How many of the remainder pass the Mako Mori test though? Some of them might be in male dominated areas and/or have minimal character numbers.
You're not going by the test as written. The test said "women", not "females". I don't count demigods in female skins or aliens who are technically female as "women". I count people who experience the human condition. Portraying the former is just another way of weaseling out of portraying women. You obviously have a much broader way of defining things. Good for you. But you can't call people "dense" when you're the one adding rules to the test that isn't in the comic. Something we may both be doing, but that's part of subjectivity. But feminists say you can't be sexist against men, cos sexism according to them is discrimination + institutional power, and they believe women lack or have no institutional power. So it wouldn't matter.
Some feminists might say that. You do realize that "feminism" isn't a monolithic organization that votes on a platform, right? I believe that those in power, whether you call them the patriarchy or something else, are just fine with using sexism against men to achieve their goals. For example, the idea that men are not suitable caregivers serves to help keep men and women in little boxes. Its primary goal may be to keep women out of powerful positions in the work world, but it also harms men who would like those caregiving roles, either as at-home parents, or as teachers, daycare workers, etc.
That would be some feminists, actually relatively few in my experience. Though a certain group of them I know fairly well who are all bent on white male privilege are pretty vocal about that POV.
Dude, the Super race are de facto humans, so transparently and unashamedly so that they didn't even bother to make them look a little different. Humans anthropomorphise, we see ourselves in most intelligent social beings we invent. If they are a human like personality, we immediately connect with them as characters, only if their behaviour is not very human do we disconnect. Talking races are particularly prone to this, pretty much 80-95% of them could be human characters and that means we view them as people when we watch/read. Your perspective is unreasonably anal and comes off as intentionally evasive.
Whew, dodged a bullet there. Visibility FTW. Joking aside, I actually find it quite boring if one moment I'm reading a chapter from the man's POV and he's engaged in something like bringing down the friggin mafia and then the next chapter is from the POV of his future love interest Myrtle, who spends her time obsessing over him (oh will he love me even though my beautiful face was deformed by fire!) while completing menial house chores or from the POV of Giselle, a prostitute-with-a-golden-heart who's committed her life to supporting the leading men in their quest to bring down the friggin mafia. This is when I wish the Bechdel test was a brick with which I could hit the author in the head. I mean, yeah, it's as dumb as a female power fantasy where two male hotties are fighting over the same she-doesn't-know-how-gorgeous-she-is woman and their lives totally revolve around pleasing her and both of them would be happy to just eat her day in day out until their necks break and wrists fall off -- hell, they'd be willing to take turns -- but it still gets under my skin when I come across Myrtle and Giselle. Maybe because they're more mainstream, and at least used to be quite common.
@GingerCoffee says it all here: It certainly opened my eyes. I now keep this issue in mind as I read or watch film. And certainly as I write. I think some genres might struggle more than others to 'pass.' A Romance, for example, is all about finding a life partner. So if the partners are heterosexual, and if the story is written from the female perspective, it's more likely that she will talk to her friends about a man ...because that's the main story thread. If a writer can include some other kind of subplot as well, so much the better. But I don't see failing the Bechtel test in a Romance to be a fatal flaw. Building the romance is the point of the story. However, any other story ...well, it's something we need to look at. If women's roles in these stories exist only to service the man's part of the story, it's certainly something we need to pay attention to.
That's actually not what's happening, that actually 100% precisely the opposite of what's happening: When you start with what's already a stupidly easy test to pass (Jane asks the waitress for a glass of water) Then add rules that make it even easier ("the word 'women' refers to any sentient females, not just sentient female humans") But more than a third of contemporary films still hold "males do things, females either don't exist or they exist to talk about males doing things" to be so axiomatic that even the most powerful female gods/demigods of SciFi/Fantasy are passive-to-nonexistent compared to the meagerest male humans in the same story Then that just makes it even worse than if only female gods/demigods were recognized as people while female humans were not As always, there's an XKCD about that: Yeah, but out of the entire book that doesn't have to be the only thing she talks about. It doesn't even need to be an entire sub-plot, just a single scene could work. Like she and Love Interest could be at a restaurant where she asks the waitress for a glass of water, and the story would pass. Or if that's not enough to count as "conversation," then maybe she asks what the daily special is.
Of course there are many ways to 'get around' this dilemma, if you choose to do so, and including subplots that don't involve women talking to other women about men is one way to do it. So is a token 'protagonist asks waitress for a cup of water.' It's not passing the test that's important. What the Bechtel test results have done is make us THINK about the issue and be aware of it in our writing. That's excellent, in my view. If somebody pointed out to me that at no point in my story are any of my female characters talking to each other about anything other than men, I'd certainly ask myself why that is. I may be able to give a satisfactory answer—or maybe not. But it will certainly make me think.
You're getting hyperfocused on the Supergirl label when clearly I'm just using her as a metaphor for the demigod/superhuman character. You could swap her with an elf, or vampire or whatever. They aren't defacto humans because they lack mortality, by which I don't just mean growing old, I mean human limits. Which is the human condition. A demigod in a woman's skin doesn't have most of the issues that a woman faces. And if they do, it's only because they choose to. And while you are correct in saying humans can empathize with alot, humans can empathise with a talking hot dog, it wouldn't make it a woman. A woman is not just an appearance that talks, but someone with the full experience of being human, which Supergirl etc, cannot have. She will never know what it's like to be an old lady with a walking stick. She will never know what it is to be afraid of being assaulted because of walking down the street at night. She'll never going to experience abuse from men because she can bench press what, a planet? She doesn't even have to experience it, but that will never even be on her mind. She won't feel the invisibility women feel when they reach middle age, because she can fall back on her powers. She won't feel any of the intimidation feminists say women experience. Bechdel as I interpret it, is a marker for realism as much as it is diversity. ------ As for the "Not all feminists" response, that's not relevant to what I'm saying. What's it says in feminist theory is what matters. Because that's what's being taught institutionally. Warren farrel once went to a campus to speak about sexism against boys and this was the result: While they would say men can on an individual level be discriminated against, they argue men do not experience institutionalized gender based oppression as a class.
No. There are countless branches of "feminist theory", and there is no single branch that is "being taught institutionally."
Supergirl is human to the audience in the same way Dorian Grey who does not age is. She is equivalent to any superhero or magician. If your argument was about aging and other experiences you should have focused on that and not the technicality of not being human. But I still refute that as ignoring our ability to empathise with those different to us. I guarantee the alien female lead from Avatar is female to viewers. She connects as a human character even though her experiences are different because she's findamentally a person. If we couldn't cross physical and cultural boundaries with empathy we'd all be massive bigots. And I don't believe modern sexism of any kind is instituionalized so much as personal and cultural. There are no gender discriminating laws. There are laws relating to gemder related issues. But they don't come from a sexist place by intention.
Then I think you might be misunderstanding it. Do you have a source for this "feminist theory" you speak of? Yes, that is true. But the majority of feminists are not nearly as hung up about the white male privilege issue as those extremist feminists I mentioned earlier.
I missed this until someone else commented on it. You can interpret anything as a "marker for" anything you want ("the budget deficit is a marker for bacon consumption as much as it is..."), but I see no evidence that anyone else interprets Bechdel that way.
I think that white male privilege is a very large issue, but I still don't agree that sexism against men is impossible. A man who has trouble getting a job as a kindergarten teacher despite being fully qualified, or who gets trouble from his friends because he's a stay at home dad when those friend wouldn't give trouble to a stay at home mom, is experiencing sexism. That man probably could shift his ambitions to areas where he would benefit from sexism instead of suffering from it, but that doesn't mean that he's not suffering from it in the area that he has chosen.
The statement was, "[Bechdel] is a marker for realism as much as it is diversity." What does that even mean? Bechdel is an objective measure of the state of gender equality/inequality in movies. Such inequality in movies does not validly reflect reality. Rather, it influences how we perceive reality. Movies (and books) affect our kids. For an example of how, read Peggy Orenstein's book, Cinderella Ate my Daughter Let me give you a different example. Nurses have white collar professional jobs. But the media image of the nurse is the handmaiden with the frilly collared white uniform or the big breasted sexpot with the miniskirt. How is my profession perceived when the public sees only those images? You have TV shows like House where they ignorantly give the nurse's job to the med students and interns. Really? The producers couldn't have spent an afternoon in a hospital observing med students and interns? Or did they just decide the role the nurses played was better suited for med students because who thinks nursing is an actual profession hospitals all need? The media influences perception. It sometimes needs a reminder as to how well or how poorly they are doing.
If that's the case, you should be able to find a single incidence in academia where sexism against men is considered a thing. Not discrimination, but -sexism-. Here's a University's Students Union diversity officier explaining how one cannot be sexist against men: There's alot of text and subtext that simply comes from being human that the audience doesn't get with aliens and gods even if they superfically see human there because they're being portrayed by a human and look like , and to some degree act like one. The empathy with the aliens comes from a form of wish fulfillment and escapist power fantasy. It's not about her being human so much as it's our desire to be inhuman. More specifically superhuman.
It means if I portray a million uber badass wisecracking, strong female character sterereotypes with about as much humanity as a sex doll, i'd be yet to actually portray a woman.
Well this is a right wing site so take it with a grain of salt but you did say, "a single case". Study finds bias for women, against men, in hiring for science faculty positions It's an anti-affirmative action whine. This is a more common aspect of sexism against men: When Men Experience Sexism Yeah, that looks like one of those minority feminists I mentioned, not a representation of the whole.
