Girlboss Feminist

"What do you want me to say? I got blinded by my desire to see myself succeed, which, since I'm a woman, is actually very feminist. But now that Vance can't help me succeed, I realize the more feminist thing to do is to make sure he doesn't succeed, either."

— Princess Carolyn, BoJack Horseman

The Girlboss Feminist wants to tell her subordinates that she's a strong advocate for women. After all, look at her. She's a woman in power!

She's a feminist in word, but in deed her feminism is shallow and seldom extends beyond white, heterosexual, wealthy, upper-class, conventionally successful women (or, in extreme cases, herself and no one else). She might be a Bourgeois Bohemian, but her area of focus is usually limited to money, fame, and other traditional hallmarks of success. She's a master at co-opting trends, particularly social justice movements, and manipulating them to suit her own selfish ends. This may overlap with the Alpha Bitch if she proclaims the importance of social issues while doing nothing to help people like her.

This character archetype is, in many ways, a backlash to the often superficial nature of female empowerment displayed in the High-Powered Career Woman and Plucky Office Girl archetypes of earlier years. While those tropes were originally intended as idealized forms of female excellence, the modern girlboss feminist serves to highlight how making it to a position of power or authority and then doing nothing for other women and marginalized groups only serves to reinforce the status quo rather than changing things for the better. If she is ever found out, she will often be considered The Quisling or a Category Traitor.

Those archetypes had previously been an idealized form of female achievement; this one deconstructs some of the assumptions behind Showing Up Chauvinists. It often asks how free women "really" are in these corporate structures. While this can be Truth in Television, it's also notable that this trope can have misogynistic undertones. High Powered Career Women can and do empower other women, and it's hard not to see this as a suggestion to Stay in the Kitchen.

While some portrayals tend to characterize the girlboss feminist as an antagonist, she can also be the hero or another sympathetic character who merely did what they had to do in order to climb the corporate ladder or who is on their way towards redemption through character development. In more extreme cases, she's a straight-up Female Misogynist who doesn't believe a word of what she's saying and doesn't care about other women at all.

Though aspects of her character have been around for much longer, the girlboss feminist remains one of The Newest Ones in the Book. She exhibits a particular kind of backlash that started around the late 1990s but only became recognized in mainstream culture around the 2010s.

No relation to Girlboss, though the series did encourage the prevalence and eventual mockery of the term.

Compare the Straw Feminist, who doesn't necessarily need to have power to portray feminism in a bad light. It often overlaps with Corrupt Corporate Executive and Bad Boss. See also Unstable Powered Woman and God Save Us from the Queen!.

No Real Life Examples, Please!

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Examples:

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • Poison Ivy (2022): The villain of issues #7 and #8 is Beatrice Crawley, the CEO of a fracking company called FutureGas. To the public, Crawley is a proud feminist and the face of an eco-friendly business. However, one of her employees accuses her of not being very kind to her female employees when they ask for maternity leave and her company is revealed to be infecting people with chemicals that turn them into plant monsters. Crawley is also a former assistant professor to Dr. Jason Woodrue, Ivy's former mentor, and is deliberately pushing her company's technology to continue his twisted vision.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): Veronica Cale presents herself as a philanthropic, feminist hero who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most powerful people in the world. In truth, Cale is a petty, envious woman who resents Wonder Woman for being born into her powers and will stoop to any low in order to publicly destroy the Amazon princess. This includes using the services of Dr. Psycho, a known rapist and misogynist, and manipulating or blackmailing her own employees, male and female, into going along with her schemes.

Films — Animation

• Pixar Shorts: Zig-Zagged in the SparkShort "Purl". Purl, a pink ball of yarn (representing women) in a traditional white male-oriented office, becomes more like the men around her in order to achieve success and acceptance. This reaches a climax when she makes a crack about the new ball of yarn in the office, Lacey, so as not to be associated with her. However, she immediately feels guilty about treating Lacey the way she was treated by the other guys and decides to make sure Lacey and other balls of yarn like her are more included and able to be themselves, subverting the trope.

Films — Live-Action

• The Assistant: This is discussed and implied to be one main future possibility for Jane, the titular assistant. She spends all day schlepping around after her boss, The Producer, and doing menial but important and thankless tasks such as booking his transport. Meanwhile, it's an Open Secret that the producer is sexually assaulting women. When Jane tries to report it, a HR rep gets it out of her that she wants to be a producer, and he uses this over her head to convince her to drop the accusation. He then tells her that she'll be a huge inspiration for other girls and "we need more female producers." She does what she's told and drops them.
• Cruella: The Baroness Von Hellman is a world-renowned fashion mogul who won't let anyone tell her how to run her business (including men who try to put her down for being a female CEO) and at first acts as a role model/mentor to the newly-hired fashion prodigy Estella. It's quickly revealed, however, that she's a true Narcissist who can and will get rid of anyone who she believes is in her way, even to the extent of killing Estella like she did her mother.
• Emily the Criminal: Liz's boss Alice initially appears to promise Emily a new career as her assistant, until Emily learns that the position is unpaid. When Emily tells her that it's impossible for her to work without money and that she thinks it's unethical, Alice tells her that she was the only woman on staff when she started, clearly expecting Emily to be impressed or grateful. When Emily retorts that she at least had a job that paid her, Alice accuses her of being spoiled and wanting everything handed to her (which is far from true) and threatens to have her thrown out before Emily leaves on her own.
• I Care a Lot: Guardian Marla is a sharp-dressed woman who dragged herself up from poverty and accuses men of disrespecting her. The men in question are sons of women that Marla has preyed upon to steal their money and valuables, before throwing them in deprived care homes to be bled dry by the state.
• Promising Young Woman: Dean Walker is the dean of Cassie and Nina's former college. Despite maintaining a reputation for apparent transparency, Walker refused to take any action against Nina's rapist Al. When Cassie confronts her over this, Walker points out that the evidence was shaky and she saw no reason to ruin a young man's career. Cassie appears to accept this, agreeing that it makes sense, before revealing that she's kidnapped the dean's daughter. Dean Walker's ostensible fairness immediately cracks, proving that she was fine with abandoning Nina (and contributing to Nina's suicide), but her own daughter is a different story.
• Working Girl: Katherine Parker starts off as a potential role model for her secretary Tess, as she is a successful career woman who seems more supportive of Tess's career than the men Tess has had to work under before. Then Tess discovers that Katherine was going to sell off Tess's idea as her own after dismissing it in their first meeting. While Tess has similar ambitions to Katherine, Katherine is a condescending Wellesley graduate with money and connections who nonetheless calls herself a trailblazer for women, while blue-collar Tess has to struggle and lie about her connections just to be heard in the business world. Tess also takes pains to treat her own secretary equally when she gets a promotion at the end of the film, showing that she is going to avert the trope.

Literature

• Elemental Masters: Arachne is an Edwardian version of one, as a woman who runs a company (very atypical for the times) and who dislikes the fact that the Black Magic she practices is so misogynistic. As it turns out, her company is Human Sacrifice on an industrial level based on physically and spiritually poisoning the young women who labor in it so she can use their suffering as fuel for her power. When feminist movements protest her cruel treatment of her workers, she waves it off by claiming that it can't be exploitative because she's a woman herself.
• Idol: Sam is a Bad Influencer and the head of a multimillion-dollar literature and wellness empire. She's also a hypocrite who stole other people's stories, exaggerated her own tale of misfortune to make herself more palatable, and possibly sexually assaulted her best friend. She also defends women's right to abortion and then threatens to reveal that Lisa had an abortion unless she retracts the accusation of sexual assault.
• The Sleeping Beauty Killer: When she found out she was being made redundant from the newspaper she'd worked at for years, Mindy Sampson threatened to sue the paper for sexism and ageism, before agreeing to go quietly provided they paid her off and let her keep the Chatter name so she could set up a gossip website. A lot of Mindy's columns are centered around spreading rumours and making scathing, judgemental comments about other women, especially in regards to their love lives and appearances (nor does she care how factual she is or who gets hurt). She also doesn't seem to truly care about championing any kind of feminist causes, being only concerned with getting attention for her website; she's only demonstrated using the "language" of feminism to benefit herself.

Live-Action TV

• American Horror Story: Cult: This is revealed to be Ally's ultimate fate, with some overlap with From Nobody to Nightmare. Having been tormented by Kai's misogynistic cult, Ally joined the descendants of SCUM and is seen gaining political power in the closing moments of the series. SCUM itself is a murderous organization (bordering on a cult in itself), and SCUM and its extreme feminist beliefs are portrayed as being behind it.
• In Black Snow (2022), Chloe Wolcott has milked her status as the female boss at a major company for all that it's worth, even as it becomes clear that Wolcott Industries is corrupt and that several high-level employees, including her father, were involved in the unsolved disappearance of a pair of trafficked boys from Vanuatu back in 1994. As Jim Cormack's investigation threatens to topple the company, Chloe begins cynically planning to use the scandal to shove her father out of the company completely. Nowhere in her plans is there any mention of whether or not she intends to discontinue Wolcott's use of migrant labor.
• Blue Bloods: The story arc for one season had Erin's new boss, a woman who talked about the importance of having a woman in a place of power, revealed to be involved in an extortion ring, using knowledge of crimes by various city officials to get them to enact policies that she wanted, rather than having them prosecuted for those crimes. Erin is all too happy to turn her in.
• The Boys (2019): Stormfront initially portrays herself as a "girlboss" who uses social media to rebel against Vought and promote feminist values, especially within the male-dominated Seven. Of course, this being The Boys, she's later revealed to be a World War II-era Nazi who murders minorities for fun. Her so-called feminist values only go as far as uplifting parts of the "Aryan" race.
• Creepshow: In the segment '"Lydia Layne's Better Half" the titular Lydia Layne is accused of being one by her employee/lover Celia after she passes her over for a promotion in favor of a man with less experience. Lydia rebuffs it, but when she's trapped in an elevator with Celia's corpse she flips out and reveals that she did pass her up for the promotion because she couldn't stand the thought of a woman she mentored surpassing her success and that only she is allowed to "be her".
• The Dropout: Invoked. Elizabeth herself is depicted as having no real feminist beliefs because she's so motivated that she truly believes her gender won't be an issue. However, when she becomes CEO and starts getting labeled as a feminist trailblazer by the media, she quickly adopts feminist language to silence questions about Theranos' effectiveness, even though it's clear to most people who know her that she doesn't believe it. Dr. Phyllis Gardner, Elizabeth's old Stanford professor who never bought into her hype, explicitly calls her out on this late in the show's run, pointing out that once Theranos collapses and the full extent of Elizabeth's fraud is clear, it's going to be so much harder for any woman to be taken seriously in Silicon Valley.
• Parodied in (out of all televison series) Nickelodeon Kid Com Erin & Aaron where Annoying Younger Sibling Natasha declares herself a "girlboss", but she sells illegal German cheese snacks to her friends at a premium and guilt trips her parents into doing an art project for her.
• Family Law (2021): Abigail Bianchi is a played with example. On the surface, she seems to be a straight example of this trope, being a bully who dresses up her meanness as girl power. However, as the series goes on and she's forced to work in a field where her abrasive attitude puts her at a disadvantage, she starts to show that she actually has principles and beliefs, but has been hiding them to further her career as a corporate litigator.
• House of Cards (US): Played with by Zoe Barnes. She sleeps with Frank Underwood in exchange for inside information on his political rivals which leads to her skyrocketing popularity. However, when she is fired for declining a promotion at Frank's behest, her former boss Hammerschmidt calls her a "cunt" which she secretly records and posts on social media spurring a widespread anti-misogyny movement. Despite her increased acclaim as a speaker for women, she still serves Frank as his mistress and patsy until she finally decides enough is enough and resolves to break things off with Frank. Her newfound sincerity is short-lived, however, as Frank immediately pushes her in front of a train and murders her to avoid his secrets being revealed.
• Impeachment: Ann Coulter and Susan Carpenter-McMillan are presented as right-wing variations on the theme. Each one professes to be elbowing her way into a traditionally male-dominated field (Coulter in media, Carpenter-McMillan in law) ostensibly to restore dignity to women after their liberal counterparts sold out women to Bill Clinton in exchange for his administration protecting abortion access. In practice, they build their careers convincing the naïve Paula Jones to launch a doomed effort to sue Clinton for sexual harassment as part of a larger plan to impeach Clinton for perjury, and then abandon her when the lawsuit is dismissed.
• Industry: Yasmin slowly morphs into one. While using the fact that she's a woman to rise through the ranks, she's also from a wealthier family than Harper who is also black. When supervising Harper, she directly tells her to "dim her light" and get used to doing menial jobs.
• Law & Order: Nina Ellis is the female CEO of biomedical engineering startup Hythena and she proudly flaunts herself as a "strong-willed woman who takes no shit from the men" in order to attract positive attention from clients and investors. She's actually a ruthless narcissist who only cares about one thing: herself. When she realizes that the prosecution has irrefutable evidence that she murdered her COO and fiancée Kyle Morrison for trying to stop the company going into business with cancer screen tests that actually didn't work, she immediately tries to use the "battered woman syndrome" defense, accusing him of having physically, verbally and sexually abused her for years in order to persuade the jury to acquit her out of sympathy. Female prosecutor Mouran is so worried about the bad optics that prosecuting a woman who makes a phony abuse claims against a man might give the #metoo movement that she pushes her male co-worker Price to offer Nina a plea deal instead. He refuses, spurred on by the victim's father indignantly pointing out that this means his son will be slandered in death as an abuser, and ultimately catches her out in a lie by revealing the broken arm she claimed to have received from Kyle was actually the result of falling off a horse.
• Leverage: Redemption: Paige Stewart in "The Big Rig Job" is a Bad Influencer who likes to paint herself as a strong, innovative businesswoman in a man's world. In truth, she is a self-centered, vain, and irresponsible woman who treats her employees like dirt and has been running her father's business into the ground alongside her brother. The Leverage team take advantage of her narcissism by posing as executives from a reality tv show about young businesswomen to get close to her. Paige, seeing this as an opportunity to promote her brand, doesn't suspect a thing.
• Line of Duty: Roz Huntley is a graduate-entry black woman running a high-profile investigation into a Serial Killer. She shows some feminist beliefs, such as refusing to describe the victims as prostitutes...but she's also trying to frame a vulnerable man for the murders. After accidentally killing someone in self-defence, she abandons all her previous compunctions, accusing AC-12 of persecuting her because she's a woman, while she's framing, bullies, and humiliates the killer's surviving victim — a vulnerable immigrant — for the murder she committed. She also baits her underling, Jodie, who idolizes her by promising to help her in her career, since both are women, but does this solely so Jodie can work with her to frame people for the murder she committed.
• Only Murders in the Building: Cinda Canning is a True Crime Podcaster and Immoral Journalist. She's shown recording an ad for her podcast sponsors showing they're sponsored by food products marketed as "By women, for women", right as she's releasing an episode of her podcast where she interviews a guy who sexually assaulted Mabel at a previous workplace and is crying victim because she defended herself and he got injured. Even beyond that, she treats her (women) employees abusively and is casually destroying Mabel's life for views, making it clear she's the kind of "Girl Boss" who will casually destroy other women to promote herself while using her own success to claim she's championing women.
• Shrill: Annie goes to the WAHAM conference in Season 2 ("Women Are Having A Moment"), run by the blonde Lady in a Power Suit (which is pink, naturally), Justine, who preaches empowerment in her extremely expensive seminars. Annie asks her about providing for low-income women, to which she claims she gave scholarships...to one woman. Who couldn't attend because of childcare issues. She then also humiliates Annie by shouting out on stage that "it's hard for her to find clothes in her size" and brags about getting the other woman at her company fired for competing with her.
• Succession:
  • Shiv Roy is ostensibly a liberal feminist and the only daughter of right-wing media mogul Logan Roy. When Waystar-Royco becomes embroiled in a huge sex scandal, one of Shiv's first instincts is to make a play for leadership, hoping to become the the token woman that can clean up Waystar. However, her real intentions become clear in Season 2 when she persuades a rape victim not to testify in front of Congress because it would hurt Waystar (though she claims to be concerned about the harassment the victim and her young daughter would receive). She promises to clean up the company but shows no real ability or desire to do so. Her brother Kendall calls her out on this multiple times but is also seen humiliating Shiv, such as playing Nirvana's "Rape Me", to make a point about her hypocrisy.
  • While a less obvious example than Shiv, Waystar's lead counsel Gerri has clearly been involved in the Corporate Conspiracy for decades. Nevertheless, she proves adept at denying all responsibility (usually because of her gender) and becomes acting CEO of Waystar in Season 3, claiming to want to clean house but doing very little of the sort.
• Veep: Selina Meyer wants be seen as a feminist hero for being the first woman president but she doesn't actually do anything to improve women's lives and she's willing to make excuses for female genital mutilation if it's in her interest.
• The White Lotus: Nicole Mossbacher is the CFO of a wellness brand and has, according to her, feminist goals. Despite this, she's accused of having "rode the wave of #MeToo" to her current position just to try and redeem the company's image by having a female executive. She then immediately lashes out at Rachel for describing her that way, suggesting that it was accurate. She also suggests to Paula and Olivia that her son Quinn is the "real victim" because he's afflicted by the White Man's Burden.
• The Wilds: Gretchen Klein is a former college professor who tries to prove that women are better than men at leading society by forcibly stranding two groups of teenagers (one composed of girls and the other boys) on deserted islands and monitoring their progress. Even discounting the fact that leading society requires a very different skill set from surviving on a deserted island, Gretchen deliberately stacks things against the boy group by using boys who all have criminal records, including one domestic abuser, so she can prove her "hypothesis" right. She is barely fazed, and even happy to learn that said domestic abuser assaulted one of the boys because it supports her views. Also, for all her feminist rhetoric, she proves to be very dismissive to other women, dismissing her female colleagues as "timid-minded" for not going to the lengths she's willing to go to, making insensitive voyeur jokes when she sees one of her male subordinates monitoring the girls (who is only watching over them out of concern), and victim-blames Leah Rilke for being in a predatory relationship with a pedophile and expected her to be grateful for Gretchen stranding her on a deserted island because Misery Builds Character.
• Downplayed with Phoebe in the series Wolf Pack. She calls out Cyrus for using sexist terminology when she had shamelessly talked about his ass all night, and uses her father's wealth and influence to try and ruin Blake.

Print Magazines

• Private Eye: Polly Filler^note A pun on "Polyfilla", a British DIY product, and Filler is a parody of women who think and act like this. Ms Filler is to be read as a successful well-rewarded newspaper columnist who uses the vocabulary of feminism and female empowerment, decries misogyny, demands the same pay and recognition as her male counterparts, and boasts of being an empowered woman. And in the next paragraph when boasting about her perfect home life, reveals this female solidarity does not extend to lowly people like her nanny or her cleaner. She complains the cleaner is too lazy for the £5 an hour she gets paid, and about her nanny's reluctance to be on call 24/7 when she is being given a generous opportunity to work unpaid in London, improve her awful English for free, and not to be in her native Slovenia.

Theatre

• The Heidi Chronicles: Heidi's longtime friend Susan Johnston, once a feminist sheepherder at a radical women's health and legal collective during the 1970s, has by the 1980s taken a job as an executive of a television production company that "wanted someone with a feminist and business background". She arranges a luncheon with her friend only to pitch her a TV show idea she wants Heidi to come work as a consultant for. Heidi is left disillusioned by her friend, and by the trajectory of feminism in general ^note  The play was first produced in 1988, so in many ways, its critiques of girlboss feminism predate the term. , after this meeting. Downplayed since she's never abusive, but is portrayed as shallow and self-absorbed, and has been this way since before she became a Girlboss.
• Ride the Cyclone: Ocean O'Connell-Rosenberg spouts slogans about democracy, fairness, and political correctness while using her "I Am Great!" Song, a girl empowerment pop anthem, to put down all her fellow competitors — including a handicapped boy and her best friend — for the chance to be returned to life, arguing that because she is the only one who will have a successful life, she is the one worth saving. ^note  Ocean and the five other main characters were killed in a roller coaster accident at the top of the show, and the Fortune Teller machine has the power to bring only one of them back. She is only told after the fact that the decision of who will be returned must be a unanimous vote amongst the people she just insulted. Eventually subverted — after a lot of Break the Haughty, her Jerkass Realization causes her to realize she was wrong to only value success, choosing to truly be fair by voting to let Jane — the one who has no achievements to speak of because she can't remember her life — come back instead of voting for herself.

Web Videos

• Bossfight has a fantasy version of this with the evil sorceress Zarkazaan, who claims to be a feminist critic, but was responsible for Gaslighting SJW for years, slut shames Princess Sparklemuffin when she tries to befriend her, and is a Know-Nothing Know-It-All. She's even given a Kim Kardashian voice.
• CollegeHumor: In the video "She's Terrible, and She OWNS It", CEO and feminist icon Mary Seabird is famous for her accomplishments regarding her all-female makeup brand. However, she is shown to be an abusive bitch to her employees, acting like "owning" her bitchy attitude somehow makes it okay. She knocks lemonade out of her own niece's hand for not using "good ice," fires an employee (who she claimed she liked and was a new mom) for wearing red, sleeps with her best friend's husband, and offers no paid family leave.
• Lindsay Ellis discusses this in her video essay "Woke Disney". Ellis maintains that most of Disney's attempted "updates" of its princess characters feel like empty pandering to some extent, because while the heroines have a more active role than before they don't address the underlying social issues in their respective movies. As she puts it regarding Aladdin (2019):
  "The monarchy isn't bad, it just needs a female CEO".
• The Onion: "First Female Dictator Hailed As Step Forward For Women" is a fictional news report that parodies this trope for dark satire. The titular female dictator is Amivi Gama, a ruthless revolutionary who has made herself the President of East Timor. She leads a brutal Reign of Terror to crack down on all dissent, with everyone in the video (even her own victims) being impressed that a woman can prove to be just as much of a cruel tyrant as any man can be. This obviously satirizes the concept that achievements made by the "first" woman in any given field are necessarily positive, even if that field is inherently evil (like being a mass-murdering dictator, terrorist, or war criminal).
• Philosophy Tube's Kelly Slaughter is a parody of this archetype. She graduated from Stanford with $180,000 in the bank and was hired by her parents' company, which she thinks proves her "struggle". She also tortures her employees by forcing them to work all hours of the day and night, uses slave labor, and thinks that her new dystopian facial recognition program is feminist because it has an all-female team.
• Sarah Z discusses the trope when reviewing Mean Girls and its attempt at adding more overt feminist themes to the movie. Finding the attempt to be shallow pandering more than anything else, Sarah says that they could have used it to demonstrate how 2010s Alpha Bitches differ from 2000s ones by using feminism as an excuse to be bullies.
• The Take has done three video essays on the Girlboss:
  • "The #Girlboss Trope, Explained", which explained what the Girlboss is.
  • "The Girlboss Villain is Everywhere, It's Enough Now", which criticized the increased use of the trope as potentially sexist.
  • "Why the Bad Female Leader is Everywhere Onscreen" mentions the girlboss archetype as a subgroup.
• Second Thought's video "How Capitalism Destroys Feminism" argues that this this trope is a byproduct of capitalism overemphasizing individualism and ignoring the need for collective action. Interestingly, their video was posted around the same time that this trope was launched.
• Rachel Bloom made a rather more sympathetic video riffing on this concept with "Lady Boss," which examines the difficulties female executives have to deal with and the no-win positions they're often trapped in.

Western Animation

• Animaniacs (2020): Nora Rita Norita is Thaddeus Plotz's successor as head of Warner Bros. Pictures. When Dot tries to ask her for some advice on being a businesswoman, Nora rebuffs her and states that she is a firm believer in "pulling the corporate ladder up behind me".
• BoJack Horseman:
  • Zig-zagged with Princess Carolyn. She often uses feminist language to sell her clients' movies, such as trying to save an action film from being shelved due to recent mass shootings by reworking it as a feminist fantasy. However, she acts dismissive toward political concerns if they won't advance her career goals, and is willing to compromise on her own principles if it means profit, such as when she cheats her assistant Laura out of a promotion, excuses Hank's sexual harassment of his employees, and looks to cast a known abuser in Philbert. This sometimes causes conflict between her and her friend/client Diane, a more genuine activist. Later in the series, Princess Carolyn is more willing to stand up for what's right instead of compromising to make a profit, as seen with when she defects to the assistants' side during their strike after remembering her own struggles as an assistant.
  • Stefani Stilton runs a website called GirlCroosh allegedly geared towards female empowerment. However, she's most concerned with getting clicks, resulting in shallow articles about celebrity penises and soups instead of insightful journalism. She also doesn't care much for worker safety despite her constant affirmations, even killing a group of cockroach IT workers who tried to unionize. When Diane sniffs out more hard-hitting news stories, Stefani pushes for her to instead do more "feel-good" pieces that won't alienate audiences or the higher-ups (which means no criticizing their sister companies).
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998)'s one-time villain Femme Fatale hates men and claims to be stealing Susan B. Anthony coins for women's rights, even tricking the girls into being Straw Feminists themselves so they'll leave her alone. However, it's later revealed that Femme Fatale only cares about herself and treats women with just as much disrespect as she treats men, even injuring a policewoman and robbing a female bank clerk.
• Tuca & Bertie: Winter Garcia is a successful pastry chef and businesswoman who is known for her line of mass-produced store-bought baked treats. While she does give Bertie the opportunity to work for her, she also sees nothing wrong with collaborating with Pastry Pete, a known predator and abuser. Winter even helps him cover up his past transgressions by helping him with a woman's mentorship program, fully knowing that Pete has no real interest in helping elevate women and is just looking to sweep his accusations under the rug.

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