I was recently reading the actress Anna Gunn's analysis of how the audience have reacted to her character Skyler in Breaking Bad. This is how she summed it up:

"most people's hatred of Skyler had ... a lot to do with their own perception of women and wives. Because Skyler didn't conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender."

I found that statement - implying that dislike of Skyler reveals mysoginistic attitudes about women - verging on offensive. While I appreciate that 'hating' an actor for the part they play is plain retarded, asserting that disliking their character implies some kind of personal moral failing, is pretty stiff stuff.

While I don't "hate" Skyler (apparently there is a FB page called "I hate Skyler White") I do deeply dislike the character's emotionally cold, rigid and controlling personality traits. And I've disliked the character's personality from day one, long before her own involvement in criminal behaviour.

I think the problem people have with Skyler, isn't that she's a 'strong' 'non-submissive' women as Gunn asserts, but that she's just not a person you can warm to. I like strong non-submissive women in drama and fiction, Skyler's simply not a likeable character. I don't think it has anything to do with "attitudes towards gender" but simply "attitudes towards people."