Hollywood, too, has given us gun-toting heroines who look like they shop at Gap Kids in their time off. In the movie “Kick-Ass,” a 13-year-old actress named Chloë Grace Moretz (who was 11 when she made the film) plays a blond-pigtailed girl named Mindy Macready. Her scary alter ego is Hit-Girl, a foulmouthed tween who wears superhero gear while shooting up bad men’s brains. Cue the propriety police!

Image Chloë Grace Moretz is no damsel in distress. Credit... Lionsgate

The violent femme, of course, is an enduring male fantasy, a Lolita who just can’t help herself around a gun. She also does double duty as a symbol of Grrrl power, particularly when she appears in the form of cute-as-a-button crime fighters like the PowerPuff Girls (cartoon kindergartners whose motto was “Saving the world before bedtime”).

According to “The Petite Handbook,” a fashion guide by Kim Williams Dahlman, to be certifiably petite, a woman has to be 5 feet 4 inches or under, though in the current crop of heroines, many are petite — and young — in spirit only. “Petite women are all too often viewed as weak, fragile, delicate, even childlike,” Ms. Dahlman wrote in an e-mail interview. Because muscle and aggression are viewed as masculine traits, “it is unexpected to find great strength and ferocity in a small, petite frame,” she noted.

These days (in pop culture, at least) it’s becoming more common. The ultimate pixie with attitude may be Lisbeth Salander, the goth heroine of the Stieg Larsson book thrill-ogy. Often described as waiflike, she is constantly reducing thugs to a bloody mess.

In the third book in the series, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” Lisbeth is described as “all alone, five feet tall, thin as a stick” before taking out a brute in “a brief orgy of violence.” In the Swedish version of the films, Lisbeth is played by Noomi Rapace, a Swedish actress; in the forthcoming American version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” the role is reportedly going to Carey Mulligan, who played a teenage ingénue in “An Education.”