I love strong independent women. I’m married to a strong woman. I have two wonderful daughters who are strong women. No, none of them are going to win an arm wrestling contest. But if you could arm wrestle by sheer will, they’d wipe out all comers.

I am proud that they are not defined by their gender or their jobs (although all of them do very well there, too) or who they're married to. They’re defined by their strength of character, something that shines through the way they live every aspect of their lives.

All of our female friends are strong independent women, as capable of handling anything the world throws at them as any man. They aren’t afraid, or subservient, or incapable, or weak minded, or dependent, or shallow, or stupid. (Things I see way too much in scripts lately and hate.)

All these women are complex, exciting, and fun. And, I believe, representative of most women.

All this begs the question:

Why the hell aren’t women represented this way in film?

I’m tired of watching films where the female characters (as few as there are sometimes in some films) play second fiddle when the filmmaker could have opened up the story, making it more complex and more genuine by having capable females doing in film what they do every day in real life.

I love writing strong real female characters. They’re actually, to me, more fun to write because of the natural much more complex thought processes compared to men. (sorry if this sounds sexist, but to me, women often do better than men in this category.)

So today my challenge is to look at the scripts you’re writing and turn them on their ear, if you need to, and write female characters that rival your male ones.  Don’t let your female characters continue to be the underused or stereotyped 50% of the population they’ve been. Make them reflect real life. Don’t make them weak and dependent. Don’t do what I see in a lot of scripts these days. Don’t marginalize them. Don’t make them second class citizens in your stories.

Try writing a script with a strong female protagonist or antagonist. The comedy I just optioned through the Black List has just that. A female antagonist for the ages, I think. So does the company that made me the deal. They told me she was reason they optioned it.

This rant was courtesy of a spec script I read last week that I thought was an insult to women because it completely ignored them, when as way of writing a much much better story it should have been embracing their contributions to it. It was that blatant and that BAD. And it pissed me off. Thanks for letting me vent.