The Bechdel Test / Mako Mori

Discussion in 'Character Development' started by doggiedude, Jul 10, 2016.

  1. BayView

    BayView Huh. Interesting. Contributor

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    Seriously? I've always thought of you as male!

    I guess I thought it was you in your avatar?

    Sorry.
     
  2. BayView

    BayView Huh. Interesting. Contributor

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    Yeah, okay.

    If any of those things are deal-breakers, it makes sense for the agent to include them in their posted criteria.

    When I am an imaginary agent I am very upfront about my anti-elf sentiments.
     
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  3. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    When I'm an imaginary agent I don't post any guidelines, just my star sign. If it's meant to be, it's meant to be.
     
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  4. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    ...yeah? The agent is choosing not to "taste" the books that don't fulfill the test. Just as you can choose not to "taste" the non-organic food.

    And, per your insistence that he/she should advertise their requirement, they did. So...
     
  5. cutecat22

    cutecat22 The Strange One Contributor

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    Aye.

    Sounds like I've gone around in a complete circle.
     
  6. cutecat22

    cutecat22 The Strange One Contributor

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    Yes. I'm a 43 year old married woman with devil spawn for kids.

    My avatar is actually my crush.
     
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  7. cutecat22

    cutecat22 The Strange One Contributor

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    :superagree:
     
  8. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    Yes, that's what was so disturbing about what the Bechdel test revealed.

    I don't think it needs to guide any single work, but it opens your eyes to some things about how women are portrayed in the media and I think awareness motivates some of us to write better female characters.
     
  9. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    This is interesting because the assumption is no women were important in your world. This is the same problem that has been noted about history in general. Historians tend to cover leaders, wars, industrial revolution, and so on that were male dominated aspects of the past.

    But if you think about it, women's roles and stories in history are also interesting but rarely chosen to document. Pioneer women for example, where's their history in your child's history book? What were the women doing when wars raged? A lot actually. But you wouldn't know that because historians have more often written about what the men were doing.

    It's how women become unimportant and invisible. Not because they weren't there, but because men have typically written the history books.

    (Not to say that isn't changing because it is as well as, there are always exceptions.)
     
  10. Simpson17866

    Simpson17866 Contributor Contributor

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    Non-Challenge Accepted!

    ... Seriously, this is a stupidly easy test to pass. I'm almost 14k words into my first publishable novel, and I've already passed the test once, and I would be very surprised if I don't pass a bunch more times before I'm finished. In my Doctor Who fanfiction, I did even better by passing the test in the first chapter. In my (as yet unpublished) horror work, I pass the test in both of the stories that have 5000 words each and only fail in the one that's 3500 words.
     
  11. Shattered Shields

    Shattered Shields Gratsa!

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    Personally I don't like the damsel in distress since it's so overdone. It's old, it's boring, it's predictable. I've played enough Mario to know how exactly every D in D turns out. And Zelda, and there was Alyx getting captured in Half-Life Two, but she was no damsel. Honestly I'm tired of women getting captured and held hostage, it's a faded, jaded gimmick. If Princess Peach whipped out a shotgun and blasted Bowser's face off, that I would enjoy.

    And the Bechdel test..... eh, it's not that important. As others have so aptly said, it was designed for a singular purpose, and not to be a rule of thumb. If you like to think it's an absurdity, then you can do that, go ahead, I'm not going to stop anyone from thinking the way they want to think.

    But mentioning Peach again, we never really know anything about her other than the two following things.
    -She's pretty, as girly as can be, and is incredibly useless. Doesn't fight, doesn't do anything. All she does is simper in the most- obnoxious voice.
    -You have to swoop her from the clutches of some bad guy.

    Granted, it's a 2D game, really isn't something you'd find great time for character development in, but theres a reason Peach is so reviled. Theres a reason why gamers hate escort missions, and theres a reason why I could not watch Red 2.

    Quite right. The movies and the stories may tell of the main man killing the bastard enemy with long, warlike blasts from his machine gun, but he would be fighting with his entrenchment tool if Rosie hadn't made those bullets in the factory on the Home Front.
     
  12. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    Example: Canadian television series Bomb Girls.
     
  13. zoupskim

    zoupskim Contributor Contributor

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    I wonder how many people will get banned over the course of this thread.
     
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  14. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    So far I can't see any remotely ban worthy offenses.
     
  15. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    I absolutely love The Bletchley Circle series about British females [who had been] code breakers during the war.
     
    Last edited: Jul 11, 2016
  16. Oscar Leigh

    Oscar Leigh Contributor Contributor

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    *After the war. But yes. Great show.
     
  17. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    :confused:
     
  18. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    Ooops, my bad. I meant that had been code breakers and continued using those skills after the war.
     
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  19. Oscar Leigh

    Oscar Leigh Contributor Contributor

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    I think he's reacting to the incredibly long slightly rambly back-and-forth discussion that just happened. It did feel kind of like other discussions that went bad, although people remained civil.
     
  20. izzybot

    izzybot (unspecified) Contributor

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    I was offline over the weekend and when I came back to see that this thread had been posted last night and already had six pages, I honestly expected it to be much worse. Surprised by how civil everyone's been, actually.

    (I don't really have anything relevant to the OP to say that hasn't been mentioned the death already, just wanted to pop in and say good job staying on topic and polite, you-all.)
     
  21. zoupskim

    zoupskim Contributor Contributor

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    I did not mean to seem trollish. I can have the mind of a parrot sometimes.

    I went over my current WIP using these criteria and it passed, although my cast is pretty diverse genderwise so MaMo was easy. However, I was surpised, despite it being very early, how insignificant the conversation between the two women was for BT. One basically points out how a vehicle has a speaker attached, and the other complains. That's pretty much it. The next woman to woman talk doesn't happen until halfway into the story.
     
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  22. Sifunkle

    Sifunkle Dis Member

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    *Nerd alert*
    The diagnostic power of a test can be assessed in several ways. Two common indices are sensitivity and specificity. A sensitive test has a strong ability to diagnose true positives as positive (i.e. to avoid false negatives; type II error) - e.g. someone genuinely has HIV and is diagnosed as HIV positive. A specific test has strong ability to identify true negatives as such (i.e. to avoid false positives; type I error) - e.g. few people are diagnosed as HIV positive when they don't have the virus. An ideal test has both 100% sensitivity and specificity, but in practice that's ~impossible: usually maximising one compromises the other, like a see-saw. Lots of tests also have a detection limit (actually a type of sensitivity... it gets complicated) - the smallest level of x that the test can reliably detect (for many purposes, the lower the better) - which leads to the idea that sensitivity and specificity can vary depending on the amount of x that is present.

    As I see it, the Bechdel test was devised as a specific test - stories that genuinely have little female representation are unlikely to have a conversation between 2 female characters and will be considered 'negative'. The 'Bechdel conversation' is such a minimal criterion that the test seems to have a low detection limit, so is quite sensitive when female representation is present at low level.

    The two main criticisms of the Bechdel test seem to be that:
    1. It isn't sensitive enough for high level female representation: works with strong female characters are false negatives if there is no Bechdel conversation.
    2. Its sensitivity to low level female representation may reinforce a feeble status quo: a single Bechdel conversation doesn't actually mean much.
    Hence the creation of the Mako Mori test, which seems to have been named after a strong female character in a film that lacked a Bechdel conversation (Pacific Rim - I haven't seen it, so won't comment). This test seems much more sensitive to high level female representation (a strong female character is likely to have her own narrative arc), and could be considered more specific in ruling out works that have a token Bechdel conversation but little else (but if you accept a Bechdel conversation as adequate, that would be interpreted as poor sensitivity due to a poor detection limit...). However, it may lack specificity for high level female representation (e.g. a horribly misogynistic narrative arc could be a false positive - although they've tried to avoid this by stipulating that the arc not involve supporting a man).

    The problem with all this is that to actually measure a test's sensitivity and specificity, you need a means of finding out (or at least estimating) the number of true positives and negatives out there (other than using the test itself). That's fine for objective things where you can find that information out if you put the effort in, but less useful here as literature and ethics are both highly subjective. What counts as female representation? By whose standards?

    Congratulations to anyone who bothered reading all that. The take-home messages really just reinforce what others have already said, but at least I found an excuse to bore everyone with statistics:
    • No test is perfect. A single test will always fail some individual cases (whether positively or negatively), but will reveal an accurate overall trend. If you want accurate information on an individual case, use an array of tests.
    • Use a test that suits your purpose. What kind of information are you trying to gather? What level of female representation would you find adequate? How much does a false positive matter compared to a false negative?
     
    Last edited: Jul 11, 2016
  23. Oscar Leigh

    Oscar Leigh Contributor Contributor

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    Oh no, I wasn't accusing you of being trollish.
     
  24. Oscar Leigh

    Oscar Leigh Contributor Contributor

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    :love::love::love:
     
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  25. Laurin Kelly

    Laurin Kelly Contributor Contributor

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    I was going to post this exact sentiment!

    My completed novel passes both of these tests, but the novella I recently submitted for publication and my half finished second novel don't. Definitely gives me something to chew on...
     
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