Deconstruction: The Bechdel Test

(NSFW: Suggestive Language and Sexual content in the comments)

The Bechdel Test, Bechdel-Wallace Test, or the Mo Movie Measure, is a sort of litmus test for female presence in movies and TV. The test is named for Alison Bechdel, creator of the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, who made it known to the world with this strip.

In order to pass, the film or show must meet the following criteria:

1. it includes at least two women* (some make the addendum that the women must be named characters)...
2. who have at least one conversation...
3. about something other than a man or men.

-- TV Tropes

Most people who talk about Schrodinger's Cat do so with the understanding that the "experiment" is a thought experiment only. The concept of the Schrodinger's Cat is used to illustrate in the mind an aspect of quantum physics, namely how (if I understand correctly) an event at a purely quantum level could have a practical effect on the physical world. There's no real value, however, in going out and getting a cat and a box to put it in -- the "experiment" in question is in the mind, and not in the box.

I may not understand the Schrodinger's Cat experiment perfectly (I'm not, alas, a quantum physicist), but I do understand the Bechdel test. This is another test whose value is largely in the mind and in understanding the larger implications, and yet it's frequently misunderstood when brought up in conversation and particularly in reference to specific works. The test itself is fairly simple: does the work in question have two female characters who have a conversation with each other about something other than a man? Yes or no?

There's wrangling over the details, of course. Do the two female characters need to have names or a minimum of screen presence? Does the conversation need to be a back-and-forth or will a single line from one female character directed to another female character do the trick? Can the topic be a man, if the man is being discussed in a professional (i.e., not relational) capacity? If a single unnamed female cop asks a single unnamed female desk clerk, "Have you seen this man?" in the course of a criminal investigation and otherwise there are no female characters for the rest of the movie, is that "good enough" to pass the test?

There are fights over these questions. Serious ones. Speaking as a member of both the Firefly and the Star Trek: Voyager fandoms, there can be seriously hurt feelings and angry recriminations when the Bechdel test is brought up. Short version for the uninitiated: Voyager had a long history of sexually exploiting its female characters and focusing everything through Male Gaze lenses, but over the long running series, there were still many conversations between the female characters on the nature of humanity, the burden of responsibility, and the importance of finely ground organically grown coffee. Firefly, on the other hand, is generally seen as a more feminist-friendly work, but the series ran for a very short time and the Bechdel examples are fewer and farther between. It is impossible to bring this up online without hurting feelings. And, in fact, the whole thing usually degenerates into a few people explaining that the Bechdel test is not a measure-o'-feminism and a lot of people responding then what is it good for?! and then everyone walks away frustrated and unsatisfied.

It's true: the Bechdel test isn't a measure of feminism in a work. It's not a measure of whether or not a work is good. It's only very rarely even used as a reason to see or avoid a movie, and when it is, it's a question of personal taste and choice on the part of the viewer. So what is the test good for? Most people, myself included, use the Bechdel test as a thought experiment only. The question isn't "is this particular movie worth watching". The question isn't even really "does this particular movie pass the test", although that consideration is part of the bigger question. No, the real question the Bechdel test makes us consider is "why is it so hard to come up with a list of examples that pass the Bechdel test?"

Go back to the Firefly example above. Name me a scene where two women have a conversation that isn't about a man. Well, you'll probably reach for the Kaylee/Inara pampering scene where Inara brushes out Kaylee's hair in her shuttle. Name me a second one. Well, you'll dig down and pull out Kaylee asking Inara how many of her male clients wanted to take her away from her life as a Companion. We'll let you have that one, even though it's sort of about men, because I'm nothing if not reasonable. Name me a third one. Well... didn't Inara have a female client in one episode? We'll count that, even though it's somewhat overlaid with male gaze which is even lampshaded by Jayne's announced intentions... and even though most of what Inara and her client talk about are, in fact, men. Name me a fourth one. Um. Okay, surely the gals must have had some light banter around the dinner table at some point, and wasn't there that one scene where River states to Kaylee that she is badass? Not really a conversation, but we'll count it. Name me a fifth one. A sixth. A seventh. How many can you give me? Not ten, I'll bet.

Now name me thirty scenes in Firefly that feature two men having a conversation that isn't about a woman. I'll bet you can do that in ten minutes with plenty of scenes to spare. The men discuss reavers, the Alliance, the ship, the state of the finances, and the likelihood of the ambush they're flying into frequently and often. They have side discussions about wealth and privilege and religion and politics and guns. They discuss the moral implications of their thieving lifestyle, and they wrangle over how their lives will be affected if they give away money they can't afford and make enemies they don't need in order to help people they don't know. They discuss their loyalties to one another, and where those boundaries lie. They even talk about silly hats and hilarious bar ballads.

None of this means that Firefly is a bad show; I love Firefly. None of it means it's an anti-feminist show: the women are three-dimensional characters in their own right, and they're nuanced and complicated and thoroughly interesting to me. (YMMV, of course.) No, the value of the Bechdel test here isn't to trash Firefly or make it out to be a bad show because it's failed to give the female characters a voice.

Instead, the value of the Bechdel test here is to get the viewer thinking about the ways our society views women and the ways it views men. If your women on screen only interact with one another in stereotypical "feminine" ways -- in this case, largely talking about and growing interpersonal relationships -- then as a writer, you've failed to recognize and reflect the reality that women frequently and daily have conversations with each other about regular stuff. We talk about our jobs. We share our aches and pains. We discuss movies and TV shows and food and books. We exist as regular people, just as regular as the men around us.

The Bechdel test is a question of presence. Reading through the listings on the Bechdel Movie List, one is struck by how many films fail at the first point by only having one (or zero!) named female characters. Those tests that do pass, frequently hinge on split-second 'conversations' -- "Can I use the bathroom?", in one instance, and "Angel, no," in another -- that have to be diligently dug from the memories of the viewers reporting back from from the theaters. The take-away here isn't that there are a lot of bad movies out there; the take-away is that it's really dang hard to find the examples necessary to satisfy this simple test.

Presence of women in movies is important. In a world where women make up roughly half the population, it's been shown time and again that we're underrepresented in movies. There are three male characters to every one female character in movies. In group scenes with large crowds, the representation drops to one out of five. If women aren't visible and aren't vocal in movies, this aggregate under-representation underscores an ongoing belief in our unimportance. The Bechdel test illustrates that perfectly, not by picking out "bad movies" in particular, but by illustrating the incredibly unbalanced ratio of men to women in movies in general.

Take the same Bechdel test, and make it a question of race instead of gender. You'll have the same problems, with many of the same movies. It's not much easier to find scenes of non-white people having conversations about things other than white people; and -- just as with the original recipe Bechdel test -- the most obvious aversions occur in movies where the entire cast is made up of the group in question. It would seem that women have the best chance at having a voice when all the men have been excised from the movie, and that non-white characters have the best chance at having a voice when all the non-white characters have been removed from the cast. What can we make of this?

The "Reverse Bechdel test" -- in which the viewer is invited to find examples of two men having a conversation about something other than a woman -- is interesting because of its rarity. The test is usually only 'failed' if either all (or all-but-one) characters are female. These movies exist, it's true, but they're generally marketed almost exclusively to women; rarely is the summer blockbuster movie cast with zero male characters and expected to do well at the box office with men and women alike as excited viewers. It would seem that having a 1:5 ratio of men to women in a movie is generally expected to have similar ratios in the audience, but having a 5:1 ratio in favor of men isn't likely to hurt sales too much.

And this, in the end, is perhaps the real value of the Bechdel test: the solidification of the lowest possible expectations. The Bechdel test doesn't demand an equal ratio of female characters to male. It doesn't look for equal amounts of screen time or character importance or impact on the plot. It starts with the very basic question: of all the many, many characters in this movie -- ten, or fifteen, or twenty, or more -- are at least two of those characters female? And in this first step, an astonishing number of movies fail. And if we adjust for race and ignore gender, we still see a surprising number of movies that fail. What can we make of this?

Well, one possibility is that the roles are being written as white male characters who need white male actors. Fair enough. If you're writing a screenplay for an Apollo 13 remake, I guess you can't stock the space shuttle with a Chinese woman, a black man, and a Native American transgendered person. That wouldn't be historically accurate. But here's the thing, almost none of the movies I watched this year dealt with historical figures who had to be X gender and Y race or else be Historically Inaccurate. And 90% of the movies I watched this year could have been cast entirely from random selection of race and gender for 90% of the roles. And yet... for some reason... they weren't.

I can't tell you why that is, because there are a lot of possible reasons at play here. Maybe writers tend to be predominantly white males who therefore predominantly write white male characters. Maybe casting directors tend to be predominantly white males who therefore predominantly cast white male actors in parts -- or perhaps they predominantly over-value the white male dollar at the box office and cast according to the assumption that white male audiences want white male actors. Maybe directors tend to cut parts written for non-white non-male characters as being less valuable to the overall piece than the parts written for the white male characters. Maybe a lot of things.

What I can say is that this sort of thing is sharply outlined by thought experiments like the Bechdel test. What I can say is that it takes something like the Bechdel test to get people to stop talking individual movies -- which largely boil down to preference, interpretation, and fan wars -- and to start talking cultural trends. What I can say is that this conversation is precisely why we need a Bechdel test, why we need lots of Bechdel tests, for gender and race and sexual orientation and a variety of other measures. The Bechdel test sharply outlines what our society presents as normative, as the "default" form a character does and should take.

That is what the Bechdel test is for. Not for the one-off artistic efforts, but for the aggregate effect as a whole on minority voices in our culture.

--Ana Mardoll

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Comments

[Deird, who should be getting ready for work rather than reading fascinating internet articles]

I have occasional fantasies of taking over a major Hollywood studio, and decreeing that absolutely no movies would be approved unless they passed the Bechdel test - both in script, and in the final film.

Of course, a lot of people would deal with it by grudgingly inserting a pointless, three-sentence conversation between two irrelevant female characters, but some would realise that the movie would work better without irrelevant conversations and would find a way to make it relevant, and it would all go on from there...

*sighs*

In the meantime, I just cling to shows like AtLA, where they do interesting female characters, and do them well.

[Akedhi]

Relating to the pervasiveness of male characters being favored in screentime and development, I (who like to consider myself mindful of such things as race, gender, and sexuality in my writing) had a moment of 'wtf' the other day - I have several important female characters in my nanowrimo novel this year (which I am procrastinating on this very second). Someone made a request for another female character, in a different archetype than the ones I already have, and while my initial reaction was 'oh, but I have lots of women characters already', I started listing characters and suddenly realized that what felt like an entire cast of named women (or to be named shortly) was still a cast of which two thirds were male. And just the idea that having women as a third of my main cast somehow made the numbers skew disproportionately to female makes me sort of wonder how much of this stuff have I internalized.

[MercuryBlue]

I have been writing a lot of three-sentence conversations between female characters about subjects other than men, one per episode of Supernatural & Supernatural: The Animation. (I started out giving the fics some substance, but then I realized just how many different original female characters I'd need to flesh out in order to accomplish a substantive Bechdel-passing fic for every episode.) And the thing is, the hardest part about this exercise is figuring out how to make the conversation about the relevant prompt from my prompt table. Take the last one I did. Anime ep 20, "What Is and What Should Never Be", prompt 'run'. I had three canon women to work with, and Jessica had never met Mary or Carmen before a point during the ep. (Which is a change from the live-action that I dislike, but now's not the time for that.) That right there is setup for the usual getting-to-know-you questions, any of which that didn't have to do with Jessica's or Carmen's boyfriend or Mary's late husband would constitute Bechdel-passing conversations, but 'run', run what, does Mary run 5Ks or something? Oh, I know, Jess is pre-law and Carmen's a nurse, and they both want to be in charge of their respective places of employment. Voila, fic, a conversation that would have taken twenty seconds to put on screen. Perhaps, as Deird says, a pointless conversation, but no more pointless than the scene in the anime's take on "Heart" where Dean is singing "When the Saints Go Marching In" and dancing along.

And a fair proportion of these ficlets, the reader only knows it's a Bechdel-passing conversation because I say it is. Like in the one for "Mystery Spot" where Doris is arguing with someone identified only as the person supplying Doris's diner with tomatoes. (I think it was tomatoes. Can't check--work thinks Dreamwidth is social media and blocks it accordingly, though last I looked work doesn't block Twitter.)

Putting two women in a story is easy. Making the story half women isn't very much harder. The more female characters there are in the story, the easier it is to put them in the same room, and the easier it is to give them plot-relevant conversations that aren't about men. Passing Bechdel is not difficult.

tl;dr I wish I'd written this, Ana, and I'm glad you did.

[MercuryBlue]

And just the idea that having women as a third of my main cast somehow made the numbers skew disproportionately to female makes me sort of wonder how much of this stuff have I internalized.

Two women is a lot of women, so a third of the group being women must be a lot of women. *nods*

Oh, Deird, I can't remember if you're into fanfic, but if you are, have you read damkianna's Imagine the Ocean and Listen to the Earth? If you haven't, you need to. Premise, Katara's parents found Aang before Katara was born, Aang promptly died, and Katara was born the next Avatar. damkianna's equation is basically 'women = awesome, therefore MOAR WOMEN = MOAR AWESOME'. And ghost!Aang has some shiny tactical advantages.

[Jarred]

But here's the thing, almost none of the movies I watched this year dealt with historical figures who had to be X gender and Y race or else be Historically Inaccurate. And 90% of the movies I watched this year could have been cast entirely from random selection of race and gender for 90% of the roles. And yet... for some reason... they weren't.

I would also note that Hollywood has had no problems recasting characters from books as white for the movie "based on" said book. I'm particularly thinking of "Bringing Down the House" being morphed into "21."

I think the thing I find so strange about Firefly's scarcity of scenes in which the women interact is that there were so many women on the show. The men only outnumbered the women on the ship by one. And yet, the number of woman-to-woman conversations in the show are still scarce.

[MercuryBlue]

I would also note that Hollywood has had no problems recasting characters from books as white for the movie "based on" said book.

The Last Airbender. I need say nothing more.

[Deird, who needs to write fic about Toph sometime]

MercuryBlue, I am rather obsessively into fanfic. (My ficcish brain has gone into hibernation lately, but my DW has a sidebar link to over a hundred Buffyverse stories... I'm kinda hoping Korra will start me writing again.)

Yay for Avatar!Katara! *bookmarks for later*

[Ross]

This is pretty much why I hate that it's called a "test". I prefer to think of it as a Bechdel "property". That way, things don't "fail", they either "have" the property or they "don't have" the property.

Because every time this comes up, inevitably, someone will try to come up with exceptions and extensions and clever tricks to avoid the fact you can not pass the Bechdel Test if you're a movie with less than two gendered characters who interact. And then the discussion becomes about clever tricks and exceptions to give yourself permission to accept or reject something, rather than about the question of why so few movies have this thing about them

[Laiima]

Fascinating, Ana.

I've read something about how often students are called on by the teacher. Even in cases where the teacher is feminist, and is trying to be egalitarian, the teacher themself would feel like girls were being called on more often, or were "dominating" discussions, when in fact, girls were only called on 1/3 of the time. Having boys and men be the center of attention just seems "natural" to everybody.

I can document where I read about tokenism in corporations. It's not until the minority population in an environment reaches a threshold of 30% that their group starts having an effect on the environment itself, changing mores and such. That comes from Men and Women of the Corporation, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, originally written in the 1970s, with a second edition in 1993. The particular minorities she spoke of were women (before that relegated to secretarial jobs), and people of color (before that, rarely hired to do anything at all).

The structure of bureaucracies itself also works against wholesale change. And the structure demands and reinforces social conformity, so even real visionaries have trouble leaving a lasting mark, because one person doesn't have any way of changing the culture. And no one already in power *wants* to change anything.

I tried to be a visionary; I was an idealist. And I never lasted very long, or got very far before I was scapegoated and discredited. You need to be part of a movement, so that there's too many of you to be silenced.

[MercuryBlue]

And rather less than 30% of Hollywood and LA movie/TV types are female, ditto of color, ditto any other minority you care to name. And of the showrunners I know by name, one (Sera Gamble of Supernatural) is female, and the only film company I know of dedicated to films by and for women is sticking to lesbian romance, which is not exactly mainstream appeal.

[chris the cynic]

I was just talking about how my work measures up as a sort of aside when rambling about my writing.

I tend to write stories in first person from the perspective of a non-eavesdropping male character. Which means that pretty much everything I write fails the test. Any conversation the viewpoint character isn't a part of almost certainly doesn't show up, any conversation that the viewpoint character is a part of isn't a conversation between women.

I think that my casts tend to skew towards female, though I'd have to look through things in some detail to find out if that's correct. The stuff I'm primarily thinking of is stuff that is not online, or at least is not gathered anywhere that's easy to find.

The one that first comes to mind, because it's the thing I've written the most of (more than 90 thousand words as I recall), definitely did. There were four primary characters, only the narrator male, two adults who served as mother figures to them (one of them the biological mother of one of the main characters, the other one a Greek goddess), no father figure of any sort. One character who was in a sort of limbo between main character and secondary character, she was female. And then if you move out into the wider tier of secondary characters you could pick up an additional male or two, but there were more female characters as well (Eros was overshadowed by Nyx, for example.)

So in that one, if I stop before I get to the secondary characters, my cast was at around 85% female. On reflection, I think it barely passed. The narrator overheard a conversation between two characters about a third while he was trying to sleep. As you can probably guess from the makeup of the cast, that was a conversation between that wasn't about a man.

-

Thinking about Firefly, I think it's definitely set up so that the women aren't inclined to talk to each other. In general I think where things fail the test it's safe to assume that conversations are happening, they're just not being shown. In Firefly I think that they're not happening. I'm not sure if that's worse or about the same as things that fail the test because those making them just don't care about conversation between women.

River isn't a big talker in general, much of the talking she does do is, it seems to me, with Kaylee in the context of playing games. Discussing jacks or taunting each other while one steals an apple and the other chases doesn't really make a conversation. Then again if we're counting X-Men: First Class as passing then War Stories and Objects in Space both pass on the grounds of Kaylee-River conversations. That's not a lot of talking though.

I think that basically covers River. Kaylee, as noted, also talks with Inara. It's been a while, but I feel like when Zoe is talking to someone she isn't married to it's in the context of a work. River and Inara aren't involved with work, Kaylee isn't involved with the part Zoe does.

Zoe is isolated from the other women. Inara and River are each isolated from all but Kaylee, Kaylee is the only one making female to female conversations happen at all.

Unless I'm misremembering, which I very well could be because it's been a long time. I think I might have loaned out my copy of Firefly and never got it back. It would have been many months ago. I'll have to look into that.

[AnaMardoll]

I tend to write stories in first person from the perspective of a non-eavesdropping male character. Which means that pretty much everything I write fails the test. Any conversation the viewpoint character isn't a part of almost certainly doesn't show up, any conversation that the viewpoint character is a part of isn't a conversation between women.

I think you could work around this with the statement that such conversations exist, maybe? Many conversations between, say, me and Husband go like this:

Husband: Have you heard about this new video game coming out?

Ana: Oh, yeah, <female friend> says the graphics are great but the gameplay is really buggy.

This conveys the concept of Bechdelishness (Women exist. They talk to each other. About normal things.) within the framework of the point of view character.

@Ross, I like the idea of it being a property. Not sure it would fix the fights, but it's an interesting terminology question.

[AnaMardoll]

Ack! The triangle brackets came out. Here's what it was supposed to say:

Ana: Oh, yeah, [female friend] says the graphics are great but the gameplay is really buggy.

I've half a mind to break the italics, just to teach Typepad a lesson. :P

Fixed the brackets for you

[WingedBeast]

Once Stephen Colbert referred to himself as the default American. He went on to explain that male is the default sex, heterosexual the default sexuality, caucasian the default race, Christian the default religion. (Of course, he was continuing his on-screen persona here, acting as spoof on conservative talking heads.)

But, there I see a general issue where characters that could be literally any race/sex/sexuality/religion with no difference are defaulted to a presumption of straight white Christian male. How many characters do we have in stories where, if the any of those characteristics were changed, there would be no change to the story, whatsoever.

It seems that producers and other people with power over casting view race and sex the same as I see the eidetic memory. I'm constantly annoyed by the advertisements for "Unforgettable" because it seems the entire hook is that the main character has an eidetic memory. Hey, good for her. But, in and of itself, that's no hook. At the same time, it's not a characteristic you can randomly throw out to any character. It has to be part of an unusual constelation of characteristics.

I guess what we've done is identified a problem symptom and, if my little hypothesis here is correct, a cause. What can be done by way of a cure?

[Wysteria]

"It's not until the minority population in an environment reaches a threshold of 30% that their group starts having an effect on the environment itself, changing mores and such." -Laiima

I find this though-provoking because currently 15-16% of the US Congress is female. This is down from a high of 17% (90 or so) in the 2008-2010 Congress and up from the early '00s when the Congressional average for female representatives/senators was about 11% (60 or so). I recently read an article about the increase of reporting of female crimes in I-think-it-was India after they started reserving a percentage of their legislature for female candidates (I'd be more specific, but I cannot find the article.) I, optimistically, look forward to what changes 30% of Congress being female will bring. Which is all a little bit off topic, but I hope no one will mind.

On topic, I've been watching a lot of classic movies lately - WWII films, Cold War films, 30s-style Cleopatra. In between the astonishing racism, I was creeped out by women appearing in all the films, but most often as pretty skirted figures delivering coffee. It was like watching a movie that was half The Birds, without meaning to be. Why were none of the women talking? What was going on? So. Much. Silence. It made it very hard to concentrate on the story whenever there were silent women ghosting around the room.

[AnaMardoll]

Zoe is isolated from the other women. Inara and River are each isolated from all but Kaylee, Kaylee is the only one making female to female conversations happen at all.

This is my problem with Firefly, though. (You asked if it was better or worse, so here's my opinion. :))

The characters aren't involved with each other... despite being a crew of about a dozen people on a ship that takes days if not weeks to travel from Point A to Point B and only two of the people on the ship (Wash and Kaylee) have jobs that would keep them busy during that time.

Zoe should have some kind of relationship with Inara -- if only because Inara is probably the best person to get her a discount on whatever birth control she and Wash are using -- but Zoe seems barely aware of Inara's existence. Inara, too, should be developing some kind of relationship with River -- her Companion training has reams of psychology and "soothing techniques" supposedly built into it, but she's not being asked (or taking it on herself) to help the poor paranoid schizophrenic girl on the ship.

I know the show was cancelled early, and perhaps SOME of this can be guessed as occurring off screen, but it *feels* like the writers took a bunch of Smurfettes (the Warrior Woman, the Gear Girl, the Kung-Fu Waif) and flung them on a ship together and then forgot that they would sometimes interact.

[Rodeobob]

Maybe writers tend to be predominantly white males who therefore predominantly write white male characters.

Not necessarily. I watched the first season of "The Shield" on DVD, and watched some of the extras, listened to commentary tracts, etc. One thing that stood out really well was how the agent for CCH Pounder got her the part; (a strong, tough police detective) the screenwriter had written the role as, well, a tough, strong police detective, and the agent said "CCH would be great in this!". The screenwriter said "Isn't that a black female actress?" The agent replied "So what? You don't have to re-write the character! You don't even need to change any lines!" She's a great actress, does a great job, and the writing for that character is rock solid. It was written by a white male screenwritter, and he'd assumed the part was for a while male actor, but to his credit, he realized it would work just fine with a black female actor.

This is one element the Bechdel test highlights: so many male characters could just as easily be played by women. Avatar gets a nod in this direction for Toph; the character was originally been conceived as male, but works equally well as female) Yes, there are characters for whom their gender and/or ethnicity is integral to their identity, but there are a lot more characters on TV and in movies that aren't. Judy Dench makes a fine "M", as good as any, because that role isn't inherently gendered.

[The Board Administration Team]

@Ana: I think we fixed the bracket thing for you

[Mary Sue]

I'm also a big fan of the Morales Rule, which is kind of a sibling (cousin?) of the Bechdel Test. The Morales Rule is that a Latino characters is a well-rounded human, who doesn't suddenly jump up and dance to Salsa music, sprinkle inaccurate Spanish into their conversation, or say "ay Papi" every few minutes.

It's named after Natalie Morales, and came about when she was starring in the TV show "The Middleman". Which if you're a geek and you've never seen it, GET ON IT ASAP.

[MercuryBlue]

Once Stephen Colbert referred to himself as the default American. He went on to explain that male is the default sex, heterosexual the default sexuality, caucasian the default race, Christian the default religion. (Of course, he was continuing his on-screen persona here, acting as spoof on conservative talking heads.)

Don't forget 'able-bodied' and 'cisgender'.

Trouble is, straight white cisgender able-bodied Christian men are...not the default. Just about exactly half of all people are female-bodied. Nearly thirty percent of the remainder in the US are men of color if we say white Hispanics are not people of color. That leaves thirty-five percent of the total as white men. The conservative numbers on Wikipedia say five percent of the population is LGBT, so we're down to thirty-three percent of the population is straight white cis men. Three-quarters at most of the population is Christian, which means straight white cis Christian men are no more than one quarter of the population. Another seven to eight percent, according to disabilitystatistics.org, report a 'work limitation', whatever that means. Call it seven percent, so now a mere twenty-three percent of the US population is what Colbert calls the default. If we go with ten percent of the population QUILTBAG, sixty percent Christian, ten percent with a disability (because estimating according to whether the disability limits work will underestimate people with disabilities), and white Hispanics are people of color, the figure is actually fourteen percent.

Between one in four and one in eight people in the US are the so-called 'default USAian', demographically speaking.

To hell with that.

[AnaMardoll]

@TBAT, thank you!

Re: Colbert. Funny thing about him: I like his show well enough but recently I listened to his "I Am America: And So Can You!" book on tape and it made me oddly uncomfortable.

I'm still not sure why... but I think it's because during his show (at least during The Word segments), words flash up on the screen undermining what he's saying, and pointing out why that position is full of fail. Plus, there's the cathartic laughter in the audience -- the whole thing is a cooperative experience of why the positions he 'holds' are terrible, horrible positions.

In his audiobook, there's no laugh track, so all he has is his outrageous persona. Unfortunately, a lot of the outrageous things he says are in fact opinions that some people really do hold. People in power even! It's kind of disturbing to hear those opinions, even though you know HE doesn't hold them, just because there's kind of a depression cloud over the whole thing that some people could listen to him in a vacuum and be totally convinced that he was on their side. And that made me sad.

I'm not sure why I derailed to say that about Colbert, but it's been on my mind and I wanted to share. And, uh... I'm addressing this to Mary Sue, so our thread just passed the Bechdel test! :D

[Deird, who fails at typing]

My most recent comment appears to have disappeared into cyberspace. I don't really want to repost it though, because that always ends up with my first comment appearing right next to the rewritten version, which looks really odd...

*waits impatiently*

[AnaMardoll]

And, uh... I'm addressing this to Mary Sue, so our thread just passed the Bechdel test!

*facepalm* Sorry, that was Mercury Blue, I scrolled up too far to grab the screen name. Apparently my blood sugar is low or something. I'll go grab dinner and hopefully be more coherent soon.

The agent replied "So what? You don't have to re-write the character! You don't even need to change any lines!" She's a great actress, does a great job, and the writing for that character is rock solid.

This is, or so they say, how Ripley (of Alien fame) ended up being a female character. 'She' was written first as a strong character, and then the gender was picked later.

[The Board Administration Team]

@Deird: You aren't in the spam trap.

[Deird, who used to watch that show]

Blast.

Well, I was saying that, much like The Shield, Grey's Anatomy also used colour-blind casting, and ended up with a very nice split of gender and race across its original cast.

Only I said it with more words than that, and it sounded way better...

[MercuryBlue]

Uh, Ana? Colbert's male.

So how 'bout them Rockettes? Or, hey, what's for dinner? I had chicken broth with macaroni, because I'm feeling all upset-stomachy and it took all my stubborn to get through the work day. (Especially since the one vending machine that sells ginger ale is teh broked.)

[hapax]

Hmmm. Just went through the current WIPs and counted:

Current NaNoWriMo thing has five named characters, two female. Neither talks to each other about anything, but then they (and one of the males) may or may not be alive, let alone sentient, and the two other male characters scarcely talk to each other or anyone else either. There's a lot of not-talking going on in this story, which is a bit of a stretch for me, considering how I love to write dialogue.

Back-burner project has so far eight named males, five named females, which is isn't ideal, but the women spend a LOT of time talking to each other, both about various men and plenty of other things two. And two of the characters are GLBTQ, and not in a romantic relationship with each other, although it really doesn't come up in the story. Only one character is currently a POC, but there isn't any reason that couldn't change.

I *could* make one of the males a female, but it would feel a lot to me like "let's make this character a woman just to have another woman", rather than because that's who the character *is*.

Unfortunately, when you're writing a European-style fairy tale -- even a fairly fractured one -- and your "crowd characters" are for plot reasons mostly knights and other military types, rather than servants or peasants, the default of "white male" seems to hold good.

[MercuryBlue]

Unfortunately, when you're writing a European-style fairy tale -- even a fairly fractured one -- and your "crowd characters" are for plot reasons mostly knights and other military types, rather than servants or peasants, the default of "white male" seems to hold good.

*side-eyes Once Upon a Time*

[Randomosity]

Back when I was in my 20s, I was a member of a gaming club that met monthly at a local college and ran role playing games. I was one of the game masters and I also paint miniatures. I had a lot of miniatures back then - still do. Then I had enough to populate a small town, now I have enough to populate a city.

I was setting up a game in which I had a foam wizard's tower with rooms and cardboard buildings on another table to represent that aforementioned town. And miniatures. Oh yes, the minis! I set up enough painted minis to represent an accurate demographic breakdown of the townspeople turned out for a parade.

Elves, dwarves, and humans were demographically correct. Males and females were also demographically correct. As in 50% of the minis on that table were female and 50% were male. A significant proportion were also dark skinned (all races). I mix them all individually and back then I only owned primary colors so no two characters had the exact same skin tone. Then when you get to shading...

I was setting up for the game I was about to run and some guy popped his head into the room I was in and saw the ridiculously elaborate setup. His comment was "Holy &^@ that's a lot of females!"

My response was, "Not really. Just 50%. According to the world's census, women are 51% of the population. I rounded down. The math was easier."

He had nothing to say to that.

[Wysteria]

I have three WIPs - a medieval fantasy political drama with 3 main male characters and 2 main female characters. The viewpoint character is female, and I think including the named minor characters I end up... darn it. I was sure this one was majority female cast, but thinking about it I've got at best equal numbers of each gender and possibly a slim male majority. That's actually very annoying, especially for a story that's meant to be about women's role in medieval wars and why stories about mothers/sisters/daughters are just as valid as stories about women taking on masculine roles. (I got into an argument about feminism in fiction, and it snowballed into a years-long writing project.)

My second current WIP has one female viewpoint character, two male supporting characters. My third current WIP has, again, even numbers with one extra male messing up my view of my own writing. This is somewhat mind-blowing, not precisely in a good way. I think I need to think about this one some more.

[Akedhi]

@Laiima - I've read something about how often students are called on by the teacher. Even in cases where the teacher is feminist, and is trying to be egalitarian, the teacher themself would feel like girls were being called on more often, or were "dominating" discussions, when in fact, girls were only called on 1/3 of the time. Having boys and men be the center of attention just seems "natural" to everybody.

I think I've read that too, and I suspect that it (at least a little) applies to writing as well. It feels oddly wrong to write a story that's not specifically about women/women's issues that also features many female main characters. It's just sort of... Not How It's Done. Which makes me want to poke my brain with a stick and tell it to shush, four out of a dozen characters is not a majority.

[Randomosity]

Movie recommendation time:

Wysteria, if you like classic WWII movies as much as I do, check out Where Eagles Dare. There are two pivotal female characters who not only discuss how to break into a castle held by the Nazis, there is an entire sequence getting them in. Their contribution to the plot is critical.

[AnaMardoll]

Uh, Ana? Colbert's male.

LOL, true, but I was also talking about politics and society in general so I'M COUNTING IT. :D

[Wysteria]

Randomosity, thanks! I was watching The Man Who Never Was, which was fantastic - the female leads are each unique and pivotal - but at the same time, their actions are being in love and bringing the men coffee. I don't want to understate how delightful they were, because there was a lot there, but I couldn't get past the scene where one of the women is told to stop blubbing. I'll definitely watch Where Eagles Dare. *adds to Netflix queue*

[Ruby]

MercuryBlue: *side-eyes Once Upon a Time*

I think Once Upon a Time passed the Bechdel in the first episode, as long as we don't count Henry as a man. ;)

Even so, my father predicts that the show won't be renewed, because the three main characters are women.

[chris the cynic]

Did I get spamtrapped?

It wasn't that important, or indeed at all important, so it's no great loss if it's gone.

[MercuryBlue]

Henry's male, so.

The show definitely passed Bechdel when Mary Margaret asked Emma about Emma's career choice. And when Emma asked Mary Margaret if her spare room was available. And when Snow White was dancing with Cinderella. \o/ show. And possibly at Snow and Charming's wedding? *checks* Hey, the officiant at the wedding is of color and so are some of the guests. Regina: "On the contrary, I've come to give you a gift." Snow: "We want nothing from you." I do believe that passes.

OUaT's already got a full season order. Grimm, far's I know, has not, and Grimm is also based on fairy tales and has a male protagonist.

(Grimm's problem is it really wants to be season one Supernatural, but the showrunners have no idea what made S1 SPN appealing and/or good.)

[The Board Administration Team]

@chris the cynic: I don't see you in the spam trap. However, TypePad had some 'issues' today and you aren't the only person who has had a post disappear into cyberspace.

[Ruby]

@MercuryBlue--Yeah, he's male, but he's not a man. I'm inclined to think that it doesn't count if the topic of conversation is a male child. But even if it does, the show "has it" (I like Ross's interpretation) anyway. :)

Oh, and the Mirror/newspaper editor is a person of color.

[chris the cynic]

Well, like I said, it wasn't important. I'll see if I can do a short version. (Because I'm so good a short.)

Uh, Ana? Colbert's male.

LOL, true, but I was also talking about politics and society in general so I'M COUNTING IT. :D

This reminded me of a story that popped into my head years ago. And by that I mean the only scene I remember of a story that popped into my head.

The two characters are a young male author and his female best friend. Young male author desperately wants his story to pass the test but utterly fails to understand that girls or women might talk amoungst themselves about the sorts of things he might talk about. Whenever he tries to make up a conversation he rejects it as being too male. So he decides to research. Which mostly takes the form of listening very carefully whenever two of his friends are talking to each other. Their topics of conversation make him more and more stressed out.

The scene takes place when, on the verge of a breakdown, he begs his best friend to tell him what girls talk about. She doesn't know he's been listening in and suggests that maybe he just eavesdrop. He lists off everything he's heard her talk about with [other female friend] it goes something like this:
The current president (which was probably Bush II at the time), Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Hercules, Jason, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Hector, Achilles, Odysseus, Telemachus, more Buddha, Keynes, Tesla, Edison, George Washington Carver, George Washington, George III, Napoleon, Pythagoras, Euclid, Socrates, more Muhammad, more Jesus, Gandhi, James Bond, Emperor Norton, and on and on, and on.

She contends that they were talking about such diverse topics as religion, politics, economics, math, science, and awesome. He's pretty sure everyone he listed was male. She suggests that he have the female characters in his story talk about Godzilla, he says that wouldn't work. She asks why and claims that Godzilla is in fact female. He starts to respond that the characters have no reason to talk about Godzilla but when he processes the rest of what she said his brain reacts like a record player that's been hit by a car and he lets out a, "What?!" that is more exclamation than question. And that sets up the lengthy discussion of Godzilla's gender that is really the thing that keeps the characters in my memory.

She argues that the original Godzilla, killed by the oxygen destroyer, might have been male but all subsequent ones were clearly female. His argument is formed almost entirely from confusion, knee jerk reactions, and, "No, he found the egg."

I think that by the end of the story he still hadn't really grasped the concept that "That sounds like a conversation I might have," doesn't mean, "People of the opposite gender wouldn't have this conversation."

There's really no point in bringing this up, Ana's comment simply reminded me of it.

Also, I think this ended up being longer than the missing post.

[The Kidd]

Thanks for writing this, Ana.

Regarding male and female roles in films, the way women are portrayed is full of problems, but what may be worse is when females are (almost) completely absent, making it kind of hard to pass The Bechdel Test. Randomosity mentioned Where Eagles Dare (thanks) and I was reminded of The Bridge Over the River Kwai (7 Academy Awards, 4 BAFTAs). At imdb.com the first 12 names on the cast list are male and then we finally gets to Ann Sears who plays a British nurse William Holden is enjoying the company of. According to the film’s commentary track they weren’t even going to include her but the studio insisted, so that the film wouldn’t be completely male. The climactic scene at the end with Alec Guinness wouldn’t have been possible, however, if the commandos led by the William Holden character hadn’t got through to plant the explosives, and that wouldn’t have been possible without the skill and courage of a village full of Siamese women whose roles are down-played and whose names I can’t find in the credits. The film was written by three males and directed by one.

Also at the imdb – every name on the cast lists for these films is male:
- Patton(George C. Scott) – 7 Academy Awards
- Lawrence of Arabia (Peter O’Toole) – 7 Academy Awards, 4 BAFTAs
- The Great Escape (Steve McQueen) – 1 Academy Award nomination
- The Hill (Sean Connery) – 1 BAFTA (nominated for 5 more)
- The TV mini-series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Alec Guinness) – 2 BAFTAS, nominated for 7 more – by the way one of those seven was for Beryl Reid (best actress) and yet imdb.com doesn’t even list her in the top 14 list of actors (they also omit Susan Kodicek as Irina)
- The Day of the Jackal almost makes the list – Olga Georges-Picot is 12th on the list, and the only female in the list of 15 – the film won a BAFTA and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Make what you will of all this.

[Launcifer]

@The Kidd: All of those films are either outright war films or else set within the armed forces though, so I can understand the lack of female characters in those films (though I've always struggled to fathom Forsyth's politics (Day of the Jackal. There's always a token gay stereotype in his novels, for example, which I gradually began to find a wee bit distasteful before I stopped reading his novels altogether). Given that they're all at least forty years old, too, that brings in a whole different set of questions regarding attitudes towards women in society generally. Admittedly, I can't fathom what would have broken The Great Escape if most of the non-camp personnel and prisoners were women, say, but still... The Hill's also a bit of cheat, given that it's set in a military stockade in the middle of the desert. I'd actually argue that it would have made even less sense to include female characters, under the circumstances.

Aaand I think I've missed the point, so I'm going to shut up now before I say something incredibly stupid.

[Mmy]

@Launcifer: The thing is that films about women are "chick flicks" and films about guys are about the "human condition."

There are lots and lots of stories about WWII or POW camps that could be about women.

[AnaMardoll]

@The Kidd: All of those films are either outright war films or else set within the armed forces though, so I can understand the lack of female characters in those films

As I noted in a recent Narnia post, women have "officially" been in modern battles since at least World War 1, though. And they've been unofficially in pretty much every war ever, as camp followers, nurses, and warriors (sometimes posing as male, sometimes not).

I'm now going to quote a few passages I liked from "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest":

An estimated 600 women served during the American Civil War. They had signed up disguised as men. Hollywood has missed a significant chapter of cultural history here—or is this history ideologically too difficult to deal with? Historians have often struggled to deal with women who do not respect gender distinctions, and nowhere is that distinction more sharply drawn than in the question of armed combat. (Even today, it can cause controversy having a woman on a typical Swedish moose hunt.)

But from antiquity to modern times, there are many stories of female warriors, of Amazons. The best known find their way into the history books as warrior queens, rulers as well as leaders. They have been forced to act as any Churchill, Stalin, or Roosevelt: Semiramis from Nineveh, who shaped the Assyrian Empire, and Boudicca, who led one of the bloodiest English revolts against the Roman forces of occupation, to cite just two. Boudicca is honoured with a statue on the Thames at Westminster Bridge, opposite Big Ben. Be sure to say hello to her if you happen to pass by.

On the other hand, history is reticent about women who were common soldiers, who bore arms, belonged to regiments, and took part in battles on the same terms as men, though hardly a war has been waged without women soldiers in the ranks.

...

An Irish law from the year 697 forbids women to be soldiers—which means that women had been soldiers previously. Peoples who over the centuries have recruited female soldiers include Arabs, Berbers, Kurds, Rajputs, Chinese, Filipinos, Maoris, Papuans, Micronesians, and American Indians.

...

Despite the rich variety of Amazon legends from ancient Greece, South America, Africa, and elsewhere, there is only one historically documented example of female warriors. This is the women’s army that existed among the Fon of Dahomey in West Africa, now Benin.
These female warriors have never been mentioned in the published military histories; no romanticized films have been made about them, and today they exist as no more than footnotes to history. Only one scholarly work has been written about these women, Amazons of Black Sparta by Stanley B. Alpern (C. Hurst & Co., London, 1998), and yet they made up a force that was the equal of every contemporary body of male elite soldiers from among the colonial powers.

It is not clear exactly when Fon’s female army was founded, but some sources date it to the 1600s. It was originally a royal guard, but it developed into a military collective of 6,000 soldiers with a semi-divine status. They were not merely window dressing. For almost 200 years they constituted the vanguard of the Fon against European colonizers. They were feared by the French forces, who lost several battles against them. This army of women was not defeated until 1892, when France sent troops with artillery, the Foreign Legion, a marine infantry regiment, and cavalry.

It is not known how many of these female warriors fell in battle. For many years survivors continued to wage guerrilla warfare, and veterans of the army were interviewed and photographed as late as the 1940s.

As Larsson points out, you'd think this would be GOLD material for aspiring movie makers, and a completely untapped subject -- Women! In war! -- and yet we almost never see women in war movies, despite it being Historically Inaccurate for them NOT to be so.

(Not picking on you, just musing. :))

[AnaMardoll]

I think my comment is in the nets.

[The Board Administration Team]

@Ana: Yup, TypePad had you in the spamtrap -- we freed you.

[The Kidd]

Thanks, Ana, for making excellent points. I also remember reading about some incredibly valiant women working in the field of espionage in wartime (e.g. Nancy G.A.Wake, Violette Bushell and Virginia Hall). You have in fact reinforced my main point, I think, which is that women were involved in conflicts historically but that in a film like Bridge On the River Kwai, that role is made almost invisible. My list of films was basically just an afterthought. Many amazing films, as you say, could be made about women at war. Maybe we could also do a film (or two) whose central theme / point / dramatic focus is the practice of trying to keep females out of many of the corridors of power in wartime, or about ignoring their exploits after the fact.

[fizzchick]

While we're listing Hollywood errors and awesome women in war: Hedy Lamarr is best known popularly for being another Hollywood beauty, but best known scientifically for inventing the technique known as frequency hopping, used first to send un-jammable torpedo signals and now for wifi networks. Wikipedia has a nice summary. There also were plenty of other women on the intellectual side of WWII - the women "computers" who did ballistics calculations, and the female codebreakers working on breaking the Enigma codes at Bletchley Park, are two of the best-known groups.

[Ian needs a nickname]

@Ana, another group of women due for a war film: the anarcho-feminist Mujeres Libres militia from Republican Spain, 30 000 strong.

In 1936, Republican Spain was anarcho-syndicalist, at war with Fascist Spain, Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. The anarchists had always declared the equality of all human beings, but as the Mujeres Libres emphasized, relationships still remained feudal. The most blatant way in which the anarchists failed to live up to their professed ideals was the different levels of pay for men and women...the greatest demonstration of the new equality was the fact of having militiawomen fighting in the front line. Away from the front line, they offered and ran training courses for [survival sex] prostitutes to acquire skills for productive work...they shot pimps and drug dealers on the spot.

Bevor, "The Battle for Spain," p. 120

[Kit Whitfield]

I know the show was cancelled early, and perhaps SOME of this can be guessed as occurring off screen, but it *feels* like the writers took a bunch of Smurfettes (the Warrior Woman, the Gear Girl, the Kung-Fu Waif) and flung them on a ship together and then forgot that they would sometimes interact.

I haven't seen much of that show, but I think something else that male writers often either forget or get clumsy about is this: if you have a majority-male group with some women in it, the women will often get together and have the occasional ladies' lunch or something similar, just to get some variety in their conversation. Not all women prefer female company, of course, and some prefer male company, but there are a lot of women who enjoy being in a female space. If you live in a man's world, it can be a place to breathe. On a ship with a majority-male crew, chances are the men will dominate daily life, and a change from that would be restful. If you had a group of people like that, personally I'd expect the women to organise themselves and have the odd girls' night (or at least, some of the women, and those who did would probably comment on a woman who chose not to attend), by way of making their lives more pleasant.

Which does not mean that the writer should go the other way and have them sitting around talking about hair and periods singing 'Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves.' Has anyone seen the TV show Jekyll? It's got some good moments, but its only Bechdellish women are a lesbian couple who are continually making jokes and comments about it to an extent that actual gay women wouldn't, because if you're a gay woman, it's your ordinary state and not remarkable. It feels like every conversation, they through a couple of moments where they apparently look down and say, 'Good grief, I'm a woman! And hey, I'm a lesbian as well!', as if they're constantly noticing how much they deviate from the straight-male norm. There's a difference between talking as a woman and talking about being a woman.

[Kit Whitfield]

Something interesting: in The Indelible Alison Bechdel, Bechdel discusses how girls were presented in the stuff she read as a child:

"The world felt like a 'Dennis the Menace' cartoon to me. Girls, even when they were good, were bad. Boys, even when they were bad, were good. And when girls were bad, if I may shift my frame of reference to 'Peanuts,' they were really bad...

The way to draw a girl, I somehow absorbed, was to draw a regular person, then add certain signifiers: long hair, a skirt, high heels, huge curling eyelashes. I didn't look like that, and there was something instinctively offensive to me about overgeneralizing women merely as a way to differentiate them from 'regular' - ie male - people.

I hadn't read The Second Sex yet - in fact, I hadn't learned to read - but it was clear to me that this treatment of 'woman' as some sort of special case, as something other than a regular person, was a serious problem. All the comics, illustrations and animated cartoons I grew up with reinforced this otherness one way or another. I've isolated four of the most common techniques they employed, all of which are still in use now, some thirty years later:

- Woman as Mutant. The female character is drawn as if she's a completely different species from the male. [She includes a picture of the female cat in Garfield.]...

- Woman as Drag Queen. The woman is a male with accessories. [She includes a picture of Minnie Mouse.]

- Woman as Fetish. Women's sexual features are emphasized and exaggerated. This is such a common practice that it's often invisible...

- All-Male Revue. Women are nonexistent except, perhaps, for one sacrificial victim. Children's literature is full of scenarios like this. Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, Herge's 'Tintin' comics. Entire universes where everyone is male except for the occasional mother or love interest. [She includes a picture of the Smurfs.]..."

[This Wicked Day]

Back in March I started my first D&D campaign as dungeonmaster (combination writer/director) rather than player, and something I've consciously tried to do from day one is to make sure that the NPCs - other characters the players interact with - split roughly 50/50 male and female. If they meet a patrol of six guards, they'll be three and three. If they meet a travelling wizard and the wizard's assistant, they'll be one and one. When they get hauled up in front of the inquisitorial court for theft of magical items claimed by the church, the panel is two women, two men. And so on.

The players have no problem with this, indeed have never commented; I couldn't say for certain whether they've even noticed or not, although if I had to guess I'd imagine that at least two of them have. It's clearly a non-issue for them and absolutely the right thing for the game, and yet I'm having to constantly fight the prickling feeling that there are somehow too many women in my cast. Which is rubbish on two counts: a) I have the stats for most NPCs written down to prove that the 50/50 ratio is holding, and b) so what? A slight female majority is hardly a disaster. Yet the prickly feeling is still there.

And it's started to become really, really noticeable that the other games I play in all have majority-male background casts. I know all three DMs personally and they're good guys, but whenever we bump into a random merchant or tavern owner or local aristocrat the pronoun set they reach for is "he". Nearly always. I'm sure this is completely unconscious, as well, which kind of makes it worse - that this sort of erasure is so normal that good, egalitarian people don't even notice they're doing it.

(On a vaguely related note, when NaNo is over my next writing project is planned to be a series of blog posts about DM'ing from a feminist/anti-oppression perspective; does that sound like something people would be interested in? I know there are other tabletop gamers here.)

RPGs are where it's currently really bugging me right now, but it's something that's also come up a lot in academic discussions: I study literature, especially medieval literature, and like movies, most literary classics fail and fail hard. I wrote a blog post about books that fail the Bechdel test way back in 2009, most of which I still agree with, though if I were to write it now I would have worded the ending "We need to do something about this" rather more strongly.

[Ross]

Once Stephen Colbert referred to himself as the default American. He went on to explain that male is the default sex, heterosexual the default sexuality, caucasian the default race, Christian the default religion. (Of course, he was continuing his on-screen persona here, acting as spoof on conservative talking heads.)

Quasi-Ironically, he's also Catholic, and frequently leans on the idea that his is the One True Denomination and all protestants are going to hell. You can sort of hear the record-needle-scratch in the mind of the Real True Default American who listens to Colbert and nods along: Male, check. Caucasian, check. Straight, check. Christian, check. Far-right but calls himself an "independent", check. Catholic -- DOES NOT COMPUTE!

----

Off the top of my head, I can probably think of more pornographic movies that meet the bechdel criteria than movies of other sorts. Maybe kids' movies.

----

All-Male Revue. Women are nonexistent except, perhaps, for one sacrificial victim. Children's literature is full of scenarios like this. Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, Herge's 'Tintin' comics. Entire universes where everyone is male except for the occasional mother or love interest. [She includes a picture of the Smurfs.]..."

The thought occurs that there is a perception that the presence of women makes something "about" sex, hence the need for single-gender ensembles, particularly in kids' shows (With bizzarre side effects: make the cast single-gendered (usually male unless you're targeting a female audience) to "keep sex out of it", then panic and realize that this makes you look REALLY sexist, so write in a token member of the opposite sex. And now you have accidentally created a "sexless" world that *you can't look at without thinking about sex, because now Smurfette is not so much a character as a fetish*)

There's a totally similar phenomenon with QUILTBAG folks, with the common media perception that the instant a gay person is in a show or film, you've "made it about sex". See also the RIDICULOUS BACKLASH over gay characters in Doctor Who.

[Randomosity]

This Wicked Day: Oh yes! I'd read your blog posts! I still run games, have done for eons. Every game included a 50/50 sex ratio in pregenerated characters for running at Gen Con and other conventions, my current campaign ends up with the characters encountering monsters that come in both sexes and in a demographically correct ratio.

There was a game that I was a player in at Gen Con many years ago in which there were eight pregenerated characters, seven male, one female. The DM described the characters and players would volunteer for the character. Each character had a role-playing hook. Guess what the hook was for the female character. She was female. That was the hook. The males all had things like undead-phobia, stutters, is actually a peasant pretending to be noble.

I once jokingly told a friend that the next game in which no female NPCs were to be seen in an entire village, I was going to the village leadership and inform them that after we complete our current quest, we would help them find the village's missing women.

[MercuryBlue]

Grimm, far's I know, has not [got a full season order]

Well it has now.

There's a totally similar phenomenon with QUILTBAG folks, with the common media perception that the instant a gay person is in a show or film, you've "made it about sex".

*sigh*

I once jokingly told a friend that the next game in which no female NPCs were to be seen in an entire village, I was going to the village leadership and inform them that after we complete our current quest, we would help them find the village's missing women.

DO IT DO IT

[Ross]

*sigh*

Yeah.

While the homophobes are saying "But if you put gay people in it, my children will ask difficult questions about why those two men are kissing, and I'll be forced to confront my own baseless bigotry in an explicit way explain graphic and explicit detail about the physical mechanics of sex to a child!", I'm in the back saying "Hey, how am I supposed to teach my kid to not treat QUILTBAG folks as a kind of metahuman when every time one of them is on-screen, we're no longer doing a show about any aspect of the human experience other than the bits Peter Faulk had to skip over because Fred Savage didn't want to hear it?"

This drives me up a wall, because pretty much every time I happen upon a movie and see that it's got some QUILTBAG characters in it, I think "Oh, this will be a nice change from the constant grind (go away part of my brain that is still twelve) of heteronormativity!" it almost always turns out to be an arthouse film with heavy sexual themes, because *even QUILTBAG filmmakers*, often play into the notion that if they're not going to have sex, there's no point in making the characters gay. Erotic thriller about a same-sex love triangle that turns murderous? Not from a major hollywood studio, but easy enough to find in the indie section. G-rated Kids' adventure where one of the kids happens to have two mommies? Not in a million years.

(In spite of which, I think I owe TV a lot. I probably grew up at the height of western civilization's "Let the glowing box raise your children for you" fixation, before regulation changed kids' tv from the awesomeness of half-hour-toy-commercial format to aggressively-educational and the cable diaspora dissolved a culture bound together in the fact that pretty much everyone was watching one of three shows last night. And while I look back and realize how horiffic most of what passed as "progressive" on TV in my youth was by modern standards, I think that even if I spent many many years with some very unhealthy attitudes based on the portrayal of minorities as "A kind of strange and different form of life, but still as worthy of respect and dignity as good straight, cisgendered, normally-abled white men ie 'regular people' even if they can be accurately summed up with a fairly small set of cliches," that "still as worthy of respect and dignity" was the primary message, and it was a shorter trip from "They still deserve diginity and respect even if they're not really full people" to "They deserve dignity and respect because they are too full people" than it would have been if I hadn't grown up with hundreds of hours of television telling me that it was Just Not On to be bigoted toward african americans, gays, lesbians, the mentally handicapped, people with speech impediments and transgendered people.)

[Rowen]

I wonder how much of Firefly was given a pass due to Buffy. The first three seasons heavily revolve around Buffy's relationship with Joyce and with Willow. There's that one girl, who's name I can't remember, who was apart of the vampire cult, and then showed up again in "Anne." Later, Tara and Willow, and Anya and the rest of the cast. I think you could include Anya's demon friend, who's name I can't remember. Cordelia and Harmony. . .

I'm not saying that Buffy is an uber-feminist show, but I think it did have some good inroads that shows at the time didn't *side-glances at Felicity*. So, I think people *might* give Firefly a pass due to that, along with some hand-waving, aka "Zoe's married to the job! Kayle and Inara are sorta friends! Inara doesn't like piracy! River isn't mentally stable!" (Which, now that I think of it, really comes across as more fail then I previously realized.)

[AnaMardoll]

I'm sorry, Kit, I couldn't hear you over the sound of my period starting, and I keep being distracted by the fact that I have breasts and emotions and ovaries.

Yes, a MAJOR pet peeve of mine is when a non-white-male character keeps doing a double-take and saying, "Look, I'm a woman!" or "Look, I have non-white skin!" as though this is some strange revelation to them.

Possibly this is one of the reasons why the "best" female characters are sometimes characters who were written 'genderless' (which in the writer's mind usually defaults as 'male') or 'male' and then a female actor was asked to play the part instead.

Which isn't to say women don't talk about being women... but that those conversations sound a little different when real women are involved. o.O

(Newest pet peeve: Upcoming movie trailer where two women are discussing a sexual position over the phone with disgust because 'nobody' -- i.e., no woman -- likes that position. I don't have a lot of sex conversations in real life with my gal pals, but I've had ENOUGH to know not to make sweeping generalizations about that. But apparently the writers decided that all women hate X because... Jasper?)

[Rowen]

AND now that I think about it, I just finished Battlestar Galactica, and for a show that ran that long, I can't think of many prominent examples. (I mean, I *CAN* think of some, but you'd think there would be more. Of course this IS the show that I didn't realize two characters were gay until someone pointed it out to me. In my defense, I was paying more attention to my crocheting then the TV during Razor.)

[MercuryBlue]

"But if you put gay people in it, my children will ask difficult questions about why those two men are kissing, and I'll be forced to explain graphic and explicit detail about the physical mechanics of sex to a child!"

And they don't ask difficult questions about why het couples are kissing?

[AnaMardoll]

AND now that I think about it, I just finished Battlestar Galactica, and for a show that ran that long, I can't think of many prominent examples.

I'm now going to publicly admit that I didn't like BSG, and I don't know what's wrong with me. I tried, god knows I did. I've watched the pilot three times, and quite a few episodes after that as well as intermittently as friends and boyfriends watched them. And I've heard online how it's just such a good show.

I can't see it, and I think there must be something wrong with me. Starbuck strikes me as the stereotypical fight-and-f*** woman, which I suppose in some ways is a male trope so it could be very empowering to show a woman in that role, but at the same time she strikes me as so incompetent that I wouldn't put her in charge of a chessboard let alone a real squadron of soldiers, so it doesn't seem empowering to me at all.

And Roslin feels like they brought back the writers from ST:V and said to them, "You know all the things that Ana hated about Captain Janeway? Do that, only ALL THE TIME." I cannot bear smug characters who are always right and long-suffering and smug and right because the writers bend over backwards to make them so, and it just grated me up the wrong way.

And then there was the harem for Balthasar or whatever his name was and all the sexy sex-pot cyborgs and... I just couldn't get it. But I recognize that everyone else on earth loves this show and there's something wrong with me. (Is this what it's like for all those people who didn't like The Hunger Games?)

[Rowen]

Mercury,

I think it's the wonderful thing where QUILTBAG folks get boiled down to what sort of sinful and depraved things they do with their genitals, plus a few stereotypes thrown in (All gay men mince and sing showtunes! All lesbians are butch and carry powertools! All transfolk are sad examples of lonely people who can't pass! Bisexuals? What are those?).

[AnaMardoll]

And they don't ask difficult questions about why het couples are kissing?

Good point: the question is only awkward if you've trained the child to think that only het kissing is right/correct. If you've learned from day one that, hey, people kiss people, then it's not weird or unusual to see gay kissing...

[MercuryBlue]

I was thinking more 'do they explain sex to a kid who asked about het kissing', but that too.

[Wysteria]

I know Starbuck was portrayed by a guy in the old BSG, and was a woman in the new BSG, but I don't know what-if-any difference that made in her character. I've only ever seen the new version. My impression is that she got bonus held-captive-and-forced-faked-marriage that the male version presumably didn't? Anyone seen both versions who can fill me in?

[Rowen]

Mercury,

I kinda meant how often times hetero couples can hold hands, and kiss and many people don't immediately go to "I bet they have sex. I wonder if they do it doggie style. Is she a dominatrix? I'm going to ask. . ."

yet, there's a lot of times where same sex couples get to deal with that. Apparently, holding hands with my (non-existent) boyfriend "shoves my lifestyle down their throats" and brazenly shouts to the world that I do sinful nasty things in the bedroom. And is also an open invitation to ask things like "Who's the wife?"

[Ruby, on the go]

I'll admit that I like BSG quite a bit, and can think of a number of Bechdel Qualifiers off the top of my head. Starbuck and Kat, Boomer and Athena, Caprica and Boomer, Roslin and Roslin's Second Assistant Whose Name I Can't Remember Right Now.

And they're mostly talking about the end of civilization, so it counts. :D

[hapax]

Y'all have convinced me about women military. There is simply no reason why General X can't have all zir pronouns changed-- I've re-read zir scenes, and it doesn't make one whit of difference to the dialogue, or even the physical description.

I will check over the cannon fodder as well... after November.

But I recognize that everyone else on earth loves this show and there's something wrong with me. (Is this what it's like for all those people who didn't like The Hunger Games?)

No. Because everyone else on earth but me who loves The Hunger Games is simply wrong, and has failed to realize it yet.

:-)

[Rowen]

So, what you're saying is that I should totally buy a copy of the Hunger Games for my bus ride to Philly this week. . .

[sarah]

@Rowen: You're coming to Philly? Wheeeee.

Except I'm going up to MA this week. Huh.

[Rowen]

^_^ My aunt lives . . . um, somewhere in Philly. I don't know the city too well. It's by the river, and not too far from Independence Hall, and the streets are cobble-stoned.

[Kit Whitfield]

Upcoming movie trailer where two women are discussing a sexual position over the phone with disgust because 'nobody' -- i.e., no woman -- likes that position.

Out of interest, what position was it?

[sarah]

Old City, then. It's sort of east of Center City (where City Hall and the business district is). Really, really nice area.

[sarah]

*are, not is. The grammar police in my head seem to have escaped.

[MercuryBlue]

*can't believe there are kids with pierced ears*

[Ross]

AND now that I think about it, I just finished Battlestar Galactica, and for a show that ran that long, I can't think of many prominent examples. (I mean, I *CAN* think of some, but you'd think there would be more. Of course this IS the show that I didn't realize two characters were gay until someone pointed it out to me. In my defense, I was paying more attention to my crocheting then the TV during Razor.)

If it's the couple I'm thinking of, most of the relationship was in the direct-to-the-web material. In fact, I kinda think you were supposed to not know it when you first watched the show, then see the other material, then go back and say "Oh! So that's why he... Oh!"

---

Good point: the question is only awkward if you've trained the child to think that only het kissing is right/correct. If you've learned from day one that, hey, people kiss people, then it's not weird or unusual to see gay kissing...

Presumably, the child saw their parents kiss from before they were verbal, and therefore never needed to ask the question.

But basically it's the stuff I struck through before. "But then the kids will ask me why that man is kissing that other man and I will have to explain it to them about anal sex!" is just code for "I do not know how to teach my child to be as bigoted as I am without sounding like a monster." I read an article not long ago, which I will try to find, which quotes a guy talking about how difficult it was to explain Teh Gay to his daughters, and he tells them this long and overwrought thing about original sin and theodicy and how in our prefallen state we had conscious controll over all our sexual urges, and this is why people grow old and die and women experience pain in childbirth -- and then he uses this as "proof" for why gay pepople should not be in the media, because he "had to" frighten his daughters with this terrible explanation. Yeah.

----

I know Starbuck was portrayed by a guy in the old BSG, and was a woman in the new BSG, but I don't know what-if-any difference that made in her character. I've only ever seen the new version. My impression is that she got bonus held-captive-and-forced-faked-marriage that the male version presumably didn't? Anyone seen both versions who can fill me in?

I don't recall it actually happening, but Starbuck being forced-to-fake-marry someone would not have been out of character for the original series. "Hero accidentally is forced to marry primitive tribal princess on alien planet" is a pretty bog-standard space opera plot. Now, being fake-married to a *cylon*...

Oh. Wait. Duh. *It happened*. There's an episode of Galactica 1980 (which of course "never happened") called "The Return of Starbuck", wherein Starbuck is stranded on a barren planet with only a damaged cylon for companionship, and they eventually form a friendship, and later a human woman crashes on the planet, and the cylon gets all jealous and catty, and eventually Starbuck sends the woman back off into space using their only chance to escape, and leaving himself stranded forever with his cylon pal.

So not quite the same thing, but, well, kinda.

----

Yes, a MAJOR pet peeve of mine is when a non-white-male character keeps doing a double-take and saying, "Look, I'm a woman!" or "Look, I have non-white skin!" as though this is some strange revelation to them.

Some webcomic or other, can't recall which, once posited that you could replace almost any line of dialogue by any woman in a sitcom with the line "I am *such* a woman, aren't I?" without changing the meaning of the joke.

[Kit Whitfield]

*can't believe there are kids with pierced ears*

As Pthalo points out, it varies from culture to culture. In Spain, for instance, girls have their ears pierced in infancy. I don't think it's to distinguish them from boys; it's just a tradition.

[chris the cynic]

I couldn't get into new-Battlestar originally, though I think that a large part of that is that I am extremely not good at dealing with things about people seeing things that no one else can and questions about sanity. Until Baltar was able to deal with the Cylon in his head with a significant level of success there was no way I'd be able to get into the show.

Anyway, I did eventually find a lot I liked in it. (I consider Dirty Hands to have been a very good episode, though it's been so long since I've seen it that I worry about the recommendation.) I have a feeling it didn't pass the test nearly as often as it should have. I also felt like it seemed like the entire universe was trying very hard to crush Boomer's soul, and I felt so bad when she finally succumbed to the pressure and turned evil.

Trying to remember back to the beginning, I think that the only reason Starbuck was trusted with anything was that the vast majority of the human population was dead and she was one of the few remaining people qualified to do what she did. I think, though am not sure, that the show started with her in the brig, and if you look at how she acts it's pretty clear that that's probably where she belonged.

I don't think I was really going anywhere with this, so I'm going to stop now.

-

Inara doesn't like piracy!

I think it was the other way around. Not saying it's any better (might be worse), but I'm pretty sure the reason that Inara and Zoe don't talk is on Zoe's end. Inara seems to have very little problem with ... it's not actually piracy but whatever the catch all term is for theft, smuggling, illegal salvage and whatnot. Criminal enterprise. In fact there's some indication that she picked the ship in part because she knew that the fact they were criminals would give her additional leverage in negotiating a price.

For Inara and Zoe I got the impression that their whole relationship was summed up the first time Inara's name is mentioned. Mal is thinking of calling her up to let her know that they plan to leave in a hurry, Zoe's response is, "Inara knows our timetable. I'm sure she'll be checking in soon." Inara knows what she's doing and Zoe doesn't have any desire to have any involvement beyond what is necessary.

The thing is, it's never established why Zoe treats Inara that way. We could speculate that it has something to do with the fact that, based on Inara's initial conversation with Mal, Inara arrived at the ship extremely willing to say what amounted to, "I supported having your lands invaded and your people subjugated by means of bloody war, the same war that you saw many people you cared about killed in," except in a way that didn't even acknowledge the questionable bits of that support and was delivered in a tone that made the whole thing sound like ... I can't find the right description because whatever I say someone will find it important, where the way Inara says it is the way someone speaks of something they don't find important, like, "I voted yes on question 2" provided you didn't actually think question two was very important. We could speculate that, but Zoe seems to have put that entire part of her life behind her, and done so significantly more effectively than Mal.

There doesn't seem to be an explanation so we're just left with the fact that Zoe appears to have exactly zero life outside of work and marriage.

With four women there should be six relationships between women. The show instead has two. Even if we accept that Zoe isn't going to be involved, that still leaves the question of why Inara and River don't seem to have a connection. As Ana pointed out, if nothing else Inara should at least be involved in her capacity as someone who is theoretically qualified to do something in the way of therapy.

[Mmy]

can't believe there are kids with pierced ears

Among many in the Portuguese and Spanish immigrant communities where I grew up it was firmly believed that piercing ears in babies was good because they healed better, the child wouldn't remember the pain and that it allowed heavier earrings to be worn later in life.

[MercuryBlue]

so that [the girls] will be identifiable from the boys

What, pink and blue blankets aren't good enough? Why do people need to tell the difference, anyway? Note to self, look up on EBSCOhost the studies that show that the same baby is treated differently depending on whether there's pink or blue on the baby.

Also re culture, male infant circumcision. Which I don't like either.

[Kit Whitfield]

Well, I don't think I'd pierce a baby girl's ears myself. But then if I lived in a country where all the girls did it, I might very well; I'd think that the potential harm of having pierced ears wasn't very great (heck, I've got pierced earlobes myself, one of them with three studs), whereas the potential harm of being the only girl in class without earrings was greater. It strikes me that it'd mark a girl out for teasing; being the Unstylish One at four or five years old is not something to take on lightly.

I wouldn't circumcise a baby boy, though. (Assuming there wasn't a medical reason.) It's a much bigger body modification, and it's also much easier to keep private. I'm keeping out of the 'should you do it for religious reasons?' debate, but I certainly don't think it's a good idea to do just for vague reasons of 'hygiene', the way it appears to have been done at some points in America's history.

[AnaMardoll]

Out of interest, what position was it?

Doggy style.

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/149357-whats-your-number

[AnaMardoll]

I turned out to be allergic to earrings but since the holes were made when I was still young, I still have the holes (and could put an earring through them, just my ears would swell up and get red and itchy)

OMG, *I* have this. I'm not sure why I'm excited, except that I've never met anyone else who does. It happens whether the earrings are metal or plastic or really anything.

[Kit Whitfield]

Out of interest, what position was it?
//
Doggy style.

And they say nobody likes it? That's ... a radically conservative opinion.

I don't like the name, mind you. I heard that in Rome they called it the 'lioness' position, which I think sound a lot nicer. :-)

--

I'm not sure why I'm excited, except that I've never met anyone else who does. It happens whether the earrings are metal or plastic or really anything.

I could be wrong, but this sounds like it might be an allergy to non-precious metals. My mother has this: she gets a rash on her neck if she wears a metal glasses chain or a necklace with a cheap clasp. High-purity gold and silver are less reactive, so less likely to cause an allergic reaction if that's what you've got - assume you can and wish to spend that much money.

[Mmy]

@AnaMardoll: Out of interest, what position was it?

Doggy style.

About which Freud seemed to have a particular fixation only rivaled by his obsession with noses.

I turned out to be allergic to earrings but since the holes were made when I was still young, I still have the holes (and could put an earring through them, just my ears would swell up and get red and itchy)

Oh yes, that's me. Apparently the main purpose of ear rings (for me) is to produce a prodigious amount of pus.

[Kit Whitfield]

About which Freud seemed to have a particular fixation only rivaled by his obsession with noses.

Really? I'd like to hear more about that if you have the time... :-)

(Oh, when I say 'Rome' I meant 'ancient Rome'. According to the historical notes of the DVD for Rome, which are interesting.)

[Ruby, on the go]

Holy crap! I thought of one for Inara and Zoe: in Trash, they talk about the job.

[MercuryBlue]

assume you can and wish to spend that much money.

I really wish I had the money to buy metal-allergy-safe jewelry pieces-parts. Best I can do at the moment is make sure no nickel was involved in gold-plating the pieces-parts and offer to trade the plated stuff for unplated surgical steel free of charge. Not that I expect my sales would go up all that much if I could provide allergy-safe jewelry, because, again, frigging expensive.

[Izzy]

Starbuck strikes me as the stereotypical fight-and-f*** woman, which I suppose in some ways is a male trope so it could be very empowering to show a woman in that role, but at the same time she strikes me as so incompetent that I wouldn't put her in charge of a chessboard let alone a real squadron of soldiers, so it doesn't seem empowering to me at all.

This. This this this this this, thank you, holy shit.

I love the fight-and-fuck woman; I like the "let's turn an originally-written-male character female" trope; but BSG didn't do that. They did "let's turn an originally-written-male character female and then add a planet-sized overdose of Broken Bird Parental Issues Chick", which...no. Piss right off, Ron Moore.

Part of the unspoken patriarchal Thing in Hollywood seems to be the idea that men can have character flaws and still be competent, and women can't. The Ubiquitous Eighties Harrison Ford Hero had the same loose-canon-playboy-iconoclast approach to life that Starbuck began series with, but he managed to get things done and be awesome regardless, and no narrative suggested that it was a facet of his unresolved psychological blah blah blah. The guy who has his head in the clouds to the point where he forgets his keys three times a week is an absentminded professor and probably a genius; the woman who does the same is a ditz and an airhead.

Bugs me.

[AnaMardoll]

i'm excited too! Are you allergic to the "hypoallergenic" ones too? I am.

Yes! Although I don't have visible symptoms like swelling and redness -- the ears just itch like argh and I have to take the earrings out an hour into my day and curse the optimism that made me think THIS pair would be different.

I *can* wear metal bracelets and necklaces, but I don't often do so. When I was navel pierced a few years back, I did everything just like they said, but the skin got thinner and thinner and eventually I gave up, took the ring out, and let it all heal over (otherwise, it would have broke entirely). I was disappointed by that.

And they say nobody likes it? That's ... a radically conservative opinion.

I don't like the name, mind you. I heard that in Rome they called it the 'lioness' position, which I think sound a lot nicer. :-)

I like that name too! Although maybe I don't because we watched National Geographic last night and they had the whole "new lion kills the babies so that the lionesses will go into heat" and that's kind of sad.

But agreed that it's a very odd position (er, philosophically, I mean) to take -- I know a lot of women who enjoy that position. That's one reason why the whole trailer stood out at me as NO FEMALE WRITERS WERE ALLOWED ON THIS MOVIE, although that's probably not true. But it felt that way.

[Mary Kaye]

Since losing its alliance with Wizards of the Coast, Paizo has started to quietly drop same-sex relationships into its roleplaying materials. I was poking around for a pre-generated adventuring party the other day and found one centered around a brother-sister pair and the brother's male lover whom the sister resents. (Also a crazed female halfling oracle who plots their heists.) And I've seen at least three more like this.

But even so, there are still big patches of all-male-for-no-reason in many of the scenarios. It varies, of course, from author to author, but this does show that the gender of nameless NPCs is not something the editors query authors on--if you turn in something will all males it gets to stay that way.

It is a real struggle to fix this, because *my* default Guard or Soldier or Miner is a male too, so I don't notice.

I suspect there is also something more subtle going on with roles: that female characters are "marked" means that if you spot one female among a bunch of males, or a female in a role that would have been stereotypically male, she is supposed to be significant in some way. This skews them toward traitors and spies and bad rulers and so forth, but also toward rebels and freedom fighters and good-guy spies and people who will unexpectedly take your side--it's not quite as simple as "noticeable women are evil" though it does sometimes feel that way.

One thing I do like is that the current module series gives me a tribe which skews 10:1 female for some genetic reason--and gives me two named characters from that tribe, *both female*. It doesn't treat the female majority as a reason to focus on the men. (And the women aren't played for eroticism as they are in some of the other products. One is a straightforward warrior and the other is a priestess. Then again, they are centaurs and perhaps not good erotica material.)

[Kit Whitfield]

I know a lot of women who enjoy that position. That's one reason why the whole trailer stood out at me as NO FEMALE WRITERS WERE ALLOWED ON THIS MOVIE, although that's probably not true. But it felt that way.

Or possibly 'not enough female writers were allowed on this movie', and the one or two they got happened not to like that position. But yes, it does sound more like a male writer, because it's a pretty standard position; based on what you described, I was expecting a Reverse Flying Cowgirl at the least.

[AnaMardoll]

@Kit, I get Cowgirl, I get Reverse, I do not get Flying. Is there a rope-and-pulley involved or something?

I feel so naive. :D

[Kit Whitfield]

Oh. I may be using the term wrong. In the interests of clarity for anyone I've confused:

'Reverse cowgirl' is where the man lies on his back and the woman sits astride, facing towards his feet rather than his head. 'Reverse flying cowgirl', if I'm using the right phrase, involves the same both-facing-forwards position, but the man sits on a chair or sofa, the woman sits in his lap, leans down and rests her hands on the floor.

It's one of those positions that crops up when copywriters have agreed to do 'Fifty New Positions That Will Revolutionise Your Sex Life!!!!', have reached number thirty-seven and are starting to struggle a bit. I'm perfectly prepared to consider that some women enjoy it, but to most women, I suspect it's one of those positions that's more effort than it's worth.

[AnaMardoll]

But yes, it does sound more like a male writer, because it's a pretty standard position

My thought was that perhaps the train of thought went like this:

Statement A: Doggie Style is used in a lot of porn that I, Male Writer, have seen.

Statement B: Male-oriented porn can be degrading to women. I, Male Writer, have heard that somewhere.

Conclusion: Therefore, women must not like porn positions, and that includes Doggie Style.

It almost seems like trying to get to The Singular Female Point Of View without (a) actually asking a variety of women and (b) understanding (and this would come from (a)) that there isn't a Singular female point of view on sex positions.

[Mmy]

@Kit Whitfield: About which Freud seemed to have a particular fixation only rivaled by his obsession with noses.

Really? I'd like to hear more about that if you have the time... :-)

In his earlier analysis of the Wolf Man case, he argues that the patient witnessed animal coitus, either performed by his parents having sex “doggie” style or nearby sheepdogs having sex. 2 A central factor in Freud’s supposition is that the patient must have seen his mother’s genitals (or some version of female genitals) and his father’s (or the animal’s) “violent” movements in relation to them. The young patient saw this scene as both threatening and exciting. (As we know from Freud’s writings on fetishism and elsewhere, the “castrated” female genitals make the threat of castration seem real.) According to Freud, the Wolf dream suggests that the patient wanted to submit to his father’s violence/passion in the way that his mother had. In other words, he wanted to adopt the passive position in relation to his father. [Kelly Oliver, Little Hans’s Little Sister

and

One of Freud's most famous dream analyses concerned a man who reported remembering a dream from when he was 4 yearss old (!) in which he saw six or sevenb white dogs with large tails sitting motionlessly in a tree outside his window.....After a labourious line of reasoning, Freud concluded that the child had dreamed about his parent in their bedclothes--presumably white, like the dogs in the dream. The dogs' lack of motion represented its opposite--frantic sexual activity. The big tails also represented their opposite--the boy's fear of having his penis cut off. In short, said Freud, the boy had dreamed about watching his parents have sex, doggy style. [Introduction to Psychology By James W. Kalat, page 362]

In that latter case the man's whose dream Freud analyzed was tracked down and stated that a) he thought the analysis was a real reach and b) Freud's sessions did little to cure/help him.

[AnaMardoll]

leans down and rests her hands on the floor.

Well now I know why I don't know about it; I wouldn't be able to do this in a non-sexual context even. Ha.

'Fifty New Positions That Will Revolutionise Your Sex Life!!!!', have reached number thirty-seven and are starting to struggle a bit.

And why is it always a round number? 36 new positions would be just fine. :P

[MercuryBlue]

So basically a case of Did Not Do The Research.

[Kit Whitfield]

Well now I know why I don't know about it; I wouldn't be able to do this in a non-sexual context even. Ha.

Well, you'd have a partner to stop you toppling over... ;-)

(See, male writers, women do talk about sex.)

--

@mmy - oh yes, I remember reading that case history! If I recall correctly, Freud basically wouldn't stop badgering the guy until he 'admitted' that he had some masochistic fantasies. Whether he actually did, or whether he just wanted Freud to stop going on at him about it, was an open question. Whether they had anything to do with his problems is, I suspect, a closed question: they almost certainly didn't.

And yeah, that whole 'symbolises its opposite' dodge is just deplorable.

[Izzy]

My experience with the OMG NEW POSITIONS!! is that they're a lot of fun for a few minutes, and then someone's knee gives out, or there's carpet burn, or whatever. Which is not to say those few minutes aren't Good Times, but I feel like the standard four or five are the standard four or five for a reason, and that reason is "not everyone takes triweekly yoga classes".