Here's a fascinating blog entry, 'Meet the Predators", from "yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com", which summarizes two recent surveys on men and rape:
yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-predators/
Illuminating article, which reveals that
men are much more likely to self-convict as rapists if the questionnaire doesn't use the word "rape"; and that
of those who do self-convict (answer "yes" to questions like "have you ever had sex with a woman so drunk she passed out?" or "have you ever pressured someone into sex by twisting their arm, holding them down, or that sort of thing?"), a high majority of the crimes are committed by a small minority of men (4-8% of those who self-convicted) who are repeat offenders; and that
of those repeat offenders, a much higher number of them also admitted to committing domestic violence; and that
those repeat offenders NEVER used violence on strangers; only on intimates. On strangers, they used alcohol, and drugs.
The author concludes that this argues that the repeat offenders who commit most of the crimes know bloody well what they're doing. A lot of the time people claim that date-rape is a tragic accident of misunderstanding by a good guy; but no. A high majority of the time, the guy didn't just happen to find himself in a room with passed-out drunk lady and foolishly took her silence for assent, oops, I'm so sorry. A high majority of the time, that guy meant to get into that room all along; that was his target. These are not nice guys who made a tragic mistake - these people are also the ones admitting to domestic violence in their intimate relationships. The men committing these crimes, in short, are creeps.
And how can we know this? Because these guys don't use violence with strangers (who might charge them); they reserve the violence for their friends and room mates and the people who love them, who aren't likely to charge them because they're scared of them, or are trying to preserve the relationship because they are abuse victims who think it's their fault. With strangers, they use drink or drugs, because they won't get charged for that, most of the time; the victim will get blamed instead.
Now I note, out of interest, that that number, 4%-8%, is exactly in line with the standard estimates in "The Psychopath Next Door" of the percentage of psychopaths in the population. (The author of TPND estimates at the high end; standard estimates are around 4%).
So this all makes hideous sense, doesn't it. Most stranger rapes and most date rapes are being committed by psychopaths, who know damn well that you didn't want this, and don't care. But most men aren't psychopaths. So why the high incidence of rape?
Because, argues the author, of rape culture - a few men commit a lot of rapes; but the culture condones the behaviour, is willing to accept barroom conversations where a drunk woman is called an "opportunity", where misogynistic jokes are tolerated, and psychopaths are very sensitive to social cues, because they don't want to get caught. So they do what they can get away with.
The solution, then, is to change the culture, so that these behaviours aren't socially acceptable. Not because most men rape; most men, by far, do not; but those who do, are enabled by a culture that speaks as if this behaviour is okay.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Dollhouse 2.4
Brilliant episode. One thing bothered me: why do I feel pretty damn sure that Priya wasn't given any choice about winding up back in the Dollhouse this time either? If she did remember, if they let her go free, Rossum would surely track her down, find out about Boyd and Topher and Evil Scumbag's death, dismemberment, and flushing down the bathtub. She's safer in the Dollhouse. But does that matter? I don't think she was right to choose the wipe; she didn't deserve to have to kill someone, absolutely, but she did the right thing. I didn't understand why she didn't want to remember. I didn't understand what she was doing in the Dollhouse afterwards.
Topher was brilliant. When she asked him if she was allowed beer in here and he flashed back, clearly, to imprinting her as his 'friend' on his birthday and having a beer with her, and said - "uh, on special occasions", he was clearly about ready to cry. Realising that the fake friend he was enjoying himself with only existed because Priya, a person, with a right to the body that she had never ever signed away, was gone.
He's not a sociopath; sociopaths don't learn, they just don't have the empathy and that's it. But he does have empathy, he just never bothered to use it because other things interested him so much more. That's why he interests us. People with no empathy, like the rapist scumbag one tick shy of a murderer, don't interest us except as horrors.
You'll notice that the people who are willing to hire dolls are clearly ethically compromised, or else regret it, this season? Serial Killer, who didn't hire dolls because he was using horse tranquillizer to make his own, but he's the same kinda guy; Professor Dirtbag, who's aware he shouldn't bone his students but can't get over the desire to, so hey, let's try creating one; rapist scumbag, obviously; Rossum high mucketymuck, serial killer's uncle; all of these are scum. The father who hired Echo to wetnurse his baby and love the little boy too, so someone would love him, but who realises that this was the wrong thing to do and deeply regrets it; you can see he decided to do it while his decision-making powers were deeply compromised by grief, and even then, all he was trying to do was to make sure someone loved his baby. But basically, hiring a doll identifies you as either a bad person or at least doing a bad thing, this year.
Adelle clings by her fingernails to the "meaningful consent" given by the dolls; when that last shred of justification is taken away, she has to face what she is doing, and she balks. But then she gives in; it's not just that she'll lose her job; she'll wind up in the Attic beside Dominic. She can't face that.
It did cross my mind that when scumbag pig demanded she imprint Sierra permanently and Adelle agreed, that, well, SURE she could imprint Sierra. And then later phone her. "There are three flowers in the vase." This problem could be solved in a number of creative ways; why didn't Adelle do that? Though Topher's solution was much better. Priya was robbed. Give Priya herself back; the only ethical solution. I wasn't sure why Boyd thought the result didn't turn out too well. I thought the creep needed to die, and now was dead; the result was perhaps inconvenient, but bad? This was what had to happen.
Of all the people in the series - Victor, Sierra, Boyd, Ballard, Adelle, Topher, Mellie/Madeleine (though didn't Mellie seem like more of a person than Madeleine? She would have had to become less dependent to survive, though), Dr. Saunders - the only one whose story doesn't really interest me is Echo's. But perhaps another Echo-heavy episode would cure that. Not sure. Dushku was quite endearing, and hilarious, as Kiki in 2.3 ("If only!")
Sorry they're not showing it during sweeps; since that surely means they've already made up their minds, and we're not going to get the back half of this season.
Topher was brilliant. When she asked him if she was allowed beer in here and he flashed back, clearly, to imprinting her as his 'friend' on his birthday and having a beer with her, and said - "uh, on special occasions", he was clearly about ready to cry. Realising that the fake friend he was enjoying himself with only existed because Priya, a person, with a right to the body that she had never ever signed away, was gone.
He's not a sociopath; sociopaths don't learn, they just don't have the empathy and that's it. But he does have empathy, he just never bothered to use it because other things interested him so much more. That's why he interests us. People with no empathy, like the rapist scumbag one tick shy of a murderer, don't interest us except as horrors.
You'll notice that the people who are willing to hire dolls are clearly ethically compromised, or else regret it, this season? Serial Killer, who didn't hire dolls because he was using horse tranquillizer to make his own, but he's the same kinda guy; Professor Dirtbag, who's aware he shouldn't bone his students but can't get over the desire to, so hey, let's try creating one; rapist scumbag, obviously; Rossum high mucketymuck, serial killer's uncle; all of these are scum. The father who hired Echo to wetnurse his baby and love the little boy too, so someone would love him, but who realises that this was the wrong thing to do and deeply regrets it; you can see he decided to do it while his decision-making powers were deeply compromised by grief, and even then, all he was trying to do was to make sure someone loved his baby. But basically, hiring a doll identifies you as either a bad person or at least doing a bad thing, this year.
Adelle clings by her fingernails to the "meaningful consent" given by the dolls; when that last shred of justification is taken away, she has to face what she is doing, and she balks. But then she gives in; it's not just that she'll lose her job; she'll wind up in the Attic beside Dominic. She can't face that.
It did cross my mind that when scumbag pig demanded she imprint Sierra permanently and Adelle agreed, that, well, SURE she could imprint Sierra. And then later phone her. "There are three flowers in the vase." This problem could be solved in a number of creative ways; why didn't Adelle do that? Though Topher's solution was much better. Priya was robbed. Give Priya herself back; the only ethical solution. I wasn't sure why Boyd thought the result didn't turn out too well. I thought the creep needed to die, and now was dead; the result was perhaps inconvenient, but bad? This was what had to happen.
Of all the people in the series - Victor, Sierra, Boyd, Ballard, Adelle, Topher, Mellie/Madeleine (though didn't Mellie seem like more of a person than Madeleine? She would have had to become less dependent to survive, though), Dr. Saunders - the only one whose story doesn't really interest me is Echo's. But perhaps another Echo-heavy episode would cure that. Not sure. Dushku was quite endearing, and hilarious, as Kiki in 2.3 ("If only!")
Sorry they're not showing it during sweeps; since that surely means they've already made up their minds, and we're not going to get the back half of this season.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Evil in the Whedonverse: Epitaph One
've just seen Epitaph One (unaired episode of Dollhouse, on the DVD, and available by bittorrent). Excellent acting, excellent scripting, brilliant all round, oh man, oh my oh my. And terrifying too; dystopian in the extreme, bleak bleak bleak. One thing that worries me is that I don't see, if this is "the future", how he can get out of this now; how he can give us another ending. The old dream ending? Alternate universe? This is what COULD happen if we all don't make GOOD CHOICES, kids?
Are we watching an Angelverse - all go down fighting, evil triumphs, it's night, it's raining, we're in an alleyway, Wes is dead, Gunn is dying, only the demons can survive in this universe - or a Buffyverse - we destroyed the town in order to save it, but we DID save it, only - and all - the demons are dead, now we can all patch ourselves up and get on with our lives, sun shines, we're on the road away from the Hellmouth and we've even got a bus? ON the basis of Epitaph One, we're definitely in an Angelverse. If that's how it's going to go, though, not sure how much I want to keep watching - except I'm riveted. of course. But one thing that does keep us riveted is hoping that there is a way the characters can escape their almost certain fates; if we knew for sure they were all doomed we wouldn't be so spellbound. So I'll be interested to see how Joss springs us out of Epitaph One, or makes us question it as the Only Possible Future, Because otherwise it's going to be difficult to carry on with the series; we need suspense.
But what I wanted to talk about mostly was Whedon's idea of evil, which is beginning to become steadily clearer and I think it's always the same sort of thing.
In Sunnydale, we have vampires and demons; in Angelverse, we have demons and a few vampires and Wolfram and Hart;
in Serenity we have Reavers, created by the establishment in an effort to make everything better;
in Dollhouse we have an evil establishment with tenttacles everywhere, absolute power producing absolute evil, a slave economy, and - in Epitaph One - vampires, demons, humans, and a new category, blank slates.
The "butchers" of Epitaph One are the Reavers of Serenity or the demons - some demons; the full-blood demons especially - in the Buffy/Angelverse. All the butcher/reaver humanity has been completely destroyed by the actions of an Establishment that used them for its own purposes without much caring about the effect on the individual - or even realising this would be the effect; children, playing with matches, as "Caroline" says in Epitaph One. Their behavioural characteristics - wanton violence, cruelty, vandalism, etc - is like demons in Sunnydale, and many demons in Angel. I think Joss Whedon has never really wanted us to think of demons as good; attractive, possessing many appealing human characteristics, but in the end, they're bad.
The "actuals" in Epitaph One - humans who have not had their souls erased, are still the people they were born as - are human beings.
Then we have the "imprints", who are vampires, kinda (original soul is destroyed, imprinted with someone else's personality)
And finally we have the new category, the "dumbshows", who are the dolls, in Dollhouse; the original personality has been erased, and basic functions still exist, but they're blank slates. They don't exist in Buffy or Angel.
So I think Joss Whedon is meditating on evil, or showing us the faces of evil, but the mechanisms used to produce it are changing. In Buffy/Angel, it was supernatural - demons were demonic, and some demons can take over your body and make you demonic, and you can get away with it because there is a structure of powerful demonic beings in places of power who will use agencies like Wolfram and Hart to protect you if you're useful enough to them.
In Serenity, an evil - control-freak - military industrial government complex tries to pacify an entire world and has unintentional side effects of creating demons by putting stuff in the drinking water (or the air, or whatever it was). The consequences were not intended but the mechanism was entirely human and certainly intentional. They just didn't realise what it would do. And they hid it, lied about it to everyone "for their own good", and were generally secretive; always a bad idea, in the Jossverse; and marks you as a bad guy.
And in Epitaph One, an entirely self-serving for-profit organization comes up with a cool new technology with some highly exploitable ramifications; but like the stuff in the water supply in Serenity, the technology gets out of control with disastrous results. But these results actually were foreseeable. So more and more, the responsibility for evil is becoming human, in the Jossverse; it's becoming our fault. We can't blame the demons or the side effects. We can blame people in positions of power, for sure; but they are people, not demons.
Which makes his new take on evil spectacularly scary because it is so much likelier to happen. It's so much closer to the real world.
I think the Buffy and Angelverse were metaphorical, and cautionary tales. But I'm not so sure the Dollhouse is a metaphor. I think he's saying, this is REAL, folks; this is HAPPENING ALL AROUND YOU. Maybe not this specific thing, but somewhere, right now, is the technology that's going to destroy us, and it's not even going to be very long from now.
Are we watching an Angelverse - all go down fighting, evil triumphs, it's night, it's raining, we're in an alleyway, Wes is dead, Gunn is dying, only the demons can survive in this universe - or a Buffyverse - we destroyed the town in order to save it, but we DID save it, only - and all - the demons are dead, now we can all patch ourselves up and get on with our lives, sun shines, we're on the road away from the Hellmouth and we've even got a bus? ON the basis of Epitaph One, we're definitely in an Angelverse. If that's how it's going to go, though, not sure how much I want to keep watching - except I'm riveted. of course. But one thing that does keep us riveted is hoping that there is a way the characters can escape their almost certain fates; if we knew for sure they were all doomed we wouldn't be so spellbound. So I'll be interested to see how Joss springs us out of Epitaph One, or makes us question it as the Only Possible Future, Because otherwise it's going to be difficult to carry on with the series; we need suspense.
But what I wanted to talk about mostly was Whedon's idea of evil, which is beginning to become steadily clearer and I think it's always the same sort of thing.
In Sunnydale, we have vampires and demons; in Angelverse, we have demons and a few vampires and Wolfram and Hart;
in Serenity we have Reavers, created by the establishment in an effort to make everything better;
in Dollhouse we have an evil establishment with tenttacles everywhere, absolute power producing absolute evil, a slave economy, and - in Epitaph One - vampires, demons, humans, and a new category, blank slates.
The "butchers" of Epitaph One are the Reavers of Serenity or the demons - some demons; the full-blood demons especially - in the Buffy/Angelverse. All the butcher/reaver humanity has been completely destroyed by the actions of an Establishment that used them for its own purposes without much caring about the effect on the individual - or even realising this would be the effect; children, playing with matches, as "Caroline" says in Epitaph One. Their behavioural characteristics - wanton violence, cruelty, vandalism, etc - is like demons in Sunnydale, and many demons in Angel. I think Joss Whedon has never really wanted us to think of demons as good; attractive, possessing many appealing human characteristics, but in the end, they're bad.
The "actuals" in Epitaph One - humans who have not had their souls erased, are still the people they were born as - are human beings.
Then we have the "imprints", who are vampires, kinda (original soul is destroyed, imprinted with someone else's personality)
And finally we have the new category, the "dumbshows", who are the dolls, in Dollhouse; the original personality has been erased, and basic functions still exist, but they're blank slates. They don't exist in Buffy or Angel.
So I think Joss Whedon is meditating on evil, or showing us the faces of evil, but the mechanisms used to produce it are changing. In Buffy/Angel, it was supernatural - demons were demonic, and some demons can take over your body and make you demonic, and you can get away with it because there is a structure of powerful demonic beings in places of power who will use agencies like Wolfram and Hart to protect you if you're useful enough to them.
In Serenity, an evil - control-freak - military industrial government complex tries to pacify an entire world and has unintentional side effects of creating demons by putting stuff in the drinking water (or the air, or whatever it was). The consequences were not intended but the mechanism was entirely human and certainly intentional. They just didn't realise what it would do. And they hid it, lied about it to everyone "for their own good", and were generally secretive; always a bad idea, in the Jossverse; and marks you as a bad guy.
And in Epitaph One, an entirely self-serving for-profit organization comes up with a cool new technology with some highly exploitable ramifications; but like the stuff in the water supply in Serenity, the technology gets out of control with disastrous results. But these results actually were foreseeable. So more and more, the responsibility for evil is becoming human, in the Jossverse; it's becoming our fault. We can't blame the demons or the side effects. We can blame people in positions of power, for sure; but they are people, not demons.
Which makes his new take on evil spectacularly scary because it is so much likelier to happen. It's so much closer to the real world.
I think the Buffy and Angelverse were metaphorical, and cautionary tales. But I'm not so sure the Dollhouse is a metaphor. I think he's saying, this is REAL, folks; this is HAPPENING ALL AROUND YOU. Maybe not this specific thing, but somewhere, right now, is the technology that's going to destroy us, and it's not even going to be very long from now.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Bechdel-Wallace testing a random children's series: Bugs Bunny
Since the children just spent all afternoon watching old Looney Tunes, I think I'm in a position to say that Bugs Bunny - and the other Looney Tunes - do not pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, in toto. At least none of the 50 or so episodes on that 4 disk set has a single scene in even one episode in which two female characters talk to each other about anything at all, let alone about something other than a man.
Perhaps someone else can correct me on this. I didn't see any. Of course there is some question about the gender of a collection of cartoon animals. When my daughter was small she believed without questioning it that all of the characters who were not specifically gendered as male or female - that is, most of them, in animated cartoon animals - were female. She believed Bugs Bunny was female. It broke my heart to think how soon she was going to discover that unless a character is specifically gendered female, it is male.
So every character that does anything fun or intelligent? Male.
And then you consider the roles of the few female characters in Bugs Bunny, with the sole exception of Granny; lipstick-wearing sexual distractions. That's what my poor wee girl one day had to realise was the only available role for her. And it's what my poor wee boy was trained to believe was all girls were good for, too.
Kinda robs me of some of the innocent pleasure of Bugs Bunny cartoons. However, they are still pretty funny.
Perhaps someone else can correct me on this. I didn't see any. Of course there is some question about the gender of a collection of cartoon animals. When my daughter was small she believed without questioning it that all of the characters who were not specifically gendered as male or female - that is, most of them, in animated cartoon animals - were female. She believed Bugs Bunny was female. It broke my heart to think how soon she was going to discover that unless a character is specifically gendered female, it is male.
So every character that does anything fun or intelligent? Male.
And then you consider the roles of the few female characters in Bugs Bunny, with the sole exception of Granny; lipstick-wearing sexual distractions. That's what my poor wee girl one day had to realise was the only available role for her. And it's what my poor wee boy was trained to believe was all girls were good for, too.
Kinda robs me of some of the innocent pleasure of Bugs Bunny cartoons. However, they are still pretty funny.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Pride and Glory, Edward Norton, Colin Farrell, John Voight
Bechdel-Wallace test: fails, of course
I was talked into seeing this. A truly dreadful movie. Sure, artily shot, good performances, nice attention paid to interiors, actual Spanish-speaking Latino actors, etc etc, and I went because Ed Norton was in it. But didn't realise till I got to the theatre that it was one of these Irish-cop-family-New-York-corruption-in-the-police-force-will-our-hero-choose-family-or-justice crapfests, I mean, let's just phone the plot in from here shall we?
Oh, and there were a couple of women in it. One was Jennifer Ehle, head shaved, playing the Madonna Wife and Mother Dying of Cancer. Does she matter at all? Of course not; her function is solely to put extra pressure on one of the good guys (protagonist's brother, her husband).
And then there's the pretty-wife-with-corrupt-husband-who-loves-her so we're supposed to believe he's actually a not entirely bad guy. He's doing it all For Her And The Kids, you see. Not that he's asked them if they WANT him to be, you know, dealing drugs and killing people For Them. Still, we're supposed to believe that anyone who loves his family can't be an all bad guy. To which one might well respond "don't even evil men love their children?" It's not a sign of virtue. It doesn't make him likeable or even interesting.
As a rule of thumb: movies about Irish cops in corrupt New York police departments are not going to be about women. Women will be used only to bolster the pretense that the male protagonists have ever had a relationship that mattered with anyone but other men. In this film, there are no relationships that matter, except relations between, and with, men. A typical Hollywood cop movie, in short.
Is there a single scene where two women talk to each other about something other than a man?
Yeah right. That is to say, of course not.
IMDB entry:
I was talked into seeing this. A truly dreadful movie. Sure, artily shot, good performances, nice attention paid to interiors, actual Spanish-speaking Latino actors, etc etc, and I went because Ed Norton was in it. But didn't realise till I got to the theatre that it was one of these Irish-cop-family-New-York-corruption-in-the-police-force-will-our-hero-choose-family-or-justice crapfests, I mean, let's just phone the plot in from here shall we?
Oh, and there were a couple of women in it. One was Jennifer Ehle, head shaved, playing the Madonna Wife and Mother Dying of Cancer. Does she matter at all? Of course not; her function is solely to put extra pressure on one of the good guys (protagonist's brother, her husband).
And then there's the pretty-wife-with-corrupt-husband-who-loves-her so we're supposed to believe he's actually a not entirely bad guy. He's doing it all For Her And The Kids, you see. Not that he's asked them if they WANT him to be, you know, dealing drugs and killing people For Them. Still, we're supposed to believe that anyone who loves his family can't be an all bad guy. To which one might well respond "don't even evil men love their children?" It's not a sign of virtue. It doesn't make him likeable or even interesting.
As a rule of thumb: movies about Irish cops in corrupt New York police departments are not going to be about women. Women will be used only to bolster the pretense that the male protagonists have ever had a relationship that mattered with anyone but other men. In this film, there are no relationships that matter, except relations between, and with, men. A typical Hollywood cop movie, in short.
Is there a single scene where two women talk to each other about something other than a man?
Yeah right. That is to say, of course not.
IMDB entry:
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Godzilla
I just watched the 1998 Godzilla with the kids. I am now torn between a desire to never think about the movie again - how could they saddle Jean Reno with such lousy lines? - and a desire to write fanfic in which the lady paleontologist gets the cute scientist, instead of the brainless bimbo blonde babe who ditched him 8 years ago without even a courtesy phone call, after 4 years together and a marriage proposal which I gather she skipped town rather than bother to answer, and betrays him within seconds of meeting him again, while whining, blinking her big round blue eyes (her only discernible facial expression) and I swear, twisting her ankle and falling while GODZILLA is after them. I mean GODZILLA - who writes this crap? I really want to know who got paid for it, and I hope they donated it to charity and are doing penance now.
The paleontologist was, one gathers, disqualified from nailing the cute scientist only because a) she had a big nose and b) she was willing to come straight out and say she thought he was cute, but obviously straightforwardness or honesty were not pluses in this guy's book. Or maybe we're supposed to grasp automatically that women with long noses aren't supposed to come on to people. Because, I mean, PLEASE, aren't they supposed to just automatically know that if you have a long nose it doesn't matter if you're brilliant, hard-working, and a person of good character - being a cute blonde bimbo is just naturally going to trump all that?
I am dissuaded from writing the fanfic though because frankly the paleontologist deserves better than Matthew Broderick. Though it's fairly clear that even Matt Broderick's wimpy character is going to dump the bimbo by tomorrow morning, possibly after a post-Godzilla boink or three. Leaving her something else to widen her big round blue eyes in distress over.
I am really not surprised that that actress, whoever she was, has not been seen in a big-screen film since.
The paleontologist was, one gathers, disqualified from nailing the cute scientist only because a) she had a big nose and b) she was willing to come straight out and say she thought he was cute, but obviously straightforwardness or honesty were not pluses in this guy's book. Or maybe we're supposed to grasp automatically that women with long noses aren't supposed to come on to people. Because, I mean, PLEASE, aren't they supposed to just automatically know that if you have a long nose it doesn't matter if you're brilliant, hard-working, and a person of good character - being a cute blonde bimbo is just naturally going to trump all that?
I am dissuaded from writing the fanfic though because frankly the paleontologist deserves better than Matthew Broderick. Though it's fairly clear that even Matt Broderick's wimpy character is going to dump the bimbo by tomorrow morning, possibly after a post-Godzilla boink or three. Leaving her something else to widen her big round blue eyes in distress over.
I am really not surprised that that actress, whoever she was, has not been seen in a big-screen film since.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Joss and the Bechdel Measure
I just got my nine-year-old daughter to watch Joss Whedon's Equality Now award acceptance speech. We were talking about why she hadn't wanted to watch "Meet the Robinsons", which was actually pretty good, but why she and the friends who were sleeping over had preferred to watch "Legally Blonde", which is so-so but she loves it. And I had just run - again - across the "Bechdel Measure", which we were applying to kid's films. To pass the "Bechdel Measure" a film must have
And if you think it's hard to find films for grown ups that pass that test, try kid's films! Just to mention kid's films I really enjoyed:
Most of these films don't even have 2 female characters. So by those standards "Legally Blonde" may be a so-so film but it's way ahead on the Bechdel Scale.
I want to start a "Bechdel measure" category on IMDB.
But meanwhile, and to come back to Joss: no wonder we love him. We're actually in his stories. Everything he does passes the Bechdel Measure. So I can't wait to dig out my Buffy disks to start watching them again once this reno is finally done - with my daughter this time.
In the meantime she wants to start fundraising to send athletic equipment to girls in Afghanistan. Well, I suggested doing something like that. But I'm happy to help her out with it. Obviously. And maybe adding Bechdel Measure Ratings to the IMDB listings.
- At least two women in it
- Who talk to each other
- About something other than a man.
And if you think it's hard to find films for grown ups that pass that test, try kid's films! Just to mention kid's films I really enjoyed:
Toy StoryToy Story 2- well, unless you count the dance between the little cowgirl doll and her female owner, until the female owner grew up, discovered boys, and put the little doll out in the recycling ...Monsters Inc- and I loved this film!Meet the Robinsons- which I just rented last night and quite enjoyedFinding Nemo- Mom gratuitously killed in the first 30 seconds; whole film is about a boy and his dad, and every helper figure he meets is also male, with the sole exception of Dory, a substitute mom-figure. Who never talks to or indeed meets another female...Happy Feet- buddy story, 3 guys, a couple of girl penguins sure but they never talk to each other, one is a mom and one is a girlfriend for the lead penguinStar Wars, all six parts- and the last 3 don't even have a pretense of a strong female character ...- Any Miyazaki movie - in strong contrast to the above, they all seem to think that what female character do matters! Even when there aren't any boys in the room! As frequently happens! No wonder my daughter likes them. No wonder I do. And my son does too.
Most of these films don't even have 2 female characters. So by those standards "Legally Blonde" may be a so-so film but it's way ahead on the Bechdel Scale.
I want to start a "Bechdel measure" category on IMDB.
But meanwhile, and to come back to Joss: no wonder we love him. We're actually in his stories. Everything he does passes the Bechdel Measure. So I can't wait to dig out my Buffy disks to start watching them again once this reno is finally done - with my daughter this time.
In the meantime she wants to start fundraising to send athletic equipment to girls in Afghanistan. Well, I suggested doing something like that. But I'm happy to help her out with it. Obviously. And maybe adding Bechdel Measure Ratings to the IMDB listings.
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