Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate

There is little more threatening to the social order than a woman who's angry. The only thing scarier is a woman who's angry about something. The only thing scarier than that is a woman who's right.

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 troubling implication is that mental illness in women is only acceptable (desirable, even) if it's beautiful - and a very specific type of beautiful at that - embodying a frail chicness that slots perfectly into the social narrative that white women must be protected at all costs, that their sadness can never be ugly, that Crazy women are only crazy if they're not hot.

When men get angry onscreen, they're angry at the system. When women are angry onscreen, they're angry at someone. Women are not allowed to be angry at the system, because that would be a tacit acceptance that we're all participants in the oppressive patriarchal structure that create this pressing, everyday anger. Women onscreen are only allowed to be angry at one person, one wrongdoing. Something they can fix. Something that doesn't antagonize audiences too much.

As with many things in the entertainment industry, likeability is actually code for marketability. The real question beneath “Is she likeable enough?” is “Can we sell her to people?

Because to me, likeability means palatability. And specifically, how palatable these characters are to a patriarchal world

You should be pretty, primped, and polite. Read: be fuckable enough to merit attention but don't enjoy the attention too much.

Unlikeable" is code. It's code for "fair game." If a woman in unlikable, 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.

All high school experiences are inherently dramatic because they are being experienced for the first time.

Every film is a prototype, and even if something similar has succeeded before, there’s no way to secure success via imitation. It’s a beautiful vicious cycle that is both pregnant with creative possibility and vicious in its capitalistic cannibalism.

The stranglehold pop culture has on us lies in its cyclical nature: it is both a mirror and an influence. There’s a reason moral panics have happened because of books, films, music videos, and video games. The stories and characters we see onscreen, the ones we grow up with, the ones that we enjoy publicly, and the ones that we secretly think are only ours to understand—all those stories influence how we see the world and how we see ourselves.

After all, likeability, in whatever form it takes is still, surely, a trap.

The greedy bastards of cinema become poster boys for masculine enterprise. Ambitious women, though, are usually pitted against each other or shown to be unhappy in some aspect of their life.

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 present in the gorgeous wrapping you've been told you should aspire to.

Male anger is threatening - when men finally explode, it's presented as painful for the characters, so we are encouraged to empathize with them. Female rage, meanwhile, has been shown as dangerous to the women themselves.

I’ve devoured every serial killer-based film and series I can, read the biographies, listened to hours of true crime podcasts, watched intensely questionable YouTube videos and every new Netflix true crime documentary. I’ve rewatched The Silence of the Lambs every year, as my own sort of holiday classic, and if stressed out, I’ll turn to Zodiac as my comfort blanket movie. I see it as a safe peek inside a psychology so far removed from my life, so totally inconceivable morally, that it’s the cinematic equivalent of bungee jumping.

The Mean Girl looms large in this genre as an amplification of a teenage bully, or antagonist, or frenemy that we’ve all had in our lives. She gets her strength from creating a culture of fear, and the specter of our own personal mean girls can live on for years after we’ve left the high school hallways.

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.