Bechdel test observations

[knnn]

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.

[Quantus]

only about half of the races have clear genders, so that kinda limits things.

Haha! Ya, I could see how that would complicate things

[hank the ancient]

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.

[OZ]

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.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

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.

[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]

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.

[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]

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

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

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.

[Paynesgrey]

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.

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]

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.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

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.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

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.

[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.