Actress Jenna Ortega, star of the upcoming “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” film, along with credits that include the popular hit series “Wednesday” and “Scream,” has come out and made a statement that is going to absolutely send radical liberals off the rails. It turns out, Ortega is not at all a fan of gender-swapping reboots, making the case women should have their own franchises. To that, I say, “Amen!” I totally agree with this. I have zero problem with movies that have strong female lead characters. Heck, one of my favorite franchises is “Alien.” Ripley is a prime example of how a woman can be feminine and kick some serious a** at the same time. The issue comes in when you take a male lead from a popular film series and just flip the gender in order to appear “original.”
Breitbart News reported that Ortega weighed in on the subject during an interview with MTV just ahead of her new film’s release this weekend. She was asked if she would ever star in a gender-swapped reboot of one of director Tim Burton’s other classics, “Edward Scissorhands.” Burton is the director of both “Beetlejuice” and its new sequel.
“I love that there’s a lot more female leads nowadays, I think that’s so special. But we should have our own,” Ortega explained during the conversation. “I don’t like it when it’s like a spinoff — I don’t want to see like ‘Jamie Bond.’ You know? I want to see another badass.”
Ortega’s sentiments have become more popularized in recent years, with actors and actresses of different persuasions publicly coming out in favor of more nuanced female-led franchises. Actress Emily Blunt, for instance, said in 2022 that she had grown “bored” of the “strong woman” lead trope.
“It’s the worst thing ever when you open a script and read the words ‘strong female lead,’” Blunt opined. “That makes me roll my eyes. I’m already out. I’m bored. Those roles are written as incredibly stoic, you spend the whole time acting tough and saying tough things.”
In other words, you don’t act like a woman, you behave like a dude. How is this showcasing a strong female? You’re essentially saying that in order for a woman to be strong she has to stop being a female and become a man. It’s veiled transgenderism.
Speaking with The Guardian that same year, actress Tatiana Maslany of She-Hulk fame called the trope “frustrating.” “It’s reductive,” Maslany said. “It’s just as much a shaving off of all the nuances, and just as much of a trope. It’s a box that nobody fits into. Even the phrase is frustrating. It’s as if we’re supposed to be grateful that we get to be that.”
Academy Award-winning actress and screenwriter Emma Thompson also previously criticized the prevailing trend of making women act like men. Speaking on CultureBlast podcast in 2020, the former Love Actually star said that it’s not “good enough” to simply give a woman a gun and have her act like a man, even going so far as to say that movies should utilize a women’s feminity as a source of her heroism.
“So all the women screenwriters I talk to, I say, ‘Well, what’s the story?’ Because it’s not good enough simply to give the women the guns, and then make the women badass, as well,” Thompson stated. “Now women have to be badass — if they’re feminine in the way that they used to be, and they’re not badass, then they’re not welcome. Also, they’re not allowed to cry, apparently, anymore, because we’ve just got to be like the men.”
“And I remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s not what we meant,’” the actress said. “When I got a group of women together in my thirties, and I said, ‘Okay, what’s the female heroine? Who is that? What does she do?’ Because she hasn’t got the wherewithal to do the Superman, to do the Godfather, that’s not the point. That’s not where our heroism lies. So how do we make it heroic?”
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I sincerely hope more actresses come on board with this line of thinking and demand that women be respected for what they tend to naturally be, rather than asking them to go against what they really are in order to pretend to be “strong women” by really becoming like just like men, stripping them of every unique characteristic that contributes to them, in their own biology, being strong.