Given that there’s much more pressure on women to take their clothes off for roles in film, theater, and television than men, I wouldn’t normally go on the record rooting for a female actor to do nude scenes. But following Angelina Jolie’s announcement today that, in response to learning that she has a BRCA1 gene mutation that increases her likelihood of developing breast and ovarian cancer, she had a preventative double mastectomy and breast reconstruction surgery, I’m hoping that Jolie won’t feel like she can’t do nude scenes in the future, if she feels drawn to roles that include nude or sex scenes.

Jolie is a strong dramatic actress, and is justly recognized for her international humanitarian and human rights work. But she also is also a strikingly good-looking woman whose film career has included a number of emotionally and physically naked sex scenes. And it’s because of that, as Amanda Hess wrote in Slate, that some observers are reacting to the news of her decision to take preventative health measures as if her career is over, or as if it’s a sign of some sort of desperation:

Commenters snarked that Jolie had received a “boob job.” Some suggested that her medical emergency was just a tabloid ruse to cover up elective breast implants. Others morbidly asked after the whereabouts of the breast tissue removed from her body. “RIP Angelina’s boobs” was a typical ignorant comment. Said one commenter on a Jezebel post about the op-ed, “How many guys stopped reading as soon as they realized Angelina Jolie has no breasts—she’s dead to me!”…perversely, some fans feel as if a part of Jolie has been stolen from them. One well-meaning but misguided commenter told me on Twitter yesterday: “Happy to hear she’s giving herself much better odds. As a guy, I will miss her lovely curves though.” (The reconstructive surgery she described presumably restored her curves.)

But as Hess pointed out, and Jolie herself clarified in her New York Times Op-Ed, her children “can see my small scars and that’s it. Everything else is just Mommy, the same as she always was.”

And I wonder if there might be some social value to mass audiences seeing those scars, too, and seeing that a woman who has them can still be sexual and sexy. It’s not as if pop culture never takes on the issues of women, breast cancer, and sexuality, but they often do so in a way that presents sex as a sign of recovery, or an act of tenderness before death. In Sex and the City, Samantha’s (Kim Cattrall) chemotherapy treatments diminished her famous libido, and when her boyfriend Smith returned from a movie shoot to visit her, they had rather comparatively tender sex to celebrate her recovery and their decision to commit to their relationship. Parenthood followed Kristina Braverman (Monica Potter) through her breast cancer treatments this season, and let her dress up in a hot pink wig for a date with her husband in a sign that her illness may have taken its toll, but it hadn’t robbed her of her of her femininity or her sexuality. And the 2005 romantic comedy The Family Stone included a sex scene between Diane Keaton, playing Sybil Stone, and Craig T. Nelson (who also stars in Parenthood) as her husband Kelly that was one of the few mainstream depictions I can think of a woman with a double mastectomy—but without the kind of reconstructive surgery Jolie experienced—who was treated as sexual and desirable.

Now, if Jolie has decided that she’s done with nude scenes or with sex scenes, that’s entirely her decision, and all of us should respect that. But if she does accept such roles in the future, I hope that she, and the writers and directors she works with, see her scars as a feature of her body, rather that some sort of grotesquerie to be hidden by shot angles or erased in post-production. Mastectomy scars should be treated like a physical characteristic that could inflect characters Jolie plays in the future without requiring major plot alterations or commentary. And it would be good for audiences, particularly of the kind that snarked on Jolie today for her brave revelation, to see that they don’t make her any less stunningly gorgeous.

Haywire, Stephen Soderbergh’s bone-crunching action movie starring mixed martial arts fighter-turned-actress Gina Carano hasn’t made its budget back yet, but Carano’s just signed up to star in another action movie, this one from director John Stockwell, who helmed surfing flick Blue Crush and thriller Into the Blue. Saorsie Ronan, who first came on the scene as a nosy child in period movie Atonement turned to action as a teenaged assassin in Hanna, signed up to star in Stephenie Meyer’s science fiction thriller The Host, and just, to some commentators’ surprise, just committed to star in a third action movie. Hailee Steinfeld, who came to prominence as a girl hunting her father’s killer in the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit will have another chance to hone her action chops playing female child soldier Petra in the adaptation of science fiction classic Ender’s Game. And Chloe Moretz’s outings as a pint-sized, foul-mouthed superhero in Kick Ass and a vampire in Let Me In haven’t prevented her from playing sweet and girlish in movies like Hugo. IConsidered together, that’s a pretty incredible crop of young action heroines on the rise. And it’s fascinating to contemplate what their collective impact could be on the industry.

In the past, it’s seemed like we can really only have one major female action star at a time, and that taking on that role can come with some limitations. Sigourney Weaver’s had that lock for her generation, and even when she takes on lighter fare, she ends up playing a heavy, or a character defined by her aggression. In You Again, ostensibly a female comedy, she’s a grown-up high school mean girl. In Red Lights, a paranormal thriller that was picked up out of Sundance, she’s a scientist defined by her intellectual certainty: she has a son, but the movie never gives us even the slightest inkling of a husband or partner or an explanation of whether she had her son on her own in the first place. It’s never a bad thing for an actress to get those kind of roles—I can’t say how excited I am to see Weaver play a vampire queen in Amy Heckerling’s Vamps along with Krysten Ritter and Alicia Silverstone—but being a competent action star shouldn’t mean that an actress can’t also nail a romantic comedy (or her male co-star in that action movie). Angelina Jolie’s allowed slightly greater range in her action roles, but seduction tends to get treated as part of her killer toolkit. When she takes on non-action fare, it tends to be as a historical figure like Mariane Pearl, or to play a woman in a different kind of extremis, as she did in Changeling.

I’d be curious to see if these younger actresses coming up a generation or a generation and a half behind Jolie can forge a new course, where they can do action movies and work in other genres. Some of it may simply be a chops issue: Jolie is just not a very funny actress, where as Moretz has charisma to burn in that particular space. And it would be nice to have female action heroes for whom action is an expression of other concerns. In the Mission Impossible movies, Ethan Hunt’s ass-kicking gets to be an expression of concern for his wife. James Bond’s womanizing and his action as a spy are both expressions of his lack of regard for himself—Daniel Craig’s elevated the act to a kind of exploration of self-harm. So it would be nice to see more female action characters with larger concerns other than lioness mode, who are allowed to protect people and interests other than small children. While I’m not a huge fan of the way The Hunger Games books ended, I do think that’s precisely the kind of franchise that could wed a woman’s ability to be a credible killer to a complex larger set of concerns.

It would also be nice to see more creative thinking about how to direct action sequences. I’m fine with certain female action stars getting choreographed the same way that men do, if they’ve got the stature for it to be plausible that they can plow through a crowd of heavies. But I also think it’s worth considering what kind of approaches slighter women would have to take to get the same result as male action stars who are bigger than them. Are there different schools of martial arts that would tip the balance? More inventive use of equipment? Differentials in vulnerabilities that female fighters could exploit? There are physical differences between men and women, and fight choreographers should think of that as an opportunity to try new things rather than as a reason to treat women as if they aren’t plausible action stars.

So, there’s a new study out that purports to find that conventionally attractive women are considered better role models than less attractive women when they’re in action roles. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised to find out that was the case. But the study seems really wonky. There were just 122 people in it, which is not a particularly big sample size. And more importantly, the examples in the study seem to bias the outcomes pretty heavily. It’s not just that Angelina Jolie and Kathy Bates are totally physically different. It’s that Tomb Raider and Primary Colors aren’t really comparable. Jolie in Tomb Raider is a very straightforward, sexy action heroine:

Bates’ character in Primary Colors has spent a lot of time hospitalized as a result of her mental illness. In the scene where she brandishes a gun on a sketchy Arkansas lawyer, she explicitly uses the fact that everyone thinks she’s crazy to make her threat to shoot his genitals plausible. “I am a gay lesbian woman! I do not mythologize the male sexual organ!” she hollers at him. The violence in Tomb Raider is abstracted, necessary, presented as if it’s cool, whereas the threat of it in Primary Colors is visceral and ugly, not strictly necessary, presented with a combination of wry admiration and disapproval. There’s no way both movies would seem comparable even if Jolie played both roles.

I’d actually like to see a study like this that’s based in more viable comparisons. If we can find a way of presenting women kicking ass that helps expand audiences’ sense of what women can do, while still making for awesome action movies, it would be wonderful to be able to advocate for it. But I need better evidence than this.