McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Bechdel test observations
Paynesgrey:
--- Quote from: Wordmaker on October 02, 2012, 10:52:21 PM ---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.
--- End quote ---
This /\ raises some excellent points. As the Joss Whedon quote goes, "Why do I keep writing about strong female leads? Because you keep asking that question." It's ironic, because Hollywood is obsessed with selling "the next NEW BIG THING", but they keep just repackaging the same old thing in terms of leaving female characters to act as props for the male leads. There's so much interesting stuff that can be done by stepping out of the traditional paradigms like "We have to have a love interest, and a rival, and the Awful Misunderstanding that almost breaks them up...
But I wouldn't say any writer has an obligation to try to "pass" the test unless the story benefits from doing so. Conformity to the test for it's own sake is no different than saying "ok, we have to write in The Cute Kid, and the Thug With A Sensitive Inner Light, because that's how shows are made these days..."
My own work in progress passes the test with flying colors, but not through any particular effort on my part to include this or exclude that.
I've always found well developed female characters more interesting, so that's what my story is about. And I like to push tropes down stairs just because. My protagonist doens't have a birth mark, a secret name, a hidden Special heritage, a mentalist cat, or a boyfriend, because she just doesn't need 'em and neither does the story. But it's not out of some decision to be Socially Conscious of any damn thing.....I've got a story I want to tell. I've no intention of attempting to provide enlearnment or upliftication or anything else beyond entertainment. If somebody finds something positive to take with them back to the real world, well, I'll be quite pleased, but it's a bonus, not the driving goal.
I do not owe it to anyone to provide support or validation to their worldview or cause or whatever.
If I were interested in that, I'd be giving seminars or something like that, not storytelling, and I'll probably be annoyed if someone starts claiming my book is "for" or "against" anything. Even if they mean it in a complimentary fashion Because it's just a story, and I'm following Jim's lead on leaving politics out.
Granted, my story takes place a couple thousand years after the fall of the Terran Empire, so it's easy to leave behind "the petty squabbles over resource allocation or tribal god images." People will find all new shit to invent grudges over given time.
And I know some reader, blogger, or reviewer will still insist there's a "message" because there are always going to be those who review everything, right down to the taste of their last smoothie or cup of tea, through the filter of whatever Cause consumes their lives. They'll bring their own baggage with them, and there's no helping that in such cases. "The repeated use of upright, phallicallitationally representative letters like "I" demonstrates the author's hatred of women, as seen by submissive, often lower case portrayal of the letters "o" and "u."
And there'll be people who see my stuff as "a vicious attack on the traditional family" because it's not Little House On the Prairie In Space, with traditional family roles depicted. (Biology doesn't give a rat's ass about social mores when a species survival is at stake, after all.) Yeah, there are strong male characters depicted, you could pretty much swap out the genders of any of the characters and the story and interpersonal reactions would remain the same. Except maybe how they pee, but I don't really go into that beyond the recycling systems.
misterjonez:
--- Quote from: hank the ancient on July 05, 2012, 04:18:44 PM --- I just want to make the point that if too many people have to throw in their two cents on the creative process we get a story by committee without a cohesive focus. Which is bound to suck. I'd rather read the Dresden Files than a political statement.
--- End quote ---
Chess grandmasters have tried to test committees in competition. They would put three players in charge of one side of the board (white or black) and each one's individual ranking was between 2300 and 2350. Their opponent would be ranked around 2100. The committees never won a game. Clearly, each player was better individually than the opponent, but the process of homogenizing the strategy and execution resulted in a categorically weaker performance.
In other words, if you think what you're doing is good, then you're better off following your own ideas than listening to other, superior, writers. Do what you do.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Paynesgrey on October 04, 2012, 04:14:19 AM ---But I wouldn't say any writer has an obligation to try to "pass" the test unless the story benefits from doing so. Conformity to the test for it's own sake is no different than saying "ok, we have to write in The Cute Kid, and the Thug With A Sensitive Inner Light, because that's how shows are made these days..."
--- End quote ---
I'm kind of "yes and no" all over this post. At least in part because it seems to me that the position of putting concern for the Bechdel test secondary to telling a good story or a fun adventure involves a particular conscious choice as to what "a good story" or "a fun adventure" entails. I am not by any means opposed to making that choice - there are some excellent books that are nowhere near passing the Bechdel test, from The Name of the Rose to the Aubrey/Maturin I'm in the middle of right now - given it being a conscious choice, and one for which there's a reason. I am somewhat leery of positions that do not consider it to begin with.
--- Quote ---I've always found well developed female characters more interesting, so that's what my story is about. And I like to push tropes down stairs just because. My protagonist doens't have a birth mark, a secret name, a hidden Special heritage, a mentalist cat, or a boyfriend, because she just doesn't need 'em and neither does the story. But it's not out of some decision to be Socially Conscious of any damn thing.....I've got a story I want to tell. I've no intention of attempting to provide enlearnment or upliftication or anything else beyond entertainment. If somebody finds something positive to take with them back to the real world, well, I'll be quite pleased, but it's a bonus, not the driving goal.
I do not owe it to anyone to provide support or validation to their worldview or cause or whatever.
--- End quote ---
My concern is not that so much as "do I want to give the impression that I am explicitly excluding some of my potential readership ?" And if so - given the unlikelihood of any one book appealing to all potential readers - which ones do i care about ?
--- Quote --- Because it's just a story, and I'm following Jim's lead on leaving politics out.
--- End quote ---
That depends how you scale politics, I reckon. I mean, leaving out any suggestion of which way Harry would vote in a Presidential election is one thing, but Harry does have a pretty clearly defined set of things he considers good and stands up for, and things he opposes, and I don't particularly see how being pro-free-will, for example, isn't a political position. I'm not seeing how a story can not be political in the second sense.
--- Quote ---Granted, my story takes place a couple thousand years after the fall of the Terran Empire, so it's easy to leave behind "the petty squabbles over resource allocation or tribal god images." People will find all new shit to invent grudges over given time.
--- End quote ---
And when you say that, that gives me the strong impression of there being a bunch of axioms, or social issues, call them what you will, that you have given some thought to, in order to decide they don't apply to your setting. I'm not quite seeing how that fits with your expressed position above of not being socially conscious.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: misterjonez on October 04, 2012, 07:06:27 AM ---Chess grandmasters have tried to test committees in competition. They would put three players in charge of one side of the board (white or black) and each one's individual ranking was between 2300 and 2350. Their opponent would be ranked around 2100. The committees never won a game. Clearly, each player was better individually than the opponent, but the process of homogenizing the strategy and execution resulted in a categorically weaker performance.
--- End quote ---
I addressed this point a page or so ago, or at least tried to; I'm not talking about writing stories by committee, so much as thinking through where one is coming from before one starts.
--- Quote ---In other words, if you think what you're doing is good, then you're better off following your own ideas than listening to other, superior, writers. Do what you do.
--- End quote ---
And the failure mode of just following what feels right to you and resisting editorial comment or analysis is pretty visible in late Heinlein, for example. (I think it was Dave Langford who said that late Heinlein showed that Robert Heinlein could write four characters; young Robert Heinlein, young Robert Heinlein with tits, old Robert Heinlein, and old Robert Heinlein with tits. And dear gods there is no escaping the tits.)
I'm not particularly interested in writing books in which every character in them is me with a different hat, plus or minus breasts (or in TIWTBW, me as Alien Space Bat or me as Talking Squid From Space). Partly because it's boring, partly because it's unambitious, partly because, me being me, it seems very likely to be drastically uncommercial. (Seriously, if you judge characters by making emotional sense to the reader, I can think of two in all of fiction who work for me all the way down; Rosie Gann in Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale, and Captain Jack Harkness. This does not lead me to believe that simply doing what feels right to me is going to produce characters that anyone else is going to connect to.)
I'm not proposing an answer here. I am proposing that "do what you do" in isolation is fine if all you want to do is give your id some exercise, and if so, by all means enjoy. I think that if your ambitions include telling stories that have meaning and connect for other people - even at the level of being entertaining and fun, having some degree of commercial success, or, if (as I do) you believe in such a thing, learning how to be a better writer, then it can be helpful to pay attention to other things as well as your own vision.
Wordmaker:
I think this is where good critique partners and a team of reliable beta readers are absolutely invaluable. We all need someone to tell us when we're crossing a line we shouldn't, or misrepesenting a particular group of people. Not because we're bad writers or we do it intentionally, but because we're human and we make mistakes. We overlook things or make assumptions where we shouldn't. We need those friends who'll give us outside perspective.
I agree that following your own vision alone is perfectly fine for drafting, or just to write for your own pleasure. But if you're going to turn that manuscript into a product, you need to reflect on how it will impact readers. Because those readers are the ones who'll decide whether you get to do this for a living or not.
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