And, it’s apparently enough of a given in the publishing industry to lead them to make that change in an author’s pen name.
Death is my bread and danger is my butter - no, danger is my - death and danger are my various breads and various butters.
I just did a search, and it appears that science fiction conventions are almost precisely divided between men and women. This is most obvious among attendees under 30. It also happens to be the case that women (and non-binary fans) dominate anime, manga, and media-centric sci-fi/fantasy. Men are more common in tabletop gaming, classic literature/hard sci-fi, and comic book fandom.
I know writers who were asked to make their names male-oriented as a condition for publication.
I’m not saying it happens all the time, just that it happens.
Have you read the Hunger Games?
Because holy shit, children throw axes at each other. And die. And get eaten by dogs.
I think constant death is a recurring trend in YA.
Constant death is how you can tell it’s dangerous.
No, I have not, but that was only one or two from each section, right? I saw the first film- i did not care for it.
However, neither Fourth Wing nor A Deadly Education are YA- at all.
I just watched the 1967 Midway- only one female in a small romantic subplot. But should we expect a WW2 film to have two significant female parts in it? No women on any of the US or IJN ships in the film, of course.
Don’t draw any conclusions based on sitcoms built around successful standup comics. That group tilts heavily male (Roseanne is a notable exception). And all those standup comedians are carried by skilled costars (Patricia Richardson, Debra Heaton, Helen Hunt, etc.) to cover their weak acting.
I’d like to offer Cheers as a counterexample. In the original casting, Ted Danson and Shelley Long shared top billing. It wasn’t until Long departed after season 5 and replaced by up and coming Kirstie Alley that Ted Danson got undisputed top billing.
The Scholomance trilogy is definitely classed as YA in my local bookstores. Wiki seems to agree.
As @Der_Trihs pointed out, the crucial issue in that fictional universe (Scholomance) is that magic-enabled kids are much more likely to die young if they don’t go through that hazardous schooling.
If your child had a 20% chance of dying during their anti-monster self-defense training, but a 95% chance of being killed by a monster if they didn’t take the training, I’m guessing you’d be lining up to send your kid to Hazardous Anti-Monster Self-Defense Training School, just like all the other parents.
Once again, I don’t think anybody is arguing that it’s a problem that some individual movie or some specific genre of movies happens to be set in a very male-dominated context and thus doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. Nobody is saying that two independent female characters having conversations that aren’t about a man have to be shoehorned into every naval-battle movie or else it’s a bad movie.
The point of the Bechdel test is that a hugely disproportionate majority of all films don’t manage to pass it. Traditionally, audiences and filmmakers have just taken it for granted that mass entertainment media will overwhelmingly default to showing female characters only when they’re interacting with, or at least talking about, a man. As in, we expect to see almost zero scenes where a man is not a key focus of the movie’s attention.
Does that approach make sense in a movie devoted to naval warfare involving male-only ship crews? Of course it does. Does it make sense as a rule of thumb for movies in general, supposedly equally capable of portraying pretty much all aspects of human life and activity? No, not really?
And it’s also possible to have movies set in a female-dominated context. I’m not sure that Mean Girls, for instance, has any scenes with two boys/men talking with each other (certainly not among the major characters).
But the male-dominated movies are much more common than the female-dominated movies, and even the female-dominated movies that exist are often much less female-dominated than the male-dominated movies are. In Mean Girls, for instance, Cadie does have a male friend who’s just a friend, not a love interest. Or look at something like Gravity: The vast majority of the movie is just one woman… but of the three other speaking parts, all are men, and there’s still a scene of two of those three talking to each other about something unrelated to Sandra Bullock’s character, women in general, nor the plot in general.
Yes. The Bechdel test is an unreliable indicator of a given work’s quality. But it is a strong indicator that industry greenlight standards are weird. Recall that the population of movies passing the Bechdel test have higher rates of return than the population that fails.
I perceive this as a reflection of a deeper problem with script writing guidelines. The six elements of any story are Theme, Character, Plot, Conflict, Setting, and Tone. Different works will emphasize different elements and improving one sometimes involves compromising another. Hollywood leans heavily into conflict which explains why so many works are puerile and why the overall themes are male centered. Guys fight.
Also, in Hollywood works character serves plot, while in manga and anime plot serves character. Hollywood characters do stupid or non-credible things to keep the story moving along, while in manga and anime various improbable scenarios are set up to see how the characters will react to them.
Both of these tendencies -favoring plot over character and conflict above everything else- lead to puerile or lobotomized dialogue, theme and frankly morality sustaining the action/plot in Hollywood flicks. Hollywood is an export powerhouse and a highly competent industry. But I think they are leaving money on the table.
And of course, yet another complication is that Hollywood executives always learn all the wrong lessons. If executives take “passes the Bechdel test” as a goal, rather than a mere indicator, then they’ll still make the same male-dominated spectacle conflict-fests, and just shoehorn in one scene somewhere where one third-rate female character comments about the weather to some other third-rate female character, just so the movie will technically pass that one specific low-bar test.
We all know you meant 1976. Good movie except for the Magic Transforming Aircraft.
Yeah, thanks. Great cast however.
Agreed; 538 did a study in 2014 showing that films that passed the test had a better ROI.
To add on to this point: It doesn’t automatically follow that moving toward 100% passing would deliver the most profits. There is likely a maximum addressable market. For example: international action blockbusters probably would not make more money with better dialog (male or female).
There’s also an institutional bias that experienced writers, directors, and producers are more likely to be male. Considering the advice “write what you know”, the most risk-adverse, short-term strategy is the status quo. Fortunately streaming (corporate and individual) is likely disrupting this status quo.
Are the stats on what percentage of movies pass the Bechdel Test based only theatrically-released movies? If we include movies on broadcast, cable, and streaming services, does that move the needle at all?
(I don’t intend that question to be only addressed to @CaveMike, but his comment is what brought it to mind.)
Generally speaking, diminishing returns are a fact of life. I hypothesize that there’s a market for better written stories and point to the international manga/anime market as evidence. But I also believe that there’s a larger market for conflict-heavy stories: Hollywood operates internationally as well despite their high production costs driven by strong unions and savvy Hollywood agents. I think Hollywood could secure higher returns by shifting scripting guidelines to a moderate degree, but there’s no fighting the lowest common denominator.
It is said that politics is downstream of culture. I say everything affects everything else but the dominant causal arrow here is culture being downstream of economics, and economics being tightly bound with technology and a handful of governmental policies. Streaming has opened up scope for serving smaller niches and I would hypothesize that this would favor Bechdel-friendly works. Like anime, but also home grown indie stuff.
When I first started writing, every scene was an action scene. I had to learn to do the more challenging work of creating conflict without violence. Yes, even in an action story.