IDEAS AND FILM

YOU HAVE TO HATE HER

the trickiest misogyny trope on tv

By Maeve Mckinney

Trapped in misogyny

I know that you think you’ve overcome your misogyny, but I’m here to tell you that maybe the old bigotry has a few new tricks, tricks so deep in the culture that you can’t see them and that you can only react to them. Everyone hates when someone gets in the way of what they want and in a number of recent television shows/movies the burden of being the blockade has fallen squarely on the shoulders of female characters. As one redditor put it so eloquently about Skylar White in Breaking Bad, “She's just so perfectly hateable. It's like they spent years developing the most annoying character ever.” It doesn’t matter how big a feminist you are, a woman who gets in the way of the hero is going to inspire hate, your hate, and it all goes out the window when a woman gets in the way of a man’s fun. We literally can’t help ourselves. While the literary trope in itself is not misogynistic, it finds its perfect form in misogyny.

This insidious trope has three key elements. First, the male lead needs to be doing destructive things that tend towards the immoral. Second, the female character must openly chastise his behavior. And third, the last piece of the puzzle? It helps that they have some sort of romantic past together. These all combine to create the “you-have-to-hate-her” trope. It allows the viewer to feel comfortable when bad things happen to good women, because, after all, she’s a thorn in the side of the leading man.

Breaking Bad: Crystal Methsogyny

Breaking Bad is about a high school chemistry teacher, Walter White, who gets diagnosed with cancer and in order to pay for his treatment he begins to sell crystal meth. From a narrative point of view, Skylar is all roadblock; she just gets in the way. She demands that he gets treatment when he wants to die; she isn’t supportive of him becoming a drug kingpin (how strange); and she spends a good deal of season one playing some version of the nagging wife, including begging Walter to turn himself into the police.

Why she can't accept his bad boy ways?

That would be all well and good, but what this allows for practically breaks the bounds of decency. So, I’m going to put this bluntly. The moral compass of the show is so crazy that we’d rather watch a rape than normal, consensual sex scene between a loving wife and husband.

The consensual sex scene is excruciating. Walter, emboldened by his vision of becoming a meth dealer, returns home triumphant. Skyler tries to have a serious conversation with him about where he’s gone and this causes him, along with his earlier failure to perform, to try to have sex with her. All along in the background we’ve hearing Mick Harvey’s pop 40 hit, “Out of Time” (make of that what you will) and then the scene cuts to the end credits. At that moment, it doesn’t feel good, especially since we’ve just watched Walter kill two people, but it’s going to get worse. The next episode kicks off right we left off with a black screen and the most excruciating sex moans every recorded in television history. I timed it and it only lasts a minute, but it feels like an hour, and our only relief is when Walter starts violently coughing and runs into the bathroom. Of course, at the same time, we get our first visual image of the scene, which is a relief because having it to imagine it is just too much, too excruciating.

The way they almost were

In contrast to that awfulness, the rape that kicks off season two is a walk in the park. Unlike the consensual sex of season one, it is quickly over and much more watchable. This gives us insight into the shift in power between Walter and Skyler: he’s becoming a successful meth dealer (fun) and she doesn’t like the way he’s behaving (like a successful meth dealer). We just can’t abide her undercutting his new fun and so we’re kind of okay with her being violated, and, in fact, we’re more than okay with it. That’s a tragedy and some diabolical logic for you.

House M.D.: The Diagnosis is Misogyny

House M.D. is another great example of this trope. It’s about a doctor who is a brilliant diagnostician and who also has a raging Vicodin addiction. Unlike other medical shows, House M.D. has no clear-cut heroes and villains or, more importantly, no one is really ever absolutely right. It’s all shades of gray and it’s left up to the audience to decide about right and wrong, good and bad. Like everyone else in the show Dr. Cameron, one of the doctors on House’s team, is enamored with his ability to solve the most difficult of medical mysteries, but for Cameron the writers and producers have added one little difference: she’s also in love with the idea of fixing House.

Don't fix my House!

Cameron’s morally upright almost to her detriment, or when I think about, it is actually to her detriment. This is, of course, trope requirement number two, being the antithesis of the male lead. Cameron’s biggest transgression is not accepting House as the God he views himself as. In season One, after she refuses to come back to work unless he takes her on a date, we can see the contours of why we might hate her and why we might as well. The date is painfully awkward and highlights that Cameron is not in love with House, but with the idea that she can help him. Clearly, she has Florence Nightingale syndrome. She is a fixer and needs damaged people to feel good. The fact that she is married to a terminally-ill man tells us and House what her deal is. He rather mournfully and cruelly tells her, “You don't love, you need… That's why you're going out with me. I'm twice your age, I'm not great looking, I'm not charming, I'm not even nice. What I am is what you need... I'm damaged.”

It's too awful to face

She invites herself into areas of House’s psyche that he and we don’t want her in. Furthermore, she commits the cultural crime of trying to curtail the leading man’s behavior, potentially depriving us of all our fun. At the end of the second season, House is shot and falls into a drug induced hallucination. We learn about his real feelings for Cameron, that he feels he would taint her if he were to touch her. But what we feel is if she fixed him, it would ruin him, and because of that we kind of, you know, completely hate her, which in the twisted logic of our misogyny trope is exactly what we should feel.

You: Death by Misogyny

The pinnacle of this trope is Beck and Joe from the Netflix show You; it’s so fundamental to the trope that we somehow end up rooting for a serial killer. It’s one thing to hate a female character who is merely impeding the male lead’s bad boy goals, but since Beck is the goal, she perversely becomes the object of our hate. We see the world through Joe’s eyes and so we expect Beck to be perfect and remain on the pedestal Joe has put her on.

This, of course, is impossible. Beck does not know that Joe is a serial killer, which is infuriating, because we can so clearly see what a freak he is. It’s as clear as day with the many “how-did-you-know-that” moments in the show. When Beck is buying a new mattress and Joe comments that her apartment definitely isn’t big enough for a king size, the correct response is, “how do you know that?” Obviously, Joe is able to play this off because all housing in NYC is small, but things like this happen throughout the show and you wonder how Beck could be so stupid. It is absolute torture and so mind numbingly unbelievable that the only thing you can do is hate her for being the love object of a serial killer—talk about blaming the victim and yet I’m doing it, too.

Books have tropes, too

You is special because Joe must justify his actions to himself, in order to do the terrible things he does. So, of course, we rationalize right along with Joe in a sick version of confirmation bias. Joe murders people to protect Beck, just like a good boyfriend should. Benji is a horrific character and Peach is a terrible friend and so you kind of forget that murdering people is a gruesome, cruel act. It’s just what our guy does to protect his girl.

This not to say Beck is a good person. She can be just as manipulative as Joe, cheats on him with her therapist, and decides to start an affair with Joe himself even though he is in another relationship. Beck is the ultimate blame-the-victim character, and we imagine that if she were just smarter or more perfect Joe wouldn’t have murdered her or she would’ve been able to detect his sinister persona from the start. Beck, despite being deeply flawed, is an extremely intelligent character and that makes us hate her even more.

She walks right into this monstrous relationship twice, which is at least one more time than any audience will put up with. Beck is flawed and detestable because we’re conditioned to root for Joe despite the heinous shit he does. She’s the perfect murder victim, somebody no one gives a damn about because she’s that bad. And that makes You the most striking example of the don’t-you-dare-get-in-the-way-of-my-bad-man trope.

Remember, the way you think can be a trap

Misogyny This, Misogyny That

This trope is not your typical wife-beater misogyny; it’s more of an invisible misogyny. And once you open up this can of worms, you can’t close it back up. I’d categorize the you-have-to-hate-her trope with the Bechtel test; while it can effect the quality of the show, it’s not an end all be all. Lots of shows included in this article are excellent pieces of art. It’s just that, well, we need to see how powerful these tropes are and call ourselves out on all our inherent biases.

©Maeve Mckinney and the CCA Arts Review