Why Strong Female Characters Are Bad for Women 

It's interesting. I was just talking about the different way hollywood sees strong female characters compared to strong male characters.

To be fair I do think it depends what type of movies you like in the first place. Calling out one point in transformers that was done stupidly is like calling one passenger on the titanic unlucky. The whole thing was shallow and mindless, so of course the woman was.

Oh, and I don't know if anyone here likes the show 'Daria' but in her official site there is an article written as if by the character talking about the same point.
One quote from it kind of sums up this failed type of strong women:

"strong female characters whose main qualifications are the same ones they share with the weak, stupid bimbos of old--their looks"

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Interesting read. I do find the way some people interpret 'strong women' patronising. Like the idea is a man can watch a male character with depth as well as stregnth but us women with our adorable little woman-brains would be annoyed and confused by a female character with depth.

A good example is an action movie (can't remember the name) that was meant to star Tom Cruise but he's less popular now so when Angelina Jolie expressed interest in his role they cast her.

At first that sounds like a huge step forward, seeing a character as a character and not letting gender affect their choice.
Then I hear they are 're-tooling' the role so the star can be a woman. What re-tooling does it need? go through the script and put an 's' in front of the word 'he'. Done. The fact that they think it needs any more re-tooling than that proves they see female characters in a different way.
What should have been a good step in the right direction turned into another annoyance.

Oh and I loved Daria, and her take on it was funny. I'd never seen that before :)

Excellent article. It expressed a lot of the issues I have with the way strong female characters are viewed. I'd love it if there were more "Strong Characters, Female" in the movies these days. :)
Oh and Daria rules! And so I shall give you a link to her spot so that you may reap the benefits of her wisdom.
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Fabulous article. Very impressed someone finally hit the nail on the head!!

I think hollywood draws a fine line. I can't comment on transformers because I haven't seen it. I thought that Michelle Yeoh's character was amazingly strong and elegant and she kept her clothes on throughout the movie.

Some people view a sexy woman as only meat for men, and is that fair? Can a woman nowadays wear sexy clothes if she wants or are we always going to say oh it's for the guys to drool over.

On the smaller screen guys are objectified as well as women. Watch supernatural, it is a long standing thing that both Jensen and Jared get their clothes off and as the writer of one episode said in the commentary they did it because they knew ratings would rise, it wasn't the only reason of course and it is important that the person saying this was a woman.

It was a good article and I enjoyed reading it.