Unlikeable Female Characters
The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate
-
- $26.99
Publisher Description
She’s too angry. Too weird. Too messy. And now, she’s the main character.
Unlikeable Female Characters is a fierce, funny, and razor-sharp takedown of the cultural obsession with “likeable” women—and a celebration of the flawed female icons who broke the rules.
From Amy Dunne in Gone Girl to Regina George, Fleabag, and Skyler White, these are the women who provoke, polarize, and captivate. Anna Bogutskaya—film programmer, broadcaster, and co-founder of the horror collective and podcast The Final Girls—dives into nine pop culture archetypes, from The Bitch and The Psycho to The Slut and The Trainwreck. She shows how these characters were once used to punish women on screen, and why audiences are now starting to celebrate them instead.
This is not just a book about characters. It’s about the real-life expectations that hem women in, and the stories that finally let them out.
Why you’ll love it:
• Bold feminist insight wrapped in wit and pop savvy
• Cultural deep-dives across film, TV, and music—from Bette Davis to Promising Young Woman
• A must-read for fans of complex female leads and feminist cultural critique
Praise for Unlikeable Female Characters:
• "Fascinating, insightful, and kick-ass." ―Emma Jane Unsworth, internationally bestselling author of Grown Ups and Animals
• "Beautifully written." ―Chelsea G. Summers, author of A Certain Hunger
• "Part-cultural exposé, part-Taylor Swift album." ―Clarisse Loughrey, Chief Film Critic at The Independent
• "Brilliant masterpiece breaking down the tired tropes of TV and beyond." ―Aparna Shewakramani, author of She's Unlikeable and star of Indian Matchmaking
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This sharp debut by Bogutskaya, a film programmer for the Edinburgh International Film Festival, examines how gender norms affect the reception of female characters and celebrities. Likability, Bogutskaya argues, is a proxy for how much a woman conforms with traditional femininity, and she explores media depictions of women who break social expectations, outlining nine types of "unlikeable women" that include "the bitch," "the mean girl," and "the trainwreck." On "the shrew," she suggests that the virulent hatred Breaking Bad fans directed at character Skyler White stemmed from her failure to passively "stand by" her drug lord husband's immoral exploits. The author contends that the conservative backlash to the explicit sexuality of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's song "WAP" demonstrates that, even though "Western visual culture has been shaped around profiting off images of female beauty," women are expected to downplay their own sexual desires at risk of being deemed a "slut." Other chapters on Mean Girls villain Regina George, Marquise de Merteuil from Dangerous Liaisons, and Fleabag from the show of the same name serve up bracing critiques of how audiences' sexism boxes in female characters and how women artists have pushed back against restrictive tropes. The result is a fresh feminist appraisal of the pop culture canon.
