January 18th, 2009
by
Ariel Wetzel
Much to my disappointment, in the premiere of the last stretch of Battlestar Galactica, another prominent female character died.
Battlestar Galactica strives to be genderblind both in casting and in the show’s military structure, and as a result I find it to be much less sexist than what usually comes out of Hollywood. But a major flaw in a “genderblind” show is a denial of the pervasive and internalized sexism that informs the creators of that show. As Ide Cyan observed in her review of Razor, women are disproportionately the characters to die. On this list of deceased characters (spoilers included if you haven’t seen the season 4.5 premier), 11 out of 19 dead characters are women. (That count would be 13 if D’Anna and Starbuck hadn’t returned.)
The producers of Battlestar Galactica may obliviously commit gynocide, but I’ll still take what I can get. BSG is a show with not only high production quality and complex, thoughtful worldbuilding, but has acknowledged social movements for prisoners’ and laborers’ rights, the former something I’ve never seen engaged in mainstream media. If I sought feminist purity all my science fiction film and televison, all I’d have left is Born in Flames.
See also a recent Wired article on women of Battlestar.
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- More blogging by
Ariel Wetzel at
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Filed under TV & Film, female characters | Comments (31)
I have to respectfully disagree with your post on gynocide on BSG, particularly a statistic you cite is that 11 out of the 19 deceased characters are women.
Be warned, what follows is a little nerdy and long, but to be fair, you are posting about science fiction, so such expositions are to be expected from the occasional die-hard nerd like myself.
If BSG was gender blind, a character’s death should be independent of their gender. In other words, a character’s gender shouldn’t make that character more likely or less likely to die.
So, you can think of character deaths like flipping a coin. Perhaps heads means a woman dies and tails means a man dies.
By the binomial distribution, there is approximately a 33.0% chance that you will get 11 or more heads if you flip a coin 19 times. 33.0% of the time you will get 11 or more tails. 34.0% percent of the time you will get 10 heads/9 tails or 9 heads/10 tails.
This should intuitively make sense. If you flipped a coin 19 times, and it came up heads 11 out of those 19 times, would you think that the coin was biased? Would you think you had a trick coin or a weighted coin? Probably not.
In other words, the fact that 11 out of 19 character deaths are women can be explained by randomness. It’s far from indicating that there is any sort of gender bias. There would have to be 14 or more female character deaths in order for there to be statistical significance.
To be fair, this doesn’t prove that there isn’t any gender bias on BSG. All that my above argument does is show that the 11 out of 19 statistics isn’t statistically significant and does not indicate any gender bias.
Season 4.5 spoilers below.
Maybe because I’m in the humanities, but I usually don’t pay much attention to statistics to support arguments because I think they’re too often detached from the complexities of the lives and situations that produces such statistics. But your knowledge about them can help me strengthen my argument. When I attach names to those characters, I feel much more of a discrepancy between the loss of women vs. men.
Cain, Dee, Kat, Shaw, Cally, Gina, Natalie, and Ellen vs. Billy, Socinus, Crashdown, Jammer, Duck/Tucker, Garner, Fisk, and the first hybrid. Out of the 30 characters the Battlestar Wiki lists as most prominent, only 11 are female. Next to the number of women killed (yes, some of whom are side characters not on their list), it really seems like women are the first to go.
I don’t know – I’ve always thought that on shows like BSG, it’s the interesting and complex characters who often get to die (because their death both affects the audience and keeps their character intact) while the uninteresting and boring and unregarded characters can linger on in the background without any interesting arcs or plots. If there’s gender bias in the deaths, I feel like it’s probably as much that Moore et al assume a woman’s death will be sadder (oh no, not the women and children!) than that the women characters aren’t valued.
I think I failed to hypothesize on any motive behind the producers to kill women, and yours is a likely one. Although it’s funny how killing children (or even including kid characters) seems to be a taboo! The one child character who isn’t a toddler is Boxy from the first season, and he just dropped off the face of the show!
Hm…I have noticed this theory posited, and I just cannot help but disagree.
With BSG has come a wealth of strong, intelligent, complex female characters that neither stay in the background, nor live out their character lives as decorations for the men.
A woman president, a woman admiral, a female cylon that leads the cylon resistance, women fighter pilots (and Starbuck is respected by the men as one of the BEST viper pilots)…these are characters who are front and center in the action and the plots, and written with such dimension and complexity as I rarely see on TV (or movies).
If anything, the fact that they ARE so involved (and in leadership roles) in the plot and action is why they end up in deadly situations.
And I don’t think that the character deaths are meant to draw on our sympathy for women specifically, so much as our sympathy for characters that we have grown to love (and sometimes hate, yes).
I am the first to highlight what I perceive as inequity, or inordinate amounts of women-bashing, but BSG has led the way in strong women characters, and because those women figure front and center in the action of a story of survival, desperation and war…yeah…some of them are going to die in the process. But if more women are front and center in battle, then more women will die. That’s not statistics so much as just basic math.
Although it’s funny how killing children (or even including kid characters) seems to be a taboo!
Actually, one of the most effective deaths in the entire series is of a little girl – the ships that were not able to jump away when the Cylons were in pursuit were depicted in their destruction through this little girl that Roslin had spoken to earlier that day. She is shown in an arboretum-type enclosure on the ship; we can see the other ships jumping away overhead, and then I believe we see the Cylon base ship jump in, and she keeps playing with her doll… until the shot goes white, and it cuts to Roslin staring off into space aboard Colonial One.
The problem is that certain people have a tendency to shall we say, come back from the dead? Which fudges the count (hint, fifth cylon?).
I think Galactica does very well with females and has many complex characters.
For example, in any other show the leaders of the Cylon rebels would be the male model, Leoben. But the leader was Natalie, a woman. In contrast the “bad” Cylon faction is composed of male models (except for one lonely cylon who crossed lines).
I agree with djshiva that the reason why women die is because they are so involved in the action. They are leaders, fighters, pilots.
In comparison, Terminator Chronicles has a much lower female death count. But that’s because most of the guest stars and new characters to appear are male. Even then, it has two female leads which isn’t bad most of the people around the main women we see in TCSC are guys. I don’t think I’ve seen a single female scientist or programmer and plenty of males scientists and programmers to appear in the episodes.
Natalie still dies. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think BSG is a horribly sexist show. I just don’t know if it deserves all the praise that even I’m guilty of giving it because I still find it significant that the women are the first to go.
Terminator is an interesting comparison because it pales in comparison to Battlestar; I don’t think the producers of that show even try. I do appreciate that Sarah and Cameron run the show, and although I’m into it enough to keep watching, TSCC reminds me of how sexist, shallow, and plot-hole ridden most shows are. I’m into the posthuman and technophobic themes, but as far as challenging racism and sexism Terminator gets a D.
I think it deserves praise for having one of the more diverse casts and well-rounded characters on TV right now.
The sheer fact that they have women of different ages and ethnicities is surprising because most sci-fi shows are populated by hot, very young white women (like in Terminator). But BSG has had an older president, older main characters (Ellen and Elosha). So it’s not just mini-skirt eye-candy 20-year olds. By comparison I think Heroes has one older female (the mother of the Petrellis).
And there’s non-white women on TV! Sharon, Dee, Dualla, Tory. In comparison, on Heroes there’s been 1 female minority I can recall. Terminator has 1.
Everyone said Buffy was kewl but I remember one minority character (an African-American slayer who gets killed, btw). It was an all white female cast. And Asian women were suspiciously absent in Firefly.
I just think Battlestar tries harder than most shows on the air in recent years. And the kill count does not bother me too much because most of the female characters have had cool storylines, not just served as eye-candy that got blown-up so a male character could fell bad/seek revenge/ be comforted and then shack up with another female. Or play hero rescuing the princess. Just my opinion.
Btw, I’m pretty sure we can count Ellen among the living in some way, shape or form in future episodes which would skewer the count down. Then again, I have no idea who is going to bite the dust in more episodes, so who knows.
You do realize that Moore et al are of the school that everyone dies in the end? I’m not being facetious. I really think that the vast majority of the characters – both male and female – are going to end up dead.
A show can both be praiseworthy for how much better it is than TV shows in general, and rightly criticized for how it screws up.
So I agree with Sylviamg that “I think it deserves praise for having one of the more diverse casts and well-rounded characters on TV right now.” But I still think there are legitimate critiques to be made.
I’m not convinced by the deathcount, for pretty much the reasons Gordon says. But on this thread, Maia argues that BSG is sexist in some other ways:
There’s also heterosexism in how rare same-sex romances are in BSG (as Charles points out on the thread I linked, the only two times we see same-sex lovers, it’s outside of the regular show, in Razor and in a webisode).
My first thought on seeing the list of the dead is that the cast of major AND supporting characters holds a larger number of female characters with significant roles – in other words, there are far more women of at least some significance to kill then men. The list of men killed, such as Socinus or Laird, is much less significant to us because those characters are third-tier and never became as established as a Kat or a Cally. I would be interested to see, if you put every major, supporting and third-tier character into a list, how many were actually women.
I suppose there was the interaction between Caprica Six and Boomer/Sharon on Caprica in the Season 2.5 episode “Downloaded,” although (a) much of their conversation ended up being about Baltar [failing the Mo Movie test] and (b) we never really saw any subsequent relationship between them.
I, too, have been troubled by the fact that the only same-sex relationships have been outside the main show (in Razor and “The Face of the Enemy”), and even then, rather obliquely depicted. The fact that Gina/Six and Cain had a relationship is kind of a throwaway, and so is the relationship between Gaeta and Hoshi that is passingly depicted — and ended — in the webisode series. And I could poke at the fact that both Cain and Gaeta end up being presented in a quite negative light.
I was musing the other day about how many of the female characters seem to end up with an emotional attachment to men who knock them around, physically or emotionally. Cally and Galen Tyrol are the most obvious examples, along with Kara and Leoben, and now there’s Saul Tigh and Caprica Six. That’s very unsettling. I was mildly relieved to see them at least acknowledge it with Cally (where she muses to Cottle about the wisdom of “practically propos[ing] to a man after he breaks her jaw”), but the coziness between Tigh and Caprica in “Sometimes a Great Notion” and “A Disquiet Follows My Soul” make me very uneasy.
I think there’s something over-thought about all of this. Perhaps more women die than men, but what that implies is unclear; it could be sexist, or not. There may not be many female-female positive interactions (although there are tons between Roslin and the priestess–can’t recall her name at the moment–throughout the whole series, and they don’t talk about men), but to be honest, how often are there men buddying around? I can think of very few examples. There are a lot of men, and mostly they talk about tense things in unpleasant ways and are not friendly to each other. Often positive interaction is in groups and spread between sexes–as it is in daily life.
This is a show with a lot of good characters, and whether or not they are disproportionately male or heterosexual, the female characters are accurate, not man-obsessed, not necessarily sex objects and mostly in positions of power, playing positive and negative roles.
To me the complaints here seem nit-picky. The question that interests me is whether a rendered world is realistic, consistent with human nature and free of unnecessary bias. In this case, perhaps there are more men in the military, so there are simply more man-to-man interactions. That does make it seem questionable that so many women die, but on the other hand, that doesn’t necessarily entail a negative portrayal of women.
In regards to the comment preceding mine, I would suggest that both Starbuck and Ellen are abusive to their respective partners–both physically and emotionally. After all, Kara murders Leoben repeatedly, she tortures him early in the series, and her behavior towards Anders is terrible. She is extremely hard on Adama, and towards all of them she initiates physical violence. And yet all of the men stay attracted to her, even though she’s beaten them.
Is this concerning? No. It’s real. In the end, I think you could probably argue there’s sexism in the show, involving negative and positive stereotypes against both men and women, but I don’t think it would be worth the time.
I was trying to think if men have healthier relationships with each other. Tigh and Adama do. Lee and Adama. But are there any other men who are good friends? Any other men with significant male-male relationships?
Baltar, no. Tyrol, no. Anders, no. Helo, no. We should not count Gaeta since he is shown to be close to Hoshi only in the webisode.
Most of the time the men and women are in conflict.
The cylons seemed the friendliest to each other (although now they’ve splintered). But they were certainly more communal than ANY of the Galactica people.
Btw, I’ve always thought the humans are probably worse than the cylons and that the cylons have been corrupted my human ways. After all, before they interacted with humans they were a single collective and now they’ve splintered off.
As for conversations between women that don’t revolve around men … Starbuck and Roslin, Roslin and her assistant, as well as several cylon interactions. I can recall quite a few.
It’s not just men having “healthier” relationships, it’s men having relationships (in the broad sense) to each other, period, in a way the women don’t, or to a far greater extent than the women do. The whole political manoeuvering in the latest episode, for instance, which involved as major players Felix Gaeta and Lee Adama and Tom Zarek and Bill Adama, only had Laura Roslin as a political player on the same level. (Saul Tigh and Kara Thrace were part of it as military allies, but not on the same level of command as the others.) Or Baltar having important recurring plot-related interactions with Gaeta and Lee Adama. Or Tyrol and Anders and Tigh all relating to each other as the hidden Cylons, with only one female character in the group, Tory Foster, who is then positioned by the plot to gather information by sleeping with Baltar, and to kill another woman in cold blood and then turn on Roslin — whereas Tigh stuck with Adama — and so forth, hardly *relating* to other female characters, even when she joins the Cylons.
Even characters talking about characters of the opposite sex isn’t symmetrical. Can you even imagine if Cally and Kara Thrace had had the chance to discuss their husbands turning out to be Cylons? But they didn’t. And meanwhile male characters threaten to rape other male character’s wives, or bond in the absence of a dead wife and mother over a child (whose parentage was retconned in such a way as to seriously undermine the plot reasons that led to Cally’s death in the first place). Or can you imagine Kara Thrace’s relationship with the Adama family if Zak’s surviving relatives were a sister and a mother instead of a brother and father?
Thrace and Roslin barely say a word to each other since the assassination attempt half a season ago, and Athena and Caprica only get scenes together when they’re thrown together in jail to be used as leverage against other Cylons and get to discuss how their *childbearing abilities* are what has made them so important in the conflict between Humans and Cylons. Not because they might have thought it important to talk to each other about it on their own.
And so many relationships between female characters that weren’t about men ended when half of those female characters died: Priestess Elosha, who was Roslin’s spiritual advisor; Kat, who was Thrace’s fellow pilot; Cain, who was briefly Thrace’s superior officer; Emily Kowalski, whom Roslin befriends while she’s dying of cancer for all of one episode; Natalie, the model Six Cylon leader who negociated the Cylon-Human alliance with Roslin… as if the show’s writers didn’t want to deal with ongoing interactions between female characters, or as few of them as possible. It’s possible to argue that the number of ongoing, evolving interactions between male characters is small: but they last so much longer, and have been at the heart of the series since the beginning.
“Can you even imagine if Cally and Kara Thrace had had the chance to discuss their husbands turning out to be Cylons?”
But why would they? I really think in Galactica seldom does anyone talk about this kind of thing. I didn’t see Lee talking much about his break-up with Dualla to another male even though it was a huge thing (he doesn’t even have a male friend, aside from his dad). Or Anders talking to anyone else about how Starbuck cheated on him. Most of the time the men are busy beating each other (Tyrol beating the crap out of Hot Dog).
“. Or can you imagine Kara Thrace’s relationship with the Adama family if Zak’s surviving relatives were a sister and a mother instead of a brother and father?”
I wish it was that way because I can’t stand Lee and I never got the whole Kara/Lee thing. I didn’t see the need to turn their relationship romantic and create the giant Quadrangle of Doom. (Kara/Lee/Sam/Leoben). Watch them end up getting married or some shit like that. I don’t mean *all* of them married (that would be cool), just Lee and Kara.
“Whose parentage was retconned in such a way as to seriously undermine the plot reasons that led to Cally’s death in the first place”
The Cally slept with Hot Dog thing was just dumb and is a symptom of one of the biggest problems in the series: not having a good outline and going back to fix stuff with a bit of masking tape.
“Thrace and Roslin barely say a word to each other since the assassination attempt half a season ago”
To be fair, Kara has been going crazy since a season ago when she came back to the dead, began to mutter to herself and paint pictures in her room. I doubt she’s talked much to anyone.
[...] some more discussion of Battlestar Galactica and sexism in this thread on Feminist SF – The Blog!, including me quoting Maia [...]
Two things:
1. As far as positive female-female interactions, I agree there is a unfortunate lack. I’ve always thought it a particular shame that after Kobol, Roslin and Starbuck had so little screen-time together (until early S4 of course). It seemed there was a lot of potential there for a mother-daughter-ish/friendship-ish kind of relationship.
At the same time, as has been noted, friendships in general aren’t particularly focused on in BSG, other than Adama/Tigh. Well, Starbuck/Apollo were buds too, but they went and ruined that w/ all the sexual angst. Early on, we at least saw more camaraderie between characters, e.g., the card games and such. Starbuck and Boomer seemed like pals. Of course, that was before everyone knew about skinjobs, and then that Boomer was one, and everyone became suspicious of everyone else…
2. One thing I’ve always thought notable about the Cylons is that, despite the gender imbalance in #s (even w/ Ellen, its still 7-to-5), the female models are far more intriguing, and have generally had more influence than the men even among themselves, at least w/ the ‘Significant 7′…
Among the men, Simon and Doral are completely peripheral, and the Leoben’s don’t do anything except obsess over Kara. Cavil’s the only one who does anything of interest (even if it is unilaterally evil), but there is also no differentiation between one of him and the next.
The D’Annas, 6s, and Sharons, meanwhile, have collectively and individually played much larger roles, wielded more power, and have had individual members who have real complexity.
I think it’s worth pointing out here that there are almost no healthy interpersonal relationships on BSG. Even the Adama-Tigh friendship is eventually crushed by the revelation that Tigh is a Cylon. The (hetero) marriages are almost all failures. Any accord reached between any two characters is likely to be brief, interrupted by death or circumstances. That’s just part of the fabric of the show, and I don’t think it disproportionately affects women.
I agree that the female Cylons have better roles than their male counterparts. Right now the Cylon pro-human faction is overwhelmingly female.
I chuckled when Adama said recently that they were going to change the hyperdrives and the would need some “Sharons, some Sixes … maybe even some Leobens.” LOL. The male model was almost an afterthought.
MS – while I agree that Kara and Ellen are definitely abusive to their partners, I don’t think Kara repeatedly killing Leoben when he’s trapped her in his own little sex prison is an example of HER being abusive.
There may be no healthy relationships at all on BSG, but the significant relationships that have lasted seasons instead of episodes do not include a single relationship between 2 women. What are the relationships that drive the show? Lee – Adama, Kara – Lee, Kara – Adama, Adama – Tigh, Adama – Roslin, Roslin – Baltar, Helo – Athena, Baltar – Six. In the shorter run and less important relationships, we start to get a few relationships between women: Roslin – Elosha, Roslin – Tory, Roslin – Kara (in seasons 1 and 2), Six – Eight, Six – Lucy Lawless’s cylon, Kara – Kat, but even at that level they are swamped by het and male-male relationships (like Tyrol – Boomer, Tyrol – Callie, Kara – Anders, Billy – Dee, Dee – Lee, etc, etc). Women’s relationships with women just don’t seem to be that important to the writers.
On the death thing, when I’ve done rough counts of the main cast before, I’ve come up with around 2/3 male, 1/3 female, so the chance of 11 out of 19 deaths being randomly drawn is closer to 20%. That still is not statistically significant, but pedants shouldn’t be sloppy.
“There may be no healthy relationships at all on BSG, but the significant relationships that have lasted seasons instead of episodes do not include a single relationship between 2 women.”
Many of the relationships you mentioned were heterosexual romance. I only counted two male-male relationships. Do you think that maybe same sex relationships between both sexes receive little attention? Perhaps even less so if its female-female.
“When I’ve done rough counts of the main cast before”
Who constitutes the main cast? I counted another dead man last episode (Laird, from Pegasus) which ups to 11 dead women out of 20 if we follow the dead character link seen above. This will probably shift with next’s episode, putting the count up to par with a 50/50 split.
“Do you think that maybe same sex relationships between both sexes receive little attention? Perhaps even less so if its female-female.”
Well, the two major male-male relationships receive a huge amount of attention, so it hard to describe the show as giving little attention to male-male relationships.
They are big, but both of them involve Adama. Adama-centric. I think any other positive male-male relationships are brushed off. Lee, for example, has no male friends.
The people who have the best same sex interactions consistently are the Cylons.
Actually, I can’t come up with a single relationship between two women that has remained moderately significant throughout the entire series, and there are several non-Bill Adama centered relationships between men that have remained significant throughout the series. Lee Adama-Zarek started in the third episode, and has come up over and over again, including in the current arc. Likewise, Baltar-Gaeta started in the second episode, and has remained significant through the current arc. Neither Kara or Roslin, characters who are definitely in the same tier of importance as Baltar and Lee, have any series spanning relationships with other female characters. So I don’t think it can be put down simply to the center of the show being Bill Adama.
I agree that the cylon’s have better same sex interactions than the humans.
There seems to be general agreement that this “gender-blind” show has 2/3 of the main cast male.
Some “gender-blind”ness. Not. That’s statistically in the “probably not by chance” category.
[...] or in post-shower underwear again. It’s so obviously, cheaply about the threat of gynocide (BSG example linky) and rape. It really telegraphs the level of sophistication that went into writing parts (or all?) [...]
It’s really fun how some of you argue that the show was genderblind, but not genderblind enough, and then say how it could’ve been more genderblind by focusing on the very issues it ignores in order to be as genderblind as it was.
Everyone loved to hate Gaius Baltar, but if he’d been a woman too, you’d all have found a way to call that casting decision sexist.