Good pop-culture writing is the literary equivalent of a nutritious Twinkie. Anna Bogutskaya's Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate is a nutrient-rich and delicious exploration of film and television's so-called unlikeable women. It's also a caution that prizing on-screen female likeability ("code for marketability") while applauding male characters who misbehave caters to a pernicious double standard.
Following a brief history of unlikeable female characters in movies and on TV, Bogutskaya devotes chapters to each of nine such personae: the Bitch, the Mean Girl, the Angry Woman, the Slut, the Crazy Woman, the Psycho, the Trainwreck, the Shrew, and the Weirdo. Bogutskaya dissects relevant flash points from the screen while she's defining her terms: "Trainwrecks are hungry characters. And female hunger, whatever shape it takes, has always been scrutinized, chastised, and punished." Among the films and series she uses as case studies are Thelma & Louise and Waiting to Exhale (re: the Angry Woman); Mae West's movies and Sex and the City (the Slut); and Gone Girl and Killing Eve (the Psycho).
Unlikeable Female Characters is such dishy fun that it's almost possible to forget the problem that brought the book into being in the first place. As Bogutskaya says of the straitjacket of female likeability, "Once characters are allowed to let go of the pressure to be nice, to conform to an impossible, made-up ideal of how a woman should look and behave, they are allowed to be messy, complicated, angry, vulnerable, and human." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer