The movie “10 Things I Hate About You” is a rom-com classic featuring Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger as the two main love interests. Julia Stiles portrays an intimidating and witty character we know as Kat Stratford, an angsty teenage girl who isn’t scared to speak up about how she feels. Even though she’s seen as an iconic portrayal of “feminism” with her favorite bands ranging from Letters to Cleo to Bikini Kill, her takes are actually seen as a more shallow approach.

In the beginning of the movie, we see Kat speak up in English class about not having many women authored books on their syllabus.

After being sent out of class, we see her guidance counselor refer to Kat as “heinous” as said by her fellow classmates. What many people don’t seem to comprehend is Kat’s teacher also getting angry about not having any African American authored books on the syllabus, which she disregards and continues to focus on her personalized activism.

Kat and her sister Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) are seen as polar opposites.

We see Bianca adopts the more typical coquette cute-girl look and Kat chooses the more rockstar-girl aesthetic. We see Bianca making fun of Kat for being so “different”, but what we probably didn’t think about when we watched the movie was Kat also making fun of her sister and everyone else like her. Kat repeatedly mocks her sister for expressing her femininity and having crushes on guys, and argues with her best friend about prom being “an antiquated mating ritual“. While she does express her opinion, she also makes a point to put other girls down while doing it, and this could be seen as even more “pick me girl” than Bianca.

Throughout the movie, Kat mocks her sister for going to parties and going to prom, saying “You don’t always have to be who they want you to be, you know.”

Kat then proceeds to go to a popular guy’s party with Heath Ledger’s character, and then goes to prom with him near the end of the movie. These both go to show she has feelings and does want to go out and do things, as she does have a good experience at both outings. Her character, though portrayed as different, is not all that different from everyone else.

Kat is then seen in multiple scenes being an outright cruel person to everyone around her. She is seen tearing down posters at school for events, backing her car into someone else’s that made her angry, and insulting people trying to sympathize with her. It’s one thing to be angry at the state of the world and want to be the change, but it’s another thing to not care about anyone’s feelings or how you affect people personally. If we pay attention, a lot of her rudeness doesn’t even stem from her feminist approach, it stems from her anger at people not taking her opinions as facts.

At the end of the movie, we watch Kat read her poem to Patrick (Heath Ledger), and finally see she has feelings just like her sister does, even though she spent the whole movie putting her and others down for that same thing.

So, even though many people, including myself, see the movie and Kat’s character as iconic, I think it is wrong to place her on a pedestal and call her an influential feminist when most of her “feminism” came from her rude attitude towards other people, music she listened to, and books she consumed. Though I thought her character was well done and I personally saw her as cool, I think there are more impactful feminist characters out there, and that Kat is just simply an angry teenage girl who wants to share her opinions with the world.