I recently gathered my friends and forced them to watch one of my all-time favorite movies, “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (2001). As I repeatedly claimed “she’s just like me,” they stared on, gaping and slightly mortified by her actions. After the movie ended, my friends — offended on my behalf — told me to stop saying I was just like the awkward and self-sabotaging Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) because I was “nothing like her.” 

But even though Bridget Jones may make you cringe with her bad decision-making and terrible timing, her character is timeless for a reason. She has long represented the inner dialogues of women navigating uncertainty in their lives. Although I’m not an English woman in her early 30s, I relate to her nonetheless. 

Besides Bridget Jones, another character who has propelled the “bad woman” agenda forward is Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character in “Fleabag,” which shares the same name as the show. 

There’s no doubt that Fleabag is flawed. In her own words, she worries that she is “a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.” It’s bad qualities and feelings like these that make Fleabag an extremely relatable character for women everywhere. 

“Women are attached to the narrator of the show because she is imperfect; she embodies the struggles and pains of womanhood that men simply have no understanding of. We love “Fleabag” because we see ourselves in every mistake she makes,” explains writer Keti Akhalbedashvili in her article about the worst women and media and why we love them for the publication Her Campus.

Moreover, “bad women” aren’t just relatable — they diversify representations of women. 

Awkward girls like Tracey (Michaela Coel) in “Chewing Gum,” narcissistic ones like Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) in “Girls,” and even hit-women like Villanelle (Jodie Comer) in “Killing Eve” offer essential illustrations of women in both their shortcomings and successes. They exemplify how the “bad woman” trope allows female characters to showcase complexity and ambiguity in their morality, as we do in real life.

It’s refreshing to see characters who don’t have stagnant storylines and make mistakes that can be fixed in a single 30-minute episode, because that resolution is not realistic. We fight with our friends. We make inappropriate comments and mull over them for the rest of our lives. We interrupt conversations to talk about ourselves. And we deserve to see that portrayed with accuracy in shows and films, even if the fictionalized scenarios are downright absurd. 

It could be argued that the “bad/messy woman” has had her run. 

“This conflation of a personality type with trauma or mental ill-health is starting to feel unhelpful. It makes destructive behaviour a shorthand for psychological distress — when in reality many people struggle in quieter, more self-contained ways,” wrote Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian. 

Internal turmoil may just be that — internal. But the “bad woman” isn’t meant to be a guideline. And she is definitely not meant to be a role model. 

“Bad women” do what we can’t and say what we can’t. That’s what makes them so great. They escape from the patriarchal box of perfection and encourage us to express our innermost faults without criticism. 

You will hopefully never catch me fumbling the name of “Mr. Titspervert” at a work event in front of Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) like Bridget Jones, or knocking on Big’s door with quirky, cringeworthy quips like Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker). But, you would catch me painfully enduring a dinner with a room full of couples as the only single person like Bridget, or making questionable decisions to find out what I truly want, like all of the “bad women.”  

Creatives must continue to write more nuanced and complex female characters who are not afraid to be their worst selves openly and honestly. However, they should also not make them terrible only for the sake of being different. They don’t have to be saints or supervillains; they just have to be human. 

We are not stagnant characters in a story. We are humans with emotions and intrusive thoughts that make us question whether we’re good people or sane. The “bad woman” proves that women are capable of loving, being loved and reaching success and happiness even with our worst mistakes and most insufferable traits.