Passing the Bechdel test

neandermagnon said:

Agreed. And can everyone also remember that women with so-called "masculine" traits are real, living and breathing women too? I've had my whole life being told I'm "not feminine" and that I walk/talk/dress/eat/skate/etc ad nauseum "like a man" and it's tiresome. "man with boobs" - I've not been called that in those exact words but it's been implied often enough or said in other ways that I'm "like a man" and not "like a woman".

I hate the labelling of personality traits as "masculine" and "feminine" as they are just stereotypes within our culture, not universal truths and there are many people who don't fit those stereotypes. I'm equally as feminine as this female Neandertal or a female T. rex... i.e.. 100% feminine, because modern western stereotypes don't get to define feminine for the whole of nature. (In T. rex the females were bigger and stronger than the males but that doesn't stop people portraying cartoon female T. rex as a smaller, weaker version standing behind the male one with a twee bow on her head. Because so many people default "female" to "smaller, weaker, less significant, less important, twee version of the real thing" - and therein is the issue because it's what so many characters in films amount to. Either that or they're just there to be sex objects.)

There is no right or wrong way to be female and there will be women with every combination of personality traits you can imagine. I agree very much that women who are more like the so-called "feminine" stereotype are also strong women and those traits are as valid as any other personality trait, and that there are multiple definitions of strong - you can be strong like a rugby forward (and still wear flowery dresses after the game if that's to your taste) or you can be strong through enduring multiple hardships or you can be strong by persevering against adversity. And there's more to life (and well-developed characters) than just being strong.

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Wonderful point. All those traditional categories really are meaningless when you come down to individuals, and that's how we should be treating our characters: as individuals. Same goes for people IRL, of course.

I think the issue is that giving a female character some traditionally masculine traits or having her do traditionally masculine things is so often used as a shortcut to make her seem "strong" (which can mean a million different things because people can be strong in a million different ways). The writer has to put in the work to give her individuality and motives and personality, too.

Perhaps the basic point of the Bechtel test is that women have lives separate from and not revolving around men. That's something to take into consideration, whether your work technically passes the test or not (because the test isn't the be all and end of all, of course, and nor is any test).

ETA: Without having read your post, lizmonster, I seem to have echoed you!

angeliz2k said:

I think the issue is that giving a female character some traditionally masculine traits or having her do traditionally masculine things is so often used as a shortcut to make her seem "strong" (which can mean a million different things because people can be strong in a million different ways). The writer has to put in the work to give her individuality and motives and personality, too.

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It's not always true, but I often find that writers who use shortcuts like this for their female characters aren't doing their male characters any favors either. If your idea of a defining trait is having someone able to beat up someone else, you may need to work on your character skills.

angeliz2k said:

ETA: Without having read your post, lizmonster, I seem to have echoed you!

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Emphatic agreement is always nice.

I had a funny thought today.

If a male character commented to another male character that his wife "is her own woman" that would do a couple things. I think.

1. Communicate that she is a strong woman and
2. Subtly reinforce patriarchy in the reader.

It's odd. And messy.

Patty said:

I had a funny thought today.

If a male character commented to another male character that his wife "is her own woman" that would do a couple things. I think.

1. Communicate that she is a strong woman and
2. Subtly reinforce patriarchy in the reader.

It's odd. And messy.

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The first book I ever DNF'd had two characters talking about how lucky they were to have such terribly smart wives. I very nearly threw it across the room.

Liz--Were they in fact smart women?

It's such a strong way to tell the reader a thing. I first noticed the trick in Sanderson's Elantriss and I loved it as a trick. It worked on me, and then I spotted the trick. Have a character feel a thing about another character.

And sadly, for some readers I think if it was a woman saying "She is her own woman" some readers would see that as less of a directive to them.

(I can't get past the experience that my female innkeeper with a husband (who works for her) is seen as subservient to him by one or two of my readers.)

It gets back to the biases we bring. Do we work within the biases we kinda know some readers have? Or write the story that represents how we think an ideal world is?

Patty said:

Liz--Were they in fact smart women?

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They were. It was adorable how smart they were. Their husbands were so very humbled and gratified that such smart ladies gave them the time of day (and also food and sex and clean homes).

It was gross, actually, and it put me off what was otherwise a pretty fascinating premise.

Patty said:

It's such a strong way to tell the reader a thing.

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I...kinda have to disagree with this.

Patty said:

And sadly, for some readers I think if it was a woman saying "She is her own woman" some readers would see that as less of a directive to them.

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Personally? I don't think any character saying that about another works. Telling the reader what a character is like is lazy. If I don't see the character's behavior, what do they matter to me as a reader?

Patty said:

Do we work within the biases we kinda know some readers have? Or write the story that represents how we think an ideal world is?

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Everybody's got their own methods, I suppose. I know what I choose.

Nah, They do it all the time. "The force is strong with him." That's for starters. It's a classic.

You made me LOL with the adorable women. I am still LOLing. I want to ask the title

What was the title?

Patty said:

What was the title?

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Nope, because RFYW. He's a now-deceased SF author who was quite prolific (not Heinlein). He wrote well, and the story was intriguing, but he should have had no women in it at all. At least then I could've finished it.

lizmonster said:

Nope, because RFYW. He's a now-deceased SF author who was quite prolific (not Heinlein). He wrote well, and the story was intriguing, but he should have had no women in it at all. At least then I could've finished it.

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Thank you for specifying that it wasn't RAH because I could see him writing something like that and I was literally in the process of running through my memories of his books for that scene.

I side with Liz on the telling the reader what a character is thing.

My personal experience: the more vehemently an author insists X character is intelligent, the less convincing that character is. Extremely intelligent characters, like intelligent people, generally stick out. (You couldn't hide Einstein in a crowd, so to speak.) Or not. Anyways.

In general it may be bad practice to have two characters talk about another character as a way to portray them. But making this an absolute rule denies us a useful tool.

In my latest novel I use this technique several times, I think to good effect. Like all tools, they need to be used for a good reason and done well.

Harlequin said:

I side with Liz on the telling the reader what a character is thing.

My personal experience: the more vehemently an author insists X character is intelligent, the less convincing that character is. Extremely intelligent characters, like intelligent people, generally stick out. (You couldn't hide Einstein in a crowd, so to speak.) Or not. Anyways.

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*nods*

I suppose it could be used in dialogue to demonstrate the prejudices/unreliability of the speaker, which is then show to be inaccurate by the actions of the subject.

Liz's example made me think that the husbands were patronising arseholes, which probably wasn't the intention of the author.

Harlequin said:

My personal experience: the more vehemently an author insists X character is intelligent, the less convincing that character is.

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Or when the character is described as having "intelligent eyes". Those characters tend to do something terminally stupid later.

Intelligent eyes must be the cousin of wandering eyes. Maybe they keep popping out of the character's face and wandering around because they're sick of being intelligent eyes stuck in a dumb head.

lizmonster said:

It's not always true, but I often find that writers who use shortcuts like this for their female characters aren't doing their male characters any favors either. If your idea of a defining trait is having someone able to beat up someone else, you may need to work on your character skills.

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QFT

I think one issue that comes up a lot in discussions about gender and characterization is which traits are truly "masculine" versus "feminine." Unless we all agree on that, it's hard to say when a woman in a story is being given masculine traits or vice versa. There are traits modern Western European culture considers feminine, from liking the color pink to wearing high heels to being fond of horses, but many of these traits were not regarded as particularly feminine throughout history or across all cultures. Even personality traits or communication patterns that are often thought to be more female (re all that Mars and Venus stuff), like being indirect or highly tactful and consensus seeking in one's communication patterns are not universal perceptions across all cultures.

But in the real world, there will be some women who are interested in things that fall more at the popularly perceived male end of the male end of the distribution for her culture.

What I'm getting at, in a rather roundabout way, is that if I write a story where a female character is a dispassionate, level-headed warrior who isn't super interested in many of the things we consider traditionally feminine, I may not be doing it because I am giving her masculine traits to make her seem strong. It may be because the story I am writing needs her to be that kind of person. And if the story takes place in a patriarchal culture, she may in fact be isolated from other women a lot of the time, and even when she is with them, she may feel like there is a barrier between her world and theirs.

The challenge lies in writing such a story in a way that doesn't portray the way this particular woman is as inherently better, even if she has bought into patriarchal norms that lead her to think of herself that way.

My take on the Bechdel: It was a striking eye opener. Hooray someone not only noticed, but articulated it well.

It's not a guideline for individual writers to proactively meet the test. It's an assessment tool to ask yourself, am I writing real women or not? And is my story male-centric? And if yes, is that because you were wide awake and that was the story you wanted to tell? Or is it because you didn't realize you were leaving half the population out of your world?

The story I'm telling in my book meets the Bechdel test, not because I set out to meet those criteria, but because I wanted to tell a story that included normal women. I was annoyed at stories that made having the best boyfriend the best thing about the protagonist.

When I finish this book and the second one in the freestanding duology I have planned, I'm going to write the real history of nursing. (Thought about calling it herstory but decided that would distract too much from the story.)

I grew up in a gender biased reality. That continued on into my adulthood when I went into a gender biased profession. I was on the forefront of changing one piece of that profession (long story off topic here), so I have a MaeZe POV on this subject.

Agree with MaeZe, and similarly, if you shoehorn in a conversation between two women about something that's not a man, it doesn't mean your story has any decent female characters and isn't male-centric. It's not a magic sticky plaster that stops a book or film being sexist.

If a book has well-written female characters then probably about 95% of the time it's going to pass the test by accident, and if it doesn't pass it, no-one's really going to care because it's got well-written female characters and there'll be some plot reason why none of them talk to each other or they only discuss stuff related to a man (like the example upthread of a murder mystery where all the conversations between the well-written female characters were about the murder victim who happens to be a man).

Example: I took my kids to see Johnny English Strikes Again yesterday. (Dunno how well known it is on the other side of the pond but it's a British James Bond parody starring Rowan Atkinson, the guy who played Blackadder and Mr Bean.) It passed the Bechdel test - there was a brief conversation between a Navy captain of a nuclear submarine and a senior civil servant in Downing Street about a request to launch an attack. That probably wasn't the only time, because the Prime Minister also may (May, lol*) have had a conversation with the same senior civil servant at some point and I missed it. I'm pretty sure none of these were deliberate attempts to pass the test. The conversation mentioned was very brief and was necessary for the plot. The film had several female characters, all with their own agency, personality, etc, and inevitably they needed to speak to each other. So it accidentally passed the test - which IMO is a lot more in line with the whole point of the test.

*she bore a resemblance to Theresa May, though I was rather disappointed that there was no parody of her dancing. But I'm guessing the film was made before she did the dancing thing. Shame, because a comedy film starring Rowan Atkinson and with a Prime Minister that's a stand-in for Theresa May had so much bad dancing potential...

There was a hilarious bit of dialogue that took the piss out of sexist attitudes. Johnny English was catching up with his sidekick, Bough, over a drink. Bough mentions that he's got married, and further mentions that his wife is in the Navy. Johnny English looks confused and says "what, as a cook? Some kind of sea-going secretary?" Bough looks rather baffled by the question and says "she's the captain of a nuclear submarine."

Another thing, there was only one American character and he was the Bad Guy

neandermagnon said:

There was a hilarious bit of dialogue that took the piss out of sexist attitudes. Johnny English was catching up with his sidekick, Bough, over a drink. Bough mentions that he's got married, and further mentions that his wife is in the Navy. Johnny English looks confused and says "what, as a cook? Some kind of sea-going secretary?" Bough looks rather baffled by the question and says "she's the captain of a nuclear submarine."

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She's her own woman. As one man said to another. It's an effective trick.

lilyWhite said:

But what if I write a story that stars well-written, fleshed-out, positive female characters...

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Then congratulations, you passed the test, for whatever you decide that accolade is worth.

Again, you are failing to understand what the whole point of these 'tests' are, and I'm not sure how many other ways there are to explain it. You're getting hung up on pointless trivialities.

Alderaan is always going to explode, with no further backstory in A New Hope than that it's where Leia is from. Krypton, and its billions of people are never going to make it past the first couple pages of the prologue of Superman's story. Batman's parents are always going to die pointlessly in an alley, and Bambi's mom isn't going to escape the Hunter.

There is nothing wrong with these in and of themselves. It creates pathos, drama, and is part of the character arc. When it becomes a problem is how over broad swathes of fiction, consistently and repeatedly, it's disposable female characters who become the target. The Green Lantern story became kind of the ur-example by just how pointlessly brutal and demeaning it was, and how quickly, almost immediately the character was forgotten. It doesn't have to be a female character, but given how predominantly they're the victims of this trope, they're the first to be looked at.

And since you seemed to have missed the previous repetitions, I'll say it again: any single story failing these very general and nonscientific 'tests' is pretty much meaningless. But if you've written ten novels, and in nine of them, the protagonist's SO doesn't even get a surname before they're killed off, it behooves you to take a second to examine how you're writing those characters.

Comics are a major target of this due to their continually published but fixed canon nature. Publishers rarely are inclined to mess with the formula too much and so things like girlfriends, wives, etc. end up being transitory props discarded for drama.

And that's not a good thing.

neandermagnon said:

Agree with MaeZe, and similarly, if you shoehorn in a conversation between two women about something that's not a man, it doesn't mean your story has any decent female characters and isn't male-centric. It's not a magic sticky plaster that stops a book or film being sexist.

If a book has well-written female characters then probably about 95% of the time it's going to pass the test by accident, and if it doesn't pass it, no-one's really going to care because it's got well-written female characters and there'll be some plot reason why none of them talk to each other or they only discuss stuff related to a man (like the example upthread of a murder mystery where all the conversations between the well-written female characters were about the murder victim who happens to be a man)

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As you’ve said, the Bechdel isn’t the be all end all. Technically Twilight manages to pass the test, whereas Pacific Rim does not, but Mako Mori is a far stronger, better written character than Bella Swan. That was the origin of the Mako Mori test; while Mako Mori doesn’t talk to another named female character about something that isn’t a man, she does have agency and has her own character arc apart from the male protagonist. She isn’t just a potential love interest, making Pacific Rim a film with dual protagonists.

Thomas Vail said:

And since you seemed to have missed the previous repetitions, I'll say it again: any single story failing these very general and nonscientific 'tests' is pretty much meaningless. But if you've written ten novels, and in nine of them, the protagonist's SO doesn't even get a surname before they're killed off, it behooves you to take a second to examine how you're writing those characters.

Comics are a major target of this due to their continually published but fixed canon nature. Publishers rarely are inclined to mess with the formula too much and so things like girlfriends, wives, etc. end up being transitory props discarded for drama.

And that's not a good thing.

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This is it exactly. And it's not just any one writer, either. There may be a writer who, over the course of an entire career, writes very few stories with major female characters with their own arcs. There could be a reason for this. For instance, maybe that author focuses heavily on stories set in Catholic seminaries or WWII submarines or whatever. Or maybe they just love telling stories about male bonding and complex relationships between men.

BUT when we look at all the stories that are out there, there are far more male-focused plots and settings being portrayed than there are female or mixed plots and settings. And plots and settings that can or should be more balanced are very often portrayed as male heavy.

The default state of being is still assumed to be male, and it is so ubiquitous that many people don't even notice it.

That is the problem in a nutshell. We still default culturally to stories being mostly about men, with women cast in support roles or even as props.

This is interesting:

https://writerunboxed.com/2016/08/06/the-problem-with-female-protagonists/

indianroads said:

This is interesting:

https://writerunboxed.com/2016/08/06/the-problem-with-female-protagonists/

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Wow!

This especially stood out:

when a science teacher specifically provided equal talking time to both male and female students in his class as part of an experiment, everyone involved perceived that the girls were given 90% of his time and attention. Including the teacher himself.

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Common sense is a really good test, and i dont trust tests that just state results with out an analysis of data, e.g in the test where there was an apparent huge disparity that defied belief, were there an equal number of male and female students,

e.g. when a science teacher specifically provided equal talking time to both male and female students in his class as part of an experiment, everyone involved perceived that the girls were given 90% of his time and attention. Including the teacher himself.

Beanie5 said:

Common sense is a really good test, and i dont trust tests that just state results with out an analysis of data, e.g in the above test where there was an apparent huge disparity that defied belief, were there an equal number of male and female students,

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If you are referring to the Bechdel test, your post does not describe it well.