Taking A Wrecking Ball to Expectations of Female Likeability

Taking A Wrecking Ball to Expectations of Female Likeability https://ift.tt/WB7DUNY

The burden of likeability continues to be borne by girls and women in fact, fiction, and film. Just ask Taylor Swift! Real-life women are supposed to be kind and communal, to play by the rules, to color within the lines. They are supposed to be paragons of proper womanhood. Given the gendered expectations we face in the real world, is it any surprise that these same expectations are likewise applied to the female characters we read about, write about, and watch? In 2023 Anna Bogutskaya wrote a worthy exposé on this very subject: Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate.

Below are a few books and shows that I have recently enjoyed featuring complicated, unconventional, unruly, or messy women. If female likeability is a construct built by men, then these titles are in search of a wrecking ball.

The Wife Upstairs
By Rachel Hawkins

After reviewing this novel, I recommended it to my sister-in-law for her book club; after she read it, she told me, “None of us liked the characters.” What she meant is that many of the characters, including the protagonist Jane Bell, didn’t behave well. Indeed, Bell is an unprincipled, conniving, kleptomaniacal striver fixated on achieving material gain and social status. But as Claire Messud said in an interview about her own novel, the similarly titled The Woman Upstairs, “If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.”

Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage
By Heather Havrilesky

Sara Beth West reviewed Foreverland here. Havrilesky’s memoir, a very funny and deeply honest testament to her own marriage, in all its messy glory, incited Walter Kirn of The New York Times to scold her for being too outspoken. “Marriage is — for myself and others — a secret,” he condescended. The hosts of the television talk show “The View,” not to be outdone, told Havrilesky that she was being “mean” to her husband. “Ms. Havrilesky,” they all seemed to be saying, “Sit down. Be quiet. Be nice.” In other words, stop being so unlikeable.

Difficult Women
By Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay wrote explicitly and insightfully about the importance of unlikeable female protagonists in a 2014 Buzzfeed essay, Not Here to Make Friends. To her, likability is “a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be.” A plethora of “improper” women populate the 21 short stories in her 2017 collection, Difficult Women.

The Custom of the Country
By Edith Wharton

When I learned that Sofia Coppola was adapting Wharton’s 1913 tragicomedic masterpiece into a five-episode series for Apple TV+, with Florence Pugh set to star as the mercurial, extravagant, social-climbing Undine Spragg, I couldn’t wait. But the project was killed. “They didn’t get the character of Undine,” Coppola said of the “mostly dudes” at the streamer. Why? “She’s so ‘unlikable,’” they told her. Her response? “But so is Tony Soprano!” Fortunately, you can still read the novel, maybe even this edition with a foreword written by Coppola herself.

Bad Sisters

Credit where credit is due: sometimes, Apple TV+ gets it right. I adore this Irish dark comedy television series developed by Sharon Horgan, Dave Finkel, and Brett Baer. Season 2 is in the works. As one of five sisters myself, I instantly took to the five Garvey sisters, despite the plotting of four of them to murder their brother-in-law (he was despicable), and despite their actions causing the unintended death of a beloved character. These sisters are slutty, bitchy, mean, angry, crazy — bad indeed. They’re a beautiful mess. But aren’t we all?

Fleabag

Fleabag (2016–2019) is a critically acclaimed British television series created and written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It aired over two seasons and can be streamed on Prime Video. I am currently reading Fleabag: The Scriptures, a book that contains the film scripts for both seasons. In a commentary at the back of the book, Waller-Bridge reveals that the idea for Fleabag, her unlikable female protagonist, came from her own “rage” at a world that “measured a female’s worth only by her desirability.” What did she admire about Fleabag? Her “ability to sum a person up and eviscerate them with a single, brutal insight… She said the unsayable, but it was the truth, albeit bent with cruelty.”