War & Peace Quote by Victoria Pratt

Pratt’s line lands like a backstage note from late-’90s/early-2000s action-TV culture: a practical observation dressed up as a gender generalization, aimed at justifying why women on screen so often seem “less convincing” in physical roles. As an actress, her intent reads less like theory and more like craft talk: if you didn’t grow up roughhousing, you may not have the same comfort with contact, spatial aggression, or the casual calibration of force that choreographed fighting demands. She’s pointing to embodied training, not abstract “toughness.”

The subtext is trickier. “Most women” functions as both shield and gate: it acknowledges a social pattern while quietly reinforcing the industry’s default assumption that the male body is the baseline for physical expression. The phrase “don’t know how” frames physicality as a knowledge deficit, not a choice or a constraint created by how girls are policed. It skips over the obvious counterpoint: plenty of women do learn physical languages (sports, dance, martial arts), but they often do it under different rules, with different penalties for being seen as “too much.”

Context matters because Pratt’s era of stunts-and-spandex leaned hard on “authentic” violence as credibility. Her comment exposes how gender gets built into bodies long before casting: boys are rewarded for kinetic risk; girls are steered toward containment. The quote works because it names a real asymmetry in socialization while accidentally revealing how that asymmetry becomes an alibi for keeping action coded male.