McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Bechdel test observations
Dom:
I don't know if this contributes to the conversation, but...
I'm female. I was raised in an all-female household. No men. And I have to consciously fight to have my own stories pass the Bechdel test. ME. And MY OWN STORIES.
Why is it so hard to do this? Why doesn't it come naturally, given my own sex and my environment growing up?
And also, why do I fight at all? Why do I take the time to consciously try to fight my own brain? Does passing a test like this even matter? "Political correctness" seems like a construct of what "they" say, and you know "they" are both jackasses and idiots. The PC Police seem to be a similar thing as "they", some nebulous, unrealistic panderers somewhere, disconnected from the world. Damn tree huggers.
Heh. I will never write stories that will be held up as huge bastions or examples of feminism, or anti-racism, with those messages driving the plots. I KNOW that, and those are not the stories I want to tell, or have the understanding to tell, and I'm not sure it's what's needed from ME as an author. But the US seems to busy patting itself on the back for "inventing" feminism or anti-racism and the like, and has largely stopped trying to clean up the rest of the remnants of the "bad 'ol days".
Little words, little stereotypes add up. They're the things that linger in the fabric of society once the overt -ism is banished, the little diseases that remain and grow while everyone's too busy patting themselves on the back once the big, obvious things like lynchings and "get in the kitchen and make me a sammich" are vanished (or we think they are). These little things influence the self-image of real people. I'm a woman, almost 30, and I struggle with my self image of being a woman when my more "feminine" traits manifest against my will. I hate that I exhibit symptoms of PMS, that I can see changes in my behavior at these times, and that if I admit PMS is making me snappish, it seems to undercut any worth an argument I'm trying to make at the time. I feel like I should banish myself to a dark room and wait it out because it's just hormones. I loathe myself at these times. I don't like being a woman. But, wait--nobody told me to hate myself. I can get any job like a man, can't I? I support myself like a man, don't I? (And I am!) Yet I still have little periods of self-loathing, and a sense that I am not worth much. Where does this unease in my own skin come from? Why do I have this? I grew up in the 80s and 90s which were all about telling everyone they were equal with everyone else. I don't wear makeup, I rarely wear skirts. I grew up in a family of women, and nobody ever directly told me I couldn't do something because I was a girl. So what did I notice in the world around me that still conveys that message?
It all comes down to the little things. Remember as a kid, when you and someone else got in a scuffle at school or something and the other person was wrong but you somehow got the blame too because "it takes two to fight"? The adult in charge DIDN'T SEE the situation, and wasn't just? All these little reminders in fiction that women aren't worth much because they don't get much focus outside of sex and romance are kind of like that, over and over. The author is in a position of power, even if only for a short while. They're asking you to believe in their world--which says YOU don't have much of a place in it. Hey, this story only has one woman. Hey, this story has two women--fighting over a man. It's like being the kid that's not really seen as a valid person, but for your entire life. And what's frustrating is that people don't MEAN it that way. You point out something's sexist or racist in a story and 99% of the time the author will feel pissed. That they just wrote the story as it came to them and now you want to CENSOR them or change it--they didn't MEAN anything bad by it, so because their intent was pure (just ignorant and uneducated) they shouldn't feel guilty, so they are angry instead.
I, personally, know how that is. I have a hard time writing non-white people into my stories, on top of getting my stories to pass the Bechdel test. If your world and story is set up with an all-white cast for a long time, maybe years, it's incredibly hard to go back and change that, because you've come to learn these characters and never once have they seemed non-white to you. So if you try to change it, it's rough, and it hurts, and you don't think it matters because everyone's equal already, right? Why don't the other people write "empowering" stories so you don't have to struggle?
Well, in sex at least, I'm one of the "other" people, and it's a struggle for me too. Because society is incredibly subtle and insidious and even unconscious in the messages it puts out and it's really easy to go with the status quo--even if the thing you're parroting hurts yourself. It's a thing that every writer contributes to...even when they protest they are not contributing at all, or that political or social agendas are the last things on their minds. But if you never think about it, then are you really in control of your craft? If you don't think about what you're writing about? How can you communicate a story if you don't want to examine what you're saying?
So the reason I fight to not let these internalized decisions seep into my writing, the reason I seemingly bow down to the PC train is because...I have proof these little things add up. I see how it's affected me. It's hard as hell to go against my "natural" inclination to write loads of guys I think are hot, screwing each other (but no lesbians allowed because I don't bend that way!), and make them all white, but...I don't want to be a part of the problem. I'm not the ultimate solution, but at least I can try to not be a part of the problem in a small way. I don't want little girls now to internalize that a convo between two smart female characters, that's not about a man, can happen in real life and does all the time yet isn't good enough for the larger-than-life events in fiction. I don't want two kids who are not white read a book and end up in a discussion trying to figure out how to insert both of them into a story that only has one token non-white person. Given all the work that goes into writing a story, how can I possibly say it's too hard to ask myself to grow enough as a person that I can honestly write stories with many women and many races and many sexual orientations without feeling like I'm somehow betraying my artistic legacy, or censoring myself? Sorry, writing a good story is hard. If you have to learn about things while doing it...well, that's just part of the territory. Isn't it? If you want to do your job well?
And small changes in attitude and stories like that, among many authors and writers and many books and TV shows and movies, are what will eventually change society as time goes on.
So yeah. Yay Bechdel test!
I also worry about having more than a single non-white person in my stories, and I worry about excluding lesbians from my stories. It's really easy for me to write lots of gay men, probably for the same reason it's easy for a dude to think two lesbians together are hot. And that sort of is...NOT getting it, when you ignore the other "variations" in favor of the one you think is ok because it's hot. I wonder if there are tests for this...?
(In other news, by posting this I just primed myself to be hit by a lightning bolt, right?)
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Dom on September 28, 2012, 08:45:52 PM ---I'm female. I was raised in an all-female household. No men. And I have to consciously fight to have my own stories pass the Bechdel test. ME. And MY OWN STORIES.
--- End quote ---
In some ways I think it's easier in the scale of far-future SF I am writing. I don't particularly want to engage directly with contemporary society's issues - particularly not contemporary US society's issues, as I have spent almost all my life outside the US and am not at all confident of understanding the nuances well enough to engage people who do live there, and yet I am also aware of the US as hopefully a primary market for my stuff.
In the particular society Thing I Want To Be Writing is set, there is no real social or economic reason why a person with my protagonist's job would be any particular gender or ethnicity - my making her female and of Congolese-Japanese ancestry (with a couple of millennia of intervening history such that contemporary ethnic categorisations are about as relevant as fine social distinctions in the early Roman Republic are now - and that society having a different set of distinctions that do matter there and then.) was an intentional repudiation of "default" being white and male.
--- Quote ---I also worry about having more than a single non-white person in my stories, and I worry about excluding lesbians from my stories. It's really easy for me to write lots of gay men, probably for the same reason it's easy for a dude to think two lesbians together are hot. And that sort of is...NOT getting it, when you ignore the other "variations" in favor of the one you think is ok because it's hot. I wonder if there are tests for this...?
--- End quote ---
heh. The way I write accurately reflects the world I see around me in this, at least, in that 70-80% of the people in it are bisexual and everyone is assumed to be unless they specify otherwise.
The one that does worry me about potentially upsetting people is not having people with disabilities in my stories; which is partly because I have characters in intensely physically challenging occupations and situations for which many kinds of disabilities would practically disqualify them, and partly because I do not find the idea of a plausible spectrum of contemporary disabilities existing in a space-opera setting compatible with my suspension of disbelief, in the same way as I'd not credit a contemporary novel in which scurvy was a major health issue among middle-class Westerners.
Wordmaker:
I'll hold my hand up and admit that my book doesn't pass the Bechdel Test.
I think the importance of the Bechdel Test isn't whether or not your book passes it. It's just to realise that women need to be fully fleshed-out characters, same as the men. Shoving in a scene with two women talking about art just to pass the test doesn't matter if the rest of the book is sexually exploitative and objectifies women.
There are books and movies which pass the Bechdel Test and yet still portray shallow, objectified depictions of women. If you get hung up on this one element, you risk forgetting other, deeper ways to portray women as fully-realised human beings.
There's an article here which makes this point far more eloquently than I can.
The Deposed King:
--- 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 ---
The further I read this thread the more I think about arbitrarily injecting stuff into my own work to meet this standard and then I'm left wondering... why would I arbitrarily force this kind of standard on my work, when its already doing so well?
I'm getting very leery of reading further into this subject. For fear it might ruin the fun adventure I'm currently writing.
The Deposed King
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: The Deposed King on October 03, 2012, 09:12:14 PM ---The further I read this thread the more I think about arbitrarily injecting stuff into my own work to meet this standard and then I'm left wondering... why would I arbitrarily force this kind of standard on my work, when its already doing so well?
I'm getting very leery of reading further into this subject. For fear it might ruin the fun adventure I'm currently writing.
--- End quote ---
One of the points I see this test as having is in leading one to re-examine what comes naturally to oneself, and is fun and feels to be working well, with an eye to whether there are as Dom talked about above unexamined assumptions of one's own in there that might make it work less well for some subset of the possible readership.
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