Let's hear it for the grit: A producer for a new movie based on a Young Adult book series, is happy that the main character is a Strong Female, unlike all those other characters out there. Popwatch interviews the producer:
Lisbeth Salander, in case you've forgotten, is described in the book as looking like 14, yet A) all the men in the book want to sleep with her, and B) she can beat up big guys. One would suspect this says much more about the author than it says about "dark female characters." We go on:
I don't watch a lot of TV, but it's been my impression that the era of helpless, non-capable, non-gritty female characters ceased to be a cultural norm around the time "That Girl" went off the air. It's also a mystery how Lisabeth Sanders - a borderline sociopath, mind you - compensates for the existence of tabloids that deal with starlet misbehavior, but nevermind. Are we really still stuck in some sexist cultural rut that discourages strong female characters? Or did I hallucinate that pirate movie where Keira Knightly swings around a sword that probably weighed forty pounds?
