But I don’t want to sound like I’m wagging my finger at all of these movies. As the father of a confident, athletic 12-year-old girl, I certainly want to see more than princesses (most of whom are also action heroines these days, like Rapunzel in “Tangled”) and sideline sweethearts. I like tough women, and I don’t think I’m the only guy who does. I have certainly enjoyed meeting the ones in “Winter’s Bone,” “True Grit” and, most recently, “Meek’s Cutoff.” Not an action movie, I know — very little happens at all — but somehow when Michelle Williams draws a bead on a bad guy, she writes a whole new chapter in the history of the western.

DARGIS I don’t know about an entire chapter, maybe a paragraph. I just don’t believe that scene where her character pulls out a rifle to protect the wagon train’s Indian prisoner — or should I say when she takes possession of the symbolic phallus. I think the movie would be more honest (and more interesting) if this woman, who appears to take pity on the Indian really because she’s the designated moral center — a quality that blurs uncomfortably with the fact that she’s a woman — were as despicable as the men. This frontier proto-feminism is unpersuasive and certainly not as convincing as the film’s vision of Manifest Destiny as collective insanity. By saving the Indian, she ends up mounting the same pedestal on which women have been historically placed, to our detriment.

It’s tricky whenever a woman holds a gun on screen, even if the movie is independently produced and the director is female. I’m glad that “Meek’s Cutoff” exists and that Kelly Reichardt is making a new film every few years — long may she direct. I complain about the representations of women, but I’m more offended when in movie after movie there are no real representations to eviscerate, when all or most of the big roles are taken by men, and the only women around are those whose sole function is, essentially, to reassure the audience that the hero isn’t gay. The gun-toting women and girls in this new rash of movies may be performing much the same function for the presumptive male audience: It’s totally “gay” for a guy to watch a chick flick, but if a babe is packing heat — no worries, man!

SCOTT Well, Ms. Williams’s character pulls the gun on a particular man, one she has hated from the start, so protection of the Indian may be as much a pretext as a principle. Her action is also governed by the practical consideration that she trusts him more than she does the other guy, which may turn out to be a big mistake. But anyway, on the topic of, ahem, possession of the symbolic phallus — since you brought it up! — Adrian Curry, inspired by the “Meek’s Cutoff” poster that shows Ms. Williams taking aim at the Male Gaze, recently posted a slew of similar images on the Mubi.com site, from much older westerns. One of them, for a movie called “Five Bold Women,” which I am extremely sorry never to have seen, has a tag line perfectly suited to our topic here: “They Used a Weapon No Badman Could ... SEX!”

Jean-Luc Godard posited that all he needed to make a movie was a girl and a gun. (Some of his later work makes me wish he had stuck to that formula.) To put the gun in the hands of the girl may be a way to cut out the middleman, as it were, and also, as you suggest, to maximize commercial potential by providing something for everyone. I think that calculation works best when the filmmakers show some interest in exploring the complex intertwinings of sex and violence, rather than simply mashing them up or using one as a substitute for the other. On the other hand, it’s sometimes just fun to watch Saoirse Ronan or Ellen Page — or all the other sisters of Angelina Jolie, our era’s pioneering and still supreme female action star — beat up some deserving Badman.