The Female Antihero, Complex Women in Fiction and Sanitized Feminism

She’s drunk. She’s bitter. She ghosted her therapist. She’s sleeping with someone she shouldn’t, and she’s absolutely not sorry.

The female antihero is not new. She’s just been edited out, softened, or punished out of existence. For centuries, literature has allowed men the freedom to rebel and break free—ruthless kings, self-loathing geniuses, charming sociopaths with mother issues. Their brokenness was art. Their cruelty, depth. But give that same freedom to a woman, and suddenly she’s “unlikeable,” “unstable,” “difficult to root for.” That's sanitized feminism. What is sanitized feminism, you may ask? Let me womansplain you:

Sanitized feminism is a version of feminism that has been stripped of its radical, political, and confrontational roots to make it more palatable, marketable, and socially acceptable—particularly for mainstream consumption. It is feminism that has been polished until it’s safe. Until it fits on a coffee mug, a tote bag, or a cute Instagram post.

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Key Characteristics of Sanitized Feminism:

1. Commercialized Messaging: Slogans like “Empowered Women Empower Women” or “The Future is Female” become products sold by corporations that, ironically, often exploit women in their supply chains. Empowerment is repackaged as a branding opportunity.

2. Individualism over Structural Change: It centers personal success stories—usually of privileged women—as symbols of feminist victory, ignoring systemic inequality. Feminism becomes about confidence, not class. About leaning in, not burning down.

3. Erasure of Rage and Discomfort: Sanitized feminism avoids the messy parts: anger, grief, sexuality, contradiction. It prefers "strong female leads" who overcome quietly and smile politely. It dismisses women who are complicated, angry, or morally grey. They love sugar coated womanhood.

4. Inclusivity as Aesthetic, Not Practice: It often claims to include everyone but still centers white, cisgender, able-bodied, upper-class women. Intersectionality is referenced, but rarely embodied in action or representation.

5. Co-option by Institutions of Power: When the same institutions that historically suppressed women now champion "feminist" campaigns, it's a red flag. Sanitized feminism thrives in spaces that value optics over justice—corporate offices, influencer culture, and neoliberal politics.

The female antihero doesn’t care about it all. She isn’t here to be liked. Let's talk about her:

Not Your Girlboss

So, we mentioned that the female antihero is bad for branding. She’s not #relatable. She’s not healing in soft light, journaling about her boundaries. She’s manipulating. She’s detached. She is, in every sense, dangerous.

And that’s why we need her.

Because under the surface of “strong female leads” and trauma-to-triumph story arcs is a deep fatigue. Women are tired of being asked to perform resilience. Tired of being polished into symbols of hope. The antihero walks off the page mid-redemption arc and dares you to keep reading. Take:

1. Medea by Euripides (431 BCE), Clytemnestra – Agamemnon by Aeschylus (458 BCE), Salome – Biblical texts / Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1893)

2. Lady Macbeth – Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1606), Milady de Winter – The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (1844)

3. Catherine Earnshaw – Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847), Becky Sharp – Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848), Nana – Nana by Émile Zola (1880)

4. Emma Bovary – Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856), Lily Bart – The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905), Phyllis Dietrichson – Double Indemnity by James M. Cain (1943)

5. Alex Forrest – Fatal Attraction (1987), Catherine Tramell – Basic Instinct (1992), Mildred Pierce – Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain (1941)

6. Amy Dunne – Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012), Arabella – I May Destroy You by Michaela Coel (2020), Villanelle – Killing Eve by Luke Jennings (2018)

These are women with too many sharp edges, too many contradictions to be clutched tight by moral expectations. They’re messy not because they’re broken—but because they’re human.

Rage Isn’t a Phase

The female antihero often leads with rage—but it’s rarely loud. Sometimes it’s the slow, smoldering kind that simmers under a smile. Sometimes it’s silent, folded into sex, silence, withdrawal. In Lust in Paris, I created a main character, Lili, whose issue is the ache to disappear wrapped in the hunger to be seen. The difference is that this rage isn’t made palatable. It isn’t neatly resolved. It stays, hissing in the corner of every decision. Writing her means stepping into moral murk. She’s not empowered in the digestible, Pinterest-quote way. She doesn’t learn her lesson, she doesn’t get what she deserves—because maybe she never wanted it. Maybe all she wanted was to ruin something. To feel. To stop feeling. To stop performing femininity like a job interview.

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Not a Role Model, and That’s the Point

Let’s be honest: the female antihero isn’t a role model. She’s a rupture. She exists to undo the centuries of literary femininity scripted by male authors and market demands. She cheats. She betrays. She leaves the baby in the bath and doesn’t cry about it. And no, she doesn’t need to be redeemed. Redemption is a narrative leash. It keeps female characters in check. If she suffers, she must evolve. If she sins, she must atone. The female antihero breaks that logic. She sins and shrugs. She suffers and keeps walking.

To write a female antihero is to risk everything: readership, likeability, mainstream approval. But it’s also to write from a place of radical honesty.

Of contradiction.

Of freedom.

She is not the muse. She is not the moral center. She is the question that keeps the reader up at night.

Let her be bad. Let her lie, steal, seduce, abandon. Let her fail and not grow. Let her want without justification.

Because the female antihero doesn’t need your permission. She never did.