Obviously, lots of women really do have babies. Lots of women really do get entangled in love triangles. Lots of women would like to make out with Matt Smith. And lots of women, if kidnapped by shadowy alien forces with unknown motives, would have a hard time coming up with a better plan than “sit around and wait for someone to come looking.” None of these things are deal-breakers on their own, or even necessarily in combination.

But when it becomes clear that a female character is defined solely in male terms, as someone to be macked on, fought over, knocked up, or rescued, there’s a problem. It’s not even that any of these cliches are insulting. It’s that they’re everywhere, and they’re boring. So much of popular culture is devoted to telling the exact same love-marriage-childbirth story over and over, as though it applies to all women in the world, and peddling the lie that deep down inside that’s all any of us really care about. And lots of us care about those things deeply, but not to the exclusion of everything else.

Female characters don’t have to avoid traditional women’s roles to be realistic and compelling. They just have to do other things at the same time. A mother with dreams and regrets and a rich emotional life is a character. A woman who exists to bring a baby into the world (so that it can grow up and make out with Matt Smith) might as well be made of cardboard.

I worry sometimes that two-dimensional depictions of women in television and film may be warping our cultural understanding of real women’s lives and capabilities. But, more often, I just think it’s astonishingly dull. We’ve all heard this one a million times. Tell us something new.