Is the Bechdel Test Useful?
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Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
EDIT: Mise said it much better than I could.
Please give me examples.
OK, well that's great, but that doesn't mean you are at liberty to dismiss problems with sexism against women by saying "well, there's sexism against men as well," especially when the latter case is so much less relevant in the cultural sense and less generally in the socioeconomic sense.
So you're just going to dodge the point about how you implied that women shouldn't star in violent movies (or that there's a very good reason that they don't as a matter of course) by mocking my posting style and idiomatic expressions?
If you can't be assed to make your point, I won't be assed to argue against it.
I'm willing to admit you can measure popularity in various ways. Unfortunately, every known or reliable metric strongly implies that the violent male-starring movies are the most popular.
Box office earnings, for example, are an excellent indicator of breadth in terms of distribution and visibility. High box office earnings mean that a movie is being watched a lot, and the only sensible interpretation of those statistics is that a lot of people watched the movie. "Total number of hours spent watching" is virtually impossible to stat.
No, but unfortunately it's the entire point - no non-sequitur required. If the point of the Bechdel test is to demonstrate sexism in media, and we have separately concluded that sexist cultural values have constructed a media industry with bias towards male values and characters, then we have accomplished the aim of the test, its effectiveness overall notwithstanding.
And we need not delve into this issue any more. The culture is sexist, and this is revealed in the media.
The reason people "go along" with sexism is because they have been developed to behave that way. You can qualify it all you like, but it doesn't make it right.
This is another example of the straw men you keep tossing out in this thread. You keep making mention of how we damn feminists are railing against imaginary spectres like film critics who pet their white persians after writing devastatingly sexist reviews, or bunches of douches who conscientiously want to keep female agency at bay.
Whenever you want to stop misrepresenting the opposition, be my guest.
It's called identifying and being aware of privilege in society.
Please give me examples.
OK, well that's great, but that doesn't mean you are at liberty to dismiss problems with sexism against women by saying "well, there's sexism against men as well," especially when the latter case is so much less relevant in the cultural sense and less generally in the socioeconomic sense.
So you're just going to dodge the point about how you implied that women shouldn't star in violent movies (or that there's a very good reason that they don't as a matter of course) by mocking my posting style and idiomatic expressions?
If you can't be assed to make your point, I won't be assed to argue against it.
I'm willing to admit you can measure popularity in various ways. Unfortunately, every known or reliable metric strongly implies that the violent male-starring movies are the most popular.
Box office earnings, for example, are an excellent indicator of breadth in terms of distribution and visibility. High box office earnings mean that a movie is being watched a lot, and the only sensible interpretation of those statistics is that a lot of people watched the movie. "Total number of hours spent watching" is virtually impossible to stat.
No, but unfortunately it's the entire point - no non-sequitur required. If the point of the Bechdel test is to demonstrate sexism in media, and we have separately concluded that sexist cultural values have constructed a media industry with bias towards male values and characters, then we have accomplished the aim of the test, its effectiveness overall notwithstanding.
And we need not delve into this issue any more. The culture is sexist, and this is revealed in the media.
The reason people "go along" with sexism is because they have been developed to behave that way. You can qualify it all you like, but it doesn't make it right.
This is another example of the straw men you keep tossing out in this thread. You keep making mention of how we damn feminists are railing against imaginary spectres like film critics who pet their white persians after writing devastatingly sexist reviews, or bunches of douches who conscientiously want to keep female agency at bay.
Whenever you want to stop misrepresenting the opposition, be my guest.
It's called identifying and being aware of privilege in society.
The thought exercise is contradictory to me in the first place. In my view the so called patriarchy on the one hand and men being more interested in violence, crime and war on the other have been in a circular cause and effect relationship for the longest time (which of course is a bad thing).
In your hypothetical society women could be interested in crime, violence and war and consume quarter billion somewhat sexist explosion fests while thrice as many rooster flicks are produced that don't make it into the top 40 of internet lists that are a rather questionale measure of popularity.
Not necessarily. I mean i can see what you are getting at.
But there are other media. And some of them may be predominantly catering to men in such a society.
Implicit to your complaint is the assertion that movies as a medium are particularly relevant. You don't seem to be bothered that women read a lot more fictional literature than men do and that this medium overwhelmingly caters to them.
You may very well be right about that claim. If you are the distribution of media consumption among genders may be the result of past male dominance in our society. If you are not it may purely accidental. Maybe the women in your hypothetical society would still read and the men still watch movies, maybe merely the economics and the marketing (and possibly the topics depending on the other question above would switch).
I leaning towards you being right, but anyway it's not exactly the point. Just saying this could go another way than one might expect at first glance.
That's the part i disagree with. There is plenty of movies that are both hugely successful and apperently geared towards women and girls if the audience is any indicator to go by. They're just not on imdb's list for one reason or another.
And i don't really see television as all that male-oriented either. I allready commented on literature.
I still don't think imdb's list is all that representative of popular anyway. I brought it up so it's my fault anyway.
But let me just lazily copy the first 20 movies of wikipedias list of hightest grossing movies:
Spoiler :
I don't think this list is as obviously tilted as in being geared towards male interests as the imdb list.
We'd have to through it movie by movie and debate who was the actual audience...
And even if you could claim that it would not suffice since i do maintain the argument that it's very well possible that any measure other than the grand total of all movie consumption might be scewed by women less demanding regarding things in movies that cost a lot of money. Like say a good script (opposed to 9 figures for special effects) which can be cheap as dirt.
Not that it's a particularly good example, since it might actually fail the test, but i hope we can agree that the success of Four Weddings and a Funeral was by and large driven by the interest of women not men.
That film had a profit margin of roughly 6000%. And that's just one. You know full well that i could easily come up with a lot such movies. Way more than you could find male-oriented action movies that draw their appeal from special effects.
Once more i have to insist that the economics of this are more complicated than more being invested into male-oriented movies because they are male-oriented.
Special effects cost money and when you are already that commited you might just as well throw in the 50 million for actors and another 50 million for marketing.
With female-oriented comedies things are way different. Beyond a certain number no further investment has any correlation with the expected return. So you do 10 of them at 10 million a piece and just roll the dice. Half of them may fail completely and one or two will obscenely outperform the investment.
Keep in mind that frequently male-oriented action movies are extremely bad (regarding script, acting etc.) and none the earn the studio the equivalent of a small planet made of gold. I'm sure i don't have to give you an example.
That's virtually impossible to accomplish with a female-oriented movie. Investment correlates way worse with their success. If they are bad they more often then not fail, even if you spend a lot of money. If they are fundamentally good, they often succeed even if the production is plagued by time constraints and a budget cut.
I'm not saying that studios are acting completely reasonable in all this. But, yet gain, it is more complex than "Guys, let's spent all the money on male oriented movies."
They don't exactly do that, that would not be their justification.
But this tangent brings me to another point: What's with that tendency of women, even wealthy, educated single women to have an interest and provide a market for movies that quite often fail the test or come close to it simply on account of being mostly about relationships and more often than not about romantic relationships.
The men can hardly be at fault. Most of them feel those movies require an exorcism and some stomach meds.
And i doubt you can blame the movie critics either...
(Not that the aforementioned movie was particularly bad in that respect, allthough it would certainly qualify. But you know which movies i mean.)
I do agree with the first sentence. As i said, i think it should be noted that society, for reasons that may be disagreeable (i believe they are) still has objections to women being graphically butchered in movies the way men are and to a female character being thoroughly rotten the way male characters often are (female characters can be rotten but mostly only in clicheed sexist ways often relating to sexuality for example).
As i was trying to point out in my last post: The expectation that female movie characters, especially protagonists are role models (which in my view exceeeds that expectation regarding male characters) doesn't necessarily help, however understandable it may be.
Anyway:
I yet again suggest that we may get farther quicker in communicating our ideas here if we'd include more examples both of actual positives and hypothetical positives.
We could as well include television in that, too, while we are at it.
Misrepresenting genuine disagreement as the other guy being too stupid to understand how right you are.
a) There is a difference between dismissing the sexism and dismissing your representation of it and the conclusions you draw.
b) You don't get to introduce points ten times the size that may be true but are highly debatable in the ideoligical way in which you have phrased them as supposed "supporting" arguments. You must see how that's disruptive to any productive dialogue.
I have absolutely no objection to women starring in action movies. I'd wholeheartedly endorse it.
Well, i personally could do entirely without the action movies no matter who's in the lead, but i'm sure you agree that's not the point.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that i objected to women starring in action movies. Maybe one of my speculations on why other people apparently do?
Yes, but that's not exactly my problem. I can rest on "the aggregate is what counts" and the burden of proof is on you.
You are the one that boldly claimed movies as a whole were geared towards men (or something along those lines). So far you have failed to come up with any relevant evidence supporting that claim at all.
Actually the very weak but none the less so far best evidence for your claim was provided by me.
We have seperately concluded superficially similar yet different things.
Yes.
Just yes. See, you have made a simple claim without funny earmarks and i actually agreed with it.
The murkyness of the first sentence aside, please remind me where i made a statement regarding what is right.
I may have made some statements that vaguely touch on what i feel is right, mostly rather general and somewhat implicit condemnations of sexism in general.
But i don't remeber having offered any apology for the status quo on a moral level.
Look, i have more of these condemnations, too. As far as acidic commentary on the style and tone "the opposition" chooses in this and similar threads goes i haven't even started.
But since we have made our regard for each other relatively clear going further down this road strikes me as a waste of time.
The claim that men were priviledged in general is most likely a very bad basis for any argument you are trying to make here.
But go ahead, be my guest: Argue how some sort of general male priviledge (i suggest you somewhat define it first) affect the claimed particular priviledge regarding the subject.
You haven't done that yet, but are none the less choosing a tone reflecting that you did. Hence my problem.
Disclaimer: I just spotted two grammar errors in the Mise part. And now i can't find them and am too lazy to reread the whole thing yet agai. You'll have to forgive me.
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
Never did that. I've perceived that you've been missing the point, but that doesn't mean you're stupid nor that I think you're stupid. It means that you're being very ineffective at communicating your position. Given the massive amounts of equivocation in this your most recent post, I think that is a fair assessment to make.
It's not merely that you speculated, it's that you attempted to excuse it and the associated societal construct as either human nature or exceptional.
You haven't shown anything to rest on.
Anyway, the website is down right now but bechdeltest.com keeps a running tally of websites that pass the test. A cursory glance reveals that this is much less than the industry total.
Now, you have admitted this, and then speculated that this is only because a lot of movies are about male characters and male values, and that's Just The Way It Is. Furthermore, that many of these movies probably don't have a lot of meaningful dialogue anyway. It's how the genres work.
But you need not use the Bechdel test. Simply look at how many of the movies featuring males and male values. Not just the violent ones, but the violent ones at well. These are also the most popular according to the metric of earnings, which is the only metric we can use with any confidence. Thus we can conclude that the male-oriented movies are most popular on average, and hence we can conclude that there is a skew towards male values in the film industry.
I can also do this:
Wikipedia said:
What does this sentence even mean?
PS:
Crezth, you demanded i be arsed to make a point. I'm not yet really in the business of doing that. Mostly so far i have been arguing against your position and offering some alternative explanations.
You are the ones who are trying to make a point here. you trying to do that is pretty much the premise of the thread.
I personally feel you have to do better than "male priviledge. duh."
That you are dragging your feed on that is't my fault.
That i am trying to fill the gaps maybe impatient and dangerous, since invariably i am going to starwman you at some point in the process (by any luck).
You could prevent tht reckless behavior of mine by offering a clear description of how you believe male priviledge in the movie market works in your view.
Generalities like male dominated society or whatever isn't enough.
To come at the thing from another point, where things are maybe a bit more concrete:
People spend a certain amount of money on movies (end customers i mean).
The film industry is distributing that money towards projects, presumably is a somewhat profit margin oriented fashion.
You would help moving this along a great deal if you'd state...
a) whether you feel women and men had a relatively equal share in the total money spent by end consumers (i presume men are slightly ahead, but it's certainly up for debate).
b) if you believe that the money spent by female end customers is used to fund male oriented movies and if so how that works
c) if women are sitting through movies that are male-oriented be it out of conformity or oblivion (you could speculate on that) and what their motivations are in this
d) how relevant a, b and c are relative to each other in broad terms.
I have asumptions on how you might feel about those four. But as you have rightly demanded i should let you say so yourself.
Crezth, you demanded i be arsed to make a point. I'm not yet really in the business of doing that. Mostly so far i have been arguing against your position and offering some alternative explanations.
You are the ones who are trying to make a point here. you trying to do that is pretty much the premise of the thread.
I personally feel you have to do better than "male priviledge. duh."
That you are dragging your feed on that is't my fault.
That i am trying to fill the gaps maybe impatient and dangerous, since invariably i am going to starwman you at some point in the process (by any luck).
You could prevent tht reckless behavior of mine by offering a clear description of how you believe male priviledge in the movie market works in your view.
Generalities like male dominated society or whatever isn't enough.
To come at the thing from another point, where things are maybe a bit more concrete:
People spend a certain amount of money on movies (end customers i mean).
The film industry is distributing that money towards projects, presumably is a somewhat profit margin oriented fashion.
You would help moving this along a great deal if you'd state...
a) whether you feel women and men had a relatively equal share in the total money spent by end consumers (i presume men are slightly ahead, but it's certainly up for debate).
b) if you believe that the money spent by female end customers is used to fund male oriented movies and if so how that works
c) if women are sitting through movies that are male-oriented be it out of conformity or oblivion (you could speculate on that) and what their motivations are in this
d) how relevant a, b and c are relative to each other in broad terms.
I have asumptions on how you might feel about those four. But as you have rightly demanded i should let you say so yourself.
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
Seems like a contradiction in terms. Either get serious or get out.
LightSpectra
me autem minui
Why are you so sure the analogy is that the orcs are a foreign nation and not spiritual demons?
I'm having the same problem with your posts.
I'm not 100% sure what the original point was leading to this quote (i guess it was one of my speculations on the various ways female characters are subject to sexism and as a result pose problems in production and script writing and as a result of that may be avoided alltogether).
If so:
Some part of that is exceptional to movies that include graphic physical violence and/or immensely corrupted and depraved evildoers.
That doesn't excuse anything.
Some part of that may be in some way shape or form nature. That doesn't excuse anything either.
That's a fundamental problem that often comes up in debating feminism.
Not everything has always to be 100% nurture. Nature doesn't excuse anything. It doesn't diminish the moral imperative to better the situation at all.
You have to make up your mind.
Originally the argument regarding the usefulness of the test was that there is imbalance (as outlined as matter of debate in our later posts) in the movie industry and the test's virtue was to bluntly reflect that.
Most proponents pretty much outright admitted that the test had little to no reliability regarding individual movies, iirc.
If you conform with that position you can't use the site as evidence for said imbalance in the movie industry. That would be circular logic.
If you want to do that you have to argue the validity of the test first.
If you have already done so and i've missed or forgotten that please referr me to the relevant passage.
Your commentary of the list is wonderful in that it helps support the claim of prevalence of violence in movies. On which we agree, at least broadly.
But you have a problem here. Other than on the the imdb list movies that had a predominantly female audience are rather populous here.
You will have to explain that. Why are movies with a predominantly female audience sexist in the way that your commentary of the list reflects?
By the way, why did you phrase #2 the way you did? Not that i necessarily disagree, but i suspect an explanation could further the whole enterprise.
That you have to make at least a minimal effort to conncect the claimed general male privilidge to how movies are written and marketed.
Being serious does not require offering a comprehensive theory. All the more since you haven't provided one and you are the one fielding the big claims.
Critisizing such claims doesn't require an alternative theory either. I'm not a Republican and this isn't climate science.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
It's really worth re-stating, amidst all this blether, that the point of the Bechdel Test isn't simply to measure the representation or non-representation of women, but to measure their representation of capable of interacting independently of men. That's a different and really more subtle point than I think is being acknowledged.
Related:
Podcast can be found HERE
I didn't catch it all. But the part I did catch was talking about how movies don't get funded if they don't pass the beancounter test. It's not about the creative process, and it's not about anyone's sociopolitical agenda. It's all about the Benjamins.
David Denby: The End of Movies?
The New Yorker’s David Denby on the future life – or death – of the movies.
Have American movies gone to the dogs? New Yorker film critic David Denby – one of the biggest voices in the country when it comes to film – says yes. Not all. Not always.
But the movies as a vital national touchstone of what matters in human affairs, in human nature, are in deep trouble, he says. The new economics of cinema bring us empty, big-budget, souped-up spectacle. “A thundering farrago,” writes Denby, “of verbal and visual gibberish.”
This hour, On Point: The New Yorker’s David Denby asks – do the movies have a future?
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests
David Denby, staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker. He’s the author of Do the Movies Have a Future?
From Tom’s Reading List
IndieWire “There are certainly some valid reasons for pessimism. We just escaped a particularly dreary summer movie season. Actual film — light captured on and then projected through celluloid — is vanishing at an disturbing rate. 3-D is still darkening theater screens and emptying patrons’ pockets. Our children’s notion of “the movies” will look completely different than ours. ”
The Guardian “There’s been a lot of death-of-film talk recently, as there often is when the first leaves of fall bid their first, golden adieus. “I’m made crazy by the way the business structure of movies is now constricting the art of movies,” fumed David Denby in The New Republic after a summer which steamrolled one action blockbuster after another into a single strip of blurry, brazen fury.”
Variety “Its biggest star, George Clooney, is simply a co-producer and its protagonist (Ben Affleck, who also directs) never does anything heroic except negotiate. So “Argo” is clearly not so much a hit as an accident. Or is it?”
Excerpt
Podcast can be found HERE
I didn't catch it all. But the part I did catch was talking about how movies don't get funded if they don't pass the beancounter test. It's not about the creative process, and it's not about anyone's sociopolitical agenda. It's all about the Benjamins.
Anyone?
Rashiminos
Fool Prophet
It's not. There's a difference between being out to prove something, and merely refuting someone else's point. So take your own advice:
As I said earlier in the thread, and as I linked the podcast above, the choices in what movies are getting made is made by the beancounters and investors. The creative people are increasingly not a part of the equation. The people who are making the choices are using a very narrow set of guidelines that are only on the numbers, and nothing else.
Chimera Kitty
Warlord
- Joined
- Nov 2, 2012
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- 107
No, but I admit to lurking moar.
In any movie with significantly more male characters than female characters, the number of possible male-male relationships will be exponentially more than the number of female-female relationships. In movies with a perfect 50/50 ratio, the relationships will be disproportionately male-female. These effects are made more extreme when the main character is male.
The West isn't taking any giant steaming dumps on women. They're now featured more prominently than ever in central action roles.
Men have traditionally done the fighting and women have traditionally gotten back in the kitchen and made sammiches. Also, the kinds of explosions that one sees in wartime are a bit more impressive than the average kitchen disaster. Thus, it makes perfect logical sense for big action movies to have male-majority casts.
Yes. Assuming that this society at some point discovered fire, and thus has a deeply ingrained "OMG fire and explosions are so awesome" cultural thing going on, those movies would still dominate. And as long as humans are stupid and easily entertained, anything that produces a visceral shock will appeal to a wider audience than a production about characters sitting around and talking about their feelings.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
You're confusing the number of possible relationships with the number of actual relationships. The relationships which are actually depicted, as well as the nature and depth of their depiction, is an artistic choice which cannot simply be inferred from the numerical representation of each gender.
...Pardon?
Chimera Kitty
Warlord
- Joined
- Nov 2, 2012
- Messages
- 107
I'm just saying, there's a reason why humans love fire. It played a major role in keeping humanity alive and will always have a special place in humanity's heart, regardless of whether you have boy or girl parts.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
That seems tenuous.
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