McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Bechdel test observations
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: knnn on July 03, 2012, 06:27:33 PM ---Thus, if the males outnumber the females by merely 2:1 (IMHO quite reasonable for things like police/army and probably *much* worse for action flicks), then we'd expect female-female conversation to take up only 11% of the dialogue.
--- End quote ---
The question would be whether that in and of itself is, if not problematic per se, at very least something worth indicating one is aware of, though.
OZ:
I was speaking mostly of movies. Novels are of course a different story. ;) In a novel, a little extra dialogue may help with characterization. Even there though too much extra dialogue can bog things down and there would still need to be a good reason for the main character not to be entering into the conversation if it's a 1st person POV with a male main character. I was talking about movies however where in many cases everything has to fit and extra dialogue gets removed. (Even worse a full 60 seconds of dialogue like the woman in the youtube clip advocates.)
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: OZ on July 03, 2012, 07:45:11 PM --- (Even worse a full 60 seconds of dialogue like the woman in the youtube clip advocates.)
--- End quote ---
meep. if you were to take random 60-second samples of the dialogues I engage in with my friends and my professional peers alike, a very significant fraction of them, you/d not fit a single sentence into.
knnn:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on July 03, 2012, 06:52:21 PM ---The question would be whether that in and of itself is, if not problematic per se, at very least something worth indicating one is aware of, though.
--- End quote ---
I suppose.
Thing is, if you are trying to portray "real life", then the male:female ratio is a number that is not really under your control. Given that an action movie will probably feature male-dominated positions, take a look at these male/female ratios:
USMC - 7:1
US Army - 6:1
USN - 6:1
USAF - 5:1
Police force - 7:1
Firefighters - 20:1
Truck Drivers - 17:1
...
(taken from Google-fu, don't necessarily take these numbers as 100% correct)
...
So if you are portraying a "realistic" police station, the total number of female-female dialogues about anything should be less than 2%. If they are talking about a random colleague, then 84% of the time it will be about a male.
Given the above numbers, it seems to me that shows like Castle/CSI/NCIS are already massively skewed in the female direction (3:1 for CSI, 1:1 for Castle, 3:2 for Leverage, etc.)
Quantus:
To be clear I dont think the Goal of the test, to draw attention to gender inequality or flat female characters, is not a worthy and important thing, just that the implementation of the specific measuring standard is very effective in its implementation. As Knnn notes, there are a number of vocations that are realistically going to be dominated by one gender or another. In a historical fiction it would likely be worse, but if we are talking about a Futuristic/Fantasy setting, you may then have the freedom to wave a wand and make all gender inequality go away.
I would say that other paths to the same goal would be to over-exaggerate the gender inequality, have one or more character comment on the one-dimensionality of the character, or even simply swap the gender roles. I read a book that was a medieval society, but dominated by the magically superior women, instead of physically dominant Men. So the women engaged in politics, while the men spent their days embroidering pillows. I cant say for certain whether any two men had any conversations that were not about a woman.
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