Two years after the Pentagon decided to allow women in the military to serve in combat roles, females are still underrepresented in pop-cultural portrayals of war. Gayle Lemmon, the author of Ashley’s War, a story about women soldiers on the special ops battlefield, discussed with HuffPost Live on Friday the ways in which women are typically depicted in war films or television. Often associated with “rape or PTSD,” Lemmon believes our female soldiers deserve all the glory their male counterparts receive.

“They should be part of our pop-culture lore now, because they’ve long been out serving America,” Lemmon told host Josh Zepps. “We’ve had several hundred thousand women deployed in the past decade of war.”

Lemmon’s case for women being equally represented in art about war stems from their ability to physically keep up with the men while maintaining their femininity, making for a riveting combat narrative. She recalled observing the unit of servicewomen featured in her book.

“We so often want to make women fit in one box or the other,” Lemmon said. “And here was a group of women who wore body armor, carried weapons, and they also wore mascara and happened on some occasions to come back after a mission and watch ‘Bridesmaids.’ These were people who were really comfortable being all parts of themselves, which I think we don’t often get to see.”

Watch the HuffPost Live conversation on how women are portrayed in war television and movies in the video above.

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