—a sly marketing tool.”

In high school, appearances are everything. So even the illusion of power is enough to cause permanent psychological damage. A teenage girl who knows how to wield her power, even if her kingdom is barely more than the halls of a high school, is terrifying. So when the most popular girl in school tells you your skirt is “adorable,” that’s a ray of social sunshine. And if you overhear her, a second later, say, “That is the ugliest f-ing skirt I’ve ever seen,” well, that might be silly, but it stays. We’ve all had a Regina George in our lives, and since 2004, she’s become the default Mean Girl, a trope that has been present in teen cinema so much that she is ubiquitous in the genre.

Hughes’s films were rewritings of high school experiences as fantasies, ones in which the nerds were the protagonists and got to hook up with the cute girls. Sometimes even the cute girls (especially Ringwald’s characters) read as gender-swapped variations on the nerd. Hughes wrote honestly and earnestly, with problematic warts and all, about the experience of being an awkward teenager. But he couldn’t write mean.

While all high school experiences are inherently dramatic because they are being experienced for the very first time, Heathers takes it up an operatic notch by adding murder to the

Teenagers aren’t supposed to die in teen movies. They’re definitely not supposed to murder each other, no matter how mean their behavior is (or how much we’ve all fantasized about getting back at our bullies).

The Mean Girl’s power is in maintaining appearances; a very specific appearance at that. For the film’s thirtieth anniversary rerelease, I wrote about how, behind all the quippy quotes and mayhem, it’s about how easy it is for us to ignore real teenage pain unless it is shown in excruciating, exaggerated form. The enduring power of Heathers, the source of its timelessness, is not the fashion or the colors: it’s the fear. Even watching it as an adult, I’m kind of scared of the Heathers.4

The Mean Girl’s worst nightmare is to be exposed like this, to be hated by the peers she once ruled over. The films that feature these Mean Girls take pleasure in delivering their comeuppance, usually employing slow motion to really drill down how much we should enjoy the undoing of these teenage girls. While she must be desirable, the Mean Girl must remain unattainable—so she has to police her sexuality. She might be promiscuous, or sexually savvy, but no one should ever know, lest it diminish her acceptability in high school society. It’s her secret power that she uses to continue exerting control over others:

On rare occasion, the Mean Girl is allowed to be redeemed (unless she is fully murdered). On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter) was the high school antagonist to Buffy, annoyed that she’d spurned being in her queen bee clique in favor of the less cool Willow and Xander. In a town overflowing with supernatural creatures, Cordelia is still the meanest one of them.

generous. She begins as a mirror image of Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who has all the ingredients to be a Mean Girl but has been forced to grow up much more quickly due to the responsibility of being the Slayer. Throughout the three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which she appears, Cordelia goes from presenting herself as a ditzy, superficial queen bee (the self-described “nastiest girl in Sunnydale history”) to a full-fledged member of the Scooby Gang. Cordelia’s journey involves realizing that she’s allowed to have a full spectrum of emotions, including the painful ones (“You think I’m never lonely because I’m so cute and popular?”), and that despite her Sunnydale status, she is not untouchable.

The Mean Girl is cruel and, with the exception of Cordelia (and until Regina came along), had always been presented as irredeemable. She’s evil, rotten to the core, and if allowed to progress, she’ll surely end up hurting more people. She’s rarely allowed an inner life and is usually painted as such a black-and-white villain that we are meant to relish her pain. Perhaps burdened by my own inability to escape the real-life Mean Girls of my life, I always saw them as sadistic creatures. Growing older, and rewatching these films, there are always hints at a brewing frustration that had nowhere to go.

While we had to read these layers of depth into even the most beloved of teen movies, like Mean Girls or Heathers, Sex Education makes the inner lives of its Mean Girls explicit. All the markers of meanness are still there, but the program shows the humanity beneath the meanness and breaks down the performance of being a girl trying to get through adolescence, mean or not. What this reveals is the internal battle that happens within every Mean Girl. On the one hand, there’s all the privileges that youth and beauty affords them. On the other, there’s the pressure of both bending to a power structure not designed for them (Mean Girls, after all, are disposable: they are not part of the high school economy in the same way that high school jocks are) and holding themselves to an impossible standard.

Looking back at several decades of the most memorable and acid-tongued Mean Girls in pop culture, it all comes back to the early stages of slut shaming. The Mean Girl is always overly sexualized—but her actual sexuality is neutered in favor of a sexless sex appeal. The Mean Girl is designed to be fuckable, but not to actually fuck. Whether she does or doesn’t, she will be punished. At worst, her own sexual agency is completely ignored or removed from

The larger-than-life figure of the Mean Girl on our screens taps into the muscle memory of our teenage insecurities, learned during a time when we were being fed vastly different narratives around our own sexuality depending on how we were socialized. The narrative around girls’ virginity—and its sanctity—is everywhere: in horror movies, a virgin’s blood is both a powerful tool and a delicacy; in teen movies, a virginal girl is unimpeachable and automatically deserving of respect; a sexually active teenage girl is de facto a Slut. Even Janis Ian from Mean Girls happily slut shames Regina. It’s the go-to insult for the Mean Girl. She might be cruel, but what’s worse is that she’s loose. The quest to lose one’s virginity is fodder for many teen comedies centered on boys—but it is treated as a life-or-death matter for a girl, a decision that everyone in their lives feels entitled to have a say in and that seems to have less to do with the act of sex itself and more to do with a girl’s reputation.

Growing up as a girl, there are contradictory rulebooks: you want to be as cool, as pretty, and as powerful as the Mean Girl (or at least enough to be on her good side), but you also don’t want to step outside the bounds of what’s sexually acceptable before you even understand your sexuality.

In 2015, a study about jury deliberation bias conducted at Arizona State University found that “when men expressed their opinion with anger, participants rated them as more credible, which made them less confident in their own opinion. But when women expressed identical arguments and anger, they were perceived as more emotional, which made participants more confident in their own opinion.” The same can be said in the context of movies. Cinema loves angry men but it doesn’t quite know what to do with angry women.

Angry women onscreen are either cute anomalies (Kick-Ass), sexy assassins (La Femme Nikita), or righteous avengers (Revenge). These characters are always the exception instead of embodying a widespread, near universal feeling amongst women: simmering rage. Mostly their stories have been focused on the individual character. She’s never angry on behalf of other women, and there has definitely been little room for intersectional anger; it’s always a single bad apple or a traumatic event (usually a form of sexual assault) that has pushed a character to an emotional extreme. There needs to be an explanation; otherwise, it’s just “her problem.” Despite this, it’s the female rage films that strike a cultural chord.

We often forget the darkness in Thelma & Louise, how trapped these women are that they decide that driving off a cliff is a better option than facing the authorities. There is an understanding between them—and the audience—that the system is just not built for them. Even in the case of the one good man cop who seems to empathize with them, there is no guarantee he’ll protect them. It doesn’t matter if their killing was justified or not; they’re bound to be punished. If anything, it makes them even angrier, but at least they get to enjoy their outlaw lives for a minute.

I love to see anger onscreen. It’s an explosive, all-consuming emotion that I’ve experienced in others and that has engulfed me at times. It’s cinematic, bodily, a full-throated feeling. White-hot rage blinds you and makes your blood run hot. It can be exhausting, destructive at its worst, and when controlled, can be turned into a positive. While it’s a terrifying emotion to feel, it’s exhilarating to watch, so I understand why it’s attractive for actors—its scope is limitless, but it requires so much control of the craft to portray it convincingly, to make us feel it without getting burnt. If anger is a gradient, seeing a character go through one shade of rage to another is akin to feeling it yourself without ever being in danger of losing control.

The more complicated answer to this is that pop culture has created and nurtured reductive archetypes for nonwhite characters, who continue to be few and far between. Black women and women of color have not been allowed to embody characters with a full range of emotion and instead have been fitted into convenient character archetypes fueled by racist stereotypes. Black female anger became the Angry Black Woman. Asian women became Dragon Ladies. And Latina women became the Spicy Latina.

It would be unfair to blame on the actress what a majority white and insidiously racist Hollywood system took from her character, but that’s what happened. The fact that out of that character was born the cultural stereotype of the Angry Black Woman tells us that Hollywood took any emotions felt or displayed by a Black woman and automatically interpreted them as anger. Throughout the years, this anger would be presented as either comedic or threatening, but never taken seriously.

With Latina women, meanwhile, anger became sexualized, a part of their “hot and spicy” personalities. Instead of being seen as a threat, as Black women would be, Latinx women were expected to get angry easily, and that made them attractive, often being compared to food like “spicy tamales.”

Film has not been kind to these stereotypes. It has leaned into them and amplified them, giving audiences cultural fodder with which to reinforce their biases. The subversion of these is often found in the physicality of female rage. It transforms into steel. In Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), when offended by one of her underlings (who calls her a “Chinese-Jap-American, half-breed bitch”) Yakuza chief O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) quickly and quietly chops off his head. She is murderously calm, only raising her voice as a punctuation mark. O-Ren’s chokehold on power lies not just in how ruthless a killer she is but also in her icy focus.

It is telling, however, that most of the films and series I’ve singled out are focused on an individual woman’s rage. Female anger is always treated as an individual issue and never a political one. That is, until recently.

The contradiction inherent in female anger is that it exists on an almost universal and nearly daily plane, but women are so socialized to keep it down that it is treated like an individual issue. If you’re angry, it’s a you issue—and one that you have to work on. Social reliance on women’s patience, resilience, and anger management has given us entire cinematic genres that, even in their own most low-budget iterations, are aiming to provide a catharsis for this anger.

Anger is a difficult emotion to tolerate because it’s not pretty, and being pretty is the primary expectation of women onscreen. If it’s directionless and it reinforces the idea that women are functionally incapable of managing their emotions, if it’s directed at one specific person, it’s a “her” problem. Anger is often lumped in with the rest of the unpretty emotions, and women who dare to experience it are simply tagged as “emotional.”

The comfort these Angry Women provide us, and the turn to entering a shared, collective rage ring in more recent films and shows, is that they’re understanding the anger, not denying it. When we’re being held accountable for every single action, our own and those of others, for our facial expressions and our bodies, the content of words and the tone of them, for assaults committed against us and our reaction to them, it can be overwhelmingly lonely.

The word “slut,” much like “bitch,” has been weaponized in so many different ways it’s not even used to describe promiscuous women anymore. It’s used to shame women who have many sexual partners, women who refute someone’s advances, women who have been sexually assaulted, women who pursue sex, women who enjoy sex, and women who simply exist as sexual beings.

The portrayal of female sexuality has been a source of both mockery and fear since the inception of the film industry. In pre-Code Hollywood, for a brief, glorious moment when unfiltered creativity and commercial savviness coexisted before the censors intervened, women in movies enjoyed their sexuality unapologetically onscreen. Marrying for love, getting rid of toxic husbands, taking lovers, and making dick jokes.

Since 1933, and even after the collapse of the Production Code, the films that get the harshest treatment are those that center female sexuality no matter what the intention. You could argue the Code was all about sex; specifically, that is was about eliminating any notion of women enjoying sex at all, and especially out of wedlock.

She never wore revealing clothes, never appeared naked onscreen, but she always exuded a sexual confidence and self-possession that transcended good looks. Even when she wasn’t showing too much skin, everything about Mae West oozed sex—and she capitalized smartly on it. She wasn’t a conventional sex symbol, but she was hot. Mae Wes fucked and made sure everyone knew it.

To watch Mae side-eye a good-looking man is to feel entitled to do the same. There’s no tragedy to her man eating; it’s always joyous, always fun, always poking at morality’s contradictions, always knowing her audience was in on the joke.

The great beauties and stars Clara Bow or Gloria Swanson also played sexually liberated women, but they belonged to the silent era. They were images. Mae West made sex speak. She wrote racy, witty dialogue filled with innuendos and come-ons. She is still remembered for her quippy, suggestive wordplay; for her, “essence was not sexual but verbal,” writes Mary Haskell in From Reverence to Rape.

Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, and Raquel Welch were sex symbols of the screen in the 1950s and 1960s, and their sexiness presumed sexual availability, whether they were playing it as such or not. They were erotic, they held the promise of sex, but were not shown having sex. Their screen roles were not slutty in nature, they were not written to have enough agency to be joyfully promiscuous but rather were prizes for the right man. They were bombshells and bimbos, archetypes of sexual desirability that were designed to be attractive, empty-headed, and easily discarded. Female audiences hated them because the bimbo is not designed to appeal to female viewership.

In the nineties, model-actresses like Pamela Anderson or Jenny McCarthy were perceived to have a brand of beauty that implied sexual availability without it ever actually being written into the roles they were playing or having anything to do with the women’s real lives. So, in actuality, the bimbo is the opposite of the Slut, united only in the way they are collectively shamed by both men and women. The bimbo is judged based on her looks, and the Slut based on her choices.

There is a big time jump from Mae West to Madonna, but genuinely, and pitifully, the pop singer exhibits the closest thing to proud pop culture sluttiness since 1933. And if 1933 was Mae West’s year, 1992 was Madonna’s.

Madonna’s creative output during this period should be seen as the different branches of one

project. It’s all an exploration of a woman having sex, thinking about sex, and talking about sex. Similarly to Mae West, Madonna’s persona is bigger than any role she could ever play, and her work during this time melded the dominatrix Mistress Dita from the album Erotica, Rebecca Carlson from the film, and Madonna the pop star herself.

While West became famous because she talked about sex, Madonna already was famous and was derided for talking about sex not because of what she was saying as much as because she was a famous woman saying it. In 2012, the Guardian wrote that the fact “she was penning her own sexual narrative was perhaps the most shocking part of the whole enterprise,” which could be said about West too and about Niki Minaj, Cardi B, and Megan Thee Stallion.

What pop culture has shown us so far is that you can be slutty, but only if it’s a phase, only if you’re not enjoying yourself too much, and only if you don’t get too good at it. Remember: agency or respect. But not both. It’s so difficult for us to accept a woman seeking out sexual pleasure or indulging her desires without pathologizing it, explaining it away with a personality disorder, or punishing her for it.

Often, Sluts will be mocked or punished because we’ve been taught that pleasure-seeking women are deviants. When we think about the Slut onscreen, there are two ways this character has traditionally been presented: as comic relief—think Samantha Jones, Meredith on The Office, Edna Krabappel on The Simpsons—or as pathologically sex crazed—like Theresa in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Rebecca Carlson in Body of Evidence, and Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct. The message, however, is always clearly sent: at best, these are not women to be taken seriously; at worst, these women must be feared.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, sex and death became intertwined in their own subgenre: the erotic thriller. Here, the femme fatale got an update. Now they didn’t just do the seducing. The new femme fatales actually fucked.

The formula for the erotic thriller always includes violence—either a murder happens during a sexual encounter or directly because of it, or someone participating in it is potentially a murderer. Every film, from the cheap soft-core titles to the high-budget, starry releases, revolved around sex. For the audience, the appeal was watching sexually explicit content without actually watching pornography.

In horror films, it’s an established rule of the genre that any character who has sex will die before the movie ends. In her influential book Men, Women and Chainsaws, academic Carol J. Clover coined the term “the final girl,” referring to the woman left alive at the end of a slasher film, usually a virginal and androgynous figure that finds the inner strength to fight off the killer. She’s the one that audiences identify with. It’s in these horror films, especially the slashers that emerged in the mid-1970s and that have been present ever since, that the rules of the genre were formed.

Sex and the City ran for six seasons (as well as receiving two feature films that shall go unmentioned because they never should have existed in the first place), and as troublesome as many, many of its politics were, the cultural impact of the show cannot be underestimated.