Trout Nation Posts

The very first time I learned about the Bechdel test was way back in 1998, when I was deeply entrenched in the Labyrinth fanfic community. I was chatting via IM with a beta reader, who told me, with a sigh, that my latest fic did not pass said test. She explained patiently that because my story

• Didn’t have at least two female characters
• who had names
• and interacted with each other
• and who did so without the exchange having anything to do with a male character

it was not feminist and I should start over.

I was perplexed. At the time, I was seventeen, I’d never heard of feminism outside of debates about Hilary Clinton’s scandalous involvement in her husband’s presidency or Connie Chung co-anchoring the CBS news. How could a fanfiction be feminist or not feminist? I had a long way to go.

That was the first time I looked up “Bechdel test” to see what it really was. What I learned shocked me. One woman, writing a comic strip, used a character’s preference in films to point out the egregious oversight of female characters with three-dimensional real-world concerns in pop culture. It was a pithy, but entirely accurate, punch line about how Hollywood represents women on screen. And that was all.

I don’t mean to minimize the contribution of Alison Bechdel to feminism. Because this comic strip, “The Rule” really is a watershed moment in feminism and pop culture. It points out something that is right in front of our faces all of the time, but we usually can’t see it because our cultural conditioning makes us literally blind to it. But the Bechdel test, as it came to be known, somehow became the ultimate test of whether or not fiction was fit for feminist consumption, and there is no gray area. If it doesn’t pass, it’s “not feminist.” If it does, it’s “feminist.”

I got thinking about this last night as I was flipping through my DVDs and I came across The Silence of The Lambs. Now, I’m never going to accuse Thomas Harris of being a feminist visionary. If your only experience of his work is the television show Hannibal, just realize that most of the female characters on that show were dudes in the books. But Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling was one of my very first feminist role models. I remember watching that movie on VHS as a freshman in high school and thinking, “My god, this is a scary movie and the woman isn’t dying? And nobody is rescuing her?” And guess what? It doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, despite being one of the very few movies you’re ever going to find that has a female protagonist who isn’t “trying to have it all.” Clarice is just a female protagonist doing her job, without romance or some looming reproductive clock.

Just don’t read Hannibal, because what in the actual fuck, Harris?

Along with The Silence of The Lambs, Labyrinth ultimately fails the test, as well. Although the entire narrative is about a young girl putting aside her dreams of being a damsel in distress in order to be the hero of her own story, it doesn’t pass the test I see my peers using to determine whether or not a piece of media is “feminist.”

Anyway, this got me thinking about what books and movies do pass the Bechdel test and yet are still packed with horrible, anti-female stereotypes and messages.  Like Sex and The City. One episode that stands out strongly in my mind is the one in which fashion-obsessed Carrie may lose her apartment because she’s spent all of her money on designer shoes, and her financial troubles cause a rift between herself and her friend Charlotte, who has alimony and a tony penthouse from the rich man she married. If we’re playing by the rules of “if it passes the Bechdel test, it’s feminist,” then there you have it.

You know what else passes the Bechdel test? Every. Single. 50 Shades of Grey book. All of them.

It’s not that the Bechdel test isn’t a useful shorthand for addressing gender inequality in media; it absolutely is. But what the Bechdel test does not do, no matter how one tries to justify it, is determine whether a piece of media is “feminist” or not. Yet that’s how it’s being used, over and over. This is a symptom of a feminist dialogue that routinely projects a very narrow view of what feminism “is,” a dialogue that is leaving all but the whitest, straightest, cisgender women out of the conversation. There is no room for argument or discussion, either something is feminist or it isn’t.

Alison Bechdel made an amazing point, that the role of women in fiction is to be focused on male characters. And that’s absolutely true.  But that’s all that comic is, an observation. It’s not a diagnostic tool for how to write your book or screenplay or how we should consume novels and television. If your work doesn’t include female characters talking about something other than dudes, examine why that is. If the answer is, “Because her love interest is the most important thing in her life!” then congratulations, jamming a conversation between her and her mother about how amazing her new car is just ain’t gonna fix the problem. And if the answer is “it legitimately doesn’t fit into the story I’m telling,” and your work doesn’t otherwise contain harmful anti-woman messages, your feminist card doesn’t get revoked.

And keep in mind, the comic strip itself is tongue-in-cheek. The movie the main character cites as playing along by her rule is Alien, and then only because two female characters talk about a monster. The entire point of the comic is that even when the woman gets what she wants, a movie where two female characters talk about something other than a man, it’s still not a representation of real women. It’s totally macho and made to fulfill male fantasy.

If you like a piece of media, and it passes the Bechdel test, there’s nothing wrong with pointing that out. And there’s nothing wrong with pointing out how a piece of fiction could have passed the Bechdel test with some tweaking. But we have to stop using Bechdel’s observation as a benchmark for what constitutes “feminist” fiction. Fiction, like feminism, is not “one size fits all experiences,” and it’s impossible to judge a nuanced medium through a black-and-white test and achieve anything resembling accuracy.

In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will have a powerful craving for Hostess fruit pies. She will also recap every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an eye to the following themes:

1. Sex is the real villain of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe.
2. Giles is totally in love with Buffy.
3. Joyce is a fucking terrible parent.
4. Willow’s magic is utterly useless (this one won’t be an issue until season 2, when she gets a chance to become a witch)
5. Xander is a textbook Nice Guy.
6. The show isn’t as feminist as people claim.
7. All the monsters look like wieners.
8. If ambivalence to possible danger were an Olympic sport, Team Sunnydale would take the gold.
9. Angel is a dick.
10. Harmony is the strongest female character on the show.
11. Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
12. Some of this shit is racist as fuck.
13. Science and technology are not to be trusted.
14. Mental illness is stigmatized.
15. Only Willow can use a computer.
16. Buffy’s strength is flexible at the plot’s convenience.
17. Cheap laughs and desperate grabs at plot plausibility are made through Xenophobia.
18. Oz is the Anti-Xander

Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments.

WARNING: Some people have mentioned they’re watching along with me, and that’s awesome, but I’ve seen the entire series already and I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So… you know, take that under consideration, if you’re a person who can’t enjoy something if you know future details about it. 

If you don’t want to go to a Halloween party this year because it just seems like too much damn work, or you don’t like people, or you just haven’t been invited to a Halloween party, this is the event for you. Join your fellow citizens of Troutnation on twitter to watch the Tim Burton classic, Beetlejuice.

Start your copy of the movie at 9:00PM EST (sorry, I know you all come from different time zones, but mama’s gotta sleep) on October 25th, and tweet about it using the hashtag #UtterlyAlone (thanks to @ShariSlade for the suggestion!). This will be a great chance to meet some new twitter friends and also, um, watch Beetlejuice, because OBVIOUSLY. It’s only the greatest movie of all time.

Apparently, someone explained to Charlie Hunnam exactly what he agreed to, and when the icy fingers of reality speared through his brain, he left the project with nothing but a cloud of dust and a body-shaped hole in the wall.

Since this will almost certainly delay the movie’s release (filming was set to begin in November), I hereby decree that October 11 be recognized as a Troutnation national holiday. St. Hunnam’s Day, known in medieval times as “Hunnamsmas,” shall be commemorated each year with a dinner of anything a controlling psychopath didn’t force you to eat, and a village wide spanking contest.

So, weigh in, all ye citizens of Troutland. Is this a bad move on Hunnam’s part? Do you believe that “scheduling” issues took him away from the project? Who should they cast now? And does anyone know Ian Somerhalder’s whereabouts?

Hey everybody out there in Troutnation! It’s World Mental Health Day! This would be a great time for one of my candid posts about mental illness, but I’m having a rough week coping. I’m just kicking back and trying to maintain, but I didn’t want to let the day go by without contributing somehow. So, I made a really grainy, awful looking webcam video about a neat invention I picked up at the pharmacy today. I think it can be helpful to people whose mental illness makes it difficult to keep track of the day-to-day routine.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFQfNTIk8iA&w=420&h=315]

 

A lot of you lovely weirdos have created fanworks about 50 Shades of Grey, and they’re often shared in the comments and beloved by all. But last night, I received this jem via twitter and I would hate for anyone to miss it: Bic McPenlamperson by Bookjunk. You might recall Bic McPenlamperson from the 50 Shades Freed chapter nine recap:

Seriously, have you guys noticed how conveniently “lunatics” pop up in their lives, causing these dramatic and unavoidable threats that mean Ana absolutely must stay at home or under Christian’s surveillance all the time? First it was Leila, now it’s Jack Hyde and the mystery woman driving the Dodge. I’m going to guess that this will become a regular thing. “Honey, don’t forget, I have Kate’s bachelorette party to go to.” “Oh, um, you can’t, because, uh, um, huh… uh… Bic… Mcpen… lamp…erson, yeah, that’s right! Bic McPenlamperson! My old nemesis Bic McPenlamperson is out to destroy us. So you can’t go.”

I’m not sure how to properly express just how charmingly bizarre I find it to have someone write fan fiction of my work. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I’m always super flattered. This time, it’s also hilarious; this is fanfic of something I wrote about somebody else’s book. See also: the recursion photo in that chapter nine recap. That about sums it up.

Coming soon: the next Buffy recap!

This is a long story. Stick with me, it really is going somewhere.

Today, I was cleaning out my mudroom. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, the mudroom is the room at the back door of a house, where you keep your boots and your coats and your umbrellas and literally every object you’ve cared enough about to bring in from the car, but not quite important enough to make it into the house.

One of the things I came across was a box of paper promo from a past conference I had helped set up. When we sent out our call for promo, we asked for a small amount and told authors that we wouldn’t be shipping promo back. My idea– which was “ambitious, but rubbish”– was that we would hold on to the paper promo and just stick it into the bags at the next conference. But now, it’s been sitting, twenty bookmarks here, thirteen postcards there, for the past year. Yikes.

I decided I would sort the promo out; anything that was touting a current release, I would pitch (it’s a sad but true fact that 97% of all paper promo ends up in the trash, either at the conference it was intended for or at home when the conference goer looks through their goodie bag), and anything that was just author branded, I would keep for the next conference.

Imagine my surprise when I pulled out postcards advertising a release with a small press who prides themselves on “clean” fiction, and the author they were promoting is now a blockbuster bestseller in the New Adult genre.

Now, I’m not suggesting that all New Adult books have sex in them (this author’s books do) or that there’s something wrong with authors writing at different heat levels for different publisher requirements. But this author was practically unknown three years ago, and now she’s inspiring the squees of dedicated New Adult readers, making them long for her heroes as “book boyfriends,” and raking in the dough with #1 New York Times bestselling novels.

This gave me pause. Let me explain why.

A few weeks ago, a writer whom I absolutely adore personally, had a book released with this same small press. It became a bestseller on Amazon, and I was so, so proud of her. But when she posted the good news to her Facebook, another author associated with the “clean” publisher posted a response to the effect of, “I’m so glad people are waking up and recognizing that clean books are better!”

Since it was Facebook, I wrote up a lengthy reply about why her comment pissed me off so much– and immediately deleted it. Because I’ve had enough experience with Facebook to know that anything, literally any critical comment, no matter how carefully expressed so as not to cause offense, is going to be labelled “bullying.”

So, I had a lot of pent-up anger when I saw this New Adult superstar’s name splashed across a book cover from a press whose publisher once explained patiently to me that romance is actually hotter when it doesn’t go past the bedroom door. I was absolutely furious. Who did this fraud think she was, jumping from “clean” fiction to sexually explicit fiction, and making an extraordinary leap of success? She must view sex as the magic key to cash, and she had no problem turning that key when she was calling it “smut” before! How dare she pride herself on her lily white, virginal fiction, then come into my genre and have greater success than I have!

Obviously, there was a lot of emotional thinking involved there. In the first place, I have no idea if this author thought books with sexual content were “smut” or not. For all I knew, she wrote a Regency and decided this was the best publisher to approach about it. Maybe she had no opinion at all on her publisher’s policy, because it didn’t affect her work. Nobody has to put sex in their stories, and sometimes it doesn’t fit [that’s what she said]. And this author really didn’t write in my genre. From what I could tell, she wrote Regencies before (which I have never written) and now she writes New Adult (which I have never published… but more on that at a later date). Throw on my mantra of “the success of others does not invalidate my own success” at the professional jealousy aspect, and I had a long afternoon of thinking to do.

When I examined the reason for my initial reaction, I realized why I had felt such a strong sense of betrayal. It was because there has been a strangely passive-aggressive war between “clean” and “dirty” fiction for years. And it’s all tied into our culturally nurtured feelings and ideas about sex.

My first series was about vampires. It was just your standard Urban Fantasy/Kick Butt Heroine 00’s vampire story. I had no idea at the time that vampires were even controversial anymore. I thought they were an accepted part of life or whatever. So I was shocked at how many people– readers and authors both– would scold me for what I was writing. They couldn’t read it because they were Christians and they didn’t like the occult and they thought paranormal books filled your head with “dark thoughts” and blah blah blah. I would come away from these encounters thinking, “Jesus Christ, it’s a fucking book, not a portal to the Netherworld.” And if it was an author saying something like this, it would always, and I mean without fail, lead into a lecture about how the Christian Inspirational Romance genre was going to be the next big thing and vampires were dead anyway (wtf, why do people say that? OF COURSE THEY’RE DEAD) and I should look into changing what I write because I was destined to never sell another book. Because readers preferred “nice” stories.

This directly parallels my experience with “clean” vs. “dirty” fiction. Every conversation I’ve ever had on the subject has involved some shaming aspect, equating chastity with “clean” and labeling anyone who wanted to read about sexual activities– no matter how mild; this could apply to a Harlequin Presents– “dirty.” I’ve had “clean” authors tell me that I “don’t need to lower yourself to writing erotica,” or that they would “read your books, but I don’t like all that trashy stuff.”

I have a problem with this. First of all, are we all on the same page when I say that, at their core and before any proud reclamation of meaning, “clean” and “dirty” are positive and negative words, respectively? Everyone likes “clean,” at least as an adjective. We like crisp, clean sheets. When choosing a restaurant, we want to eat at the one that looks clean. Clean is a desirable enough commodity that we hire people to clean our house, our clothes, our teeth. If clean wasn’t a big deal to us, then there wouldn’t be at-home butthole bleaching kits, right?

But dirty, oh… dirty is bad. I’m not talking about the fun way, the way that applies to fiction. Dirty is a smelly diaper. Dirty is a subway pole still warm and slightly damp from a stranger’s hand. Dirty feels bad, looks gross, and it’s even dangerous; a mother’s frantic, “don’t eat that!” when her child picks a sucker up off the floor. “That’s dirty!” We hear about “dirty money” and “dirty cops.” “Dirty deeds” describes crime. The message is pretty clear: dirty is bad.

And obviously, this all applies to our sexuality. I’m sure this is not news to you. Sex is “dirty” and no sex is “clean.”

There are readers out there who want fiction without sex, and publishers certainly have a right to sell and market their product to those readers. And I’m not going to judge an author because their artistic vision didn’t include sweaty humping times. But what I am going to suggest is that we stop referring to fiction as “clean” and “dirty.” It devalues the work of the authors and the interest of the readership.

I respectfully ask that the readers and authors who are proud to call their books “smut” or “dirty” really consider what kind of message those words are sending. I understand that it’s supposed to be a cheeky, fun reclamation of the terms, but is it really? It’s a negative word that bolsters the argument of people who want to vocally reject “dirty” fiction as undesirable and harmful. And before anyone argues that “dirty” actually has a positive, fun meaning when applied to sexuality, answer this real quick: what do we call it, colloquially, when a person is free from sexually transmitted disease?

Bingo.

After a long, hard think this afternoon, I decided that I’m not going to call my books “dirty books” anymore. I’m not going to say I write “smut” or that my books are “raunchy.” Because I feel like I’m reinforcing a message that I don’t agree with; that sexuality is dirty, and therefore less preferable, to the clean absence of sex.

I would also like to see a decline in the number of “clean” authors, publishers, bloggers, and readers insisting that the market is oversexed and soon everyone will be reading “clean” stories instead of “dirty.” That’s a really arrogant attitude, and it smacks of malicious willful thinking. Do you really want other authors to fail, just because they include sexuality in their stories? Do you really want authors to gain their readerships through disillusionment, rather than by finding their own niche and making readers happy?

There are books about space, books about cowboys, books about vampires, baseball players, elves and doctors, and there is a readership for each of these varied tastes, not just in the bookstore but specifically within the romance genre itself. Why can’t there be room for readers who prefer sexually explicit and non-sexually explicit material? Why does it have to be a competition to see who is better, of sturdier moral fabric, or who is a real writer and who’s just a pervert with a keyboard? Do we have to label readers as prudes or wild women based on what they want to spend their book buying dollars on?

The short answer is, no. Writing or reading sex doesn’t make you morally loose and automatically cool and free-spirited, any more than not writing or reading sex makes you a superior person with a pure soul. So why are we bothering to assign positive/negative symbolism to either? Why not just accept that some books have sex in them, and some don’t?

I’m interested to read Troutnation’s thoughts on the matter.