Thank you to Netgalley and Sourcebooks for providing me with a digital copy in exchange for my honest review.

For pop culture enthusiasts, film buffs, and feminists in the age of media.

I am not one for non-fiction. I read 50-70 books a year and usually less than ten are non-fiction. This is my first analysis of pop culture, and I hung on every word as much as I would my favourite thriller. I absolutely loved it.

This analysis has given me countless unlikeable characters to look up to, and to see in a new light.

There is even a watch-list included to further analyze our favourite unlikeable women. I’ve already found some new favourites.

Unlikeable Female Characters explores erotic thrillers, female rage, revenge, train wrecks and all of the things we are told to hate about ourselves.

My favourite part of the read was discovering what archetype of unlikeable female I am. Tag yourself, I’m a shrew.

Thank you Netgalley for sending and allowing me to read this brilliant e-arc. The writing style is amazing and the topics talked about are wonderful. This is nothing else like what I've read before, the author did a great job.

A review of women in pop culture who are often deemed unlikeable and the various archetypes they fall in. I was expecting more analysis after the intro, but the archetype chapters were more explorations of characters that fit into those archetypes. Despite that, I thought it was a great review of this topic. Plus there is a good watchlist at the end!

I received my copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Fascinating, well-written, accessible, thought-provoking, gut-punching truth. This book is needed! I'll be recommending it far and wide.

This was a fun, engaging read that analyzes pop culture history in a thought provoking way.

This book examines the evolution of how women are depicted in Hollywood through TV and movie. She provides a historical analysis of unlikeability through several different archetypes, including the “mean girl” to the “train wreck” to the “psycho,” just to name a few. She gives a high level overview of each archetype using specific character examples of women we “love to hate.” Bogutskaya writes passionately about the myth of “likability” and the transformation of women characters in cinema into complex, three dimensional beings.

Overall, it was a rather enjoyable read! I found myself engrossed in the media analyses that Bogutskaya presents. I definitely had to sit and think on a few character analyses that she presents. I found myself gravitating toward the “Mean Girl” and the “Crazy Woman” chapters a lot, as they brought up some very interesting points with some of my favorite pop culture characters of all time (like Regina George).

Thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebooks for the advanced reader copy!

Decently enjoyable but overall too long. There are great examples of characters worth reading and learning about, but the book would be better in a shorter form. Enjoyable for fans of film and tv who want to read about sexism in media.

Unlikeable Female Characters is a fascinating exploration of the way females are viewed in pop culture. There are a variety of archetypes explored such as the mean girl, the bitch, the angry woman, the slut, the trainwreck, the crazy woman, the psycho, the shrew, and the weirdo. The authors gives an explanation of every archetype as well as examples - i.e. the slut being Samantha in Sex and the City, Regina George as the mean girl in Mean Girls, etc. The author explores the evolution of major female characters and audience's reactions to them. Overall, Unlikeable Female Characters is a fascinating research study on female characters in pop culture.

Thank you NetGalley, Sourcebooks, and Anna Bogutskaya for an arc of this book.

The chapters are broken down into titles women tend to fall under in the media: The Bitch, The Mean Girl, The Angry Woman, The Slut, The Trainwreck, The Crazy Woman, The Psycho, The Shrew, and The Weirdo.

The cover and description were intriguing. The first quarter of the book or so was interesting. However, each chapter just felt the same and the whole theme repeated itself over and over again. Bad things happen to the woman no matter the category she would fall under.

I read the book thoroughly until about halfway through and then I ended up skimming to the end because it felt like a chore to get through. It just felt like long synopses of different characters and the movies/tv shows they were a part of, and not really a thought provoking book. And be warned, if you haven't seen a movie mentioned, the author does spoil the ending.

Finally, the author put Harley Quinn under the category of Weirdo, which that was where I completely fell out of caring about the book, even though it was the last category. She says Harley starts as a Crazy Woman and then morphes into a Weirdo. No, Harley is Crazy bordering on Psycho and stays that way because she enjoys being Crazy and she makes you like her because of how much fun she has. Harley is so much more than the Margot Robbie version, but that was the version the author only seemed to care about. Maybe Harley could be called a Weirdo for how crazy she is, but she really is a loud, fun, energetic, murdering, insane Crazy Woman.

This was a fun, engaging read that analyzes pop culture history in a thought provoking way.

This book examines the evolution of how women are depicted in Hollywood through TV and movie. She provides a historical analysis of unlikeability through several different archetypes, including the “mean girl” to the “train wreck” to the “psycho,” just to name a few. She gives a high level overview of each archetype using specific character examples of women we “love to hate.” Bogutskaya writes passionately about the myth of “likability” and the transformation of women characters in cinema into complex, three dimensional beings.

Overall, it was a rather enjoyable read! I found myself engrossed in the media analyses that Bogutskaya presents. I definitely had to sit and think on a few character analyses that she presents. I found myself gravitating toward the “Mean Girl” and the “Crazy Woman” chapters a lot, as they brought up some very interesting points with some of my favorite pop culture characters of all time (like Regina George).

Thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebooks for the advanced reader copy!

Thank you to Anna Bogutskaya, sourcebooks, and NetGalley for an Arc of “Unlikable Female Characters”

Anna Bogutskaya’s analysis on what makes a female character unlikable is pretty engrossing. I normally don’t go for books like this because many times I find the writing to be overly academic and thus hard to read for a casual read through, but the language Bogutskaya uses is very accessible and I had an easy time parsing through it.

Bogutskaya identifies 9 categories in which they believe makes a female character unlikable. These categories include The Bitch, The Shrew, the Mean Girl, the Slut, the Weirdo, the Angry Woman, the Trainwreck, the Crazy Woman, and the Psycho. She writes thoroughly about why she believes characters fit into these archetypes and gives numerous examples of characters that would fit (though some of the characters picked seem like the popular choice and it would have been nice to perhaps hear about some more less well known characters).

I didn’t find myself agreeing all the time with the assessment of each of these characters but was still finding myself completely engrossed in the argument and analysis at hand, I don’t want to give too much of the book away, so I will say if you enjoy TV and Film and especially how characters are written, this would be a great book to pick up.

Unlikable Female Character provides a short and interesting history of female representation in American tv and movies. Bogutskaya uses very accessible language which is refreshing and will open this book up to a much wider audience.

I really enjoyed the self reflection required in reading this book. There were a lot of penny dropping moments where I got realize why I disliked so many female characters and that I was coerced and manipulated into that way of thinking. It will be tough work to try and change such a deeply ingrained mindset, especially when I thought I was quite open minded.

First off, wonderful eye-catching cover! By the title, I was certainly curious what unlikeable female characters would be discussed here, as that's a subjective adjective (some people like what others put down). I liked how the author broke it up into archetypes like "the shrew," "the slut," "the weirdo," etc. I recognized and was familiar with the majority of characters and movies discussed, and there were a few I haven't. I like that at the end, there was a list of films attached for the reader to peruse to really deep dive into more unlikeable female characters. I agree with all the sentiments expressed, for the most part, about how the women are depicted and how audiences felt about them. It's not a huge analysis per movie or tv show, but just enough for the reader to get the idea and understand why society loves to "hate" these women. I do wish there had been more characters included either with each archetype, or even more archetypes than just the few that were discussed. All in all, this was a fun read, especially if you like pop culture! Thank you, NetGalley and publisher for the ARC!

This was fun in a way that it’s fun to listen to someone talk about things they enjoy and obviously spend a lot of time on.

A lot of these movies and shows I only know on a surface level, have seen partially or not at all and I thought the author did a good job of summarizing them without going into too much, or too little, detail. Bogutskaya catalogues the unlikeable female characters into The Bitch, The Mean Girl, The Angry Woman, The Slut, The Trainwreck, The Crazy Woman, The Psycho, The Shrew and The Weirdo. I got the impression that we’d be talking about 1 or 2 major popular characters for each category but really this was an ocean of examples and sadly I got the sense that some of the analysis got lost in it. Once you get the gist of it it gets a bit repetitive; the thing that held me until the end was the simple joy of seeing my personal favorites mentioned and nodding along.

Still, this is a concise, straightforward (and fun) account of female characters that shaped culture and some that culture never allowed to shine. I will be going through the watchlist if only to see the pre-Code Hollywood movies and lament what could’ve been.

Thank you to Sourcebooks and NetGalley for providing this ARC.

I feel that this book could have been better as a piece of long form journalism or an essay. The title conveys the premise of the first half of the book in a nutshell. The second half gets a bit more esoteric in its argument and lost me in the process.

In the beginning, this book touches on very interesting and relevant topics about the portrayal of female characters on the screen, big and small, particularly those characters that are "unlikable" women.

What exactly is an "unlikable" female character? I think that will vary greatly depending on the individual, because what's likable or unlikable for one watcher (or reader, for that matter) isn't going to be strictly the same. I, for one, don't like the "likable" female characters that YA books push on the public and one of my all-time favourite characters is an "unlikable" female character. [1] For the sake of brevity, Anna Bogutskaya defines an "unlikeable female character" as a fictional woman who doesn't "look, behave, or talk like the blueprint of a 'good woman'." Those women are the Bitch, the Mean Girl, the Angry Woman, the Slut, the Trainwreck, the Crazy Woman, the Psycho, the Shrew, and the Weirdo.

What do they have in common is, that none conform to the societal expectations of what a woman should be personality-wise. They're not moral, upstanding, nice, polite, pliant, and sweet. They are downright despicable, or at best "morally compromised" as the author calls them. They are the grey and nuanced characters that, when they're men, are acclaimed by the public as realistic and true to life. But when they're women . . . they are insulted and hated. A male character that sleeps around is seductive, a female character that does the same is a Slut. A male character striving to reach the summit of financial and political power is driven and smart, a female character doing the same is a Bitch, a male character that express his anger is angry at the injustices of the system/the world, a female character that does the same is an Angry Woman that's merely angry at someone specific; and so on and so forth.

In this aspect, I 100% agree with Bogutskaya. There's definitely a blatant double standard to judge unlikable male and unlikable female characters; anyone that is even passingly familiar with a fandom knows that. Why is Skyler White the most hated and not Walter? Why is Cersei Lannister the one publicly and sexually humiliated and not Tywin?I myself have pointed out this discrepancy of standards with the Marquise de Merteuil, that Bogutskaya also mentions. The Bad Boys are redeemed or allowed to get away with it, and who doesn't love redeemed Bad Boys? There's a whole subgenre of romance whose entire premise is basically a bad boy reformed by a good girl. But the Bad Girls must always be punished, letting them get away with murder is rare and redemptions are rarer still.

Bogutskaya argues that this need to punish female characters for the sin of unlikability is due to sexism and misogyny, and I agree there as well. She argues that "likability" has historically been a way to keep women constrained, to dictate acceptable behaviour to women, to control them, since the earliest days of Hollywood when the censors reigned supreme and could sink a film or musical with a head shake. That much is true, too. She argues we've inherited that from the old censors, now flavoured with the argument that "likability" means a film/show's success and "unlikability" means it'll tank in the box office, which Bogutskaya says is wholly untrue because there's a huge market for unlikable female characters in cinema and TV . . . if only they were allowed to flourish!

So far, so good. Bogutskaya and I have agreed on three points already, in my view the most important and that contain this book's purpose in a nutshell.

But then, it's when we arrive to the middle of the book and continue till the end that this book loses its interest and, through that, goes from a valid denunciation of sexist practices in cinema and TV to a pamphlet that basically calls for the abolition of "likability" in its entirety but put in a way that reads more like arguing to spare women the consequences of their bad behaviour. After the chapters on the Bitch and the Mean Girl, which to me are the strongest, the argument becomes repetitive and exhaustingly ranty. It's basically "Bitches aren't allowed to be bitches, they're punished; Mean Girls aren't allowed to be mean, they're punished; Sluts aren't allowed to be slutty, they're punished; Angry women aren't allowed to express their anger, they're punished, Psychos aren't..." ad infinitum. Always peppered by comments that male characters that are all those things are celebrated, even when the examples are cherry-picked and made to fit in with a hammer. So your example of male anger being "celebrated" is The Joker, really? Really?

That's the biggest problem, to me, the cherry-picking of examples and omissions of context. Bogutskaya very deliberately goes for the worst/extreme examples to "prove" her points, which many times are a stretch. She goes for Reddit threads to support her claims, a place that is infamously young, white, male, and liberal, so how exactly does she expect them to react given that skewed demographic? That'd be like going to ask the Amish for their opinion on Playboy. And speaking of that, she also goes to the other extreme to "prove" her point, by citing without naming them, the conservative reactions to Cardi B's WAP song. Bogutskaya might steer clear of naming the pearl-clutchers, but we all know it's the likes of conservative Orthodox Jew pundit Ben Shapiro, who is predictably going to react like a conservative Orthodox Jew. What was I saying about asking the Amish, hmmm?

And some of the critics and media she quotes aren't known for their quality analysis content or their outstanding journalism either. I mean, the Huffington Post, really? Really? And as the cincher, Bogutskaya, a white woman, doesn't know where to stand on the whole Latinos vs Latinx debacle, because at first she uses the gendered Latina and then suddenly remembers she's meant to be "inclusive" and, good little white woman that she is, uses Latinx next, screw what actual Latin American people think of the term.

So, essentially, this is another case of a relevant and important topic suffering from the writer's delivery, plus too much pop psychology and pop feminism. Nothing Bogutskaya says here is really groundbreaking or particularly new, I've read the same things from better informed and more thoughtful feminists, including the controversial Camille Paglia. And the book suffers so much from the omissions and oversimplifications, to the point I was sometimes asking myself how much Bogutskaya really knows the fandoms she's criticising. For example, on the chapter where she addresses Cersei Lannister (in the Bitch section), she seems to imply that the reason Cersei is hated is because she's an ambitious woman who goes for it and doesn't apologise for it, and quotes actress Lena Headey as support, breathlessly adding that Lena got hate for her performance from fans. Here, I have to ask, did she know Cersei was so hated because the showrunners were doing their damnedest to make her "likable" and "nuanced" at the expense of other characters? TV Cersei isn't Book Cersei, that was the root of the fan hate. TV Cersei is a prime example of botched "likability," but Bogutskaya thinks it's her being the villain and punished for it that is the problem. Frankly, Catelyn and Sansa Stark are better examples for her thesis, both are "likable" in the traditional sense but hated by the fandom because they go against the popular characters (male and female). And, curiously, Bogutskaya, who argues for abolishing "likability," has no thoughts on the fact that Cersei's brother Tyrion, who in the books is morally compromised, is made to be nice and near-saintly in the show . . . and he is a fan favourite.

In sum, I do think there's merit in campaigning for allowing female characters to be as bad and flawed and messy as male characters. We women are no saints, and many of us love Bad Girls too as we love Good Boys. Not everyone likes Bad Boys, and not every Bad Boy is allowed to "get away with it" (we circle back to the cherry-picking issue) either, and the concepts of likability and unlikability are highly subjective in any case, so the conclusion to get rid of likability as a passé concept and view unlikability as merely a trait doesn't appeal to me. It smacks of the trope that bad behaviour means "nuance" whilst good behaviour is "unrealistic idealism," and glosses over the reasons for why the "bad/grey characters" became so popular in the first place. I'd much rather advocate for well-rounded characters, which to me mean both good and bad, flawed and layered, instead of working with black-and-white concepts of characterisation.

it was fine, i mean. nothing all that groundbreaking here. a series of essays on movies and television, no insights that you wouldn't find already circulating on tumblr or something. i find some of her readings kind of strange, and not really backed up by very much from the actual "texts" (the kids on tumblr are citing their sources a lot better), but ymmv

Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley
I have to say, Bogustkaya is one the makes me want to read and watch Gillian Flynn novels and adaptions, so that has to count for something.
Many times, when looking at a review of anything really, the term unlikable comes up. For some of us, it means simply that a character isn’t someone we like but is still interesting enough to read. But even we acknowledge that it does carry totally different weight and meaning when it comes to female characters, in particular those in media other than books. One of the first times I became aware of this was the character of Starbuck on the new Battlestar Galactica. It just seemed people were condoning behavior in her that was totally acceptable when Starbuck was a guy.
Bogustkaya’s book focuses on the types of unlikable female characters that one sees in film (be it movies or series). She traces the development, as it were, of each type, though most of the examples are from the 1990s-2020s, mostly shows that even if you are not a fan, you know enough about. At times, she highlights the fact that viewers forgive men for bad behavior (such as drug dealing and murder) but attack the women who express disagreement with what men do (Breaking Bad gets a good section).
If you are of a certain age, like me, you will find the section on Shannon Doherty and how perceptions of Brenda blend into how people viewed her to be quite good.
And the sections about The Craft and Fatal Attraction are worth the price of the book. (Hell, the comment about Michael Douglas and some of his movies is worth the price of the book).
I LOVED her bit about Samantha and Sex in the City.
It should be acknowledged as well that during her discussion of the HBO series Girls, Bogustkaya acknowledges the problematic nature of Lena Dunham herself as well as the character, and this is done in a way that is far, far different than the Shannon Doherty chapter.
Bogustkaya raises good points and concerns about empathy as well. I would have liked to see more of a discussion about the difference between unlikable and just not caring. For instance, I don’t like any of the characters in Succession, but I also don’t care enough to even hate them (hence why I don’t watch the show). Is there a difference between that type of unlikable and the one that inspires such hate, like the kind that was directed toward Anna Gunn?

A feminist takedown of the misogyny in our culture that leads us to root against so many women just for being human and female.

“Pop culture is the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. It’s our folklore.”

Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate by Anna Bogutskaya was a delight to read and gave me exactly what I wanted. I’m a fan of Bogutskaya from her podcast on horror movies and she’s taken her pop culture knowledge and savvy to this book in an accessible way.

I especially enjoyed the history that Bogutskaya goes into about old Hollywood and how dominated many female writers there were working on those films and the stories that they produced. It’s interesting to see the rise of “unlikeable” female characters and how it’s definitely reached the forefront of pop culture consciousness now.

Bogutskaya divides the unlikeable female character into several categories such as The Bitch and breaks down notable figures that fit these archetypes. She explains what makes them so apprehensible and also so intriguing with a careful eye. I really enjoyed her approach to them and seeing how these categories overlap and differ.

The book can wander a bit in places and be a bit repetitive at times but that’s just the nature of the topic that Bogutskaya is talking about since these categories do ultimately fit under one overarching umbrella. I also love that the book has a sense of humor, which makes it feel like I’m talking to a friend or listening to a podcast. This is a must read for anyone interested in film history and media literacy.

*This review will be published on my blog and other review websites a month before the pub date. Thank you NetGalley and Sourcebooks for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review!

Really enjoyed this, I love when you can feel the authors passion for what they are writing about. This is a fun and accessible read and the history behind the film and television dramas was super interesting especially the time period before the Hays Code was implemented. The choices to express the different unlikeable archetypes also worked well. Want to go further down the rabbit hole? She’s got you with a film watchlist and sources for each chapter. In the intro the author mentions how women in horror would have to be a whole other book and honestly I would be so here for it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.