The pool represents a lot of things, but it has also served as a straightforward tool for satisfying the male gaze on film. It is a pretense for babes to appear. But recently female creators have reframed the pool as something new: a place where a woman can be the complicated subject, with her own issues and her own fantasies.

Men are allowed to float through pop culture, their half-naked time drifting atop a pool doubling as a signal of emotional profundity. But for women, the pool is often filmed as a flat, uncomplicated pleasure. These women are typically beautiful, young, thin and white. They are filmed in water as if it is their natural habitat, and the bikini their everyday uniform. They are all Elle Woods, floating into Harvard Law.

Lately the swimming pool scene has received an infusion of new perspectives from female storytellers and stars. In the coming-of-age films “Booksmart,” “Lady Bird” and “Eighth Grade,” in the shows “Shrill” and HBO’s “Insecure,” in the videos of Beyoncé and the internet presence of Lizzo, the pool is more than a set-piece for the male gaze. Through them, the pool’s overwrought metaphors are stripped away to reveal more grounded tensions and revelatory fantasies. The visceral reality of a woman’s relationship to the water is interesting enough.

The pool is a pressure cooker of social expectations for women: to diet, shop, shave, tweeze, sculpt and tone. It lays bare discriminations of race, gender performance and size. It’s a miserable objectification zone of ourselves and others, the feeling “Shrill” writer Samantha Irby has called “how do my legs look compared to their legs.” The expectation that women exhibit an easy confidence in this scenario is its own kind of prison. But the pool is still a site of opportunity: for freedom, pleasure, sex, friendship and rebirth. In the funhouse-mirror refractions of the pool, a woman’s body may be viewed in a new light.

n “Lady Bird” and “Eighth Grade,” the pool is the domain of the rich, popular kids, an access point to an elevated social circle — and a place for harshly exposing one’s incompatibility in that world. Kayla (Elsie Fisher), the painfully shy loner of “Eighth Grade,” is unexpectedly invited to a popular girl’s pool party, and spends the afternoon lurking at the pool’s edge, watching as her classmates’ slick bodies fit effortlessly into social arrangements. Kayla is enchanted by the image of one boy — she watches, slack-jawed, as he emerges from the pool — but she herself is invisible. Her only escape is to dip under the water, where she must hold her breath, which is really what she feels like she is doing all the time.

In “Booksmart,” the typical male conquest of the teen movie is subverted when Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), the film’s studious heroine, pursues her skater-girl crush in the pool at a graduation party. Amy has never had sex, but she wants to, and as she slips underwater, she enters her own kind of fantasy state, gliding toward self-actualization, only to come up for air and discover her dream date kissing a boy. While “Eighth Grade” and “Shrill” succeed by recasting the female body — as a site of stress, and of opportunity — “Booksmart” keeps its eyes underwater, eliding the bodily focus of the teen sex romp to hang on emotion instead.