On Fri, 23 Aug 2013, Rohan McLeod <rhn@jeack.com.au> wrote:
Rick Moen wrote:
..............snip The test very simply is: At any time during the movie / novel / etc., does such a conversation occur at all?
OK; so just one conversation between two female characters involving a reference to a male; is a sufficient condition to fail the test ?
The Wikipedia page which was cited and the other references to the test that I've seen have not made it a condition that the women in question never talk about male characters. Merely that they sometimes have conversations that don't involve them.
The beauty of it is that it's deterministic and makes no ideological claims about what yes or no outcome might automatically mean for work X. It implicitly acknowledges that there might be any number of reasons other than sexism why it works out to 'no'.
But in practice it's an interesting metric.
though no comment on :
"Also the anti-sexist context; seems to miss the more general problem of the cliched nature of story-telling;(so evident in Hollywood's view of the world). That is how to tell a story in a way which will be appealing to an audience, whose real interests are very narrow ? "
I think that in many cases movie producers could add some diversity without most viewers noticing the difference. Such issues are most noticed by people who aren't affected by them, men tend not to notice sexism, white people tend not to notice racism, straight people tend not to notice homophobia, etc. So it's not as if men will start turning off their TVs because women have a conversation about something other than male characters. In fact if the conversation drives the plot they probably wouldn't notice it at all. There's also the fact that the amount of time spent viewing movies and TV shows doesn't differ that much among demographics. So about 50% of the ticket sales for movies will be to women and the portion of sales to various other groups will about match the population demographics. If movie producers were directly aiming to maximise their profits they wouldn't alienate 50% of their market. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/