High-Achieving Women with Low Self-Esteem Because Boy
A look at the weary trope that is women with low self-esteem whose entire life purpose is to help men with low self-esteem
Mr. Robot might be one of my favorite hacker show ever made, almost solely because the hacking is not just five seconds of keyboard mashing to triangulate signals and recalibrate the firewalls, with a smug “got it!” as the geeky hacker taps the “enter” key and spins around from 12 monitors in a swiveling chair.
The hacking is almost good enough to distract from a very tiresome, problematic trope. Almost. (Seasons 1 and 2 spoilers ahead).
Take a look at Angela Moss, portrayed by Portia Doubleday, and quickly think of why she exists in the screenplay. Something tells me that the words that come off the top of your head are not about her career or her endeavors or even her character traits (of which there are none). She’s a love interest. And the role of a love interest, male or female, is to be devoid of personality because personality gets in the way of being a tool for the protagonist.
In Mr. Robot, Angela is good at her job. Yet, we know nothing else about her except for her relation to our hacker protagonist, Elliot. She evidently has no social life or higher aspirations. This frees up her character to be disproportionately and unreasonably invested in Elliot.
This is excellent, if you’re viewing this solely from Elliot’s perspective. Here’s a childhood friend who is very good-looking, high-achieving, and very understanding and patient with your idiosyncrasies and many, many problems. Now we get to watch the titillating friendship unfold into a juicy, juice romantic relationship!
Self-esteem is the only thing missing for Angela to take her life a different direction. That’s not to say she should leave Elliot in the dust (but I mean, he’s a severe liability, if we’re honest). She could easily keep him in her life, care for him occasionally, but not at her own emotional, financial, social, and personal expense.
Luckily for the many problematic male characters in film and the problematic male writers behind them, our society is very good at cutting down female self-esteem and female support networks so that, like Angela, women’s roles are reduced to only what their relationships to men are.
Another one of my favorite shows, Better Call Saul, disappoints similarly. (Spoilers ahead). Jimmy McGill, our protagonist, is a lovable, royal fuck-up. While entertaining to watch, he’s a very problematic person to have in your life and certainly not someone you would want to make a friendship with or depend on in any way, shape, or form.
And yet, Kim Wexler. She’s a high-achieving, smart, attractive woman whose self-esteem issues and history with Jimmy makes her, again, irrationally emotionally invested in our emotionally inept protagonist. She has little reason to actually keep Jimmy in her life, given how many times Jimmy has screwed things up for her.
Jimmy shares a similar relationship with his parasitic and emotionally-exploitative brother, Chuck. As a result, we hate Chuck. So it’s a testament to the strength of this trope that we don’t have the same visceral hate for Jimmy. (To be fair, Jimmy actually tries to be a good person, while Chuck is Satan.)
Let’s pull in some other examples!
- Like, why does Hermione Granger, someone who is literally the highest-achieving witch of her time, wasting her life on Ron Weasley? Love him or not, he still sucks at life.
- Or, while we’re talking about British stuff, why is the Queen stuck with this Phillip guy? He’s really not very useful. It’s not fiction, sure, but tropes have to come from somewhere.
- Isn’t Shrek basically just a huge asshole who, because he has layers, requires a princess to literally transform herself for him?
- Beast is an asshole, and it’s Belle’s job to love him, for no reason other than she was kidnapped. To be fair, Belle is a pretty big asshole, too.
- Every romance anime.
And we could go on.
I’m not sure why this trope exists, except perhaps to stroke the male ego, to tell people with problems that the universe will always offer up women to make you feel better. And not just any woman, but high-achieving, stunningly-attractive ones.
This culturally-promoted entitlement can have seriously insidious results. While it seems innocuous to serve high-achieving women with low self-esteem on platters to our protagonists, what happens when it’s an antagonist? Aren’t Disney villains simply playing by this same script when Dom Frollo attempts to capture/rape Esmerelda, Scar tries to capture/rape Nala, Jaffar tries to capture/rape Jasmine, and Gaston tries to capture/rape Belle? The only difference between Gaston and Beast is that Gaston acts on his entitlement by trying to actively rape Belle, while Beast simply kidnaps her, waits for her to magically fall in love with him, and suddenly see him for the charming man he is. It’s the same damn sense of entitlement.
At least villains seem to understand their acts as selfish; the good guys are too busy explaining why, despite their problems, they’re “one of the nice guys”, sidelining the fact that relationships are two-way partnerships, not consumer goods to be consumed by one party at the expense of the other.
