Tag Archives: Alison Bechdel

April 3, 2013 · 10:22 pm

If women don’t talk about men all the time, what do we talk about?

Remember the Bechdel Test? It’s that set of three rules that helps determine the presence of women in TV and movies? Rule 3 stipulates that two women must discuss something other than a man. Back when I wrote that overview, some hilarious internet denizen wrote back, “but women do mostly talk about men…” Hardee har har. Bro, I think you’ve been watching a little too much SATC.

Though his joke was clearly stupid, it did make me wonder how much of what I discuss with my girlfriends has to do with dating, men, sex, etc. We like data and graphs around here, so we did a little experiment. My best friend and I gchat much of the day most days. Although our gchats are in no way a comprehensive view of communication (lacking face-to-face, phone, text, and email), there’s no reason to think they aren’t a reasonable proxy for our typical patterns of communication.

I went through and tagged two weeks worth of gchats with their subject matter and the amount of time devoted to each item. Then, I graphed that as a ratio of the whole. Bottom line: Gentlemen, we hardly talked about you at all. 

Screenshot_4_3_13_4_44_PM

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February 21, 2013 · 3:46 am

Bechdel 101

alisonanddrawingI was out to dinner last week with two new friends who are awesome, smart, talented, progressive in-the-know feminist ladies. Like seriously, they are rock stars. We were talking politics and media, gender studies and feminism (you know, the $1 taco usual), and I mentioned the Bechdel Test. In response, I got blank stares. It was a great reminder that even in a community where we know our values align so well, there are often tools and memes, instruments and concepts that don’t permeate from group to group.

I’ve written about the Bechdel Test before, but I think it’s worth recapping in honor of the upcoming Oscars. This is one of those “lightbulb” moments in my own education, one of those ideas that, once it had been gifted to me, permanently colored everything I watch. For you visual learners, Anita Sarkeesian at Feminist Frequency has a great overview, but here’s mine:

History Lesson: From 1983 to 2008 Alison Bechdel wrote a comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For that followed an array of queer characters through twenty-five years of relationship drama, parenting, and political upheaval. In one panel of a 1985 DTWOF, a character created a “rule” to gauge gender bias in movies. The rule has three parts:

1. There have to be two female characters with names

2. They have to talk to each other…

3. About something other than a man.

That is an offensively low bar. It doesn’t say anything about how women are portrayed in film, it just tests the most basic presence of ladies on screen. Are they there? Do they have a teensy, tiny bit of substance (i.e. names?). Do they have some non-man related agency? The bar is so low, we should all be shocked when a film doesn’t pass it, and yet, here are a few 2012 movies that don’t pass: Battleship, The Avengers, The Campaign, The Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit, Jack Reacher, Life of Pi…

Putting It Into Practice: Take Lincoln, for example. The only conversation between women in this movie is a brief comment by Mary Todd Lincoln to her companion Elizabeth Keckley, but the comment is only about Representative Stevens’ speech. In other words, they’re talking about a man.

Another Oscar nominee, Django Unchained, also fails the test. The primary female character, Kerry Washington, never speaks substantially with any of the other minor female characters.

Remember, the point with the Bechdel Test is not to create some sort of false parity just for the sake of parity. Lincoln and Django are both set in male-dominated environments (Congress and the American West, respectively). You don’t fake female Congresswomen or add a token lady bounty hunter, that’s not the point. The point is that the female characters are not decoration, are not foils or objects. They have agency, autonomy, and lives that clearly exist independently from the male characters on screen. When the women exist only as backboards for male characters to react to, use, rescue, lust after, or discuss, they are not real characters; they are props.

The Bechdel Test doesn’t check for feminism in movies, or equality, or progressive values. It doesn’t ensure that women are treated well, or fairly, only that they are treated as human at all. Why is this important? Half of humankind is female, but the stories that get told (the movies that get made, etc) are overwhelmingly male in both subject and execution. There is nothing wrong with male-dominated movies (many of them are great films), but there is something wrong with a pattern of creative output that ignores female stories or female voices.

Want to try? Start applying the Bechdel Test to everything you watch (television and movies). You may find some things that pass on a technicality, but the exercise of asking yourself these questions is valuable in and of itself.

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January 8, 2013 · 8:27 pm

Why You Should Watch That Show with the Terrible Name

jules

Tonight is the return of Cougar Town and it will be glorious. How much have you missed Dime-Eyes, Jelly, Jules, Trav, and the Robert “Bobby” Cobb? Penny can? Army Boyfriend Wade? Tom! Big Carl! The nice guy and the “other one!” Baby Stan! God, so many good friends that I just want to snuggle up with forever and ever.

Wait, you mean you weren’t watching Cougar Town? Seriously? Yes, I know it has a stupid name that even its own writers hate, and yes, I know the first seven episodes are terrible, horrible, no-good flailing attempts at comedy. I grant you all that, but will you pretty please just tune in already?

Cougar Town is one of the most delightful examples in my absolute favorite television genre, Mixed Groups Sitting and Talking, zanier than Friends, less gimmicky than HIMYM, slightly more stable than Happy Endings, and more generationally diverse than New Girl. And it is absolutely drenched in wine.

If that’s not enough for you, Cougar Town passes the Bechdel test with flying colors, and it even scores highly on my own overwrought, overly complicated rubric for determining whether a show is feminist or not. Behold:

1. Marriage and Babies? The main character, Jules, is 41 when the show starts. While her attempts at romance are a plot point, they are not the plot point. Even for the younger character (Lauri), her trajectory is about figuring out what she wants in life (she starts a new business at the end of season 3), and less about some desperate or overwhelming urge to partner.

2. Women like sex too? Check! My favorite scene is when Lauri (late 20s) and Ellie (early 40s) try to find a sexual partner they’ve shared. Jules’ teenage son, Travis, matches up their respective lists to find a winner. “There are a LOT of names on these lists,” he says, and the two women high five.

3. Body beautiful? As important to me as this component of feminist-y media is, it’s such a rare find that I’m considering removing it from the list altogether. I guess I just have to acquiesce to the fact that 95% of bodies on television are going to be thin, blonde, and mostly white. On the other hand, on CT, you do get Andy (short, bald, pudgy, hairy), and yet all the women fit a very narrow version of beauty. That doesn’t seem quite fair….

4. Platonic Boy Girl Friendships? Cougar Town always wins big when it relies on the less frequent cross-gender friend pairs. There are some great moments between Ellie and Bobby and even better ones between Andy and Lauri. Plus, Lauri and Grayson sleep together and then manage to maintain a sweet, supportive friendship that isn’t tainted by their past shenanigans.

5. Girls that don’t talk about boys. Ellie, Jules and Lauri do spend a lot of time talking about boys (tennis pros, Abercrombie models, Zac Efron, and more), but they also talk about Lauri’s relationship with her mom, how Jules and Ellie’s parenting styles have differed, relationships with therapists, their aging bodies (but like… come on, have you seen Courtney Cox?), and Ellie’s claustrophobia as a stay-at-home mom.

6. People want different things? This metric is about recognizing that men aren’t just after sex and women aren’t just after love and Cougar Town nails it. People are complicated. Jules writes Grayson off as a player who left his wife to date younger women, and comes to find out she left him because he wanted children and she didn’t. The original (flawed) premise of CT was the very exploration of a woman pursuing sex for the sake of it. It didn’t work, but the conversations that continued are really, really good.

7. Some women are bitches, some men are douches ≠ Battle of the Sexes: Sometimes people behave badly, but their behavior isn’t tied to men being dicks and women being bitches. Ellie is the closest to a caricature of a bitch, but over the last few seasons her role in the group has gotten more and more delightfully complicated.

8. Feminism isn’t a dirty word. Not sure that Cougar Town ever explicitly brings up the F word (correct me if I’m wrong!) but I would argue that the show addresses a lot of the big third wave questions (slut-shaming, double-standards, pressure to partner, body-snarking, SAHM vs. working mom) with wit and with a progressive-ish attitude.

9. Male Gaze? CT is obsessed with bodies, to be sure: Grayson’s waxed chest, Lauri’s boobs, Travis’ insecurity about his physique, the very opening sequence of the series (Jules pinching her underarms), but the camera isn’t sexist. It doesn’t linger on women’s bodies, it doesn’t pan up and down, it doesn’t encapsulate the male gaze.

This is all beside the point (I mean, not really, but kind of…). Cougar Town is fucking hilarious. It’s one of those shows that rewards your for your loyalty by echoing past gags, trusting you to remember the inside jokes, and having characters evolve in ways that only make sense–but they do make perfect sense!–if you’ve been following along. So start with season 1, but know that the first seven will be kind of janky, and just stick with it. I promise it’s worth it in the end.

Related Post: Does The Good Wife out-feminist Parks and Rec?

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December 14, 2012 · 9:33 pm

Some Facts About My Reading Habits

It’s that time of year for Best Of lists, some which I’ll be doing later this month. The ones that always cause me anxiety are the book lists, because they force me to admit that I will never, no matter how hard I try, read all of the things worthy of being read. It’s some nerd version of FOMO, I think, and it makes me hyperventilate with literary desire.

This is not going to read a list of the best things I read this year, but for what it’s worth, my favorites were The Art of Fielding (Chad Harbach), Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell), The Tiger’s Wife (Tea Obreht), The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (Alison Bechdel), and Drown (Junot Diaz). Obviously, most of these weren’t even written this year, that’s how much I can’t keep up.

Instead of a straight-up list, I’d like to take the opportunity to turn a critical, data-driven eye on my own reading habits (woooo! data!) Who do I read? Who don’t I read? We could get real specific, but here’s how it breaks down in broad categories for my thus-far-in-2012 reading list:

Gender Books

Race Books

A few other notes:

15% of the authors I read this year are openly queer

48% are under 50, 44% are over 50, 8% are dead

23% were not born in the United States

Perhaps most surprising to me, 55% of what I read this year was non-fiction, with about half of that being straight-up memoir. Who’d have thought?

The point of anything like this (whether it’s analyzing women in the boardroom data or percentage of black women on television) is not to just through some charts up and be all “BOOM! DATA!” The point is take a closer look at our sources of information. For me, much of my perspective on the world comes from what I read (both on and off the internet). If everything I read is white and straight, well, I think it’s safe to say I’m limiting myself.

That said, I’m pretty happy with this, though perhaps the non-white section of my reading list could be beefed up a bit. That’s a sourcing problem as much as anything else, right? Where do I get my recommendations? Book blogs (mostly by white people), my bookish friends (most of whom are white), and book reviews (mostly by white reporters about white authors). So…. who’s got some recommendations for me?

Related Post: The Vida Method of analyzing gender bias in the media

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May 17, 2012 · 8:04 pm

Literary Geek-Out: Bechdel

Last night I went to a reading by Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist, creator of comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, author of Fun Home (nominated for the National Book Critics Award), and her new memoir, Are You My Mother?

Readings by graphic artists are kind of challenging, since much is said with picture instead of text, and Bechdel’s style also draws on large passages of other people’s text (in this case, Virginia Woolf and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott). It’s particularly hard when there are mega pillars scattered throughout the space, requiring much craning of necks, and delayed ooohs and aahs as people read the satisfying end of a speech bubble.

Craning of necks and such

I feel like the act of reading graphic novels is particularly personal, more so than the reading of an average book. Everyone has a methodology and order in which they approach the lay-out of text and images, lingering over one or the other, or jumping back and forth. Me, I read the text first, then take in the picture, then try to zoom out and sync them up as a story-telling unit in my brain.

My favorite part of Alison’s presentation was the detail she went into on her multi-step creative process. She takes pictures of herself in each posture to help herself illustrate. She meticulously researches background scenery (stores, landscapes, and the like). At one point, she showed us a close-up of an illustration of her mother, which turned out to be a short movie clip. If you watch closely, she told us, you’ll see my changes to the image. She was literally deleting pixels from her mother’s mouth, to make the expression exactly as she wanted it.

After the reading, she opened the Q&A with “Does anyone have anything they want to talk about?” No wonder the focus of her current book is psychoanalysis and introspection.

Literary geek-out captured by the lovely Kate D

Unrelated Note: I have never been in a room with so many short-haired women before. Felt strange to look like everyone else.

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May 6, 2012 · 9:22 pm

Sunday Scraps 58

1. TECH: Great analysis from NYMag about the technological differences between Facebook and Instagram, and what makes one distrusted and the other beloved. What happens after the billion dollar purchase?

2. PROM: Religious and cultural restrictions prevented many Hamtramck students from attending a co-ed prom, so they had their own (via New York Times).

3. PLAY: Design blog This is Colossal has an awesome collection of super creative play structures. No basic monkey bars here!

4. BOOKS: Can you guess the ten most read books in the world? The Bible is number one, but what else makes the cut?

5. AUTHOR: Surprisingly, Barnes and Noble has a really interesting interview with author Alison Bechdel (Fun Home) about her new book, her mother, and process (she had a font created from her handwriting.)

6. INTERWEBZ: Comic strip Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour explains why the machines have won, and we might as well give up on ever disengaging from their shiny, glowing grasp.

Related Post: Sunday 57: Naked in the park, David Brooks on higher ed, child stars all growed up.

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