Strong female characters in films inspire girls around the world every day, and yet they are never girly. Why can’t our beloved heroes reflect the women we see in our everyday lives?
Think about strong female action heroes. What do they have in common? From Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) to Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), one quality, or lack thereof, is their lack of girliness.
In some instances, girliness is seen as a flaw. Take Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley) from the Divergent films, where she begins compassionate and feminine but as she gains strength she abandons her hair and dresses. What does this say about women? Can they only be seen as strong by mimicking men?
Helen O’Hara, film journalist, editor-at-large at Empire Magazine, and author of ‘Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film’, feels strongly on this subject.
“I think one of the shortcomings of strong female characters is that they don’t tend to have some of that girliness, and one of the ways that is expressed is that they often don’t have a lot of female friends.
“They are what I called in my book ‘The Smurfette’, which is the one female character in a group of otherwise entirely men, and so a lot of these strong female characters are the Smurfette in their movies. There’s just one girl.”
A lack of female friendships is a trait shared amongst strong female characters. Divergent’s world, for instance, is almost entirely male.
“Something like Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), it takes her more than one film, before she has a conversation with another woman. She was ‘one of the guys’ and a lot of these strong female characters are essentially ‘one of the guys’.
“There’s not two girls and they don’t get to hang out and be girly because that would be seen as ‘not strong’. Things that are often perceived to be girly are often dismissed as less important, less witty, less inherently dramatic or interesting for audiences, but really the person doing the dismissing is often a male critic, a male studio head or a male director.”
The strong female character trope really began to rise in the late 1970s, in the wake of second-wave feminism’s push for greater gender equality. Prior to this, the two main types of characters women were allowed to play were that of a damsel in distress of femme fatale. These more dominant female characters were provided greater agency and physical strength and were pioneered by Ripley in Alien.
However, O Hara thinks it is less about conforming to second-wave feminism and more that directors are conscious that they are only putting one woman in the film.
“Think of a generic action film. They’re putting a woman in to show that women can be tough too. They don’t want to make her incompetent.
“They don’t want to make her a victim because they know they’ll get shouted at. So they avoid traditional feminine tropes to avoid feminists complaining.
“What they are more concerned about though is their target audience which is probably still young men
“That is also why she has to be super-hot and has to be wearing super form-fitting, non-functional armour. She’s probably wearing platforms or heels so they can get her in the same shot as the men. The same eye level, which, if you think about it, is totally ridiculous. Wonder Woman does. Wonder Woman has platforms, and so does Black Widow. It’s ridiculous.”
O’Hara points to the small number of speaking roles for women in film, which dropped from 37 to 35% in 2023.
However, Raquel Marvez, an award-winning film director from Miami, believes the problem isn’t a lack of female presence but rather a lack of female representation.
“I think the roles are the problem. I think the roles need to be diversified. It’s ok for the female to be the one making the decisions. It’s ok for the female to be the hero. It’s ok for a female to be in charge and come up with the solutions to the problems and not always be the one supporting them.
“There are very attractive women that are only locked into roles that highlight that aspect.”
Statista showed that in 2022 only 14.6 percent of all movie directors in the United States were women, so it is hardly surprising that the amount of authentic representation in films of ‘strong women’ is scarce.
It poses the question of whether the lack of girliness in strong female characters is related to the lack of girliness behind the scenes in the process of creating these characters.
“I think there are filmmakers who genuinely haven’t figured out how to write good women or how to shoot good women and it shows,” says O Hara.
Anouchka Santella, a Parisian filmmaker and costume designer, rejects this notion, however.
“It’s really lazy to say men can’t write women or shouldn’t try to write women. Men should do better than this; they should write them, and they should write them well in the same way that women should write interesting men. There’s not really any reason men can’t write women.”
Luoying Yang’s 2020 research ‘Measuring Female Representation’ found movies featuring more women tended to have lower budgets, resulting in higher revenue but also higher criticism.
O’Hara says: “I think the problem is not with any one filmmaker or certainly not with the actresses involved even if they are also producers. I think they’re all doing their best, the problem is really structural.”
Marvez says the main thing she wants to see from the film industry is for women to be equally paid.
“I think things need to be changed from the beginning.”
The general consensus amongst them is that women want more strong female characters who still reflect ordinary women. From the range of various tropes surrounding women, none of them seem to quite be a true reflection of the ones in everyday life.
“I want to see more girls just having fun whilst also doing all this cool stuff, you can really be inspired by them in a way where you want to be her friend, but you also want to be like them.” Says Santella.
Marvez says: “I think we as women develop a wall to be tough, and I’ve learned that it is not needed, and I would love to communicate to women that their personality is your personality and you can still have important roles and love responsibility and still be soft and polite with others and still help the younger generation to raise up”
