TV Tropes gives it the name “Girlboss Feminist“, but among critics it’s known simply as “the girlboss”.
Whenever I get into the mood, usually when I hear another “there was no strong women heroes until this production” line, I post a list of strong female heroes, super and otherwise, that I grew up with. I knew that girls could do anything a boy can do by example instead of ads or force, though not many girls wanted to do the things boys do, and when they did they had their own way of defining and achieving success. Not counting “tomboys” of course, back when they were allowed to be a straight girl who just happened to prefer sports to Barbie and pants to dresses. That’s a discussion for another time. The point is there were women in fiction that I admired and even as a boy took positive moral and personal lessons from while still being perfectly happy with my boy parts and wanting to kiss girls. For the record I never had a “girls have cooties” phase but I still had to grow into wanting to kiss them. Sadly they never grew into wanting to kiss me during my school days. That’s a discussion for no time you need to worry about.
Nowadays, as the activists have ruined storytelling, we have the “girlboss”, a militant feminist power fantasy so strong that even regular feminists are pushing back against…some of it, and regular women are outright opposed to, from authors to actresses. The girlboss is for the “modern audience” crowd, and if you don’t worship them you’re either a sexist man or a self-loathing woman. At least that’s what they say, but as modern Hollywood likes to forget past Hollywood happened they also ignore the women I grew up watching who were just as awesome as the men, but in their own way. What’s the difference between a strong heroine and a girlboss?
