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We haven't hit our weekly quota of gender posts yet, so, let's have another one. (This one's not about trans people, don't worry.)
This will be an unorganized series of bullet points because I'm responding to an unorganized bullet point video.
The Sentence I Only See Men Write: How writers flatten a female character
In the not too distant past, I was engaged in a conversation in which a familiar complaint was lodged: "Why aren't there more complex™ female characters in fiction?" (Are any real humans "complex" in the way in which that term is applied to fictional characters? I consider this to be a wide open question.) "Why are male literary characters allowed to be anything and everything, while female characters are consistently shunted into a small group of familiar and repetitive archetypes?" To which my immediate response was: "Well, the people who are most deeply invested in this issue and are clamoring the loudest for complex™ female characters are also the ones who most strictly police how female characters are allowed to act, and they complain the loudest when characters don't meet their stringent standards". Fortunately, the youtube algorithm furnished me with evidence to support my hypothesis (that being the linked video above).
Her first point about the "perky tits" thing is, y'know, perfectly valid and reasonable, point granted. That is a silly thing to write. My quibbles started with her second point about the "competence tax":
"Why anybody wanted a competent FMC to begin with". As though we, collectively, sit down with a book carefully chosen for its "competent" FMC and then ensure that the character meets every requirement on our checklist before continuing. This is an NPC's way of approaching art.
Anyway, isn't she just giving away the game here? To be a complex character (i.e. not a "flat" character, the exact phenomenon she claims to be opposing) is to have weaknesses and face adversity. But she immediately claims that a female character whose weaknesses are too prominent will be seen as "wounded", and readers will start to "worry" for her. She complains when she gets what she claims to want. Do you see the issue here?
Do woke feminists truly want female characters to be complex (meaning, multifaceted and sensitive, nuanced and reflective, yes, but also at times damaged, depraved, unloved and ostracized, perhaps even for perfectly valid reasons)? Could feminist literary critics really stomach say, for example, a female Shinji Ikari? Someone who has duties they are expected to fulfill, but who has no identifiable virtues in the classical sense, consistently fails to meet every challenge that is posed to them, and has to be literally, physically dragged into action by other people during the critical final battle (shortly prior to causing the extinction of all humanity due to what is essentially a childish emotional outburst)? I have an inkling that a hypothetical Female!Shinji would fall flat and fail to resonate, particularly for a female audience (regardless of political persuasion), although to be honest I'm not entirely sure why. Meanwhile Male!Shinji, despite not being anyone you could classify as a "role model", is still felt to express something important and universal.
To the extent that we have difficulty imagining a female Hamlet, or Leopold Bloom, or Humbert Humbert, I think it's due to a combination of men and women feeling that 1) such characters would be unrealistic, or would at least represent the extreme ends of the bell curve of possible female behavior, and would thus be seen as novelties, and 2) the Women Are Wonderful halo effect kicking in and causing people to want such characters to be shielded from unnecessary harm and risk. Perhaps these attitudes are immutable, perhaps they are not. But my point is that these attitudes are just as strong among the woke as they are among "traditionalists", if not more so, and this is part of what explains their preference for repetitive generic girlboss characters.
The video continues with some further Do's and Don't's:
I mean. I talk like that. And I'm a dude. Is that a bad thing? Should I not be doing that? (Yes, I know that you just clarified that it was ok, but you also called it insufferable, and you felt that it was important enough to include as its own point in the video, sooo...)
None of them are "bad desires", buuuuut only certain types of desires can actually "drive the plot", apparently.
At some point, the relentless girlbossification of all characters just starts to look like the demonization of perfectly normal and healthy psychological traits (many of which are more common in women, but all of which can also be found in men as well).
Is there really anything so wrong with your wish including "another person's name"? Is that something that a modern liberated woman is always going to feel a bit icky about? If there is any residual "structural misogyny" that remains in the culture of first world western countries in 2026, it lies in our hyper-individualism. Who can you go to today who will not tell you "be your own person, don't care what other people think, define yourself, your own opinion matters most"? Who will tell you the opposite? "Actually, maybe what other people think does matter. Maybe their opinion of you is more important than your own opinion of yourself. Maybe you need other people, in a very deep sense, and that's ok. It's just as legitimate as any other way of being". No one, that's who. (People who are adept at social games will of course tell you that what other people think matters, but usually only in a cynical and utilitarian way, rather than in a deeper personal sense.) Material dependence is actually relatively normalized, at least on the economic left. "Who do you think built all those roads?", "do you know how many government programs you actually use?", and so forth. But emotional or spiritual dependence? Unthinkable. Attitudes that are only fit for weaklings and children.
This is why the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition has the capacity to serve as such a powerful corrective to the excesses of both woke moralism and rightist traditionalism/hyper-individualism; it represents a sort of "middle voice" that has been culturally suppressed. Lacan stresses from the beginning that desire as such is always the desire of the Other ("what does the Other desire from me?"), thus there is no such thing as desire outside of a relational context. A desire that is completely purified of the Other's name is a fantasy. But I digress.
Let me reiterate, the mere fact that a character exists to fall in love is not flatness. It could be written in a flat and uninspired way, particularly if the author is a flat and uninspired person themselves. But those properties are not intrinsic to it qua life project or psychological trait.
Perhaps there are real humans who "exist to fall in love", or perhaps there are not. I pass no judgement on the empirical question. But to the extent that there are such real humans (or, to the extent that we can imagine them, and weave together the threads of such a character as they might emerge from the infinite sea of possible stories), their mode of existence is just as pregnant with possibilities, just as liable to contain secret worlds, just as much an inexhaustible well of pathos, as any other legitimate mode of existence that you might care to name. To assume otherwise would be to import the aesthetic and value judgements of "common sense" and adopt them wholesale; but it is precisely the task of art and the artist to interrogate these judgements and put them into question.
What makes someone an artist (as opposed to a dancing monkey) is their capacity to look at what has hitherto been considered ordinary, common, uninteresting, lowly, drab -- or, in the limit case, ugly, horrific, and evil -- and see the beauty in it that went previously unnoticed, teaching people to look at it anew. To the extent that these principles have hitherto not been applied to "genre fiction" or "commercial fiction", this is a skill issue.
To me, this sounds like an attempted variation on the Bechdel test, or the stuffed into the fridge complaint: essentially, that the female characters only exist in terms of how they relate to male characters. When feminists brought up these concepts, I never interpreted them as meaning that a book that fails the Bechdel test is automatically bad, nor that a book in which a female character exists only to get murdered to motivate the male protagonist is automatically bad. But if the goal of every female character in your book involves a male character in some way (but not vice versa), it suggests that maybe your female characters aren't as fleshed-out and three-dimensional as they could be.
But then, she's still complaining when the female characters' goals involve other female characters. So I don't really know what she's looking for tbh.
I'm having a hard time even picturing how to write a story with characters whose goals don't involve other characters. All the classic male characters of literature and pop culture have goals involving other characters. John Rambo, Huck Finn, Frodo, the A Team. In the X-Files, Mulder's motivation involves his sister while Scully is more abstractly motivated.
Yes. I thought through some characters of my own, and while many seemed like their goals weren't pointing at specific other people, there's always the possibility of asking "but is that really what they want?" Sure, it looks like they're devoted to this mission, but maybe they just care about that mission in the first place to make their father-figure proud... You can always dig down to whatever interpretation satisfies your criterion and stop there.
I just feel like most of these tests or rules are disingenuous. One thing that really stuck with me was how it's misogynistic for a woman's death to motivate a man ("Women In Refrigerators") and it's misogynistic for a man's death to motivate a woman (because now her motives revolve around a man.) (Same-sex couples put in the same situation are "Bury Your Gays.")
So what's the takeaway, then? Are slices of the human experience to be put off-limits to art to satisfy vindictive score-keepers? That's a sucker's game: a grievance can always be found.
As has been said before, “If freedom entails responsibility, most people don’t want to have anything to do with it.” They’ll argue for their privileges more than they ever will their rights, but there are no rights without duties and there are no duties without rights.
99 times out of 100, someone making this argument is looking to saddle someone with duties without rights. Perhaps the duties come now and the rights come in some forbidden future, or perhaps the duties by nature circumscribe the rights to near-nothing. It's an anti-freedom argument.
I suppose, but looking around, I think that giving people the ability to have freedom sans responsibility has produced most of our problems today. Would it be better to somewhat constrain people and have a functioning society or allow total freedom and live in a society where nothing works and you can’t leave the house unarmed lest you be robbed.
Some people have freedom sans responsibility, others responsibilities and very limited freedom; this is a part of anarcho-tyranny.
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I hate any and all discussion of the bechdel test from feminists, I think it's all in bad faith. But if I think about the bechdel test myself and try to separate the concept from the pop feminist application if the concept, I think it really is interesting and intriguing. I really don't understand why there are so few movies that pass the bechdel test, and I feel like something may be wrong about the formulation of the question, but I can't put my finger on it.
I would say that the bechdel test should also include the converse (a movie only fails the test if 1. there's no two women who have a conversation about something other than a man and 2. There's also two men who have a conversation about something other then a woman). But even so, I don't think that actually ends up changing much in terms of which movies pass. For whatever reason, there really do seem to be a lot of movies that feature men talking about things other than women, but don't feature woman talking about anything other then a man. I really really don't know why that is, and it kind of bugs me that I can't justify it. Is it simply that there's fewer female characters in movies? Is it something to do with the nature of femininity in our culture, that we don't expect it's interesting to see women talk about things together? I think it should be possible to have a blameless analysis of that question... but not with a feminist. So I'm interested in people's thoughts here.
Also, one thing that bothers me so much is that movies from 2014 onward started explicitly putting scenes on to try to pass that test, like the The Force Awakens scene with Mas Canata and Rey. It feels forced as a scene, but made feminists happy.
I wonder to what extent the Bechdel test has an inherent difficulty due to psychological differences between men and women. That is, if men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people, then male-male conversations are more likely to be about things, while female-female conversations are more likely to be about people.
Ie, suppose we have a story with a main cast of four: 2 men and 2 women. And we have 6 conflicts during the story. If during each conflict one pairing of our characters steps up to solve it together (there are 6 combinatorial pairings, one for each conflict), first of all, only one pairing is female-female, one is male-male, and the other four are some combination of male-female. And if each conflict is on some spectrum of "thing-oriented" to "people-oriented", then it makes the most logical sense for the male-male pair to handle the most object oriented conflict, which involves talking about the thing that isn't people. And if one conflict is mostly people oriented then it makes the most sense for the female-female pair to handle it, which involves talking about lots of people (half of whom are male). If the women solve a meaningful problem where the group is not getting along, that involves talking about men. If the women solve a problem of how to convince the population of a village to band together and fight off the threat, half of the village are men. Now granted, people can have conversations outside of direct plot solving, but those conversations are still likely to be people oriented because, statistically, women are more likely to care about people, think about people, and talk about people. And half of the people they could talk about are men, so especially conversations about multiple people are likely to include at least one man in the topic of conversation.
This doesn't apply if you have a more masculine character who doesn't think about or talk about people or feelings as much. Which can happen naturally if done well. But not if you artificially just write a male character and then gender swap them or try to shoehorn in a bunch of stupid alpha male asshole energy into a woman and call her a girlboss.
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Here's a hypothesis:
Generally speaking, most movies center on a single main character. And that character is either a man or a woman. Male-centered movies tend to fall in the genres of action, adventure, etc. Stuff that men like. For example Conan the Barbarian (1982) or Die Hard (1988). In such a movie, most of the dialogue is going to involve the central male character and his conflict with the Bad Guy, quest for the Macguffin, etc. In terms of advancing the plot, there's not much need for female characters to speak to each other and if they do, there's not much to discuss other than the male character.
On the other hand, female-centered movies tend to be romantic comedies, family dramas, etc. chick stuff. In those movies, people are mainly talking about their relationships with other people. So if two female characters are talking, there's a good chance their discussion will touch on a male character. (And discussions between male characters will touch on a female character. Nobody is talking about how to sneak in to the enemy's fortress and liberate the MacGuffin.)
What about a female-centered action movie, e.g. Kill Bill? It's been a while since I've seen it, but I would be pretty surprised if it didn't pass the Bechdel test. If it fails, then I'll definitely have to rethink my hypothesis.
It’s been a few years since I last watched Aliens, but I’m fairly sure it passes the test by Ripley and Newt talking about the aliens.
Isn't the alien also female? She lays eggs.
Yes, the Alien queen is most definitely female. Not sure about the facehuggers and chestbursters. I'm sure there's a description of the Xenomorph's lifecycle somewhere on the web....
Ah, here. Doesn't look like sex would apply to the facehugger, it's basically disposable. It doesn't appear there are any males in the genetic sense, canonically.
The facehuggers are the males, at least symbolically. They violently penetrate and deposit an embryo inside a reluctant host where after gestation it then bursts out of the distended abdomen. Plus - as you note - they're disposable.
Biologically it's not one to one but it's sci-fi horror, not a science textbook.
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Haha, I would heart this if this site supported emojis. The Alien Queen is definitely female, in the way that hive creatures like bees have females. And it's possible that was deliberately chosen so that we have a theme of motherhood in the movie. And the conversation that would pass the bechdel test (besides the aforementioned Ripley/Newt conversations about aliens and Newt's family) is Ripley conversing with the queen about how she wants to queen to stay away from Newt. The conversation is as follows:
Ripley: Get away from her you bitch!
Queen: <Roar>
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And the ship's computer in Alien is called Mother, if that counts.
Funny, I've just looked up the Bechdel Test on Wikipedia and the original comic strip that spawned the term explicitly references Alien.
Interesting. I don't think the original Alien would pass the test, though, unless there's another female character I'm not remembering.
Lambert. I don't recall her having any conversations with Ripley without other crew members included too, though.
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Kill Bill definitely passes. The bride talks with 3 of her female victims about things other than Bill. Mostly that she wants to kill them and she hates them.
Ok, and I doubt that Quentin Tarantino was setting out to try to pass the Bechdel test. Arguably, he just made a female-centered action movie and as a natural result of that there was dialogue between women which wasn't about men.
I'm still just spitballing here, but I think what it comes down to is that at some fundamental level, (1) men are not that interested in discussions about relationships and are more interested in discussions about the villain's plan to steal a nuclear bomb or whatever; and (2) women are very interested in discussions about relationships and how the female lead got a text message from her ex and she doesn't know whether to meet up or not.
Another interesting thing about Kill Bill:
By far the most memorable conversation in the movie between two men was about Beatrix -- the scene where Bill goes to warn Bud that Beatrix was coming to kill him. So the movie kind of fails a reverse Bechdel test. In fact, off the top of my head I can't remember any scenes in which two men were talking and it wasn't about Beatrix. Maybe the scene in the Okinawa bar? But Beatrix was present and the argument was related to her order.
Anyway, the point is that Quentin Tarantino is not some kind of misandrist. He just made a female-centered action movie and as a natural consequence, a lot of the dialogue in the movie for which Beatrix was not present was about Beatrix. Which makes sense. The whole plot revolved around her and her quest for revenge.
I would say that he passes by writing male dialogue for his female characters. Real life assassins are men, as are people who go on 'rip-roaring rampages of revenge'. Passing the bechdel test is easy, as long as you don't require that any of your characters behave in ways that real women do.
I'm tempted to point out that Kill Bill is wildly unrealistic regardless of the sex of the characters, but I basically think you are more or less correct here.
That being said, I think this observation is basically consistent with my overall hypothesis.
To illustrate, suppose (1) in one movie, two characters of the same sex are having a discussion about the best way to get into a bank vault and steal the MacGuffin; and (2) in another movie, two characters of the same sex are talking about how one of them received a text message from an ex and is wondering whether or not to meet that person for lunch.
Which these is more likely to be "male dialogue"? Which of these is more likely to be in a movie which is oriented towards male audiences? Probably your answer is (1) because in real life, women do not plan heists. And in real life, heist movies tend to be more oriented towards male audiences.
In other words, it seems to me that the tendency of movies to fail the Bechdel Test is not so much due to invidious anti-female bias but rather a difference in male and female proclivities and interests.
It reminds me of Star Trek television show (or was it a movie?) a few years back where early on there was a scene of two female officers on an alien planet facing some kind of hostile terrain together. It seemed highly likely at the time that the scene was shoehorned in so that the show could pass the Bechdel Test. But I am pretty sure you would call this "male dialogue." In the sense that when a member of an armed service is sent on a dangerous mission on hostile terrain, it's normally a man.
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Bill and Bud talk a little bit about how Bud says he sold his sword. But that's also in the middle of the context of him warning him about the bride.
Right, for the most part the conversation is about Beatrix. Certainly if the genders were all reversed, feminists would count it as a conversation between two women about a man.
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Movie that passes and always amuses me that it does: Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (when two girls have a shitting competition, which ties neatly into the concurrent conversation on that topic).
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You should. They will claim otherwise, but that's in-between paragraphs applying those tests in exactly that way (and often enough, wrongly).
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Take a wild guess in a group of women in their 20s how much of the conversations revolve around dating and looks upkeep. My observation is that when it is not about girly stuff - there is very strong preference in women to discuss it with the opposite sex then intersex.
Yeah, real life generally fails the expanded Bechdel test, where the expanded test includes stereotypically girly stuff like dating, gossip, and thotmaxxing.
Though in real life women talk with women more about other women than about men
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Whereas the only times I ever saw it used was to imply or outright state that the book/show/game was bad and wrong.
One thing that frustrates me about media criticism is how interesting and nuanced concepts get abused and boiled down to lowest-common-denominator imitations over time, and how the people who should know better aren't rigorous enough about gatekeeping these concepts.
Take the "male gaze". Anyone who's studied film at an academic level would understand that it's an observation about camera perspective in visual media: that, while movies and TV shows often act as though they are presenting the characters within their works from an objective and disinterested perspective (a "view from nowhere"), in practice, the camera is often positioned in an implicitly heterosexual male posture, and female characters are shot and framed in a systematically different manner than male characters. This is an interesting observation! Once it's pointed out to you, you can't unsee it, and in Western cinema it's damn near omnipresent, to the point that it still feels surprising and fresh when movies go out of their way to turn it on its head (depicting female nudity in a deliberately unsexy fashion, or lusting over the male characters and not the female e.g. Magic Mike).
But decades since the term was coined, it's become corrupted from "the ostensibly objective and disinterested (but implicitly male and heterosexual) camera perspective used in Western movies and TV shows" to "something about the way men look at women, which is bad". I saw a post somewhere in which a young lesbian said she felt guilty about looking at other women she thought were attractive, and someone consoled her saying that she shouldn't worry, because sapphic sexuality isn't aggressive like male heterosexuality and she "didn't have the male gaze". No one "has" the male gaze. The male gaze is a property of cameras, not of people. While I have little doubt that Laura Mulvey, the academic who coined the term "male gaze", would agree that men sometimes leer at women in a sexually intimidating manner, that wasn't what the term "male gaze" referred to.
But in any case
As ever, stated vs. revealed preferences. It's easy to say that a movie is good because it passes the Bechdel test, or that a movie is bad because it fails it. But I'd hazard a guess that if you were to look at these feminists' favourite movies, they'd include a lot more movies that fail the Bechdel test than that pass it. I think this would actually be an effective rebuttal to this line of argument – just ask someone to name their top five movies. Better still, consult their Netflix history to see which movies they've watched most. Back when it was still good, The Onion had a great article about the gulf between the media feminists claim to enjoy and the media they actually enjoy.
I think Jiro has the right of it here, and further, the academics often specifically pick terms that would obviously be "misinterpreted" in the pejorative way ("toxic masculinity" perhaps being the worst offender, or "symbolic racism").
Further, I don't find the "male gaze" of the camera to be all that interesting, because when the directors or cinematographers specified that the camera moved up from the walking woman's legs, lingered on her ass, and only then continued slowly up to her face as she turned (revealing her prominent breasts)... they always knew damned well what they were doing. And so did most of the audience. The feminist critic just put a name on the practice so it could be denigrated (and equivocated upon).
I think "white supremacy" has everything else beat by miles, especially in its "no, I said 'supremacy', not 'supremacism', it's totes different!" manifestation.
A friend sent me a Nathan Cofnas interview a couple weeks ago, and I only got about halfway through it before I told him I couldn’t watch it anymore; and it’s specifically because of this academic haggling over words.
It was very clear to me that John McWhorter was wanting to saddle up Cofnas with propositions he just didn’t want to be held to. Forget whatever you imagine to be true for the moment about the differences between individuals and groups. Essentially McWhorter got butthurt over the fact that he thought Cofnas wasn’t being forthright about the things he ‘really’ wanted to say; and he asked him why he was using the language he was; and why he just wouldn’t come out and say something like “black people are stupid.” There are several reasons why, which Cofnas didn’t articulate, but are highly relevant.
So I can use whatever language someone wants me to use. I can say things in a nice way, I can say things in a vulgar way and if you engage in these debates long enough, you’ll find it’s been said every which way. The reason you don’t use words like “stupid,” and “inferior,” is because it smuggles in a moral-value judgment about the worth or dignity of another person. As a matter of principle it’s simply wrong and operationally speaking, it’s factually false as far as being a scientifically accurate term being applied in this respect. And if someone like McWhorter wants to cast aspersions over Cofnas, then there’s no room for this podcast to even take place if he’s not going to engage the argument, and is frantically searching for the rifle in every one of Cofnas’ statements to pull out the proposition that “blacks are stupid.” Because once you start doing that, you’ve stopped giving the benefit of sincerity to what someone is trying to say, and instead you’ve resulted to seeing everything that comes out of their mouth as a coded statement for something more crude and nefarious.
It’s a simple point Cofnas is making. There’s differences among people. There’s differences among groups of people. Across all human traits; and intelligence is no different. I’ve spent a good chunk of my early life around people who were just objectively both more intelligent and educated than me, and I owe a lot of what I’ve learned to these people. Not at one point in any of that did I ever think to myself I was “stupid” or “inferior” to them, because I simply wasn’t.
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"Toxic masculinity" is actually a perfect example of nuanced concepts reduced to silly caricatures. Originally, it was coined by the men's movement, not academics, and referred to masculine traits carried to unhealthy extremes. The classic example being men's reluctance to seek medical care until far too late. The goal was to get men to realize a need for balance; to understand that things like self-reliance could be taken too far. The modern Internet version is, as happens so often, a perversion of the original.
"Toxic masculinity" is (IMO) intentional equivocation. The phrase "toxic masculinity" can either refer to a particular subclass of masculinity, or it can be describing all masculinity as "toxic", in the way of a poetic epithet. Academics pretend to mean the former, but it is clear that the phrase is intended to assert the latter.
My apologies. I mistook your phrasing "academics often specifically pick terms" to mean you thought those academics deliberately created said pejorative terms. If your meaning was simply that they deliberately adopt and misuse any such term they come across, then I completely agree.
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It's not the modern internet version. I'm tired of people trying to blame the plebs for concept degradation, the "modern internet version" comes directly from academia itself.
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Either that, or it's a motte and bailey, where the "nuanced academic" version that isn't necessarily wrong is the motte, and the "you put this in so you're a horrible sexist" version is the bailey. And if it wasn't originally meant as a motte and bailey, it's clearly working as one.
That's definitely part of it. The difference in this case is that I think a lot of the people saying "men have the male gaze and women don't" would be unable to define the original meaning of the term "male gaze" if put on the spot. They literally think that "male gaze" refers to the way men look at women and have absolutely no idea what this term means in the context of cinema and TV.
I'm guessing the expression is mainly used in the context of video games nowadays.
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Most people don't know the half of it!
The term "gaze" that would go on to inspire the film/media studies concept of the "male gaze" was originally introduced by Lacan in his Seminar XI. Lacan was interested in exploring the way in which there's always a reciprocal interplay between observer and observed: you distort the image you receive (unconsciously), and the image in turn distorts you. The street goes both ways. There's no "I'm the Subject and I'm looking at you like an Object so haha I win" because that way of thinking is thoroughly un-psychoanalytic.
Any originality or nuance that may have once existed in the concept was excised by the Studies crew so that it could be turned into a political cudgel.
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I'm pretty sure there was a mainstream journo somewhere who is responsible for first popularizing the dumbed-down interpretation.
Interesting, any idea who it was? Sounds like the kind of thing Jessica Valenti would do.
That seems likely. Or Marcotte, or Lindy West. Who knows.
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It's not specific to media criticism (though I suppose media criticism is a particularly low-barrier job). Every discussion about intersectionality is prefaced with a claim that a certain conception of it (essentially: video game maluses) is not what Crenshaw meant, but it's what the average person almost always means.
I've always thought that the one redeeming feature of the horrible Charlie's Angels reboot is the contrast it provides between how male McG shot very attractive women in the early 2000s vs how Elizabeth Banks did it (YMMV on whether Banks casts people as hot as the 2000 cast).
Cameron Diaz is gorgeous, as is Lucy Liu (but then, I would say that about an Asian woman wouldn't I?). Frankly, I never understood the appeal of Drew Barrymore: I've legitimately never found her a talented actress or sexy. She's even in one of my favourite movies, Donnie Darko, but every scene she's in grates and her line-readings sound so forced and uncomfortable.
As to the reboot, Kristen Stewart was gorgeous in the Twilight films, but in more recent movies she's received a succession of unflattering haircuts, each more butch than the one preceding it, and Charlie's Angels was no exception. (It's amazing the difference a good or bad haircut can make.) Ella Balinska is pretty hot. I thought the name Naomi Scott sounded familiar, and it turns out she played Jasmine in the live-action Aladdin remake. When I saw clips from that film I thought she looked absolutely stunning, but in photos from Charlie's Angels she looks hardly recognisable and nowhere near as good-looking. I'm calling it a wash.
She used scab writers on her show during the 2023 WGA strike. On this forum, I would expect that to appeal to at least some people.
I meant appeal as in sex appeal. But yeah, based.
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She's the nepobaby, Hollywood royalty. But I'd also mark her as the weakest link.
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IIRC she was a child star and came from an acting family, that carries some inertia.
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