I say top five just to show that it takes time to think of it because it's uncommon. If I say top five white leading men, nobody has difficulty with that. If I say top five leading Asian men, the clock starts ticking. Likewise, top five strong sexy females is not an easy thing, compared to top five sexy females.
I have to disagree with most there. Brockovich and Starling are played by attractive actresses (because there is no room in the industry for 'character actresses', just character actors), but not portrayed as sexy (and Brockovich is portrayed kind of abrasively from what I remember of the movie 20 years back), while Lara Croft is definitely a male fantasy, not a female one... They've only begun to tone things back with her in recent years. Croft was the lighting rod of criticism of the gaming industry for a decade or more. Indiana Jones never did his stunts in a tank top with his butt facing the camera. Aeon Flux is on the line for me, but i only ever saw the anime, not the movie. She's a little grotesque in the anime, and I doubt Charlise Theron was grotesque. Leela was created to be strong and sexy, I can agree with that one.
Of course, every single one of those products was created by men. I'd have gone towards material that women created where the women can be sexy on their own terms, instead of satisfying a man's definition of sexy, but there's not much of that which is even near mainstream. Sex and the City? (which most men hate anyway) Even Wonder Woman, which will be big around the world with the movie this summer and is a strong, intelligent, beautiful but not overly sexualized character, she was created by a polygamist with a bondage fetish so he could write scenarios of her being tied up. America is evolving, but mainly through women's criticism, not because most men find strength sexy (and look no further than the "I want a Japanese girlfriend" threads here, where Western men dream of a stereotypical passive partner).
I still don't think 'strong is sexy' is anywhere near default in the West. Actually, it's only in the past decades anything resembling that has appeared. You only have to read a few interviews with actresses to know the stereotypes they're forced to live down to, or read interviews with actually powerful women to know the hatred they get. Or look at the past American election.
Just to spin this round to the actual topic, Japanese women have this cutesy attitude pushed on them from birth, basically, or from pre-school. And of course there is a world of difference between Japanese women, I know just from the hundreds I've encountered teaching. But if a Japanese woman is going to make it in front of a camera, for the most part, they need to play the game, which is being a stereotype. America is ahead of Japan in showing diverse and occasionally strong women... but not by much. It's about 30 years ahead or so, give or take the awakening of American feminism.
