[B]eing tough, autonomous, intelligent, aggressive, and rational no longer means being a man. In fact, those traits don’t even mean being masculine, at least not in the sense of bring incompatible with or the opposite of feminine. Strength and independence are not part of what many women learn, through mass media, about being a woman, in narrative after narrative. (2)

This problem—the reconciliation of feminist goals and activism with romance and its ties to narrow conceptions of womanhood—has been far from solved for feminists growing up in the 21st century, whether on screen or in real life. This problem is at the heart of my own yearnings and my attempts to find assurance and even decent blueprints in the unsatisfactory onscreen fantasies about the strong, independent woman. (5)

[B]y the beginning of the 21st century, the fighting female capable of spectacular violence had gained a firm ground, and there were more versions of them than ever before on the big and small screens, and the number only continues to increase. Audiences growing up in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, male and female, have been raised on depictions of women onscreen who could more than hold their own and didn’t need to be protected, at least no more than a man did.

Today, some viewers who seek or expect constructions of female identity that cohere with expectations for a strong, independent woman who can take care of herself and save others have less patience with uncomplicated stereotypical representations of the utterly helpless female, no matter the genre. (9)