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In a recent New York Times op-ed piece that has been heavily shared, dissected, and analyzed by the Breaking Bad cognoscenti, actress Anna Gunn attempted to process the venomous rage that has often been directed at her Breaking Bad character Skyler White.

"I finally realized that most people's hatred of Skyler had little to do with me and a lot to do with their own perception of women and wives," Gunn concluded. "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."

The commentary sparked several rounds of additional commentary, some of which suggested that Gunn's essay could have taken a harder stance on the treatment of female television characters and some of which noted that those anti-Skyler sentiments may not be representative of the entire Breaking Bad-viewing population.

In other words, not everyone hates Skyler White. Our attitudes toward her are more complicated than that. Still, like Gunn, I've never understood the Skyler scorn-mongers who get so supremely irked by this fictional woman that they will create memes that look like this:

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In my view, the B-word certainly never applied to Skyler in the early seasons of Breaking Bad, when she was completely unaware of Walt's meth-cooking habit and, later, when she found out and begged him to stop it. Yet, as Gunn notes, the Skyler haters who rose up during that period often derided the character for being "a ball-and-chain, a drag, a shrew." To some, almost immediately, Skyler committed the cardinal sin of the stereotypical awful wife: She was a nag.

The notion of Skyler White, Relentless Harpy was planted the moment when, in season one, Walt demanded that his pregnant wife "climb down out of my ass." Of course, she was "up in his ass" because he was being secretive and not disclosing that he was in the process of illegal-drug manufacturing, murder, and the holding of hostages. But she was being sooooo naggy and Walt's irritation was so relatable in that moment that a lot of viewers immediately set their Bunsen burners of Skyler hate to the highest possible flame and never cranked them down.

But of course, that was four seasons ago. The Skyler White we now see is an entirely different woman. As evidenced by all that beige and white that she and her husband have been wearing this season, they're now both on the same team. In fact, on the Breaking Bad morality spectrum, Skyler has recently tipped closer than Walt to "Really, Really Bad," particularly in last week's episode when she implied that Walt should bump off Jesse by uttering that chilling question: "For us, what's one more?" Skyler's not up in Walt's ass anymore. She's watching out for it.

This is actually the moment when some legitimate dislike of Skyler White would make sense. As Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan said in an interview with New York magazine earlier this year: "I like Skyler a little less now that she's succumbed to Walt's machinations, but in the early days she was the voice of morality on the show. She was the one telling him, 'You can't cook crystal meth.' She's got a tough job being married to this asshole."

Yet some fans of the show continue to detest Skyler, but not because she's engaging in immoral behavior. What bothers them is a certain hypocrisy they detect in her, stemming from the fact that she objects to Walt's meth business — an objection that finally convinced him to quit cooking — yet continues to potentially benefit from all that dirty money.

A couple of weeks before Gunn's op-ed piece was published, I got into an argument with a male friend of mine about this very issue. We started talking about Breaking Bad, and he mentioned how much he loathes Skyler, adding that the reason she bugs him is the same reason that Hillary Clinton bugs him.

At this point, a small but discernible amount of smoke started coming out of my ear holes. But I took a deep breath. And then I very calmly said, "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"I would have had more respect for them if they had just gotten out of their marriages," he explained, referring to both our Secretary of State and the First Lady of the White household in the same sentence. Instead, he contended, they used those dysfunctional marriages to their benefit.

Now I'm not even going to address the Clintonian side of this argument because, frankly, it's my mission to get through most days without thinking about the Starr Report. But I will say that I initially reacted to this statement by assuming my friend thought that Skyler should have behaved like a victim and just slunk away with her baby carriage and what was left of her pride.

But then I thought about it more and realized what he actually meant was that these women shouldn't put up with their men's crap, that as soon as they were disrespected and mistreated, they should have walked away. But here's the problem with that argument: Marriages are complicated. There are a lot of reasons why just calling it quits isn't necessarily the right or even the smart thing to do.

Anna Gun as Skyler White, finally breaking bad.

If we all remember our season-three Breaking Bad, we remember that Skyler actually did try to initiate divorce proceedings at one point, but felt strongly that she didn't want Walt Jr. to find out about her father's crystal-blue inclinations. More importantly, her attorney advised she could be prosecuted as an accessory after the fact if she spent any of Walt's drug money, something she had already been doing unknowingly, then knowingly did when she used it to help with Hank's medical bills. She trapped herself. And now that she's trapped, the best she can do is continue to protect her family — including her husband — by pragmatically preventing them from getting caught.

As I further ponder that Breaking Bad argument with my friend — which ultimately ended with us agreeing to disagree, then deciding to talk about The Walking Dead instead, but without bringing up Lori Grimes — I also think that part of what irks him and perhaps others about Skyler is that, as she's a woman, we expect her to be the moral compass. If her husband is the one who knocks, then she's supposed to be the one who knows better, the one who figures out how to extricate herself from the marriage and accepts the consequences of being a so-called accessory instead of digging herself even deeper into an aiding-and-abetting hole.

We expect this, perhaps subconsciously, because Skyler is a mom and all of us are conditioned from birth to see our mothers as our ethical barometers. They're the ones who praised us for saying "please" and admonished us when we beheaded our sister's favorite Barbie for no particular reason. Moms tell us the difference between good and bad. Certainly dads do, too, but as a quick scan of virtually any mommy blog indicates, as a culture, we have much higher expectations of mothers in this regard.

By extension, as a culture, we also tend to be less forgiving of women who do wrong and more understanding of men who cheat, or over-tweet, or do a whole host of much worse things. Why? Because men, supposedly, have a harder time resisting temptation. They deserve some slack and we should all just climb down out of their asses, for God's sake.

None of this is fair, mind you. These preconceived but deeply ingrained notions are insulting to both men and women. But they're there, felt unconsciously even if not spoken out loud. We want Skyler to do the clear-cut, black-and-white right thing because that's what women are supposed to do.

But she's more complicated than that. Because of Walt and also because of her own misjudgments, she's now in a situation that requires her to complete the same transformation her husband has already made. In Gunn's op-ed piece, the actress wondered whether the source of some Skyler backlash is discomfort with the idea that she and Walt are equals. To put it another way: They have become equals, right down to their khaki wardrobes, in a way that men and women are not allowed to be. When it comes to committing sin, we expect men to ask for forgiveness, not permission, and prefer that women ask for neither.

Skyler White has never met that impossible standard, both before and after she broke bad. That makes her a troublesome figure for some and one that we, like Gilligan, may not like very much right now. That's fine. But from an objective, TV storytelling perspective, it also makes her a character who's finally just as fascinating and unpredictable as the depraved, egocentric soul who helped to turn her from mere nag into Ms. Heisenberg.

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