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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on June 26, 2012, 06:40:38 PM
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This is probably obvious to anyone with the cognitive capacity of a toasted teacake or higher, but it's been hitting me hard recently how very very much easier it is to pass the Bechdel test with a single female first-person POV character than with a male one.
Also, given a female homicide detective, I am torn between fretting that male murder victims prompt plotlines with an awful lot of that female character talking and thinking about that particular male character, but female murder victims continue to be harder to keep out of the metaphorical refrigerator. I may just go for one of each in the two volumes where this is an issue.
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For those like me who hadnt heard of it, from wikipedia:
The Bechdel test (also known as the Bechdel/Wallace test, the Bechdel rule, or Bechdel's law) is credited to Bechdel's friend Liz Wallace,[5] and appears in a 1985 strip entitled "The Rule".[6] One of the characters says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:
It has to have at least two women in it,
Who talk to each other,
About something other than a man. (Not limited to romantic relationships, for example two sisters talking about their father does not pass.)
Speaking to Testing methodology, Id discount your MC in any 1st POV situation. In 1st POV the MC is forced to be involved with more situations than their own character role would necessarily warrant on its own, since they are the stand-in for the Audience perspective, and so will have more opportunities to talk about various topic simply because they need to be said on-screen, sometimes even with a variant of the the "as you are probably aware" statement
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Hasn't it been expanded to also exclude females who discuss plot points with each other? If so, I'm afraid my current characters would fail the test.
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... what is a Bechdel test?
(and no. I don't have the cognitive capacity of a toasted teacake. I have the capacity of an untoasted teacake. ;D)
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... what is a Bechdel test?
(and no. I don't have the cognitive capacity of a toasted teacake. I have the capacity of an untoasted teacake. ;D)
I'm sorry for leaving the definition out; Quantus helpfully provided in the second post.
I am also having a wurble about the Bechdel-Turing test, which is whether two people have a conversation that makes no mention at all of computers; most days in my real life fail that one.
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I didn't understand Quantus' post at all.
Oh well. At least i have a toasted teacake. :)
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In simple terms, a story passes the Bechdel Test if three conditions are met:
- there are at least two women
- who talk to each other at any point in the story
- about something other than a guy
And that's it. 90% of movies and genre novels fail, which is pretty sad when you remember that half the population of the world is made up of women. ::)
It's not impossible for a first person male POV to pass the Bechdel (DF manages it, though not every book), but it can definitely be finicky, particularly if the story occurs in a male dominated setting. Sometimes passing the Bechdel is just not possible depending on the story you're trying to tell. But those instances are a lot rarer than Hollywood would have it. (50% of the population)
And there are definitely cases where I'd say a book passes the Bechdel in spirit, if not by letter. (I'm thinking of The Name Of The Wind and the first half of The Lies Of Locke Lamora.) And there are cases where a story passes the Bechdel by letter, but not in spirit (like Changes, with Susan and Molly).
What's ridiculous is when you've got a door stopper fantasy trilogy with a major female POV and it still doesn't pass the Bechdel Test. That's just sad. (and perplexing? like, how is that even possible?)
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I didn't understand Quantus' post at all.
Oh well. At least i have a toasted teacake. :)
I was just saying that in a 1st POV story the MC is involved in more conversations purely because they are the POV for the reader, and not because of anything about the character itself. So if you want the test to be a fair one that you can use comparatively, I think you should discount the MC (regardless of gender), and only consider supporting characters.
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Fascinating. Until now, I never even heard of this test. Ironically, I don't use it consciously either. By that, I mean that if the characters talk to me, they define the parameters of gender. I really feel these worlds are already established, and the characters simply allow us the privilege of seeing into them. (Which many famous authors have mentioned or alluded to.) The concept sounds silly, OFC, but if you're one of them who enjoys this privilege, you understand what I mean. For those who write differently, the concept is... difficult to relate to, I imagine.
Now regarding the ironic bit, I say ironic because the novel I am currently seeking to put on Amazon Prime has a nearly 50/50 ratio of male/female characters, with the males popping out in the lead by only one, out of a cast of seven. The bad guys, on the other hand, are at a 3:1 ratio. XD However, I can't remember if passes the Bechdel test, but if it does, it's by sheer coincidence, I assure you, LOL
The point I'm making however, is that I do not believe an author sits down with the sole intent, much less even a passing thought, of creating a work which will, indeed, pass the Bechdel test. Whether it does or does not, I believe this to be a product of coincidence, rather than design. In fact, depending on the numbers of the cast you employ in your novel, it would seem to me more a matter of numerical probabilities whether or not the Bechdel test is passed or failed.
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The point I'm making however, is that I do not believe an author sits down with the sole intent, much less even a passing thought, of creating a work which will, indeed, pass the Bechdel test.
I do. Very consciously and specifically. Along with a number of other issues on similar scales.
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I think that a lot has to do with who the protagonist and the antagonist are in the movie. If the main character and the main villain are both male, the movie probably often fails the test. I wonder how many movies with females in both roles have two male characters discussing something other than females?
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I think that a lot has to do with who the protagonist and the antagonist are in the movie. If the main character and the main villain are both male, the movie probably often fails the test. I wonder how many movies with females in both roles have two male characters discussing something other than females?
LOL, I think it's easier for men to pass the Bechdel test because they are easily distracted by things like beer, pizza and football. XD
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It's easier for men to pass the bechdel test because they are far, far more likely to get parts other than 'love interest' or 'competing love interest.'
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLF6sAAMb4s
^Found a youtube video explaining it.
The Bechdel Test isn't something you build an entire story around, it's just something to keep in the back of your mind while writing. Does your story have two named female characters? Do they ever talk to each other about something other than a guy? These aren't things that will hurt your story. If anything it'll flesh it out more because you're expanding the scope of your worldbuilding in a way you wouldn't have thought of before.
(and this is where I point out that the Dresden Files and the Kingkiller Chronicles -first person male povs, many male antagonists- can both pass the test.)
eta: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH8JuizIXw8 <-- start at 7:45 for the reverse male bechdel test question
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My comment was not to try to pretend that there is an issue of men not having meaningful roles in films. I was simply wondering how much the gender of the protagonist and antagonist in the film have to do with whether there is any meaningful interaction between two members of the opposite gender (from the protagonist or antagonist) that don't have something to do with either the protagonist or the antagonist. I would think that this would be rare.
I would think that the sixty second rule that the woman in the You tube clip was proposing would be very problematic. Any action films that are light on lengthy dialogue would be almost automatically eliminated.
I found it funny that Wall E was listed as having failed.
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My comment was not to try to pretend that there is an issue of men not having meaningful roles in films. I was simply wondering how much the gender of the protagonist and antagonist in the film have to do with whether there is any meaningful interaction between two members of the opposite gender (from the protagonist or antagonist) that don't have something to do with either the protagonist or the antagonist. I would think that this would be rare.
I would think that the sixty second rule that the woman in the You tube clip was proposing would be very problematic. Any action films that are light on lengthy dialogue would be almost automatically eliminated.
I found it funny that Wall E was listed as having failed.
Thats what I am thinking. The test in itself is biased. The Protagonist (and Antagonist as you point out) are in a position to have many more interactions of all kinds, whereas the supporting roles are far more limited, due to their literary roles.
And, I dont see how it makes a work any better or worse if a female character asks some random lady the price of rice in china, or fails to do so.
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And, I dont see how it makes a work any better or worse if a female character asks some random lady the price of rice in china, or fails to do so.
It indicates that the author is aware that women exist other than as love interests or adjuncts to male characters. This strikes me as a non-trivial plus.
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It indicates that the author is aware that women exist other than as love interests or adjuncts to male characters. This strikes me as a non-trivial plus.
On the flip-side, I'd bet that over 90% of lesbian porn movies pass the test...
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It indicates that the author is aware that women exist other than as love interests or adjuncts to male characters. This strikes me as a non-trivial plus.
Gender equality is certainly a good thing, and so is having properly written, rounded characters. Im just saying that this particular test, without the addition of some normalizing elements at the very least, strikes me as a remarkably arbitrary way to rate such a thing.
In 99% of stories the MC will have to be either a Man or a Woman, and in either case the test is dramatically scewed towards that gender choice. As mentioned above Wall-e doesnt pass, but thats mostly because there are only three characters with real gender (5 if you count the pair of robots with 2 word vocabularies) and many of them never interact. But if you randomly say Auto is female (which would make sense since Ships are traditionally female) then it passes with flying colors. But that doesnt in any way affect the quality of the work, or the relative gender equality demonstrated. Knnn's observation about Lesbian Porn seems relevant to this point as well. Hell, you could write a story that passes with flying colors, that is nothing but a couple of women mudwrestling over a pair of shoes. You could also write one that fails simply because the two female protagonists are focused on taking down the male villain, and so dont stray to other topics (granted it would probably have to be short).
To be clear, Im not saying that there isnt bias in Fiction (though Id like to think its a little less so in Literature than in Hollywood), or that Female characters arent trivialized at times. Im not entire convinced that there isnt a similar number of flat, useless male characters out there that are relegated to base tropes, but Ill fully admit that I dont usually take much note of that sort of thing, so i may just be uninformed.
Now, if you remove any POV characters from the equation, and evaluate it as a ratio of the conversations between two women that do and do not center around a man, Id think you have a more representative metric. :)
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(snip) ...You could also write one that fails simply because the two female protagonists are focused on taking down the male villain, and so dont stray to other topics (granted it would probably have to be short).
(snip)
...Now, if you remove any POV characters from the equation, and evaluate it as a ratio of the conversations between two women that do and do not center around a man, Id think you have a more representative metric. :)
That was why I mentioned in an earlier post that it's almost necessary to eliminate plot-relevant dialogue from such a test; in, for example, a police procedural/crime thriller, much of the dialogue will be discussion of the various suspects, some of whom will almost certainly be male. I don't believe anyone would consider it sexist for detectives Carol and Alice to discuss the probability of Bob's guilt rather than Mary's.
(Of course, that brings up the question of whether all non-plot-essential dialogue should be edited out anyway...one can make a pretty good case either way.)
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That was why I mentioned in an earlier post that it's almost necessary to eliminate plot-relevant dialogue from such a test; in, for example, a police procedural/crime thriller, much of the dialogue will be discussion of the various suspects, some of whom will almost certainly be male. I don't believe anyone would consider it sexist for detectives Carol and Alice to discuss the probability of Bob's guilt rather than Mary's.
(Of course, that brings up the question of whether all non-plot-essential dialogue should be edited out anyway...one can make a pretty good case either way.)
Precisely. The more you look at the test the more you realize you have to discount in order to make it work, at which point what you are left with is all pretty trivial anyway.
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Yes. If the story centers around taking down a bad guy, then most of the dialogue is going to be about the bad guy. Any that isn't is probably going to end up on the cutting room floor. If the main character is male then he's going to be involved in most of the conversations. If he's just standing watching two women talk about some random subject it is going to be
a) a little strange (why doesn't he join in the conversation) and
b) probably superfluous and again will end up on the cutting room floor.
Now I am certainly not saying that this is true of all movies. If the movie is about a family then the mother talking to another woman (or her daughter if she has one ) would make perfect sense. If there is a female villain it makes great sense for two female cops,reporters,lab techs, etc. to be discussing how to catch her. If the driving plot of the movie does not involve a human villain but rather deals with survival from nature or aliens or the supernatural or whatever then it would make much more sense to have two female characters discussing the problem.
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To make a fair benchmark, you need to first consider the ratio of non-protagonist male/female characters. If the ratio is fair, then given the we assume two random characters are speaking to each other the chance of them being both female is (f/(f+m))^2.
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. Given that movies have a limited time frame, I don't expect the characters to be doing small talk unless it is germane to plot of the story. If they are talking, they can either be talking about other characters (random 2:1 it is about a male character), or some plot device. Assume 50-50 (at best), giving us around 7% "Bechdel worthy".
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(Of course, that brings up the question of whether all non-plot-essential dialogue should be edited out anyway...one can make a pretty good case either way.)
I do think dialogue does other things as well, like characterisation and world-building, and while ideally as much of it as possible will do more than one of those things, if you cut everything that's not doing lots of things at once you end up with "The Waste Land" or "Four Quartets", which are awesome things to have, but not novels.
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I do think dialogue does other things as well, like characterisation and world-building, and while ideally as much of it as possible will do more than one of those things, if you cut everything that's not doing lots of things at once you end up with "The Waste Land" or "Four Quartets", which are awesome things to have, but not novels.
I would argue that world-building dialogue is more relevant to novels. Right or wrong, "Show don't Tell" for movies usually means that you substitute dialog for a spectacle.
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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.
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.
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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.)
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(Even worse a full 60 seconds of dialogue like the woman in the youtube clip advocates.)
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.
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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.
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
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(taken from Google-fu, don't necessarily take these numbers as 100% correct)
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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.)
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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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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.
A good example of that might be Cherryh's "Pride of Chanur" series. I am actually pretty sure that it wouldn't pass an "anti-Betchdel" test (or maybe barely). To be fair, there are 7 different species in the book and most of them cannot communicate with each other. Also, only about half of the races have clear genders, so that kinda limits things.
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only about half of the races have clear genders, so that kinda limits things.
Haha! Ya, I could see how that would complicate things
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At the risk of being chewed out here, does it really matter if a single author can't bass the Bechdel test? I would think it more of an issue that the entertainment industry as a whole can't. For instance, I like a cheesy popcorn book series called the destroyer series (the movie Remo Williams is based off this). Clearly it is meant to be campy male fantasy, and this is okay. That's the idea. If however, every book or movie followed the formula of the destroyer series books, then we would have a problem.
So at what point do we start yelling at authors for not intentionally setting out to make their books pass the bechdel test?
At what point do we ask they change their own works to be politically correct in other ways? and at what point will going out of the way to satisfy these requirements actually start to interrupt the story? Worst case scenario, I can see these scenes sticking out like a bad product placement. Hell, why not just make the female-female conversation a feminine hygeine commercial and do both?
I'm not trying to play devil's advocate here, 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.
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I only want to touch on this because to do any more could rapidly create a TT but for a large percentage of fiction created in the last half of the twentieth century, it would be possible to guess which overlapping time period it was created in by who the token character was. I always hated this. I think the idea of the Bechdel test is that if you put solid, well rounded (no pun intended) female characters into your story, the dialogue should take care of itself. Of course, as many of us have already mentioned, that would depend on the story being told.
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At the risk of being chewed out here, does it really matter if a single author can't bass the Bechdel test? I would think it more of an issue that the entertainment industry as a whole can't.
How would one address the entertainment industry as a whole not passing other than encouraging individual authors to pass, though ?
So at what point do we start yelling at authors for not intentionally setting out to make their books pass the bechdel test?
Yelling's a loaded word. But noting it; at the point when we are writing reviews or criticism, or talking about books to our friends, seems good enough to me. (And note, I started this thread out of concern for my own work doing well by this standard, not with the intent of yelling at anyone else.)
At what point do we ask they change their own works to be politically correct in other ways? and at what point will going out of the way to satisfy these requirements actually start to interrupt the story?
"Politically correct" is vague enough a term that I'm not seeing any useful way to engage with it; if reflecting whatever the underlying set of values you wish to reflect interrupts the story, be that a set of values that supports women being depicted as people who talk about things other than men or any other position you want to address, then that's not a problem with the values or the desire to reflect them, it's a problem with not writing the story well enough.
Worst case scenario, I can see these scenes sticking out like a bad product placement.
I think I have faith in the ability of any random writer to do better than that. (Also, it would occur to me that a book in which a scene with two women talking to each other about something other than a man drastically sticks out from a background in which that never happens has problems enough on those grounds, or at least, needs some other reason for being that way; being set in a fourteenth-century Catholic monastery, for example.)
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.
I think again you are envisioning this at a different scale from me.
By analogy; suppose I wanted to write a book set on Mars. What you're talking about sounds to me like you think I am saying "oh, you've decided you want to write a book set on Mars. You must immediately go out and read Edgar Rice Burroughs and HG Wells and Ray Bradbury and Kim Stanley Robinson so you don't do those things that have already been done." Which would indeed do odd and probably ungood things to creative focus.
Whereas what I am actually trying to say is "Ideally, if you decide to write a book set on Mars, you'll already have read Burroughs and Wells and Bradbury etc, probably many times and probably years ago. You'll have a good feeling for their place in the history of the genre, you'll be conscious of the sort of influence they have, and they may or may not influence you but you won't have to paste them on or jam them into your story, they'll be integral to how it develops in the first place because of being part of the context you come from."
I'd rather read the Dresden Files than a political statement.
Oh, I think the DF has some pretty clear political perspectives in it - being pro-free will, for example. Well threaded in and integral to the story, but still political perspectives.
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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?)
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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.
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.
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...?
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.
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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 (http://thehathorlegacy.com/the-bechdel-test-its-not-about-passing/) which makes this point far more eloquently than I can.
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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.
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
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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.
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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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 (http://thehathorlegacy.com/the-bechdel-test-its-not-about-passing/) which makes this point far more eloquently than I can.
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.
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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.
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.
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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..."
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.
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.
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 ?
Because it's just a story, and I'm following Jim's lead on leaving politics out.
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.
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 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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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.
Personally, when I say "a good story," I'm looking at whether something fits naturally. Tough Eurasian Street Girl Gang Member With A Heart Of Gold would never fit into Name of the Rose for example unless one decides to chuck historical accuracy and have the Doctor drop her off.
Now, if the Bechdel Test, or any other "Test" does fit, and can be used to add to the story, then I personally feel that ignoring it would be missing an opportunity to write something amazing instead of just something good. God knows, there's enough of people doing the Same Old Thing and ignoring that half of the population that can provide wonderful characters.
Well, "yes and no" all over the place is probably good, because if we totally agreed on something for an extended period of time, that there would likely be End Times stuff, like Zombie Antimatter Marsupial Cyborgs. ;D
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 ?
Personally, I don't mind excluding readers who *expect*, who feel that I have some obligation to write to their cause or worldview. I suspect that those readers will bring so much baggage to the story they wouldn't have any fun anyway... and I don't like the presumption of those readers/bloggers who feel they have some sort of moral authority to school any artist on what priorities they should be supporting. Those people who can't get a glass of water without filtering the experience through some sort of "Well, as a supporter of XYZ, I find that this drink of water doesn't speak to the cause of XYZ..." are likety not going to find something to dislike anyway.
But the readers who would say "Hey! This clown actually came up with some strong, developed female characters!" or "Hey! There's no love triangle or boy talk!" without feeling that I "owed it to them"? Well, I'll be thrilled if I dish up something up that they like. That's who I'm looking to please. That, and people who maybe want to see steampunk and hard science get slippity together.
Some readers will always be excluded. People who want magic space pandas will be pretty much out of luck with me. As will be readers who want me to specifically write something "relevant" to some Current Awful Plight Somewhere In The Real World. Same with those who want to read about a Manly Race Car Driving Detective Guy. Can't please everyone, so I'm going with what pleases me, hopefully with some measure of skill, and put it where people with similar tastes will trip over it. Whether that actually is enough readers to allow me to purchase a grape at the next feast is something that remains to be seen. Hell, I might be so awful people'll establish a fund to pay me not to write. Kind of like what should be done with Uwe Boll...
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.
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.
If you parse it down enough, anything is on some level "political." A character picks an apple, and tells their friend "The tree's right there, go pick your own damn apple. I'm tired and hungry, and I'm not climbing back up there" will be at some point processed as a Political Statement by someone. They might think it a Good Statement, or an Evil Statement that they think I'm making. Dependent on what they're really looking to find, generally.
Basic conflicts, like "I got this, and you want it" are the eternal genetic base-stock of politics, after all.
Personally, when I say "I'm trying to avoid politics," I'm avoiding any intentional ties to Current Events in the socio-political scene.
And I know that there are some people who will see a conflict between Homesteads and the Towns as a "Left Wing" or "Right Wing" "Statement,"that they imagine is a reference to some current upheaval somewhere in the world. "I got this, you want it" is a theme where both sides claim the moral high ground, after all. There are always people looking for things they can feel validates their worldview, others look for things they can claim threatens it. That's unavoidable, because it's generated by their own mental filters. So I do take an effort to avoid anything someone will say "Oh, this obviously a reference to The American Revolution/The Civil War/The Intifada/War On Terror"... at least without them having to work to invent an imaginary connection.
If a writer *wants* to do something that's a reference to such issues, they've every right to do so, that's just something I have no intention of doing... For me, personally, socio-political "fan service" (See Avatar: Dances With Space Marines) detracts from a story. It becomes a wink at the camera which, for me anyway, which breaks immersion and gets in the way of enjoying the experience, and has the potential of dating your story in a bad way. It's something that is frequently thrown in by Hollywood types who want to generate cheap buzz and congratulate themselves on their own cleverness at taking their sword and spaceship story and "making it relevant", instead of focusing their efforts on better character development, or tighter, crisper writing.
(I'm not saying that socio-political commentary ruins a story, but that unless it's the writer's main goal, it's no substitute for quality story elements.)
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Just to be quadruple sure here, I want to make it clear I'm not harshing on writers who choose to address this or that issue or cause. I'm all about "you go with your bad self!" The only people I'm harshing on are those who feel they've the moral authority to dictate what I write about, and how I write it.
If anyone feels the desire to embrace some cause or theme, chooses to direct their writing towards that, then I applaud them and respect their right to do so.