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

by Anna Bogutskaya

“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.

It’s not about relatability; it’s about permission to fail and be flawed.

Like the complicated, often contradictory demands of being a woman, being unlikeable implies being both too much of something and not enough of something else. What the “something” is will always vary, mutate, and slip away before being understood, with some other unlikeable quality taking the place of the first one.

“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.”

“Likeability,” as a term, is intrinsically linked to the entertainment industry and is quietly gendered.

The fear that’s instilled in us is that when a girl is a problem, she is a problem without a solution.

” This was the second iteration of the movement initiated by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 on MySpace advocating for empathy with sexual assault victims, particularly women of color. A decade later, Hollywood did as Hollywood does best and magnified the movement by adding the power of celebrity to the mix, which kick-started a global shift in consciousness raising.

After the U.S. election, critic Inkoo Kang wrote about the need for inclusivity in culture because “art and entertainment are how many of us simply stay sane, but they also play a huge role in how we’re groomed to look at the world.”

Why are we talking about whether a character is likeable or not when we should be talking about whether they are interesting. The 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.

Filmmaking is beautiful chaos. And when a film is finished and released into the world, it no longer even belongs to the filmmakers: it becomes part of popular culture, ready to be ripped apart, analyzed, reinterpreted, reclaimed, and presented back to the filmmaker.

I believe wholeheartedly that a film belongs to the audience as much as it does to the people who made it. The way an audience responds to a film, and more precisely to its characters, tells us a lot about the culture at large.

Film, as the most populist of art forms, is a great litmus test for behaviors we consider reputable (and even aspirational) versus those we deem unacceptable or even deviant.

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.

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 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.

“Hollywood in the 1980s,” writes Faludi, “was simply not very welcoming to movie projects that portrayed independent women as healthy, lusty people without punishing them for their pleasure.”

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.

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

Think Zooey Deschanel in "New Girl"

“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.

Hence why the phrase “unlikeable female characters” has become a catchall that refers to any and all female characters, heroines, or sidekicks that dare to not give a damn what other people think about them.

The entertainment industry is built on monetizing people’s desire to watch other people.

"Likeability" can mean "marketability."

“An unlikable man is inscrutably interesting, dark, or tormented but ultimately compelling even when he might behave in distasteful ways,” Roxane Gay writes, but when women dare to be unlikeable (emphasis on the dare), it becomes a conversation, a challenge, a how-dare-she situation directed at the characters, the author, and the performer. We wouldn’t want them to be our friends, co-workers, bosses, or partners, would we? Likeability equals money. That’s the unwritten law that’s dominated filmmaking since, well, the birth of Hollywood.

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. Their agency and sexuality has more often than not been weaponized against them with the more noxious stereotype of the Jezebel, rendering the depiction of Black women’s sexuality a double-edged sword: the screen paints them as sensual, attractive, and alluring while at the same time nurturing the racist idea that Black women are oversexed.

Once characters are allowed to let go of the pressure to be nice, to conform to an impossible, made-up ideal of how a woman should look and behave, they are allowed to be messy, complicated, angry, vulnerable, and human. And we are

This offhanded quote traces a direct line of the Bitch archetype and the actresses who played her. 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 plays with our expectations and, very often, she gets what she wants because of this. Surely, this would be an attractive proposition for actresses. Doesn’t, as they say, “the Devil have the best lines”?

In the original conclusion of Baby Face, Lily keeps her money and keeps her man. The censors forced the studio to reshoot the ending, wherein Lily gives away her hard-earned cash to her love interest so he can bail out his company, and they return to her hometown. In the censored version, Lily is back where she started. The lesson is clear: ambition and money are not meant for women.

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.

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.