The D.C I have come to know is the tamest place in the country(outside of the traffic of course), where people will wait 45 minutes on line in whole foods in their suits so they can stuff their reusable shopping bags with overpriced products and making eye contact with a stranger is considered risqué.
Which is funny - because that's not the town I know. Actually it kind of is "DC", but it's not "The Hill." "The Hill" is a place full of type-A, power-drunk people who were probably jocks or cheerleaders in high school and are still ladder climbing (Fun fact - there are two people from my Colorado high-school now working on "The Hill" - nerdy me and the captain of the cheerleading squad.) It's "Hollywood for Nerds", calibrated to benefit the egomaniacal, and the type of place where you occasionally have to tell people not to include headshots on their resumes. You have to wear a suit every day - man or woman - and that means fashion-wars, every day, both sexes, regardless of sexual orientation. If you want to see a bunch of straight, self-styled manly-men primping with their pinstripe suits and bow-ties, come to "The Hill" (always the freaking bowties...seriously guys...it doesn't make you look smart, it's a big flashing neon sign that says "A--HOLE" in all-caps). "The Hill" is the place where power and sex co-mingle readily - usually dirty old men looking for action and too many young women (or young gay men) looking to use it as currency. It's the place where people who work just outside it (me), snicker at the actual congressional offices for always hiring "skinterns" (you know - the blonde college girl in the short skirt who might not be all that competent but makes nice office decor for whatever dirty old fool hired her). And, of course, it's the type of place where you learn that the people who bomb out of office in sex scandals are the ones stupid enough to get caught, the tip of a much larger and more twisted iceberg.
Addressing the thread question and OP from the real-world ethics perspective I suspect it was asked from (meaning I'm not considering the merit of the actual story, but what it contributes to society)... I suppose it depends on whether you believe past wrongs are ironed out by making the pendulum swing back the other way, or by stopping its swing altogether. I think people vary in their opinions on this. I doubt many would be offended by a book where men get the raw deal for once, but then, everything starts with some kind of precedent...
Are you joking in this post? Somehow "janitors" in particular makes me suspect that you are, given the lack of a dynamic literary tradition of janitor-centered drama. But I'm going to temporarily assume that you're not. The police, the military, politics, security guards, janitors, and the homeless population all involve women. I suspect that firefighting and construction do as well, but I'd have to research that. In real life women don't simply revolve around men and not talk about anything else ever. But many, many pieces of fiction fail the Bechdel test; they either lack female characters, or those female characters are entirely focused on men. Why are you more indignant about failing the reverse Bechdel test, than about failing the Bechdel test?
I'm saying / thinking this all the time. All the goddamn time. I have appreciated your prose in this thread, Mr Lemming. No idea what Breschel's thingy has to do with anything, but it sure sounded complicated. Sounds like you're pulling it off well enough. Alas my first novel attempt is going to be very male-centric (pro sport), but perhaps I'll consider the ramifications for my dream project. If @jannert ever deigns to beta read something I am writing and gives it that much praise I'll be over the moon.
I work in construction. 30% of my company's workforce are female. Many of us are in non-technical roles like finance, HR and marketing, but a good chunk are surveyors, project managers and other technical disciplines. There are certainly projects where all the big players are female.
Haha - that's not ever the worst example of that particular type of male-vs-male miscommunication I ever had. The worst one was a few years back, leaving networking happy hour (insert DC joke here) with a buddy of mine, after the two of us had finished a cordial four-way conversation involving ourselves and two young ladies. I hadn't caught both of their names (I still only remember one of their names, so I'll use stand-in names) and somehow the conversation came up as we were walking back to the Metro. Buddy: "So Kate said..." Me: "Wait, which one was Kate?" Buddy: "The hot one" Me: "Which one was that?" *I'm confused at this point because I thought "the hot one" had a different name* Buddy: "You know, the hot one." Me: "Like I said. WHICH. ONE?" Buddy: "Oh, the short one with curly hair." Me: "That explains it. I liked the other one." (In which we established that he was going for the chatty/bubbly one who was doing standard bar-talk, while I was drooling over the brainy one who wouldn't stop talking about foreign policy and international development.)
Wow - now there would be a setting....especially seeing as we're talking about gender representation, it would be hilarious to see a semi-serious Shonda Rimes-style whos-screwing-who ensemble drama set among the janitorial and cleaning staff at a huge office building. Now we just have to figure out how to get Katherine Heigl to play a down-on-her-luck recently-graduated PhD who can't find anyone willing to hire an entry level employee with a doctorate in Medieval Arabian History, and ends up scrubbing toilets to make ends meet.
As much as I generally get bored to bleeding tears of Identity Politics, especially now that 'Gender Studies' is an actual thing you can get a degree in, I actually think the bechdel test and the reverse are interesting ways to think about how other people might see your work. Which is very important for a writer, whatever you are writing.
I'm not sure if you need to make your every character measure up to some test or its reverse that really tell nothing about the quality of the work it's applied to, and at least I tend to care more about that, as in, how the story affects me, whether I find myself interested in the characters and if they're reletable, and whether or not the plot is riveting. I'm not, in general, very interested in the sexes of the characters as much as I'm in their personalities, although I guess I do tend to prefer books with male protagonists. Kick-ass heroines often irritate me 'cause I get jealous of their beauty, mad skills, and the never-ending romantic attention they get from hot male side characters (just kidding ). It's a slippery slope to start tweaking characters based on a fairly simplistic test, or on the expectations of the tumblr generation. You probably want to tell the stories of people you find interesting, not tailor them to please someone else. So unless you truly feel like your male characters could be different, that they would actually talk about something else in the scenes (I mean, they talk about stuff you consider relevant, right? Say you want to use diaologue to communicate sexual tension. You probably write it in a way that conveys that and steer clear of topics that'd ruin it), this isn't really problem, afaic. I doubt strong men are underrepresented in fiction. Sure, there are loads of wafer thin characterizations out there that reinforce gender stereotypes (men have to be this or that to be "real" men), but I don't think you're in any way obligated to change things to "even the scales", plus, you probably aren't reinforcing stereotypes. I can't tell though 'cause I haven't been able to sneak into a men-only space so as to eavesdrop what guys are really talking about there.
I can't help but wonder where this idea that men, even strong men, have to be stoic, unemotional, and uncomfortable with talking about feelings and sex and nice things came from.
I missed "characters don't pass". The Bechdel test, IMO, has essentially no significance when it's applied to an individual character--that's just too fine-grained. It has limited significance when it's a applied to a single fictional work. The Bechdel test's significance is statistical.
