Read this: The OA’s Brit Marling on the stories we tell and the Strong Female Lead

It’s Oscars weekend, which means the next several days (around these parts, at least) will be filled with speculation, frustration, reflection, and enthusiastic tweets about whatever Billy Porter winds up wearing on the red carpet. More broadly, though, it’ll be spent writing and talking about the stories the entertainment industry tells, who tells those stories, and which of them are ultimately celebrated by the most visible (but “very local”) awards-granting body in the west. That makes the timing of this New York Times op-ed, from writer-performer-producer Brit Marling, so perfect: it’s about the stories we tell, and those we don’t; the stories we value, and those we don’t; and most especially, the stories that even Marling has trouble conceiving because the world in which they’re created has been one way for so, so long.
It is very good, both because Brit Marling is a great writer and because she makes some extremely good points, but here’s the one you’re most likely to see floating around the internet today:
When we kill women in our stories, we aren’t just annihilating female gendered bodies. We are annihilating the feminine as a force wherever it resides — in women, in men, of the natural world. Because what we really mean when we say we want strong female leads is: “Give me a man but in the body of a woman I still want to see naked.”
But Marling, who as we said has a hell of a way with words (R.I.P. The OA), doesn’t stop with her dissection of the characters we consider to be “strong” and female at the same time. She also ties it to her own life, and specifically her time in the financial industry: