Why calling women 'strong female leads' is degrading

The message seems to have gotten muddled.

As #MeToo and Time’s Up have worked to move the culture forward with twin goals of making workplaces safer for women and closing the pay gap, a curious thing has happened in Hollywood.

Good news first: Screenwriters are learning that not all women are downer wives, hot girlfriends or shrews. But in a knee-jerk reaction to the times, Hollywood is trying to make up for lost ground, trumpeting every female character as a "strong female lead," someone who's a pitch-perfect blend of tough resolve, intellect and conviction in a man's world.

It's not only grating, it's ... weak. 

“Every time someone writes that I play 'strong women,' what they're implying is that most women aren’t,” Jessica Chastain tweeted last year while promoting "Molly’s Game." “How about I just play well written parts?”

We're on board for mischievous, multidimensional and maddening. Give us messy, give us miserable, give us monstrous. Just don’t try to fake us out with the notion that female strength is a fad. 

What screenwriters and filmmakers often lose sight of is nuance: Women at the center of their own stories who contain multitudes. What makes someone bad? What makes them good? And aren’t most people (women and men) an ever-shifting balance of both?

It’s why I’ve been so insistent about getting my circle to watch BBC America's "Killing Eve." Sandra Oh’s spy, Eve Polastri, on whom the series hinges, is constantly evolving in her pursuit of a female Russian serial killer. She’s sharp, brings snacks to semi-important meetings, gets in too deep with her target and sometimes takes her partner for granted. (She also happens to be good as hell at her job.)

There are bright spots on the silver screen, too. Evangeline Lilly finally gets a superhero suit in the new "Ant-Man and the Wasp" (out Friday). But what I was happier to see — along with the Wasp’s equal title billing (which came as a surprise even to Lilly, she told me) — is how much depth her Hope Van Dyne has, from her quick wit and encyclopedic knowledge of quantum physics to the pain she displays remembering a sweet childhood spent with her now-MIA mother. 

Hope feels real, even when she shrinks down to the size of a bug.

But the wins make the errors all the more glaring. Look at "Ocean’s 8," (a film chock-full of women's stories), which came in at a B-plus on CinemaScore — not a great grade from audiences, who tend to reward blockbusters on a curve.

Why? The script was maddeningly undercooked. I left the theater far more interested in Mindy Kaling flexing as a millennial jeweler and Awkwafina's sticky-fingered huckster than the top-billed Cate Blanchett and Sandra Bullock.

Not that I blamed those actresses: Their roles weren't written as well. Who was Blanchett, other than a shaggy-haired bar owner skimming profits and watering down her vodka? Who was Bullock, other than Danny Ocean’s scheming sister who was smart enough to pull off a intricate Met Gala heist but too smitten to see her former beau for the double-crossing crook that he was?

Their characters were one-dimensional stereotypes, and I didn't buy it. 

So we celebrate the wins; the projects that put forth the real in a world that defaults to the male gaze. This spring, the teen girls of "Blockers" debated the future of their virgin status and took on their overbearing parents without a hint of Valley Girl whining. 

“I often felt like (Valley Girl speech) is when men are writing women, because that’s how they hear young women,” director Kay Cannon told me, describing how the script depicted the characters. "The young women I’m talking to, that’s not how they talk.”

Charlize Theron, working off a script by Diablo Cody, took on the complexities of being an overwhelmed mom of three who drops the juggling act in "Tully."

“I've seen a lot of depictions of, like, the control-freak mom. I think that's been played for laughs a lot,” Cody told USA TODAY. “You know, the woman who wants everything done a certain way and is obsessed with nobody touching the baby and so on.

"And I hadn't seen the other side of that coin, which is a mom who is so distracted and underwater that she accidentally bangs the baby's car seat into the wall or drops her phone on the baby while she's changing her diaper. … Maybe we needed some representation.” 

The key is ditching buzzwords and delivering realistic, complex women to actual, multifaceted audiences made up of 50 percent women. We don't need a Netflix queue labeled "Strong Female Roles" (a real thing, and please point me to a queue of "Strong Male Roles" because I haven't seen it). 

We need an influx of women we relate to. Just save us the strong spiel.

Contributing: Patrick Ryan