Failing the Bechdel Test gracefully
The Bechdel Test is a well-known yardstick used by writers and critics to assess the feminist credentials of a narrative. Taking its name from an episode in Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, the basic principle is that in order to pass the test, there must be at least one scene in which two women talk about a topic other than men. Some people define it very strictly, in that the conversation shouldn’t mention male characters at all, but this is (IMHO) an impractically tight definition that excludes a lot of films, TV and books with positive portrayals of women. Taken to extremes, it means that a scene where two female cops discuss their strategy for taking down a male criminal doesn’t count, whereas one where they talk about...
Read MoreAn Opinion of One’s Own
The recent debate on women’s visibility in SFF has thrown up a few issues facing women in the genre, but has mostly focused on male blindspots and the predominance of male reviewers, awards judges, survey participants and so on. On the other hand August started well, with proof that the trend is not universal: out of the six novels shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award, four are by women (and three of those women are black). There’s more to the issue than women writers, however. Women also publish, read and review SFF, and many of those books are inevitably by men (somewhere around 60%, according to various estimates). In fantasy in particular, where stories are often set in historical or quasi-historical patriarchal cultures, a significant percentage...
Read MoreWhen short stories aren’t stories
Dave Truesdale, editor of Tangent Online, has caused a bit of stir recently by announcing a new direction for his reviews. On the one hand, I strongly disagree with some of his claims, particularly that SF&F is “a genre infested with politically correct thinking”. Truesdale seems to think that part of the “decline” is down to some magazines allegedly having a rigid policy of including as many female authors as male, i.e. the fiction written by women is poorer quality and only chosen for PC reasons. Frankly this attitude beggars belief, and only serves to show up the level of sexism that still pervades some areas of the genre – science fiction in particular. That same sexism, or at least a distinctly male aesthetic, also appears...
Read MoreWoman-shaped hole
From time to time I revisit The Bechdel Test, because my fiction tends to feature a lot more men than women. Now I’m not going to go out of my way to make sure my work passes, because I hate tokenism in any form, but it does keep me thinking about women in fantasy. At the moment I’m reading The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan, which is unusual in that one of the protagonists is not just female but black and lesbian. We haven’t seen as much from her PoV as the two male characters, but it’s enough to pass my version of the Bechdel Test; let’s call it the Lyle Test For me, what matters in written fiction (as distinct from film and TV) is not how many women there are and what they talk about, as how unstereotypical they are, how integral...
Read More
