A Plague, A Spot, oh, and what exactly is a Strong Female Character?

While walking idly down the street I happened to overhear some folks chatting in the financial district. It wasn't intentional (okay, the truth is that I may have picked up the conversation because my phone is dead and therefore not actually offering me music)


EXT. FINANCIAL DISTRICT - DAY
Guy

You know she's one of those women. She flirts with all the men.



Woman

She's a bitch to other women.


Pregnant pause, obvious tension.

Guy

I'd say, like, 90% of women just don't like other women. It's weird, it's like they just don't have role models that they see on TV.

Alright, maybe that last bit was mostly made up, but it's kind of valid. Also, I've learned how to just make up statistics on the fly - thank you Random-Business-Guy.

The NY Times posted this article on defining "strong" female characters.

Strong Women are ‘Tough, Cold, Terse, Taciturn and Prone to Not Saying Goodbye When They Hang Up the Phone’

To be fair no one ever says goodbye on TV - if they do it's dead air, and as a writer you don't add that in (unless, of course, you can make it a strong character beat) - but the question is still valid - what does make a strong female character?

All of the actresses I've worked with have been fantastic - if it's for Pretty in Geek, The Gate or TV work I've done - and they all have the same complaint. They go into auditions and the parts have nothing to offer - they're the character who is seen having sex, giving information or, you know, that girl that the guy wants to date. The characters don't have depth or they're too "perfect" - finding female characters that are as conflicted as their male counterparts can often be terribly difficult.

Sure there's exceptions to this - but in my admittedly non-scientific study of Mandy casting calls I found (for five different shoots) - there were 10 male parts, and 3 female parts. All of the female parts - the breakdowns were either "innocent and naive" or "ball-buster".

Or, if they're in tween, they're the girl-next-door-who-likes-pretty-dresses:



One of the reasons I write is to and get more of that out there. There's a lot of crappy female parts out there - in every part of screen from film to TV to web. While web seems a bit more egalitarian in the gender ratio, I've never actually done a full study, and I think it might break out in a similar way to TV and film - there are still less female characters in general on the screen.

And the question still remains - what is a "strong" character - female or otherwise.

“Strong female character” is one of those shorthand memes that has leached into the cultural groundwater and spawned all kinds of cinematic clichés: alpha professionals whose laserlike focus on career advancement has turned them into grim, celibate automatons; robotic, lone-wolf, ascetic action heroines whose monomaniacal devotion to their crime-fighting makes them lean and cranky and very impatient; murderous 20-something comic-book salesgirls who dream of one day sidekicking for a superhero; avenging brides; poker-faced assassins; and gloomy ninjas with commitment issues. It has resulted in characters like Natalie Portman’s in “No Strings Attached,” who does everything in her power to avoid commitment, even with a guy she’s actually in love with; or Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy; or pretty much every character Jodie Foster has played since “Nell” or, possibly, “Freaky Friday.”

The point that Chocano eventually makes in the article relates to a more or less recent film - with Bridesmaids and why the lead is, in fact, someone we can call a strong female character.

We don’t relate to her despite the fact that she is weak, we relate to her because she is weak.

We relate to interesting and strong characters because they're interesting - not because they're actually physically strong, or stoic. It's because they're nuanced, because there's interest there.

The argument in the above video - that boys (or men) won't associate with female characters, but women will (and can) do the same for male characters is drilled through - but the question of whether or not that's actually true still is, seemingly, up in the air. Guys, after all, play Tomb Raider.

The list of the best 100 characters of the last twenty years totalled as such:
MALE: 68 (63%)
FEMALE:40 (37%) (math from here).

After looking at that list, though, the thing that pops out

So how do you write a strong female character?

Write one with flaws, write someone interesting, and for god's sake remember that writing a strong female character doesn't mean she has to be The Most Awesome Ever. Be revolutionary - she can even, maybe, have some female friends.