I Don’t Want to Be the Strong Female Lead

[Zombie]

Brit Marling (creator/star of OA, Another Earth, Sound of my Voice) put out an in the New York Times today. Female representation in movies has come up a few times in our various review threads so I wanted to share.

[Phoebe]

I have a Netflix category (given to me unbidden) called Strong Female Lead
Uh oh unsupported character. What do we do?

[Stan]

Good but it still has a bit of the problem of some brands of feminism. They react to men saying "Men are X, Women are Y. X is better." by saying "Men are X, Women are Y. Y is at least as good." That path accepts many of stereotypes of the old paradigm. I want to throw out the paradigm altogether. Gender stereotypes are largely fiction.

I realize I'm lucky in that I live in an exceptional world. I work with female scientists on a daily basis. We're all too busy doing our jobs to worry about gender roles.

[Phoebe]

Happy Birthday to you btw, not sure when it is but . Sometime around nowish or not longvago!

[poorpete]

Solid take, though I think Strong Female Lead is just fine, an added tool in the tool belt of positive female roles.
I am reminded of
The meme of
kumail nanjiani
Before and after.
Women are being pushed to be an After Kumail, which is fine if that's what they want, but prefer they get solid characters like the ones Before Kumail got.

[Phoebe]

I looked this up to see what you were talking about and WHOAAA!
So I discovered that a really good personal trainer helped him get there, and he has lots of details to offer but a nice short summary is here:

[Kyle]

[Phoebe]

I took you both to be arguing for a roughly related point, that valorizing a different part of the gender binary can still mean upholding harmful expectations about gender, and maybe we should tear a lot of those things down. But the really important thing here is that we properly objectify a hot guy, so I don't want us to lose sight of the goal in the midst of nuanced discussion of vital topics.