Brit Marling: Women in pop-culture tend to be the strong female lead or objectified and disposed of

The New York Times

In a New York Times Op-Ed, The OA co-creator and star writes about the depressing reality of female screen portrayals, many of which end up with women dead. "When we kill women in our stories, we aren’t just annihilating female gendered bodies," she writes. "We are annihilating the feminine as a force wherever it resides — in women, in men, of the natural world. Because what we really mean when we say we want strong female leads is: 'Give me a man but in the body of a woman I still want to see naked." But there's another role that many women are tied to on scree: the Strong Female Lead. "She’s an assassin, a spy, a soldier, a superhero, a C.E.O. She can make a wound compress out of a maxi pad while on the lam. She’s got MacGyver’s resourcefulness but looks better in a tank top," she writes, adding: "It would be hard to deny that there is nutrition to be drawn from any narrative that gives women agency and voice in a world where they are most often without both. But the more I acted the Strong Female Lead, the more I became aware of the narrow specificity of the characters’ strengths — physical prowess, linear ambition, focused rationality. Masculine modalities of power...I don’t want to be the dead girl, or Dave’s wife. But I don’t want to be a strong female lead either, if my power is defined largely by violence and domination, conquest and colonization."