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" It seems like you can&amp;#039;t watch a TV show, go to a movie, or read a novel about a woman without someone describing her as &amp;quot;strong.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s like a bonus issued with every uterus. While the idea behind using the adjective is laudable, the effect is actually detrimental to women. Words are as crucial as laws in the struggle for equal rights. Back in the civil rights heyday, the media took to adding the word &amp;quot;proud&amp;quot; to every description of an African American. Of course African Americans were proud long before popular media added that word. It was just that pride used to be described as &amp;quot;uppity&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;arrogant.&amp;quot; Similarly, for centuries, women have been perceived as weaker than men, both intellectually and physically, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This perception is fortified and perpetuated in culture through word choice and stereotypes. Marilyn French&amp;#039;s famous groundbreaking 1977 novel The Women&amp;#039;s Room &amp;amp;lt; target=&amp;quot;_blank&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt;had the words LADIES&amp;#039; ROOM, but with LADIES&amp;#039; crossed out and WOMEN&amp;#039;S scrawled over it. The idea was that as long as we call women &amp;quot;ladies&amp;quot; (or these days chicks, bitches, hos, etc.), we&amp;#039;re dismissing them as childlike, weak, and incapable. That&amp;#039;s why it&amp;#039;s so important that we choose our adjectives carefully. As with &amp;quot;proud blacks,&amp;quot; there have always been &amp;quot;strong women.&amp;quot; They&amp;#039;ve been around since the beginning of humankind, even when societies didn&amp;#039;t acknowledge it. Now we do acknowledge it, but with TV, movie, and novel characters that portray the exact opposite of what they&amp;#039;re meant to. First, let&amp;#039;s agree to a quick definition of what it is to be strong, whether you&amp;#039;re male or female. Strength isn&amp;#039;t about gender because we&amp;#039;re not talking about hauling rocks; we&amp;#039;re talking about the qualities of character. Strength is about enduring hardships without letting those hardships make you bitter and pessimistic. Strength is about holding onto moral values even when it&amp;#039;s more expedient and rewarding to compromise them. Strength is accepting one&amp;#039;s vulnerabilities and shortcomings without accepting that they define you. Finally, strength is about showing kindness without expectation of anything in return. Unfortunately, the word &amp;quot;strong&amp;quot; has been usurped by bad writers, lazy men, and delusional women. Here are some examples: THE BAD WRITERS When writers want to create a &amp;quot;strong&amp;quot; woman, they generally do so by giving her male characteristics. By that I mean she&amp;#039;s a fanboy&amp;#039;s one-dimensional comic-book fantasy: a physically imposing, shapely, hot woman in tight clothes (and heels) who can also kick ass, drink hard booze, brag that she doesn&amp;#039;t cook, and is quick to ram a knee to the groin of anyone who challenges her. We see this stereotype in Kate Beckett in Castle, Carrie Wells in Unforgettable, Mary Shannon in In Plain Sight, Megan Hunt in Body of Proof, Michelle Maxwell in David Baldacci&amp;#039;s novel series (now a TNT series), and many others. Okay, nothing wrong with showing that women can be just as violent and swaggering as guys. It&amp;#039;s even satisfying to watch a bullying misogynist have his scrotum pancaked. But each of these hard-boiled women also has a major psychological weakness. Beckett&amp;#039;s mom was murdered; as a child, Maxwell murdered her mom&amp;#039;s lover, which she&amp;#039;s suppressed; Shannon&amp;#039;s dad is a criminal and her mom is an alcoholic; Hunt must prove her father didn&amp;#039;t commit suicide. The lesson here is that women turn tough not out of choice, but because of family trauma, making it a symptom of a problem rather than a positive trait. It&amp;#039;s as if this addition of trauma is to allow us to forgive her these trespasses into maleness. Notice how the men in these same TV series rarely have traumas that haunt them to this extent. Mostly, they act like boys, with the women then forced into acting as their responsible mothers. The kickass part is merely a magician&amp;#039;s misdirection. THE LAZY MEN The problem with using the familiar language drummed into us by bad writers is that it makes us lazy in describing individuals. It&amp;#039;s a lot easier to go with the flow of popular terminology than to actually say something original. So, if a guy describes a woman as &amp;quot;strong,&amp;quot; he&amp;#039;s playing it safe by demonstrating he&amp;#039;s a good guy who respects women and is therefore worthy of their affection. In fact, guys rattle off the expected adjectives \u2014 funny, smart, independent, strong \u2014 so routinely that they&amp;#039;re really one word: &amp;quot;Hi, I can see that you&amp;#039;re a funnysmartindependentstrong woman.&amp;quot; The fact that we&amp;#039;re using these &amp;quot;positive&amp;quot; adjectives generically and indiscriminately to describe Women-in-General means we&amp;#039;re not respecting the individual woman standing before us. We&amp;#039;re saying these characteristics are traits of being a woman rather than traits of that particular person. It&amp;#039;s lazy because the man using these words gets rewarded for basically playing to the vanity in a person rather than taking the time to get to know their actual strengths and weaknesses. And that reduces women to a different kind of stereotype.  THE DELUSIONAL WOMEN A lot of women on reality TV shows refer to themselves as &amp;quot;strong.&amp;quot; But calling yourself strong is like calling yourself cool or a hero: doing it means just the opposite. It says you&amp;#039;re so weak you have to announce you&amp;#039;re strong because otherwise no one would notice. It seems desperate. It&amp;#039;s often used in the context of why they can&amp;#039;t find a guy to love them: &amp;quot;Men are intimidated by a strong woman.&amp;quot; Again, that&amp;#039;s not what the viewer of these shows sees. We often see a woman who is acting obnoxiously, or petty, or rudely to the extent that people \u2014 male and female \u2014 avoid their company. At which point the woman wraps herself in the cloak of Sisterhood to complain that society can&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;deal&amp;quot; with her strength. This use of &amp;quot;strong woman&amp;quot; keeps the person from seeing herself as she really is and instead embraces John-Paul Sartre&amp;#039;s idea of the person who denies who she is and denies her ability to change who she is. Popular &amp;quot;girl power&amp;quot; songs can also have this effect. Kelly Clarkson&amp;#039;s mega-hit &amp;quot;Stronger (What Doesn&amp;#039;t Kill You)&amp;quot; is supposed to be an anthem of overcoming a bad relationship by giving the liberated finger to your ex-lover: You think you got the best of me/ Think you&amp;#039;ve had the last laugh/ Bet you think that everything good is gone/ Think you left me broken down/ Think that I&amp;#039;d come running back/ Baby you don&amp;#039;t know me, cause you&amp;#039;re dead wrong The chorus echoes the old clich\u00E9 \u2014 from another existentialist, Nietzsche \u2014 that whatever doesn&amp;#039;t kill you makes you stronger. But what is the effect of someone who feels the need to tell an ex-lover how great she&amp;#039;s doing? Does that make her seem strong or weak? HOW TO GET BEYOND &amp;#039;STRONG&amp;#039; If we keep saying &amp;quot;strong&amp;quot; but portray weakness, the word becomes useless. We also risk creating a comic-book stereotype of strong that is one-dimensional and impossible to attain. It&amp;#039;s like the morphed photos of models that create a false definition of physical beauty and lead us to ignore real physical beauty. Popular culture can be like that drunken uncle at Thanksgiving who&amp;#039;s had a few too many beers and lets his political correctness slip. He starts every sentence with, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t care what color you are, but...&amp;quot; Or &amp;quot;I think women are just as good as men, but...&amp;quot; After that &amp;quot;but&amp;quot; comes what he really means. That&amp;#039;s why we have to be so careful in what words and images we use in our popular arts. We&amp;#039;re teaching society, especially children, how to perceive each other. To constantly refer to women as strong is to send the opposite message: that they need to constantly have this positive re-enforcement because deep down they are really fragile orchids. It has the same effect as a parent cooing over his bawling skinned-kneed toddler, saying, &amp;quot;Who&amp;#039;s my strong, brave boy?&amp;quot; Women will truly be considered strong only when no one feels the need to comment on it. Popular culture reflects not only the zeitgeist of who we are at any given moment, but also who we want to be. Thomas Jefferson said, &amp;quot;The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.&amp;quot; The same things holds true in our arts. We need to be eternally vigilant, even to the well-meaning, if we&amp;#039;re going to be truly free.  RELATED More Kareem on Esquire.com How to Be a Man: The Definitive Guide "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a31260/kareem-strong-woman/>