gryphonsegg

I know I shouldn't get this worked up over somebody's stupid AU fanfic, but . . .
( cut for feminist nerdrage )

It has come to my attention that some people on this very internet are misusing the Bechdel-Wallace test to an egregious degree. Specifically, they have been asserting that anything that clears this very low bar is a net good for "female representation in media," even if the thing in question is Oz: The Great and Powerful or A Game of Thrones. Also, they've been arguing that anything that fails this one test-- such as Pacific Rim--is therefore more sexist than anything that passes-- such as the Star Trek reboot movie, which passed on a technicality because of a single conversation during which both women were in their underwear and a guy whom one of them didn't know was there was watching them from under a bed.

So first of all, I'd like remind anyone who happens to read this that the Bechdel-Wallace test was not intended to be used by all feminists everywhere as a test of the definitive test of the goodness of any one movie. The comic in which it first appeared was pointing out how skewed the movie industry as whole is, when it's hard to think of many movies that pass this test. Part of the point is that passing it should be really, really easy and not a big deal and not necessarily an indication that the movie is pro-feminist or portrays women well. After all, you could have a really sexist story in which the women spend all their time together complimenting each others outfits and swapping recipes and hair styling tips. It's messed up that, in a society where women are slightly more than half the population, most movies can't even manage that. On the other side of same coin, an individual movie can fail the Bechdel-Wallace test without being anti-feminist or a bad movie in general. There are some settings in which an all-male or heavily male-skewed cast would be the only logical or historically accurate way to go. The problems are that 1) so very many casts are more male-skewed than they logically should be, 2) we don't see an equally large number of movies that have female-skewed casts getting made, and 3) movies that do have multiple female characters very often portray them as revolving entirely around the male characters instead of being interesting and important in themselves.

Next, I'd like to propose a multilayered system for discussing how female characters are portrayed in movies and other narrative media. This system would have multiple "tests." Passing or failing any one of them doesn't tell you much about the quality of an individual story (although it's perfectly reasonable for any individual person to decide that she's sick and tired of one kind of "fail" and won't consume any more movies/books/etc. that fail that test). But when the scores start adding up, things get interesting. Here are the tests I find useful, with suggested names:

Bechdel-Wallace test, aka, Mo's Movie Measure: I don't believe in fixing what's not broken, so we'll start with the original. The story passes if it has two or more named female characters who talk to each other about something other than man.

Gail Simone test, aka the refrigerator test: Another well-established test, this one comes from the world of superhero comics. A storyline fails the simple version if it shows a female character getting murdered, raped, or de-powered. A more sophisticated version that makes allowances for more grim'n'gritty storylines declares a complete fail only if the main narrative impact of the bad thing happening to a female character is that it makes a male character distraught and vengeful. My preference is to declare a simple fail for de-powering, sexual assault, or murder (not counting battles) of a female character and double or compound fail for the event being framed in terms of its emotional impact on a male character.

Takeuchi test: A newly formulated standard named in honor of the creator of Sailor Moon, the Takeuchi test is more about how a female character's importance to the "A plot" of a story. A manga, movie, novel, etc. pass if a female character actively contributes to the resolution of the problem around which the story revolves. In an action movie, this might mean striking a crucial blow in battle. In other contexts, it could mean solving a crime or a scientific problem or doing any number of other things. The point is that a female character decides to take action and uses her skills; being mind-controlled into fighting, saying something silly that causes a smarter character to think of the right answer, and inspiring a man to take action don't count. It's also important that female character's action actually does resolve or help resolve the main plot crisis; this test is about taking female characters out of the "nice but not that important subplot in a male-centric story" cage. For each female character who actively contributes to the resolution, the Takeuchi score increases.

Heinlein test: You've come a long way, baby. In the so-called golden age of science fiction, writers often portrayed women as flighty, frivolous, illogical, and unimaginative if they bothered to portray women at all. Robert Heinlein didn't see the appeal of that. He liked his women intelligent, athletic, and ultra-competent, as well as drop-dead gorgeous and up for any sexual experience he cared to imagine. Unfortunately, a lot of SF dudes haven't moved on from Heinlein-inspired views of women, and a lot of women in fandom accept this as the best we're going to get. A book, TV series, or movie might have several named female characters who all have military rank and hard science degrees, but it can still be annoying to women and harmful to girls if it sends the message that a woman's looks and sexual availability are more important than her skills. To pass the Heinlein test, it must have at least one major female character who is not gratuitously shown undressing or otherwise used for fan service, whose looks are irrelevant to her role in the story (so "she uses her sex appeal to manipulate the good/bad guys" doesn't rate a pass), whose character development is not defined by sex, and who is not disparaged for being unsexy by the narrative.

I'm at a really weird place in my life right now. My career is moving forward, and I feel more mentally healthy and stable than ever before, but I'm not making friends in my new town (is it still new by the end of my second semester?) as easily as I did last time around. So I could really go for some nerd bonding, even if it's only online, just get some genuine, unforced social contact. At the same time, I'm gearing up for a period of high activity/stress related to SCIENCE!, and I really miss having fandom nonsense to dive into between bouts of Serious Business to keep different parts of my mind active. But the fandom landscape has changed, and nearly everything I'm interesting in fangirling over falls into one of more of the following categories: obscure, dead, popular with people who are so much younger than me that I feel acutely uncomfortable about the existence of anything that's not totally G-rated, or awash in tropes I absolutely cannot stand for one more bloody prompt, including AUs based on Supernatural and crossovers with Supernatural and (ugh!) the increasingly ubiquitous "omegaverse" or "A/B/O dynamics" AUs. Yes, I'm kink-shaming. Hard.

I really, really miss being in an active fandom that based on a source text I like. Yeah, part of my problem is that I'm just getting older and naturally moving from "lol, fifteen-year-olds writing bad smut, I'm so glad that I was soooooo much more mature when I was their age and didn't have internet access!" to "Fifteen-year-olds reading smut? But they'll internalize damaging messages! They're too young for their imaginary boyfriends! Think of the children! And eat your vegetables or you'll get scurvy!" Meanwhile, older fans have moved on from where we were back then, but I seem to have moved in very different directions than most older fans. I've become increasingly sensitive about misogynistic portrayals of female characters and sexual abuse and over-the-top gross-out violence and the glamorization of allegedly sociopathic characters and the the glorification of arrogant, snarky dudes who deserve to get away murder because they're sooooo much smarter than everyone else. But when I look at what's popular on the internet now, I get a sense that online fandom as a whole has either stayed the same or gotten more desensitized to those things. So I'm the weird dumpy grown woman wandering around the YA section in search of something "safe" to read while most of the grown-ups are watching Game of Thrones and Hannibal.

A little background: Years and years ago, a very long time indeed by internet standards, I read the book Les Miserables and frequented a message board (remember those?) for fans of the book. I never saw the musical because I lived way out in the middle of nowhere until such as I had moved onto other fandoms. I remember there being a great deal "they're so dumb and we're so superior" attitude toward fans of "Eppie Sue"-- that is, musical-first and musical-only fans who over-identified with Eponine and used her as their self-insert in fan fiction. So I was aware that rabid Eponine fangirls and Eponine/Marius shippers existed, but I didn't understand why anyone would form that particular fannish fixation. I didn't get into griping about them too much unless they crossed the line into Cosette-bashing, but their preferences made no sense to me. I mean, why would anyone want to be Eponine? People who had seen the musical told me that musical!Eponine and musical!Marius were actually friends instead of a stalker and a guy who pities her a little and is slightly creeped out by her when he bothers to notice her at all. But still, who would want to be Eponine or think Marius was such a great catch?

Now that I've seen the movie, it's not so baffling anymore, mainly because Marius is not a giant tool there like he is in the book. Also, this version of Eponine seems a lot less beaten down than book!Eponine. Obviously, she's still poor and her parents are still awful, but she's more spirited and less resigned to a life of misery. I think I can understand why a teenager with a crush on a friend who likes someone richer/more popular/generally luckier would get invested in Eponine now, especially if they happened to see a production with a handsome actor playing Marius.

Hey, if anybody is still keeping up with this journal, what are your thoughts on gendering robot/AI characters? The practice of assigning social genders to characters who don't have sexes in the biological sense has been on my mind lately. Among other things, I'm trying to sort out how the category of "robots that humans prefer to think of as girls" fits alongside the category of "female characters." I find that I tend to like "girl robot" characters in media intended for younger audiences but usually find their portrayal in media intended for adults extremely unsettling and discouraging because works written for mature audiences so often use the "robot that looks like a woman=sexbot" trope. Also, children's stories seem to be more likely to have a "girl robot" interacting with other robots or a varied mix of creatures, whereas stories for older audiences are more likely to make her half of a dyad with a human man, which brings in some weird politics. I'm flipping through the card catalog of my memory, looking for girl robots that were a) created by women for b) an adult audience, and all the examples I can come up with were blatantly created to critique or express frustration with RL exploitation and/or the popularity of the concept of the robotic woman as sexual and domestic servant.

Name a fandom, and I'll tell you one of my unpopular opinions about it.

I've had a stressful couple of days making arrangements for a new apartment in the same town as my new university, but I finally got everything done. Now I just have to wait and clean. The thing I'm looking forward to most is having a bigger bed. I roll in my sleep too much.

In other news, I'm on tumblr at last. It makes finding fan art much easier, and there are some people posting fic too, but I think I still prefer the journal format for my own fic and for serious meta posts. I like to have discussion in the comments.

I have fan bracelets finished for Annie and Katniss. I started one for Rue, but my eyes decided they'd had enough for the day, so I'm planning to finish that one this coming week. That's the good news.

The bad news is that the fandom is racefailing again. Remember the racefail from the first movie, when Katniss and Prim and their father, and the rest of the people from the Seam by extension, couldn't be part Native American because they had light-colored eyes and Prim had blond hair like her mother? And Cinna couldn't be black because he had green eyes? And Rue couldn't be black because she reminded Katniss of Prim, even though the text specified that Rue's coloring was dark? And no characters could be Asian because the West Coast fell into the ocean and it is apparently impossible for Asian people to live anywhere else in North America? Bad times! Also, does anyone remember that I'd always pictured the people from District 4 as Creole or otherwise multiracial but resigned myself to seeing them played by white people in the movie because of the whitewashing of the Seam and the fan outrage over that not being enough whitewashing for some people? Well, some of the non-failing fans have started campaigning for a biracial actor with stunning green eyes to play Finnick. This guy fits the description amazingly well. And the racefailers insist that he can't play Finnick because . . . well, because they have re-written Finnick's description in their own minds to change "sea green" eyes to blue and "bronze" hair to "blond" or "bright red" and skin described as "tan" and "golden" to "tanned" or "pale" or in at least one case "freckled." Also, District 4 people apparently have to be Irish because their names sound Irish, and they can't possibly be less than 100% pure Irish even though the author herself stated that everybody is mixed by today's standards and non-Irish people never get named Annie or Margaret. Ugh! This is getting to be worse than the Last Airbender nonsense for revealing white US fans' willful obtuseness about defaulting to white.

Anyway, I need to concentrate on the fact that Mags, whom I do not and never did imagine to be white, will have to be in the second movie. FUCK YEAH, MAGS!!!

I had another feminist click moment this morning, and it helped me articulate one of the things I find immensely frustrating about the recurring debates over female characters in fandom, especially the ones that center on labeling certain female characters as "feminine" or "girly-girls" and labeling others as "unfeminine," "rejecting or hiding their femininity," or "men with breasts." One of the baseline assumptions that both of the two most vocal sides of the debate start from is that a fixation on fashion and make-up is inherently feminine, girly, and womanly and that a female character who doesn't care about or take pleasure in playing with fashionable clothes, accessories, and cosmetics is more like a guy and more distanced from typical women and their concerns than a female character who does. And I just realized that I fundamentally disagree with that assumption.

Look at world history. There have been many, many times and places-- even within modern European history!-- in which men were just as fashion-conscious as women. There have been--and in some places still are--cultures in which both men and women use make-up and other cultures in which neither men nor women do that. There have even been times in the not-so-distant past when white Americans and Europeans considered wearing make-up improper for "good" women. There have been and still are some non-Western cultures in which it's the men who use cosmetics and elaborate clothes and accessories to attract attention to their appearance, while the women's traditional dress and grooming styles are more practical and low-key. The emergence of the current Western popular gender schema, in which women are highly ornamental and men are much less so or not at all, emerged along with certain shifts in economic structure and cultural values, including women's work being disappeared from public view so that married women were increasingly regarded as ornaments and economic drains to their husbands rather than household managers and economic assets, and fashion being considered less a luxury that upper class people enjoyed and more a waste of time that frivolous people enjoyed.

So the conversations I'm seeing now about whether certain characters don't get enough respect because they're feminine, where feminine is defined as highly focused on and invested in fashion and make-up, are really bugging me. I mean, I used to be uncomfortable with those kinds of conversations because I could see that both sides had some good points. But now it has become really clear to me that the very terms of debate are more full of problems than I had consciously recognized. In addition to the issues that are entirely about gender in and of itself, it also bothers me that these conversations completely erase the matters of class and poverty. All of this really settled for me while I was thinking about recent commentary on The Hunger Games, in which people asserted that the series is anti-femininity because it's about people who are too poor to pursue fashion as an end in itself rebelling against an oppressor class that revels in ever-changing fashions because they have the time and material resources to do so thanks to a sociopolitical structure that takes away resources produced by the former group. Supposedly, this valorizes the main character's so-called rejection of femininity (she was too busy keeping her little sister from starving to death to care about clothes and make-up) and disparages "girly things" (literally defined as "fashion and make-up") and the people who like them. Way to completely ignore all the themes, especially the entire issue of poverty and exploitation on which the whole story hangs.