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.

Men can be liked for being bad, but can women? Should we even aspire to the same: to be liked? After all, likeability, in whatever form it takes is still, surely, a trap. Maybe, in fact, the ultimate act of the unlikeable woman is to be recognized and seen, shown to be alive—as in the pages of this book—but to say, after careful consideration, fuck it and fuck you. To stay true to her name, to remain proudly unlikeable. Maybe that’s what freedom really feels like. For them, for me and for you.

“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.

It’s not about relatability; it’s about permission to fail and be flawed. The thing is, though, it’s not about me at all. I’m just tired of trying so hard to pretend to be superhuman, of bending in incongruous ways to try to fit into a box that was not designed for me, or any woman, to begin with—but who isn’t? 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. I have distinct memories of girl assemblies that felt like UN negotiations: How and when is it appropriate to “lose it”? How long, how many dates, who with, what prerequisites do they needed to fulfill? The pressure, we’re told, is life defining—and it’s compounded by the self-fulfilling prophecy of pop culture narratives reinforced by our peers. But their biggest win is making us think that the teenage girl, mean or not, is a static being.

In a world where a woman’s respectability is directly linked to her ability to stay quiet about her grievances, it becomes understandable that a woman’s rage must be icy, kept under wraps, never to be externalized in an ugly way.

What makes a woman messy? The short answer is excess. Of any kind. The more complicated answer is excess of fun. The Trainwreck in pop culture is a sort of deuteragonist of the Shrew. She’s fun to be around, a “good-time girl,” but ultimately a cautionary tale, a woman who will lead good girls astray if they spend too much time with her. Indulging in pleasure and partying for the sake of it is childish and unladylike. Girl parties should be wholesome sleepovers in pastel-colored pajamas, not drug-fueled benders involving sex with strangers. That’s why she’s often been the supporting character and not the lead.

We can explain away our fascination with killers and psychopaths onscreen as a desire to justify wickedness. These characters are usually motivated by trauma, sex, or an unnamed deep, dark desire. Our voyeurism compels us to keep watching to try to see if this movie, this series, this podcast will unlock something that will help us understand. Just think of how many different versions of Ted Bundy we’ve seen, all trying to uncover how someone could simultaneously be hot and a killer. When an explanation, a villain origin story, is lacking, it’s so much more perverse. It opens up the terrifying possibility that violence is simply another want. A predilection.