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There’s a Buzzfeed quiz that’s called “What 90s Bitch Are You?” I got Kathryn Merteuil from “Cruel Intentions” even though I feel like I’m sort of actually Cher Horowitz in real life. I set up my best friend from high school with another friend and the date didn’t implode on itself plus like, I say “like” like twelve times a sentence.

But, I don’t classify Cher or even Kathryn as bitches because I don’t feel that term is complimentary when used against women of a specific type, especially very young women and I really loathe this putting down of women as “bitches” and the “wrong” girl who isn’t supposed to be a certain way because it’s just the height of misogyny.

I do think I am Kathryn at my worst because I like my revenges and my dramatics and I like to win. I am not Annette and honestly, I’m simultaneously extremely jealous and disdainful of that type and never want to even be associated with it because it ideologically disgusts me. “Doll perfect women with angry black hair stomping in heels and demanding and demanding and demanding” was the phrase from “Nobody is Ever Missing” that I used as the ultimate about me because I can walk, skip and run in high heels and I think that’s a bad thing in our society when it’s not designated for the approval of other people.

I am not supposed to be this way because I show the cracks and I’m only doll perfect on the outside and not always sweet and kind and at the mercy of other people on the inside. Kathryn shows the cracks on the inside as well; she’s proto-Blair Waldorf and the disgusting part of this is that she isn’t allowed to win, or even come out even with Annette according to the narrative of the film.

Cher on the other hand, according to my mother is what “people are really like when they’re not being called on to perform.” It’s the 20th anniversary of “Clueless” and it’s highly appropriate because there has been a renaissance of movies for and by women. Cher is blonde and bubbly and sweet and “a virgin who can’t drive” but Cher isn’t Annette Hargrove by any means.

She just is, free from stereotypes of what young girls ought to be like, refusing to be polarized as the Madonna or the Whore because of what she might wear or say because she knows she’s good at heart and well meaning which is the most important thing when facing the Holy Gates. Or at least, that’s the moral code I’ve been following. She’s perfectly aware of what she’s good at and demands credit for it, unique even today but unheard of 20 years ago and she accepts praise because like, why wouldn’t she?

When Jane Austen wrote “Emma,” she described Emma as “going to be loathed by everyone apart from myself” but personally I couldn’t ever bring myself to hate Emma/Cher because she was as human as they come. To people who loathe her for being a spoiled know-it-all: have you met Fitzwilliam Darcy, or like, most other male heroes in history?

Kathryn is decidedly harder to stomach than Cher for the sharpness of her personality but is also punished by her narrative in a way that Cher isn’t and for the wrong reasons. She ends up being punished not for manipulating innocents, but for her cocaine addiction which is more tragic than reprehensible in such a young girl and even Sarah Michelle Gellar looked as young as her character in this film. (One thing the directors of both “Clueless” and “Cruel Intentions” did right was casting age appropriate actors which made their antics all the more realistic no matter how extreme they might have seemed.)

Perhaps the movie is making a statement against how women are always punished for the wrong thing, but what I got out of it is that Sebastian died a martyr and Annette is the better woman for remaining pure and good and not succumbing to drugs or sex except with the oh so holy Sebastian who was in actuality just as bad if not worse than Kathryn, and Kathryn is the slutty whore who deserved what she got.

I was thinking about the implications that my preferences are eternally towards very “white” media, like Clueless and Cruel Intentions, and my general consensus is that, similar to how women are expected to identify with men but men don’t automatically identify with women, there’s the ingrained expectation that people of color identify with white people while the opposite isn’t true. I’ve always been more into Gossip Girl than Bollywood (even though quite honestly, which plot lines are more unbelievable is a discussion worth having at a later date), because, to me, race is an unfair social construct in a million ways. Why can’t I be an Indian Cher Horowitz? Because Indian girls shouldn’t be perky and resourceful and indignantly right?

I think it’s a matter of broadening our horizons of what people ought to be like and moving on from there, because the way to progressiveness is to start at a humanistic individual level, and encouraging acceptance in media is one of the first steps forward.

Review by Dhaaruni Sreenivas.