Daily Inspiration Quote by Adrienne Barbeau

A sly little pivot hides inside that line: Adrienne Barbeau isn’t talking about women so much as the machinery that labels them. “Superchicks” is already a loaded, fan-magazine term, equal parts compliment and costume. Barbeau’s move is to treat it not as a flattering category of people (“the variety”) but as a set of parts written for them (“the roles”). It’s an actress’s way of yanking the camera off the body and onto the script.

The intent feels corrective. In the era Barbeau came up through - late-70s genre cinema, TV, and the glossy, male-skewing hype around “tough women” - the industry loved packaging women as types: the bombshell, the badass, the scream queen, the cool girlfriend who can shoot. “Variety” suggests a buffet of personalities, an abundance of individuality. Barbeau implies that what’s actually being offered is narrower: repeated archetypes that pretend to be expansive because they come in different outfits.

The subtext is a critique of empowerment-as-brand. “Superchick” sounds like liberation, but it can also be a leash: a marketable idea of female strength that still answers to a gaze, a genre, a box-office pitch. Barbeau’s phrasing is blunt and deliberately unglamorous; “roles” is work, labor, limitation. She’s reminding you that representation isn’t just who gets on screen - it’s who gets written, and how often they’re allowed to be something other than a template.