In pop culture, I was always drawn to the women who were unapologetically angry, horny, ambitious, and even bad, who got away with cons and murders, acting out and misbehaving.
I didn’t know I was looking for them. Sometimes, I hated them. At other times, I was afraid of them. But I remembered them and was drawn to them, drawn to their hunger.
In music, I was drawn to the messy women of punk, like Courtney Love, Kathleen Hanna, and Brody Dalle, who screamed coarsely and earnestly about their experiences. They shouted, they were loud, they had voices and bodies and faces that did not look like those of the girls I was told I should aspire to look like.
On my tiny square TV screen, which lived in my room and with which I learned English through subtitled movies, I watched the manipulative, rich, mean girl Kathryn Merteuil of Cruel Intentions. Although I knew I was supposed to hate her, I liked her more than the prissy protagonist (even more so when I graduated to the adult adaptation of the novel Dangerous Liaisons, in which the Marquise de Merteuil is played by Glenn Close).
As I entered the professional sphere, I yearned to have the ballsy, naked ambition of Bette Davis characters (and much later, of Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, who created a new blueprint) but was swiftly chastised for it.
Is there something sinister about our fascination?
I’ve always been more eagerly attuned to my shortcomings than to my positive attributes. Even these were often turned into negatives through everyday experiences, passive-aggressive “negs,” and outright insults, not just from others but often from myself.
My own inner monologue was shaped by warning signs, which were in turn shaped by pop culture as much as by real-life experiences: “Too smart for your own good,” “Too intense,” “Too ambitious,” “Too much.” “Too” being the operative word. I come back to the behind-the-scenes stories of defiance of actresses like Bette Davis – who was, in her own words, “too much,” both onscreen and off – much more often than I do those pretty, polite, and primped stories that resonated so very little with me or any woman I have ever known.
“Why am I so taken with these unlikeable women? Am I defending them? Do I see myself in them?”
Before I even understood the layers contained in these words, I was drawn to these extreme characters, these difficult women. When I worried about being too pushy at work, I’d think back to these fictional women, think of how they would have handled the situation. As I write this, I keep asking myself: Why am I so taken with these unlikeable women? Am I defending them? Do I want to redeem them? Do I applaud their transgressions? Do I see myself in them? Do I want to be like them?
Racism, anti-feminism and slavery have cast a shadow over the film since its inception, and it's exhausting. Just let us have the damn fish movie.
Working as a film programmer, participating in those discussions in which decisions were made concerning what was written about, what was screened, what was acquired for distribution, or what was programmed for a festival, I often thought about the question of “likeability” and about these women that I continued to be drawn to.
Before I knew anything about criticism, film theory, or film history, I was drawn to these women who didn’t look, behave, or talk like the blueprint of a “good woman.”
“Being unlikeable implies being both too much of something and not enough of something else.”
They swore, they fucked, they robbed, they killed. They lived fantastic, over-the-top lives and did not apologise for it. When they succeeded, they didn’t downplay their achievements, and they dominated any room they went into. When they fucked up and failed, they owned it and moved forward. They were the centre of their own stories, the drivers of them. They went after the things they wanted, and I thought, even before I had the awareness or the language to articulate it, that if they could do all those things, maybe I could too.
And if I messed up, I could just get back up again and not be ruined. 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.
We are now living in a cultural reckoning of the stories we had accepted as canon, questioning the rules and empathizing with the characters we had point-blank considered villainous or unlikeable.
We’re finally asking ourselves the question: Why do I consider her unlikeable?
Excerpted from Unlikeable Female Characters by Anna Bogutskaya. © 2023 by Anna Bogutskaya. Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved.
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