Hollywood creators depict “strong female leads” in such 2-dimensional, cringe ways that I’ve started to wonder if it’s actually a deliberate, long-term strategy to make audiences reject women as central characters.
Many theories have been floated in recent years about why modern, female-led films flop so abysmally, so before I get into my theory, I’ll review them.
“Men write women badly” isn’t an axiom we should accept
One of the leading arguments is that Hollywood producers, directors, and writers are still overwhelmingly male, and men don’t write women well. This argument can actually be separated into 3 claims:
- Men are incapable of writing women well – “It’s just too hard! Women are too complex!”
- Men don’t bother learning enough about women to write them well
- Men refuse to write women in ways that don’t suit them
I reject the first claim as it’s a stereotype that enables laziness, giving permission for men to not even try. Men are perfectly capable of understanding women well enough to write them as fascinating, flawed, memorable characters. Film and literature are filled with such examples, so there is no excuse for the embarrassing alpha women inflatables we’re plagued with today.
So we get to the second claim – men just don’t bother to put themselves in women’s shoes and imagine what it’s like to be treated like a woman, and so their female characters don’t feel like real people. I’m sure there’s some truth to this, but it’s not like these writers have never met women. It’s impossible not to gain an understanding of the opposite sex through interacting with relatives, teachers, neighbors, coworkers, etc. What it comes down to is whether a person keeps their eyes and ears open, or rejects anything that contradicts their preexisting opinions.
Men are capable of understanding women. Men will learn about women whether they try or not. So we get to the third reason. Men refuse to act on what they’ve learned, depicting women only in the ways they prefer.
Before you get your hackles up, this is an observation true to all humankind. Harmful depictions of certain races, classes, religions, and genders aren’t due to an incapacity to understand, or just a refusal to learn, but because of willful cruelty paired with premeditated plans to control certain populations.
Old authors who used women like paper cutouts – the virtuous damsel in distress, the buxom wench, the creepy witch in the woods, the wicked seductress, and so on, made a deliberate choice to use women not as real people, but as objects to move a male-centered plot forward. Classic authors with memorable female characters weren’t geniuses blessed with an unusual understanding of women. They simply made the choice to put the same amount of effort into writing their female characters as they did when writing their male characters.
As far as I’m concerned, modern filmmakers who write unlikable female heroines don’t just misunderstand “strong women” despite trying their best, and haven’t just neglected to get to know “strong women,” but are willfully choosing to portray them in a way that will make audiences groan every time they hear a new release features a female hero.
Hollywood claims “You asked for this!”
Once we agree that Hollywood is entirely responsible for and in complete control of their depiction of women, we get to the second common argument – Hollywood’s response – which is that they’re only giving women what we wanted, what we asked for! “Women demanded the femme fatale, so don’t blame us if you think it’s bad – blame your fellow women for having bad taste.”
Here’s the first problem with this argument: Does Hollywood really think Rey running around snapping, “don’t hold my hand,” is what girls actually wanted to see? If so, they’re morons. Or they want to pretend they are, in order to shrug off responsibility for their insulting depictions of women.
They’re essentially re-using the first argument about women being “too much,” turning themselves into dewy-eyed schoolboys who can’t understand what women want even when they try really, really hard to listen. But that also implies they asked.
Did any producers talk to female Star Wars fans and ask them if Rey was their billion dollar heart’s desire? Or cold-faced women in catsuits breezing their way through problems as they push men around? Hollywood didn’t give us what we asked for, they gave us what they imagined we wanted.
Which is insulting in and of itself.
We say, “I want women who talk to women on screen about something other than men,” and they say, “Ok, you want arrogant bitches who sneer at men.” We say, “I want intelligent women who solve their own problems rather than waiting around to be saved,” and they say, “Ok you want cold, distant, dismissive women who don’t listen to anyone.” We say, “We want multi-faceted women with varied strengths and weaknesses,” and they hear, “ok, women are perfect? We’ll show them strutting around shoving in peoples’ faces how good they are at everything.”
These depictions do more to show us what Hollywood leaders think of women in “leading roles.” Through every box office flop, they are telling us that they think an active female character who saves the day is inseparable from an entitled, aggressive, emotionally distant narcissist.
But women are producing these “alpha women” too
Now, to be fair, many feminists do act like this, and many women writers have written female characters who act like bratty alpha males (Sarah J. Mass). So there’s a real basis for this image. A fact which grieves me greatly.
I think female writers and creatives have an even greater responsibility to depict women of good character! It’s not like we even have the excuse, “It’s so difficult for us to understand women!” So it’s maddening to encounter female characters that read like the author’s teenage fantasy (“Wouldn’t it be great if I could say and do whatever I want and have everyone around me, especially the men, respect and affirm me for it?”).
Male writers get to point at the examples and say, “Look, they’re doing it – I’m just following their lead and giving them more of what they themselves make!” But would female writers get away with that excuse? With meeting such low standards?
Let’s say I wrote a male hero based on the nastiest Homecoming King I’ve known in my life and the rapiest male protagonist I’ve encountered in male-written fiction. Then, in the reviews, readers call me out on it and say my male characters are 2-dimensional caricatures that don’t deserve to be called heroes. If I replied by pointing at my real-life and fictional examples and crying, “But they did it too!” would that fly?
Some men would probably have no problem with how I wrote my hero because they would see themselves in it. Nasty jocks like to see nasty jocks depicted as heroes. Would that excuse me writing all male heroes as nasty jocks? But that’s what Hollywood is doing – they’re writing female heroines with the dialogue of the angriest feminists they’ve met and the behavior of the most entitled YA heroines they’ve read. And then they say, “Well, those feminists and those readers asked for this, so clearly that’s what all female audiences want!”
The cringe ladybosses are deliberate
There are plenty of examples of well-written female characters, but men in Hollywood are choosing to follow the bad examples because that’s how they see women. Just like some female writers choose to write strong men as assholes, because that’s what they think of men.
It’s not that Hollywood’s overlords don’t know what a good example of a strong female character looks like (Princess Leia, Sarah Conner, Ellen Ripley, the original Mulan, Eowyn, Hermione Granger). It’s not that they think the majority of women want the copy pasted “badasses” they’re giving us.
Hollywood isn’t dumb. Between focus groups, polling, early release feedback, etc. there is no way that these massive corporations couldn’t tell that Captain Marvel was going to flop compared to Captain America.
So we get to my new theory – did they actually want it to flop?
Do producers and directors want to go back to the good ‘ol days when it was socially acceptable for women to be nothing more than the booby side-piece? Are they sitting in a room together asking, “How do we get audiences to accept the Bond girl as the norm again? Even better, how do we get them to actually demand it from us?” I think they’re dreaming of the day we say, “Oh Hollywood masters, you knew best all along. How wrong we were. Please forgive us. We beg of you, show us what we really want and need to see!”
Hollywood is doing this on purpose to try to get men and women alike to reject “strong female leads,” when what we’re actually rejecting is “deliberately poorly written, nasty female leads.”
This is a vital distinction. Plenty of people call out Hollywood for writing women badly. More still call them out for being insensitive, incompetent, and dismissive of issues surrounding representation of gender, race, religion, and more. Some call them out for choosing terrible female writers and directors to lead the way.
Plenty of people know what a good story looks like, and they know that modern Hollywood films suck all around, not that heroines are objectively bad. But in some ways, Hollywood’s scheme is working. They’ve primed audiences to think that a female-led film will be awful. So even if we can consciously list all of the ways they set Captain America up for success and Captain Marvel up for failure, the end result is the same: men and women alike are less likely to go see a film about a female protagonist.
If every time you bought a cake, it was sickeningly sweet and chalky, you’d probably start wincing every time someone offered you cake, even though you know there are plenty of good, even amazing, cakes in the world.
When’s the last time you heard someone say the phrases “ladyboss,” “strong female character,” or “badass heroine” without an accompanied eye roll? People didn’t always roll their eyes 10 years ago – we were excited at first! But a decade of horrible movies has primed audiences to think that “cringe” and “ladyboss” always belong in the same sentence.
We have to discern whether Hollywood is doing this on purpose or not. Because there’s no point in criticizing their writing if they picked a barfably woke script to make us hate it and anything remotely related. There’s no point in petitioning for Kathleen Kennedy to be fired if they picked her so we would do just that! …Enabling them to replace her with a male President – the natural order of the world restored.
There’s no point in telling the baker you ordered a low-sugar cake and asking him to remake it if he purposely baked a nauseatingly sweet cake so you’d give up and order the cookies instead – his original specialty.
This is a pattern consistent across film history
Now, before you go claiming that I’m a man-hating woman with a conspiracy theory, it would behoove us to examine some film history. I actually studied Film in college – that’s my degree. If you think producers aren’t sitting in a room together making agreements about how to depict certain races, religions, professions, and genders you’re just wrong. This happened all the time.
One example is the depiction of Asian men – Hollywood studios have very deliberately portrayed Asian men as bumbling, comedic idiots or asexual, walking calculators. When Asian men cry out, as women have done, “Write more stories with active Asian characters!” Hollywood argues, “What are you talking about? There are plenty of you thrown in there. And you’re even shown as smart.”
Mixing positive features into your “stereotype template” doesn’t make it ok. I imagine an Asian man would rather play a genius tech geek in an action flick than a pudgy sidekick in a rom com, but that doesn’t mean he actually wants to play either. Just like women would rather play emotionless heroines in spandex who get to kick the bad guy in the face than buxom babes who scream and cower in the clutches of a monster.
Both depictions are templates that Hollywood has decided are acceptable for screen. Men pay to see the second one. Neither men or women want to pay to see the first. I wouldn’t pay to see a standalone movie of Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman. What Hollywood wants people to take away from that conclusion is, “Women don’t make good leads. Women aren’t meant to be the heroes.”
But I would pay to see a Catwoman movie if Selena Kyle was written as well as Nolan’s Bruce Wayne. I would pay to see a movie about Queen Boudicca if it was written and directed as well as Braveheart. But Hollywood refuses to do so.
You’ve heard the saying, the best lies are made up mostly of truth. Hollywood hasn’t written incompetent female heroines. They know that’s too far from the truth for modern audiences to accept. They’ve just written immature, unlikable heroines. They know how to cover their butts. People aren’t walking out of the theaters able to say, “Hollywood is sexist because they showed women as weak and irrelevant.”
But people should be walking out of theaters saying, “Hollywood is sexist because they’re depicting strong women as arrogant brats.”
Hollywood has power and money to spare. I think they’re playing the long game, perfectly happy to lose money now as they pretend to support PC causes, while actually twisting the narrative so they can reshape demand back into their preferred mold.
Once people gain the power to shape opinions (on an international and society-wide level!), they’re not going to give it up because people tell them to change. They’ll just use the weapons at their disposal to get people to stop asking. And their greatest weapon is their stories.
Again, this is already a well-established flaw of human nature. How many people drive themselves into bankruptcy over issues of ideology, pet feuds, and threats to their own superiority? Some people are willing to destroy themselves to be seen as right or to force their version of what is right on the world. It’s no accident that before the #metoo movement, we saw a mix of excellent and lousy female leads, but after #metoo? I come up with a blank.
It almost feels like Hollywood producers and directors are saying, “You got in our face about how we treated you and then made yourselves reserved and unavailable. We’ll reflect that version of women back at you and see how you like it.”
Still think I’m taking it too far?
Let’s consider the realism of this argument by imagining it from the other side. Let’s say the CEO of a major publisher decided that going forward, 80% of all their fantasy books need to have a male lead. The managing editors at their imprints are displeased by this decision, but they have to go along with it. How could they honor their boss’ demand while actually subverting it?
I know what I would do. I’d round up the equivalent of Terry Goodkind (The Sword of Truth), John Norman (Gor), George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones), Richard Morgan (The Steel Remains), and Mark Lawrence (Prince of Thorns) and put the most money behind the darkest, rapiest, most toxic depictions of masculinity I could find. (Those hyperlinks will take you to discussions about the controversies in those books…)
Then I’d wait for audiences to cry out, “Enough already!” I could then cock my head in innocent surprise and ask, “What? Wasn’t this what you wanted? It’s what you asked for. What you think a male hero is. You don’t like it? Aww, well I did try to tell you.”
And because they’re male authors, and many male readers don’t find the content problematic, I’d be safe from the criticism that I’m pulling this version of masculinity out of my behind so I can spit on it.
Just like Hollywood directors can laugh and say, “but the directors of Charlie’s Angels 2019 and Captain Marvel were women!” Yeah… Elizabeth Banks and Anna Boyden (the directors of each, respectively) wouldn’t exactly have been my top choices for heroic, women-led filmmaking, let alone Kathleen Kennedy. They don’t represent the potential and desire of most female creatives or audiences.
Anyone who uses those flops to prove women make poor heroes (and poor directors) is full of it and deserves to be told as much. Just as I’d call someone out if they praised publishers for rejecting male-authored or male-led fantasy novels using Terry Goodkind as the basis of their reasoning.
Don’t accept Hollywood’s lies about heroines – or their denial that they’re lying on purpose
We know what truly strong female characters look like. And so does Hollywood (“methinks you doth protest too much”) – that’s why they’re trying so hard not to give them to us – because a compassionate, selfless, strong, intelligent, brave, emotionally healthy, unencumbered woman would be truly formidable.
Hollywood can’t convince me they:
- Are too simpleminded to write women well
- Are just too negligent to learn anything about women
- Actually think most women want the garbage they give us
- Tried their best to give women what we wanted but just don’t have enough practice yet
- Pick only the best women writers and directors who represent the peak of female creativity and vision
- Tried their best, but it’s as they suspected – audiences just don’t want heroines
We’re left with one option. No longer able to depict women the way they want – as sex objects and attaches to male leads – Hollywood has settled for second best: a perversion of good leading women that will make viewers sick at the phrases “empowered” and “independent.”
Hollywood told us for decades that female-led superhero films would flop. We disagreed. So they set out to prove themselves right. Big studios give us terrible heroines done up in the flimsy trappings of good ones. They thought this would rob us of our voice, of our ability to call them out anymore on deliberate sexism. Too bad – I’m calling Hollywood out on it anyway.
Under no circumstances should the above portrayal or implications not be insulting to you.
Hi, I’m Caylah Coffeen, a freelance editor and marketer of sci-fi and fantasy books. I love reading and writing and am a follower of Jesus Christ.
I’ve worked for Monster Ivy Publishing, Eschler Editing, and Havok Magazine. Reach out to chat about books and publishing!
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