Unlikeable Female Characters
The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate
Ratings7
Average rating4.1
How bitches, trainwrecks, shrews, and crazy women have taken over pop culture and liberated women from having to be nice. Female characters throughout history have been burdened by the moral trap that is likeability. Any woman who dares to reveal her messy side has been treated as a cautionary tale. Today, unlikeable female characters are everywhere in film, TV, and wider pop culture. For the first time ever, they are being accepted by audiences and even showered with industry awards. We are finally accepting that women are-gasp-fully fledged human beings. How did we get to this point? Unlikeable Female Characters traces the evolution of highly memorable female characters, from Samantha Jones as "The Slut" in Sex and the City to the iconic Mean Girl, Regina George, examining what exactly makes them popular, how audiences have reacted to them, and the ways in which pop culture is finally allowing us to celebrate the complexities of being a woman. Anna Bogutskaya, film programmer, broadcaster, and co-founder of the horror film collective and podcast The Final Girls, takes us on a journey through popular film, TV, and music, looking at the nuances of womanhood on and off-screen to reveal whether pop culture-and society-is finally ready to embrace complicated women.
Tags
Genre
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Easy to read and free of the somewhat prohibitive lingo of academic media analysis, Unlikable Female Characters provides a short and interesting history of female representation in American movie and television through the lense of the women we are meant to dislike.
I wish more time was spent on certain types of unlikable women but considering the amount of history and examples the author managed to cram in relatively few pages I can't really hold it against the book. I particularly enjoyed the author's criticism of the idea that women representation necessarily has to be feminist in some kind of way to be worthy (edited to add; this book has a resolutely feminist bent so please do not read this comment as an implication that the book is somehow against feminism).
I received an eARC of this book from SOURCEBOOKS through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Not sure I quite get the subtle distinctions between some of the character types that Bogutskaya describes (e.g., psycho vs. weirdo, bitch vs. angry woman, etc.), but nevertheless, each chapter highlights the injustice of the same behavior viewed positively if the character is male and negatively if female. She also excoriates the entire premise that we can't root for or identify with unlikeable women in pop culture. A quick but important read.
