Last year especially, I tended to complain about the fact that Jessica Chastain is sort of a boring interview. She’s one of those boring-on-purpose celebrities, because she truly doesn’t want people to know much about her personal life, so her interviews are mostly just full of work stuff. But, Jessica started using her interviews to talk more about feminism and ageism, as well as sexism in her industry. While I think her heart is in the right place and I often agree with most of what she says, her perspective is pretty consistently narrow. As in, she cares about sexism and ageism with regards to how those –isms affect her career. In a new interview with Radio Times, she chats about the sexualization of lady action stars, right on schedule because she’s playing a badass astronaut in The Martian.

“If you look at films like Elektra and Aeonflux, the problem that studios have is that they try to make kickass women very sexualised. They have to be in some catsuit,” Chastain tells this week’s edition of Radio Times. “But if you look at the most incredible female roles, like Ripley in Alien, she is a very sexy woman but she’s not wearing a lot of make-up. She’s in a T-shirt and jeans. What’s sexy about her is how capable she is. Same with Jennifer Lawrence in Hunger Games – she’s not wearing a catsuit, either.”

The Martian star went on to stress that cinema audiences are more interested in seeing an “intelligent” character, rather than one who is reliant on her sexuality. “Studios have misjudged it in the past, and thought audiences weren’t interested in seeing a woman in an action role who’s a capable, intelligent woman and isn’t only leaning on her sex.”

Chastain’s latest film, The Martian, sees her star as Commander Lewis, the leader of a manned mission to Mars alongside Matt Damon who she sets out to rescue after he’s abandoned during a failed expedition. “If the female character isn’t as interesting as the male character, I’m not interested,” she explains. “Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 was incredible. I remember the opening shot of her in that tank top doing those pull-ups, and I remember being a little girl watching her and thinking, ‘This is amazing. I want to be her.'”

[From Radio Times]

I’m trying to put my finger on what exactly is bugging me. I mean, I get what she’s saying and I agree: it’s absurd and sexist that Hollywood producers insist on casting and dressing female action stars like S&M beauty pageant contestants, all black leather/vinyl, bedroom eyes and bouncing cleavage. It’s a larger problem in comic books/graphic novels as well.

So what’s bugging me? I think it’s this: “She’s in a T-shirt and jeans. What’s sexy about her is how capable she is.” That’s still a problem, because we’re still ultimately sexualizing every woman on screen, even if the whole point of a character is that “sexiness” isn’t even part of the story. It’s one thing to have a fully formed female character where her ownership of her sexuality is one part of who she is. It’s quite another to expect every female character to achieve “sexiness,” and arguing over what sexiness entails because, somehow, every female character must achieve sexiness in some form. The point is NOT that Ripley was perfectly sexy in her dungarees and t-shirt, it’s that the whole point of her character was that “sexiness” had no f—king part of it.

Photos courtesy of WENN.