Simone Giertz Quotes

Women are being welcomed into science fiction, but it's through the back door.

I get the feeling that characters are written female when they have to be, and all the other characters are male, and it doesn't occur to somebody that the lawyer, the best friend, the landlord, whoever, can be female.

Quite often in comic book movies, very good actresses are relegated to being the girlfriend or the helper or the sidekick or something.

Any reasonable person can look at video games and see that we don't represent women well.

I don't like tokenism. I don't like the idea that somebody should just appear at a press conference or in a media interview because they are a woman.

Time's up on cheesy, lesser, boring roles for females in the stories that we try to tell.

We have it in our heads that women only need to take up a certain amount of space and then we've done right by them. It's the same in every profession. We get a handful of women professors, a few female board members - that looks normal.

Every year there's five cop shows, five medical shows and five 'Law & Orders,' but when it's a show about women, they want to pit everyone against each other. I don't think they'd do that if it was a guy show. I think there's room for all of us.

Well, I don't think of myself as a feminist at all. As soon as we start labeling and categorizing ourselves and others, that's going to shut down the world.

I'm a gatekeeper, and the gatekeepers all used to be mostly old, white men.

We don't have enough young, female antiheroes. We don't accept women as antiheroes the way we do the men.

Most executives are male, so it's always sort of their vision of stuff. I'm constantly fighting against that even when I play the wife or the girlfriend or the best friend. I always try my hardest to bring as much layering in and not make things stereotypical, but it's hard.

There is this idea that you have to play heroines or women who succeed.

I think women are sick and tired of being portrayed as victims, a lot of the time anyway, the bulk of their time on film.

Film is not a woman's medium. If you weren't the hottest kid in town, men stayed away from you.

Sexism kind of predisposes us to see men's work as more important than women's, and it is a problem, I guess, as writers, we have to change.

When they make a woman's picture, they treat it like a 'woman's picture.' In the '40s, they didn't treat Joan Crawford movies like that, but as the big movies of their year. I'm upset that there's no 'Terminator' with a woman in Arnold Schwarzenegger's role. Because that would make just as much money.

Females want other females to be really strong, so there are a whole lot of scripts that are basically just male parts renamed as a girl.

I've always been told that women know everything. Is that not accurate?

One of the sad commentaries on the way women are viewed in our society is that we have to fit one category. I have never felt that I had to be in one category.

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?'

Far too often, I read a script where the girls are the girlfriend or the set dressing.

Being the one woman in the room should not be seen as a victory. If there's only one of us in the room, we're still a token; we don't actually have an empowered voice. If there's two of us, we're still a minority. If there's three, then we're allowed to have a multiplicity of opinions.

I really hate having to put 'female' in front of any title, because it puts us in some kind of weird category for handicapped people or something.

I won't say there aren't 'smart' roles for women, but the variety is limited. I feel the real representation is not widely available in Bollywood.