Is It Progressive to Have Female Characters Be Grouchy Assholes?

Toxic masculinity minus the men

Above: The spirit animal of most female protagonists these days.

***This article contains a spoiler for Season 2 of The Last of Us (which I marked with bold text — it’s six paragraphs down).

Recently, I replied to a note by comic book author Hannah Rose Williams, and my reply got enough of a response that I thought the topic might be worth a whole post. Here’s Hannah’ note:

And here’s my reply:

What I want to add to the conversation is this: In the irony of ironies, I think that by writing female characters in a defensive and formulaic way, writers are endorsing the behaviors that we typically associate with “toxic masculinity”. Phrased another way: They’re saying “women can be unlikable assholes, too!”

As is so often the case with woke bullshit, the overcorrection comes in response to a real problem. It used to be true that most female characters were mere objects in narratives that centered around men. Even female-centric stories — especially fairy tales — often featured women who waited around to be saved by someone else. Consider Cinderella: It takes a coalition of animals, magic relatives, and the administrative power of the state to save that girl. She does almost nothing to help herself and finally gets bailed out by a powerful triad — she’s basically France in World War II.¹ People were right to be annoyed that TV and movies didn’t contain messages for girls other than “try to be so hot that royalty will try to make out with you even when you appear to be dead.”

But of course, Hollywood “solved” this problem in the dumbest possible way. Instead of writing female protagonists that display context-appropriate strength alongside other positive traits, they over-indexed on strength. TV and movies are now full of (supposedly) hardcore female leads who kick ass, consistently and thoroughly. A 90 pound girl who beats up a 250 pound guy and then says “need your Mommy?” or “now who’s the princess?” is a trope as overplayed as “guy walking away from an explosion and not looking back” or “lasers kill bad guys but only knock the wind out of good guys”. Writers, directors, and producers are afraid of creating helpless female characters, so they make those characters tougher and tougher until they’re basically roided out maniacs.

But what does society think of a person who does whatever the fuck they want and is quick to resort to physical violence? We think that person is a psychotic asshole. And we’re right: A selfish, violent person is extremely dangerous. We also have a word for the worldview that values strength over all other traits: “authoritarianism”. Writers used to know that a tough character needs to show flashes of empathy; that’s why Jack Lipnik told Barton Fink that Wallace Beery had to be paired with an orphan or a dame to soften his edge. But today, writers often use a “tougher is better” heuristic for female characters that turns them into total dickheads.

I see this character everywhere. I think Ellie from The Last of Us is a narcissistic asshole. I stopped watching For All Mankind because several female characters reminded me of the worst jocks on my high school football team. I blame Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones for some of this — that character got a lot of industry buzz, and whenever something works in Hollywood, it gets copied for the next decade. But Brienne of Tarth worked because in addition to being strong, she was duty-bound and fiercely loyal; she wasn’t a loose cannon wandering the countryside telling the world to suck her ladydick. She was also about seven feet tall,² which made the “kicking ass” part of “kicking ass in the name of justice” make a lot more sense.

(*The Last of Us spoiler is in the next paragraph.*)

The implication of these selfish, violent female characters is that the only problem with “toxic masculinity” is the men. Hollywood wants us to cheer when the traits we associate with bad male behavior — like aggression, self-centeredness, and a propensity for physical violence — are present in women. I, for one, do not cheer that; I don’t like any alleged protagonist with those traits. And it seems that most people feel the same way — The Last of Us lost more than half of its audience between the finales of Season 1 and Season 2. Though, to be fair, surely some of that was due to this cringeworthy guitar scene — that scene made me decisively Team Zombie — and due to Pedro Pascal breaking his own record for Most Gruesome On-Screen Death.

(*Spoiler over. The paragraph basically said “People don’t seem to like these characters.”)

The habit of loading female protagonists with aggressive, toxic traits could only happen in an environment that’s obsessed with identity. The writers and producers thought: “It’s different because she’s a girl!” But it’s not different; the rules of writing a good protagonist are the same whether the character is male or female. And by equating “strength” with “likability”, Hollywood has perversely validated the notion that strength is the only trait worth caring about. Maybe after a few more years and a few more billion dollars down the drain, Hollywood will realize that protagonists need to act like protagonists even if they’re women.

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1. To complete the analogy: The animals are Britain (plucky, resourceful), the Prince’s kingdom is the US (awash in resources), and the Fairy Godmother is The Soviet Union (summons resources in an unsustainable way and imposes harsh, inflexible rules).

2. Gwendoline Christie, who played Brienne of Tarth, is not seven feet tall — Google says she’s six foot three — but she was shot so as to appear taller.