Media is and always has been the highest form of self reflection society has, but it can also be the most deceiving. It’s our way of taking a step on the outside and peering back in on the life we believe is occurring. I recently read the viral Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate and it confirmed my worst fears. Women are being observed in the black and white binary of right and wrong, when there is nothing in this world but grey, and our media is a direct result and showcase of that. I want to clearly iterate that whilst the word female is being used in the context of women, I am referring to all of those who identify as so. You certainly don’t need to come out of the womb with a vagina to be treated like a b***h in this world.
Growing up, I remember being told to smile in public by my parents, a common experience among many. Seemingly harmless, and not to their fault, but rather hidden preparation for the world I would be living in. As a woman, I would have to be nice and happy for the people around me to get where and what I want. Nobody wants to work with the difficult woman. It’s also not news that the overly passionate woman is really being heard as aggressive by society. There unfortunately being more gender bias and stereotyping around women of color: for example the stereotype of the “angry black woman.” Just as women can be viewed as either good or bad, a female character in a movie can be received or created as such. Very few fall in the inbetween. The reason being that since women entered the film industry, they have been marketed to men for their entertainment in order to create a profit for other men. Not creating female characters with interesting qualities because they did not view women as having them in the real world. For women characters to have the same high qualities or more than a man would be demeaning to the men watching. Women villains would mainly have the power of looks and sexual attraction because that’s the only thing they could use against men. Parallel to the real world, female characters have gone through much change in how they are allowed to act. A tortured, mean, unattractive, unlovable woman would not be marketable to the masses. And when they did finally start creating characters for women that had deeper backgrounds or more interesting qualities, they were meant as warning or cautionary tales for how women should not act, because a woman with any unlikeable qualities would not reach her goals (the end result being their death or demise). Upgrading straight to women being allowed to have the full set of human emotions on screen, but they’d better have a reason. Women could be crazy, sad, angry, mean, but they’d better hope it made sense to the viewer. However, the current standing of women in the media is not as I have said above. There are unlikeable female characters flowing into our pop culture feed that you are meant to love and relate to, or maybe just observe. The problem now lies in there being a fascination with “mean girls” or “crazy women” in the media. It is still headline worthy, still a gag, when a character that is a woman does something of controversy for what is expected of them in society.
One of the greatest movies of my generation,” Mean Girls”, created a character as iconic as they come: Regina George. Admittedly, the “Heathers” girls came first (and before that Chris in “Carrie” and so on), but Queen Bee Regina would be the formula for every mean girl stereotype: ruthless, quotable, and drop-dead gorgeous. All for the movie to turn out to be a representation that that animalistic “mean girl” exists in all of us. Regina just looked better doing it. The mean girl trope movies then overlapped with the horror genre in the sense that beautiful women killing people is equally iconic to more commonplace acts of female agency. In the “X” franchise, Mia Goth, whether playing Maxine or Pearl, has a sexual energy not just from being a pornstar, but rather one that comes from within, which allows us to appreciate her murderous tendencies. Once again, women can be crazy, weird, and mean, but they should at least be pretty and palatable! We are clearly not ready for a female Hannibal Lecter or Art the Clown. These characters, as fantastic as they are (and they really are!!), are seen as symbols and figures instead of well rounded characters. Edits to the song Highschool Lover (the theme song from “The Virgin Suicides”) have gone viral on TikTok, aestheticizing anything “bad” a woman character does. Delivering unlikable qualities in a cute package with a bow. Characters like Cassie in “Euphoria”, Susanna in “Girl, Interrupted”, Nina in “Black Swan”, the list goes on. These creations of women that are in fact challenging the stereotype of simple female characters but doing so prettily. It’s not that we shouldn’t be finding beauty in everything, but that not everything has to be beautiful. I have nothing against a pretty woman, but the fact is that it is the reason we as viewers, myself included, have gotten to feeling able to watch and accept them as characters.
Deviating far from this idea, a media creation that could care less about what people think, is “Girls” by Lena Dunham (a controversial character in herself). Girls did not not take off in the 2010s like its unofficial predecessor “Sex and the City” did, but rather is now seeing a revival and new appreciation. Have we finally accepted a lack of perfection in women? Where Carrie Bradshaw pissed America off in a tutu and Manolo Blahniks, Hannah Horvath ruined lives in a desperately artsy berry printed tumblr dress paired with a tragic haircut. The characters of Girls were not being marketed towards anyone, they were the women you loved to hate (the perfect celebrities), and to talk about how much you hated. At one point, Hannah being more unliked as a character than Hannibal Lecter on the internet (yes, the cannibal). They are now succeeding in being popular not in spite of their awful personalities, but because of them. Why do these women cause so much discomfort? Is it so hard to accept that there doesn’t have to be a woman other women are aspiring to be in all forms of media? Or is it the worst thing in the world to observe realistic women on screen? All of the characters being so unlikeable created a very liberating watch, you weren’t rooting for any of them and that didn’t matter. Just this summer, Dunham released “Too Much”, starring comedian Megan Stalter. A Netflix watch surrounding an American Jessica moving to London after a breakup. Unlike Hannah, Jessica does have redeeming qualities that make her sweet, caring, and thoughtful, all while also being “too much.” But her character comes from years of relentless boundaries being pushed on what women are “entertaining enough” to be put on screen to what characters we are seeing now. I am in no way saying Lena Dunham is the only writer to have thought of these characters, but they are pretty great examples of humans that just happen to be women.
This shift of characters being created and watched is a direct mirror of a broader shift in how women are allowed to just exist. Finally messy, flawed, and overall just naturally human characters are being celebrated, but maybe too celebrated. Just as male characters and men in general have been allowed to take up space being a**holes, women being just as so shouldn’t be major news. I love to hate and fangirl as much as the next person, but the radicality of an untraditional female on screen reveals more about us than it does them; we’re still learning how to watch women without needing to root for them.
Words by Elisabeth Edwards
Graphics by Aubrey Lauer