Unlikeable Female Characters by Anna Bogutskaya

Author:Anna Bogutskaya
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks

THE SLUT IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE SLUT

When we think about sexually liberated, sex-positive female characters onscreen, promiscuity is no longer the frontier: it’s honesty and agency.

We’re moving beyond using “slut” as a derogative term and instead centering stories about women taking their sexuality into their own hands. She’s acknowledged her desires and she’s taking action to satisfy them. It’s the action part that irks audiences. Female characters can enjoy sex, but only if they feel guilty afterward, or are punished, or are using sex as a tool, separating their bodies and sex acts from their desires. If they’re sexually active and noncommittal, they’re either the butt of the joke or broken.

The narratives around women’s sexual agency and pleasure have only recently started heading in a nuanced direction. Happily promiscuous characters are controversial because they pursue pleasure for pleasure’s sake, they invite pleasure into their lives without letting it control them. Sluttiness is not a pathology, but slut shaming is now being used as a narrative plot point, not just as a way to judge sexual female characters. The 2010s started a cultural course correction of the savagery directed against young women through a series of films and series that directly questioned why exactly public opinion comes into play on the matter of a woman’s sexuality. Narratives around female sexuality and one’s agency over it begin so often in teen films, and it’s in teen films that the pervasive phenomena of slut shaming is addressed and rebalanced with protagonists who do not buckle at being called sluts but rather pose the question: What makes a Slut exactly?

In Easy A (2010), a teen comedy that’s a millennial interpretation of The Scarlet Letter in the tradition of nineties self-aware teen movies, the lead character, Olive (Emma Stone), is branded a slut through a fake rumor—and instead of letting herself be shamed by it, she profits off it (but never actually has sex). Actually, she calls herself a bimbo (“People hear you had sex once and, bam, you’re a bimbo”). The two terms have been interchangeable in pop culture but have very different connotations. “Bimbo” is usually used to describe a conventionally attractive, sexualized, but unintelligent or naive woman. Much like “slut,” it implies that these women are interchangeable and easily discarded and that their only value is their sexual appeal. And much like with the reclamation of “slut,” “bimbo” has been the subject of a powerful and fun reclamation, led by the Bimbos of TikTok, who embrace the term as describing someone who “radiates confidence, is comfortable in themselves, and doesn’t give a fuck about what anyone says to them.” But before TikTok, there was also Marilyn Monroe, who was typecast as a breathy bimbo and remains a sex symbol, her almost effortless comedic talent and timing often coming in second place to her trademark beauty.

Going back to Easy A, actual virgin teenager Olive becomes the target of slut shaming after she makes a deal with a closeted friend to fake having sex with him so he doesn’t get bullied for being gay.

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