Never mind that “strong is the new skinny” is still pretty damn skinny (unattainably skinny, for many of us), or that devoting one’s life and creative energies to becoming a shinier, more effective cog in a vast corporate machine shouldn’t be the most admirable goal, or that though gun violence is a leading cause of death for women (particularly in domestic violence homicides) no matter how thoroughly they pink-wash the bloodstains. Even most of Captain Marvel’s Strong Female Protagonist foremothers—like Sarah Connor pumping her shotgun with one well-muscled arm, Trinity mowing down a slew of faceless assailants in a balletic procession of gunfire, or even her sister in the MCU, Black Widow, who proves her mettle by subduing men twice her size (while wearing a cleavage-bearing catsuit, no less)—are largely defined by how much damage they can inflict. There is precious little sense of their personal investment in their fights, beyond some amorphous concept of “saving the world.” Their narrative arcs, like the narratives behind the current mode of “empowerment culture,” is about achievement and dominion, about being tough for toughness’ sake and ratcheting up easily-quantified victories.

"Captain Marvel" explicitly rejects these narratives. Yon-Rogg serves an avatar of the benevolent sexism that has tried to curtail Carol, and the beautiful wildness of her emotions and ambitions, under the guise of “her own good.” He is just like than Carol’s father, who snaps at her that she’s going to “kill herself” by racing at the go-cart track (though he lets the boys do it), or her colleagues at the Air Force who smugly mansplain that it’s called a “cockpit for a reason” and that she’d be a “great pilot and all” if she didn’t let her feelings “get in the way”—yet there’s something more subterranean, and insidious, about the way he positions himself as her mentor and ally. He trains her in the fine arts of hand-to-hand combat and tries to harden her for war, to make her an impassive soldier for the glory of all Kree; his litmus test for her to prove that she’s truly strong, truly capable, is for her to knock him down, mano a mano, sans her “light show.” He tells her, repeatedly, that the Kree vested her with her powers, and that their mission to hunt down and obliterate the Skrull scourge is a sacred one—both lies. The movie’s great twist is that the Kree are not, in fact, “noble warrior heroes,” but militaristic invaders whose only value is “might makes right.”

The Kree don’t give Carol her real power—just as the gym ads and hard-bodied action heroines, the career advice columns about “knowing your worth and asking for more,” the “fight like a girl” breast cancer awareness campaigns, and the pink handguns don’t give women real power. But they need her to believe that they do, just as “empowerment culture” needs women to believe that spending the money on Krav Maga classes and diet supplements; submitting themselves to a crass capitalist machinery that isn’t invested in ever helping them breathe the air outside that glass ceiling; accepting macho-lite sloganeering about “not being a victim” from an organization that propped up one of the virulently misogynistic administrations in recent history, is demonstrating how strong they are. It’s like complimenting the spit-shined perfection of the boot on our necks. Authentic empowerment can’t be hash-tagged or packaged in gym memberships. It doesn’t come from a promotion or in the squeeze of a trigger—it manifests at the ballot box or in front of a mirror, in a quiet yet insistent refusal to ever let anyone or anything make us feel inferior.