The Lie of the “Strong Female Character”
And the apparently radical claim that women are human.
I saw a thread on Reddit the other day. Some expat guy was asking for advice because, in his words, he “sucked at dating women.”
A woman replied (I am paraphrasing):
“Women aren’t Pokémon to catch or rare animals to hunt. They’re people. With interests, jobs, thoughts of their own. As long as you get that, you don’t need to be good at ‘dating’. You just need to be good at interacting with a fellow human.”
And I thought — there it is. The missing line from every Hollywood script. Women aren’t Pokémon. But you wouldn’t know it from watching how we’re written.
Somewhere between damsel in distress and emotionally constipated assassin, women in fiction are rarely allowed to be people.
“Strong female character” may sound progressive, but it’s really just a new way to flatten women — same two dimensions, different pose. Where we once had baffled heroines asking “What do we do now?”, we now have superhuman badasses (still sexy, of course) mowing down enemies in leather pants.
Now we have the girl who never cries, never needs, never wavers. She’s competent, witty, and usually wearing something unreasonable in a gunfight. She has about the emotional range of the AK-47 she’s firing, but she can do a roundhouse kick, so—representation!
It’s not about giving women agency. It’s about giving audiences a performance of empowerment that still fits neatly inside the male fantasy. She’s powerful, but not threatening. Sexy, but not sexual. Independent, but never alone for too long (God forbid). It’s a new animal species for the man of the movie to tame.
Take Hermione Granger. Book Hermione is brilliant, bossy, infuriating, often right, occasionally unbearable. She’s human — gloriously so. Film Hermione? She’s perfect. Calm. Clever without the insecurity, brave without the nerves. A supermodel with a wand.
Somewhere between page and screen, she was airbrushed into the Strong Female Template™. Who, incredibly enough, somehow still ends up with Ron— despite him being turned into a complete idiot.
(All his good lines from the book were handed to her in the film. Maybe that’s the new male fantasy: even if you’re useless, even superwoman’s still in your league. Remember when Seth Rogen manages to bed Charlize Theron as the US President?)
But here’s the thing: real women don’t act like that. Real people don’t act like that.
We’re inconsistent. We cry in taxis. We rehearse entire confrontations in the shower and then say “no worries!” when the moment comes. We hold ourselves together at work and fall apart over a half-hearted emoji. We are tragic, comic, and often both.
That’s humanity for ya.
The problem with the “strong female character” isn’t the strength — it’s the character. She’s not written as a person. She’s a symbol, a marketing checkbox, a vehicle for a shallow idea of what “empowered” looks like.
Maybe that’s why shows like Fleabag hit a nerve. She’s not strong. She’s not weak. She’s a mess. She’s hilarious. She wants things that make no sense. She breaks her own heart. She’s not a symbol — she’s someone you might know, or have been.
Women aren’t strong or weak, clever or stupid, mothers or lovers.
They’re people. Just people.
Can we please start writing them as such.