4061: Victim

[jen_aside]

I'll start this as the lead-in to that post about feminism I was going to do, because it's sort of a Part 1 of 2 when splitting into two parts seems to be a Thing now.

So C watched Inception again, and--out of curiosity--I looked up the movie's Bechdel Test rating. tl;dr: At least a few people believe the movie fails on the basis that 1 of the 2 NAMED female characters is primarily the subconscious of a man, with the ["dubious"] passing rating reinstated on the basis that the women being "real" is irrelevant to the test [and, in fact, starts down a slippery slope when subtexts and imagery get introduced to what are supposed to be three cut-and-dry rules].

I point out, also, for a movie to pass,

1. It has to have at least two women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man

with my own emphasis on MAN because that changes things if a woman who talks about her pregnancy with another woman is disqualified on the basis that her child turns out to be a boy [and I would hardly call a fetus a MAN*]. Or even if it's disqualified on the basis that a man has to be involved with a pregnancy, even though mice have bred without sperm AND female sperm have been created.

*despite CaliforniaWAIT WHUT D=<

Yes, I realize the Reverse Bechdel shows that male characters can practically go forever without talking about a woman, much less a girl [though Cobb won't shut up about Mal], but most of the debates are about semantics with the test--for instance, that Mal as she appears in the core plot of Inception is primarily Cobb's projection of her and, thus, she is actually Cobb should [not] count. I agree wholeheartedly that the test is itself only a rough indicator of female misrepresentation in fiction [especially movies], that arguing the "spirit" of the test is meaningless since the test itself was written as a joke and is full of logical flaws.

I also get what people are trying to do, but there's no objective way to measure a movie's feminism-worthiness. I'll get into this more later, but it's pretty much "I know it when I see it." But I'm not particularly surprised that so many more movies pass the Reverse Bechdel Test than pass the Regular Bechdel Test. From The Politics of Housework [accidentally a different link from the one I've used before, but same article]:In a sense, all men everywhere are slightly schizoid-divorced from the reality of maintaining life. This makes it easier for them to play games with it. It is almost a cliché that women feel greater grief at sending a son off to a war or losing him to that war because they bore him, suckled him, and raised him. The men who foment those wars did none of those things and have a more superficial estimate of the worth of human life.
So men, historically, have very little to do with women outside of keeping them "in their place," because that's how the men get to do whatever the hell they want while their basic needs are taken care of, by women and/or slaves [the article has a lot about the oppressors keeping power, for all it is about housework]. What the selection illustrates is it's partly biology to blame--the way we're built, it's nigh-impossible for women to have ever been the oppressors--so if we're to blame anyone for the Bechdel Test Failure trend, especially when a piece is historically accurate, it's Mother Nature. [I still find it impossible to believe in Intelligent Design--Intentional Design, maybe, but we sure ain't intelligently designed.]

[[although film schools are not helping]]

[[[end pt 1]]]

OH WAIT I meant to add that my books totally pass the Bechdel Test ^o^ though... hmm, one scene is a spoiler =' Anyway, 1 has two women talking as neighbours [though the second has a male pet who gets mentioned, I hope no one's so anal as to disqualify on THAT basis], and 2 has a scene about two women finding a suspicious file. I'm totally all feminist and shit XD

FWIW, BTW, I got to 18,409 words for Nano, and about a third of that is not related to the intended story =p but I been drawring!