Peeking into the rock

I also have been thinking aboutnthe Bechdel test for a long time.  This is the test: are there two (named) female characters?  Do they talk to each other? About something other than a man?

But I don't pass it all the time. Or hardly ever, because of the tight-third single male protagonist and few other characters issue.  And why do I write that way,  anyhow?  I'd prefer to indicate a rich, complex world outside the narrow focus of the problems of my main characters.  And why are my main characters almost always male?  I did have a kind of huge case of gender dysphoria as a young girl -- it never made sense to me that I was a girl, for the longest time, though that gradually went away until some time in my teens I looked around and thought "hey, I don't feel that way anymore.  I wonder why?"  So maybe that has to do with my characters almost always being gay men, I don't know.  Maybe not, though.

I actually have a chapter title in one of my gay-romance bagatelles "This chapter passes the Bechdel Test."  The story, which is meant to be a screwball comedy romance but is almost universally read as a heavy angst sobfest with a moderately happy ending in sight (no, not that one, the WIP), is set within the kind of complex overla[pping mildly incestuous friendship network I spent my youth in.  There are two women who originally set the story rolling by meeting at a brunch and realizing they have friends who both need roommates.  As the story progresses, they're developing a friendship of their own, independent of their relationship to these men.  One of them is trying to buy an art gallery and the building it's in, and in that chapter and in subsequent chapters that's what they talk about.  There's a bit of sexual tension between these women, but I believe that in the long run, they're going to end up with different people, because it's just too neat to pair everybody off all the time, and my stories are not neat.  Anyway, I object to the notion that everybody who becomes close friends has to end up lovers.

So the tally.

I don't have a lot of traditional publishing credits so I'm just thinking about the stories I am thinking about.  I don't know if there's going to be a selection bias that matters.

fictionpress stories
passes:
  -Royalty
  -A Suitable Lover
 -Not At All Like Paco (is it cheating if two of the three speaking characters are not assigned a traditional gender but one of them is heavily implied to be a woman? The third is a biologically unsurprising woman)
fails
  -Trying Hard (there are only two speaking characters)
  -No For an Answer/Mr. Sly (Mr. Sly should be part of No For an Answer)
 -The Raw and the Cooked
 -The Rubaiyyat of Omar Camacho
 -I'm With the Band
fails, but female characters either speak to male characters about things of substance or indirect knowledge is presented about female characters having conversations about things other than men
 -Esperanza Highway
 -Prospect Road
 -Sissy and Buddy and the Whole Nine Yards
 -The Man of His Dreams (which seriously needs a new title, more on the line of Goodwater)

Not-Poland:
 -The Drummer Boy has a tight-third male pov, but the conversations that are reported to him or overheard by him include a bunch of things said by or to his sister about trees, genetics, mathematics, bicycles, the university she wants to go to, inheritance and marriage concerns, etc.  Also her nurse/governess talks about these things.  And the Duchess talks about a bunch of medieval claptrap that doesn't all directly involve particular men.
-The hundred years after story (which I'm not calling Seeing the Light anymore because that was just too stupid, now I'm calling it The Greenest Boy in Town) just completely fails.  Not a single female character except, indirectly, the protagonist's mother, who is notable mainly for not having told the protagonist anything important or true.

The Donor fails. Nobody ever has a conversation that isn't actually about Eurick, who is a man.

A Song for the Dead -- I'd have to go back and read the manuscript but I believe that, in fact, the two young women do appear in it and talk about the one young woman's future irrespective of the men involved.  In the other book that goes with it, The Calling, this definitely happens, as the younger sister's future is the main motivation for the older sister and for the brother.

Okay, I'm, not going to think about anything older than The Calling.

other bits:

Wink -- fails, I guess.  Since nobody has an unambiguous gender.

John Brown's Body -- fails.

Okay, so I fail the Bechdel test the majority of the time, and I care about it.  It makes me wonder about what I'm writing about, and what I want to be writing about.



 -

Two of the annoying things that keep popping up about writing are (1) an irrational hatred of the passive vocie coupled with a complete ignorance as to what the passive voice actually is: and (2) blather about gender and writing style.  They've come together in a recent<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/29/AR2010062903997_pf.html"> idiotic essay by Kathleen Parker</a> about President Obama, and you can read the takedown <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2427">here</a> at Language Log as usual.

You are all reading Language Log, right?

You better be!

Scalzi went and did the gender genie, and was smug about the answers he got -- he put in something he wrote from a female perspective and got a female answer -- so naturally, since I ought to be doing a dozen other things, I did too, and got the result that my fiction -- four samples -- came out male, and my blog entry, female.

Well, I've been writing about men, here lately.