The problem with "strong female characters"

There's been a recent backlash against portraying women as weak in fiction, and that's fine, but the result, the "strong female character" has become a stereotype in and of itself, and does absolutely nothing for feminism.

The problem with the strong female character is all she gets to be is strong -- and sexy. We've traded weak women for women whose only value comes from their looks and the power they have over men using their looks. And this is not an improvement.

The reason why we even talk about "strong female characters" (we never talk about "strong male characters") is because there's a severe shortage of female characters to begin with. Don't believe me? Try this simple exercise. It's called gender-bending. Take a TV series or movie and switch the gender of every single character. I'm using Sherlock. This also works really well with Breaking Bad. Or, most likely, any big box office film you've seen recently. Now look at the cast you have and imagine watching this show instead. You'll probably have a thought along the lines of, "Wow, it's all women." I know I did when I started developing my gender-bent Sherlock fanfiction.

But if it's "all women" now, it must have been all men before. So why didn't we notice the disparity before gender-bending? Why are we noticing it now?

We simply don't get to see as many female lead characters as male lead characters. And when there is a movie or show with many female characters, it's called Girls, or its female representation is the basis of the show. Do women distract from plots or something? This can't be true, though, because Orphan Black is loaded with female characters. And they're all played by the same actress. And they're all totally unique, interesting individuals.

Wow, Orphan Black is so good. Go watch it.

But maybe it's the fact that there are so few female characters that contributes to a vicious cycle. If you have a female character, it better be a good one. It can get scary; no one wants to do it wrong and be attacked. So you pour all your effort into one female character that's... um. Scarlett Johansson.

Okay, great. But you do understand that half of all people are women, right? So one women in a virtually all male cast is getting no one off the hook, no matter how "strong" she's meant to be.

And why can't female characters be weak? A lot of people are weak. More people are weak than strong. That's a much more relatable and realistic trait. But since there are precious few female characters around, the ones that we get can't be real in this way. They have to be some "ideal" representation.

If half of all characters were female we wouldn't be talking about how to best represent women in the media. Because we would see a variety. We would see real people, not a handful of stereotypes and love interests. Love interests that are slated to die so our hero can grow, and our actor can showcase his talents. (I'm looking at you, Amazing Spider-Man 2.)

The problem with the whole idea of "strong female characters" is that we shouldn't even be talking about it. We should have enough women in movies and TV shows that the way they are portrayed isn't a big deal at all.