It's certainly not a bad thing to attempt a more multidimensional portrayal of women. Women are everywhere, and they behave in ways that media is generally not interested in.
The problem is that when you start giving credence to rules that are extrinsic to the work itself, where do you stop? One problem with the arts in general now is that so many decisions are made by people who may have good intentions (and certainly claim to) but are fundamentally uncreative. Overall we need less of that.
2 comments:
I wasn't familiar with the Bechdale test but now I've been introduced to the origin I get the one-off joke assessment. It may have been the height of lesbian humor since there aren't too many examples to compare it with.
There's a big difference between the multidimensional portrayal of women in fiction and actually replacing male characters with female characters who say or do the same things a male would have said or done. That's been tried in Hollywood on several occasions with failure the inevitable result.
Simply swapping genders brings nothing new to to a story when what the reader wants is a believable character, an honest voice. No matter if someone has good intentions or not it's impossible to change human nature.
Have you ever seen a 1939 movie called 'The Women'? Of course the whole movie revolves around men but there are no men in it; the point is that the story is compelling all by itself.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032143/trivia/?ref_=tt_dyk_trv
Oh, I'm sure there's lesbian humor around. But I don't hold with official sources on what's funny. Or who's gay, for that matter.
There are differences between men and women, to be sure, but when I hear them generalized I always figure there's a lot of nuance missing. Trans activists and people like Matt Walsh both lean heavily on sex stereotypes even if their conclusions are different.
But yes, putting a woman in the story does change the chemistry of the thing. Which is interesting.
I think I saw The Women but it was a long time ago. Seems like it was made about when Joan Crawford was really starting to make her mark.
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