If you know anything about me, you know that I am an avid supporter of women’s wrongs. I am a certified terrible women aficionado. I love nothing more in a story than to see a woman who’s a massive piece of sh*t winning. Maybe it’s weird, but I find it so exhilarating when a writer just fully allows their women to get their hands dirty.
And yet, this trope tends to be a terribly neglected one. I mean, morally complicated women are a dime-a-dozen, but often, media seems to shy away from actually making them sh*tty people. You see this with the prevalence of fallen women storylines, where a woman is seen engaging in morally questionable actions, but is often treated by the narrative as simply a victim of her circumstances. In romances, a snarky, mean woman is never outwardly cruel, her feistiness acts more as flavoring than a genuine character trait that is expanded upon. The scorned woman, too, is helplessly driven to her position by the evils of man. Even when the story actually allows her to be a bad person, she’s painted as crazy or foolish, in a way most male characters just … aren’t. At the heart of all these false, terrible women, there’s an underlying theme: the narrative refuses to let its female characters actually have agency over their life and decisions.
Take Game of Thrones, for example. Danaerys is often contradictory; she has lofty goals and (mostly) good intentions, but is frequently bloodthirsty and cruel in her actions. Or at least, that’s what the story starts to do, before it backtracks. Her moments of brutality are always softened by the narrative, especially once the showrunners seemed to realize she was crazy popular. The result is a mess. Yes, she burns people to death constantly, and she commits several massacres on her quest to free the enslaved peoples of Essos, but the narrative never lingers on this for very long. As a result, when she eventually goes mad, it’s like a switch has flipped. She turns into an entirely different character, and the foreshadowing of her madness is not enough to justify it. This is because she’s not allowed to act mad until the last possible moment. Danaerys should have been much messier. Her cruelty should have shown through much more often. We should have seen her take pleasure in the pain she inflicts, even as she tells herself it’s for a good cause. Even her final rampage isn’t allowed to be hers, but her madness’s, avoiding letting her take responsibility for her actions at any point. The narrative is too ashamed to let Danaerys be a bad person.
Game of Thrones is hardly the only example of media that is too afraid of making a complex female character a bad person. This hesitancy is one rooted in misogyny — in the belief that women are pure, good beings by nature. It may be uncomfortable for a man to be a crappy person, but for women, it’s something even worse: unsightly and distasteful. To see women actively choosing to be cruel, to be ruthless, to be calculating and manipulative and selfish in ways that cannot be excused or shoved under the rug of cartoonish evil seems to make audiences and creators alike uncomfortable in ways they’re all too willing to ignore. Take Amanda Waller, one of my favorite comic book characters. In her original incarnation, she had an unshakeable moral code, but a moral code founded on the protection of the United States and the world above all. She did not take pleasure in causing pain, but she saw herself as the only one willing to make the hard choices that would guarantee her people’s safety. She was a wonderfully complex villain that perfectly captured the outward political and military philosophies of the U.S. government at the time, and she was, unapologetically, a massive b*tch. Modern incarnations, though, seem to either make her incredibly cruel for no reason, or to soften her edges so much she may as well be baking cookies for her criminal task unit. Amanda Waller may not have been an easy character to understand, but by god, she was interesting. Now, she has become another dime a dozen villain of the week, and comics are worse for it.
However, I would say some of the biggest offenders are many of the pop-feminist “female empowerment” narratives that make money off of superficial subversiveness. (It’s all very profitable.) You get to cash in on the feminist name, while refusing to actually examine the systems of patriarchy and oppression that affect every aspect of our lives. You don’t have to make people uncomfortable to be revolutionary; you just need to make a whole lot of cash under the illusion that you were. After all, it’s not like feminism is a centuries old political movement that calls for us to engage with and challenge our pre-conceived notions of the world or anything.
It goes like this: you need to decide who’s your protagonist first. It’s ok if she’s super pretty and conventionally attractive, since as Elle Woods taught us, pretty women can be smart too! We won’t examine why our subversive main character must be subversive specifically by being pretty, and never by challenging beauty standards. Then, you pick one aspect of The Female Experience™. Make it real angsty, and make sure to focus specifically on the evils of men. Make it one evil man or, actually, even a whole lot of evil men. It’s mostly just very important that they’re Evil, and clearly separated from the Good men in the narrative. These are two separate beings, and only Evil men benefit from the patriarchy. You will show her trauma from a Female Perspective, which is what makes this Feminist. The Female Perspective is, of course, the perspective of a female as to how her trauma affects the men around her. If your protagonist is angry, it’s very important that it’s only in ways that can be justified to the audience, because, as we all know, feminine rage is when women are angry in palatable ways only! Finally, give her a love interest, a manly man that does man things and is also a perfect feminist as he protects his poor innocent darling that needs to be pampered and kept away from all dangers. No, we will not examine the gender roles in their relationship, why would we ever do that?
That may have been a little snarky. Still, it’s a prevalent phenomenon. Take most Greek myth retellings, in particular the Persephone and Hades ones. Trust me, I have read far more than I care to remember. For some reason, they always seem to market themselves as feminist retellings. However, in my opinion, it’s clear that simply being told from the point of view of a woman isn’t enough. The original story of Persephone and Demeter can be read as an allegory for a mother’s grief for her daughter having died in the prime of her youth, and for her desire to protect her from a world that seeks to do her harm. It’s hardly feminism when the story always goes out of its way to portray Demeter as some helicopter mother who is overly controlling and protective of Persephone for no reason — even though the story literally opens with that same daughter getting kidnapped out of her own backyard and forced to marry a stranger. We’re just … not going to acknowledge that? Damn it, let the woman be mad! Her daughter got kidnapped! Let her be angry and cruel, and let her raze the earth as more and more people die to winter! Let her force the hand of gods much stronger than her in order to get her daughter back! Why are we so opposed to portraying Demeter with respect? Is it because we cannot pretty up her winter and the subsequent deaths of thousands of people enough to be palatable?
The idea of feminine rage has been much touched upon, but frankly, I find that most depictions seem to focus much more on the feminine than the rage. If men can constantly be portrayed as edgy anti-heroes, I want more female characters absolutely crashing out. I want them tearing down the wall and going far beyond what is reasonable for revenge. I want them to be cruel and messy and complicated, to enjoy causing others pain, to not fall into the trap of the pitiful and the nurturing and just be allowed to be. I want them to be cold and calculating and to love no one, and yet still be the protagonist. I want her to make every bad choice she can, and when given the choice to become better, I want her to bloodily drag herself into becoming worse. I want her to make me flinch, to make the audience want to hurl up their dinner, and yet be unable to stop watching. I want women in media to be terrible, unpleasant, contemptible with every fiber of their being, until we are no longer forced to be easy to swallow for the sake of protecting the viewer’s biases ever again.