March 25th, 2008
by
Laura Q
Since I was smacked down for running the previous thread on Dollhouse and the Frank Miller test awry by just focusing on the Frank Miller test, I’ll open up a post here for anybody who wants to talk about the Frank Miller test.
The FM test purports to be applied to male writers and is based on a single work (“in his story”), and failure of the test “is an indication that the writer is suffering from a debilitating obsession with whores, and may be assuming that all women can be represented by sex workers.” The test is: “If the proportion of female sex workers to neutrally presented female people in his story is above 1:1, he fails.”
I’ll start by saying that I was intrigued by the test initially. Tests — they’re so cool, so definitive and objective. Pass/fail, and all that. And surely it was a good idea to Santorum-ify Frank Miller, whose failures in depiction of female characters are aptly summed up by the language of the eponymous test.
But when I saw the FM test applied I began to consider the ways in which it wasn’t really very helpful. More of my meanderings on the topic can be found at that (unauthorized hijacked) thread off Yonmei’s post, but the gist is this:
* Persnickety complaints about how as a test it’s structurally confusing: Meeting the criteria is “failing”, which is bad, but not meeting the criteria is “passing”, which is good.
* Substantive concerns that the test really doesn’t tell us much in the way of, well, anything. The test purports to tell us something about whether the writer “is suffering from a debilitating obsession with whores” and “may be assuming that all women can be represented from sex workers”. Setting aside the second clause, which is conditional, the first clause is definitive and is patently untrue. “Failing” the test, i.e., creating a work in which there are more female sex workers than female non-sex workers does not in fact necessarily or even likely indicate that the writer is suffering from an obsession, debilitating or otherwise, with whores. There are two main reasons why, as I see it:
1) First, the test attempts to define a writer based on one work. I think this is unnecessarily reductive and is as likely to give wrong answers as right ones.
2) Feminism is itself concerned with sex, commodification of sex, and the political economy of sex work, so, it’s fairly easy to construct feminist stories that “fail” the FM test. Works decrying sex work, works glorifying sex work, works glorifying sex workers — all of these might in fact have feminist takes.
3 etc.) and there are lots of smaller reasons why the test might be less useful, or often wrong, or so on, but these pale in relation to the reasons that the test actually fails, described in (1) and (2).
A commentator on the other thread noted that there’s also something troubling about the language of “neutrally presented female people” in juxtaposition with “female sex workers”. I agree.
In sum, I think the Frank Miller test is most useful as a Santorum-ification: It’s useful to call out and label a particular pattern of creative behavior. But, it’s not actually useful in identifying such patterns (because it only looks at a single story rather than a career’s worth of stories) and it can give false results when applied to a single work.
So, jump in. Do you like it, hate it, think I have an inexplicable wild hair up my ass about it or am otherwise missing the boat on the FM test? Does it capture a feminist analysis or some other kind of useful analysis? How does it compare to the DTWOF test, aka “the rule”, about a work having 2+ women in it who have a conversation about something other than a man? If there’s a problem with the test, is there a way to rejigger it to make it into a useful analytical tool?
I’m fairly free-for-all with my thread moderation. Misogyny and racism will be called out, but cluelessness or lack of familiarity or even disagreement with some nuanced über-feminist perspective is a-okay. Have at it.
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- More blogging by
Laura Q at
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Filed under Theory, Writers & Artists, female characters | Comments (32)
I don’t find either test very useful as actual tests. There are just too many ways in which works of fiction could come down on the theoretically feminist side of either test and not be feminist at all, or vise versa. I do think that they’re valuable as descriptions of potential problems in fiction, though.
The Frank Miller test is a quick way of pointing out something odd about a work of fiction – a majority of the women are prostitutes. That’s not a bad jumping off place for looking at why, and what that says about the work’s depiction of women. I mean, if the story is specifically _about_ prostitution, that’s one thing, but if it’s, say, an adventure story, that’s more than a bit odd.
But I tend to be a bit of an odd one, so I’m not sure how much my two cents are worth.
Thank you! Clearly I should have delivered a smackdown on 9th March when you first threadjacked. Will next time. ;-)
I think the DTWOF test is actually very useful, but the Frank Miller test not so much, especially since there are entire genres where a lot of the female characters are sex workers or other fallen women (westerns, film noir, some historical fiction, particularly war films) for the excellent reason that “non-fallen” women have less entre into male-dominated spaces (the saloon in the western is a good example).
So the presence of female sex workers per se does not mean a work … or a writer … is anti-feminist in and of itself. And you can have incredibly anti-feminist depictions of women in every possible profession. The scientist in the film Deep Blue Sea comes to mind.
But the DTWOF measure is a pretty darned good one. You could have a story entirely populated by prostitutes but if they talk to each other about something other than men, then being a prostitute is not the entire definition of who they are.
Anyway, the problematic Frank Millery works will also flunk the DTWOF test. So that stands to my mind as the useful standard.
“threadjacked” – nice phrase. yours? (she wrote, hoping to not threadjack her own thread)
anna TPK: nice point about the frank miller failing works also flunking dtwof. i’m going to try to stretch my mind & come up with a counter-example, because if a test can’t withstand some serious efforts to break it, then it’s not helpful. and that’s MY test, for tests.
Can I just say that when I first posted that blog entry, I had NO IDEA the FMT was going to catch on? :) If I’d known it would be more than me letting off steam, I may have taken the wording more seriously. There is time for another edit yet, so please, suggest revisions on the wording if you have any ideas.
That’s a big part of where I was coming from in the first place – it’s a sign of something very odd going on in an author’s mind – especially when, as so often, the prostitute characters are accepted into a social class or social movement that contains no other women but many other men.
And portrayals of prostitution are often samey, and are usually skewed to one of two extremes; either the ‘happy hooker’ or the ‘victim’ (and I can’t offhand think of any stories in which the two coexist – am I forgetting anything? Also, I can’t name any male-authored sci-fi stories which deal with women suffering due to men’s labour/economic privileges that don’t invoke sex work, and that’s a pretty massive conceptual hole). Male sex workers, and trans* sex workers of either gender or none, are rarely presented as named characters in spite of being relatively common IRL. I wonder why that is? *eyeroll* Pimps, madams and other such leaders of whores are similarly neatly divided into Evil Pimps (almost all male) and Nice Pimps Who Defend Sex Workers (almost all female – see Nandi in Firefly and Inara’s boss in Serenity, I forget her name; Ann-Hari in Iron Council; Ophala in Neverwinter Nights; Gail in Sin City).
This isn’t some documentary – this is a male writer fantasising sex in the least threatening way possible. The fantasy of prostitution is a male-centred portrayal of sex – the male character pays to get his desires fulfilled, and the female character’s sexuality is unimportant. The sex workers are all female, so male economic and sexual power isn’t threatened. Other men who might seem like sexual competitors are often framed as Evil Pimps (or sometimes Evil Johns) who can be treated without empathy. (I’m reminded of the ‘White Knight’ fantasists that real-life sex worker Ren complained about in her article on Creepy Dudes).
At this point it’s not even an obsession with whores – it’s a general hangup about anything that might interfere with the fantasy of male-centredness.
When male writers use these made-up stereotypes to demonstrate their philosophies of life – their gender theories or their politics or whatever – I get pissed off. That’s what really narked me with Iron Council – there’s a scene I quoted that featured a group of women who are very sexually assertive. These women are beaten by a group of railway prostitutes because of the obvious threat to their trade. One of the group later becomes a railway prostitute. So basically a male writer is using this made-up story about female sexuality to make his point about the evils of industrial capitalism, and the entire prostitution issue gets framed in a way that has nothing to do with male privilege – while in reality, the sex trade has a lot to do with male economic privilege and male sexual entitlement. How many men who write prostitutes into their adventure stories seem to have any grasp on either of those two factors?
Most of my favourite films fail the Bechdel test. That doesn’t mean that they’re not good films, it means that they’re portraying a man-centred world – and we all know that even in crowdscenes the gender split in films is horrifically skewed towards men. Films rarely feature women occupying public space to the same degree women do in the real world. Making all women be prostitutes has a similar effect wrt women’s presence in commerce and women’s presence in heterosexual sex. Speaking of:
Why is it excellent for speculative fiction to so frequently be set in male-dominated spaces? It’s meant to be speculative, no? So why minimise the public space for women?
Hi, Thene! I’m not surprised to hear your story about coming up with the FM test: That’s how these things often come about. I do think something interesting is at play here, and your expanded thoughts here may trigger some suggestions that could help you if you decide to tweak it! I’m about to go pilaf some rice and will mull the issue …
Oh, I think it’s an excellent test. Not because it means pass: good or fail: bad, but because it definitely tells you something about the work. And I think it’s important because in our happy sex-positivity (I’m not being sarcastic, I like sex and I’m happy about that) I think we sometimes tend to ignore or elide the fact that women’s roles being circumcribed to sex work in fiction (and real life) is highly problematic. Whether or not there is anything inherently wrong with sex work. Take another look at the post in which the Frank Miller test got introduced. There are so many freaking stories, like the ones she mentions, in which all the women are whores – for no other reason than that the author was too lazy or stupid to think of other women who might be there, other reasons why women might be there, other jobs that might be open to women, other roles women might play, other ways in which men and women might interact. That’s worth pointing out.
To repeat a passage from Anna The Pirate King’s comment which Thene also remarked on:
there are entire genres where a lot of the female characters are sex workers or other fallen women (westerns, film noir, some historical fiction, particularly war films) for the excellent reason that “non-fallen” women have less entre into male-dominated spaces (the saloon in the western is a good example).
I am reminded of an article from the Guardian, last December: Sarah Churchwell’s High noon for Belle Starr, subtitled “Westerns with female leads are nothing new, but modern films seem intent on excising them”.
And, in turn, of Dale Spender’s Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them. It’s so *easy* to buy into the myths about what women have done when the facts are buried and erased from the consciousness of subsequent generations. But it is extremely pernicious, both for the disservice it does to our predecessors and, more importantly, for the way this handicaps us in the present, in the construction of the future, when we are kept ignorant of the historical processes which perpetuate our oppression.
Spender describes the tactics used by men to discredit women as sexual harassment. (I wish I could quote her directly, but I don’t have her book in my possession.) This takes many forms (the point being to discredit women because they are women), but, I imagine (if not recall specifically) that portraying women as whores was one of those forms.
It certainly is today. (Call a woman a whore, a slut, a bitch: attack her sexuality to destroy her credibility.)
It is also worthwhile to note that in conditions where women may majoritarily appear as prostitutes, such as war zones, women have to be made into prostitutes, by poverty, violence, the destruction of their homes and other means of earning a living, by outright kidnapping and enslavement. (“I do it because I like it” won’t stand up as a reason for such numbers.)
In order to deny non-prostituted women entry into male-dominated spaces, someone had to create male-dominated spaces in the first place.
Thene asks an excellent question:
So why minimise the public space for women?
***
In the comments for Yonmei’s post, Laura, you said that the test doesn’t specify “exploit”.
When men write fiction about the people that they oppress on the basis of their sex, the people who are prostituted to service men’s needs, when men write about women as prostitutes, men use the oppression of women as a means to earn an audience, money, public acclaim, social status (sometimes as feminists!) and respect. That’s exploitation, even done artfully, even done sensitively, intelligently, or science-fictionally.
(It’s the exploitation of women’s oppression in a manner that conveniently dovetails with propaganda about women as unreciprocally sexually available beings, because, to deny that availability, women have to stop being sex workers.)
So no, it isn’t the same thing as writing about firefighters.
And, for the record, I don’t think that men writing role-reversals where women exploit men (or women exploit other women) solves the problem, either, because, point in fact is, that’s still men calling the shots. (And because role-reversals where women are the oppressors often serve as scare tactics for the purposes of maintaining men’s power over women.)
I think that the Frank Miller test is useful, and I think that the specification that it applies to men’s fiction is utterly salient.
Not because women can’t write exploitative, worthless stories about sex workers. Not because male sex organs or hormones have anything to do with writing ability.
But because the gender (the sex-class) women belong to is not the oppressor’s. (There are, of course, other axes of oppression.)
So why minimise the public space for women?
Because it is accurate. Public space has been limited for women throughout recorded history, and that very limit is part and parcel of the story of women. We can’t excise that from our experience, nor should we. It is part of our history.
There is a ton of wonderful feminist literature, whether it calls itself that or not, that is fundamentally about those limits and where and how you can push them. Charlotte Bronte’s Villette comes to mind, but a better one is that old (and problematically racist) chestnut, Gone With the Wind. It is difficult to deal with GwtW for other reasons, but the entire story is about women who are forced to twist, reinvent and disregard the accepted limits of femininity by circumstance instead of by choice, and how society responds when they do it openly (like Scarlet) instead of covertly (like Melanie).
The thing about “fallen women” as a genre trope is that chastity is always invoked as a reason to keep “non-fallen women” in line. So the prostitute, the courtesan, the madam, the mistress, the stripper has autonomy that the wife, mother, daughter, schoolteacher, nun seldom has.
Do many male writers simply fall into genre conventions in a lazy or self-serving way: absolutely! Of course they do. But does the presence, or absence of sex workers mean they are doing it automatically? I don’t think so.
It also takes a woman writer (Margaret Mitchell, say) to have a character note a truth that many men are blissfully unaware of: a prostitute like Belle Watling is far more honest and honorable a character than a woman who marries and manipulates men for money like Scarlet.
Obviously (grin) I’ve come back to my pet theory: that the answer to bad anti-feminist male writing is more women writers.
Thene was talking about speculative fiction.
And if we’re quoting authors, how about Olive Schreiner?
As I said above, these guys are not writing documentaries, and there is little accuracy or realism in the way they write about sex work; they’re writing their sexual fantasies. Clinging to exclusion – while erasing the role men play in maintaining exclusion – as being accurate isn’t a valid argument when the rest of the content is so wildly inaccurate.
I really don’t see the need to assume the same exact mechanics of real-world sexism in a speculative setting that is otherwise different from the world we live in – especially one where social and economic gender roles are shown to differ from what we have here and now, or had in history. (Discworld, for example – it’s a medievalist speculation, but gender is not the same as gender in medieval Europe, and yet there’s this organised group of happy hookers with a female leader who are the only women who participate in the revolution. Um, yeah, accuracy). Frankly, that’s lazy, and shows that the author probably hasn’t been thinking about the way economic oppression and sexual entitlement interact to create sex work.
Note what Ide Cyan said:
-that part of the whole situation, the role men play in creating it, is something I’ve never seen a male writer mention wrt sex work. Ever. It’s just assumed that the natural state of the world is thus, and we don’t need to worry about how that state is created, maintained and enforced; just keep looking at the tits.
As I said above, these guys are not writing documentaries, and there is little accuracy or realism in the way they write about sex work;
Oh, I agree … but its not because they’re writing about sex work! This is why I find the DTWOF test far superior and more insightful than the Frank Miller test.
Regarding erasing the role men play in maintaining exclusion, I find the “good woman” stereotypes much more cringe-worthy than the sex worker stereotypes … and waaaay more self-serving because they are supposedly wrapped in praise and the false pedestals. The damsel in distress, the loving wife and mother who has no role other than to look at the camera dewy-eyed, the girl Friday who makes it possible for the hero to save the day through some timely message-taking. At least the “bad women” stereotypes allow for some presence of independent motivation.
The “good woman” and the “bad woman” stereotypes you refer to are types that can only be defined in relation to a patriarchal system of appreciation. The woman on the pedestal, and the woman who has fallen off of it, only receive those qualifications because of the predominance of the esteem of men as a unit of measurement. The substantive difference between them is illusory: neither position in this model accounts for the presence of independent motivation.
The substantive difference between them is illusory: neither position in this model accounts for the presence of independent motivation.
Do you mean, according to the patriarchal model itself? Because that’s not really true in life, and I’m not sure it’s true in fiction. In my own life, there is no question that I had much more autonomy and freedom once I affirmatively rejected the “good girl” aspirations with which I was raised. Because patriarchy is a series of shackles, throwing any of them off is some sort of liberation, even if all of them are not thrown off. I think it’s not coincidental that sexually liberated women are frequently called whores.
I mean that one has to look outside the model for that independent motivation. The model is predicated on forcing women into a relationship to men, without which, outside of which relationship, the model becomes meaningless. As it applies to real life — well, when women seek to reject the model, men may try to fit us into it anyhow (because it serves them as a means of oppression). Usually by denigrating our choices, but not always, since it’s possible to get, say, Honorary Male status, or to become invisible when men no longer want anything to do with us. And because women live in patriarchies and are inevitably influenced by patriarchal ideology, we may also apply men’s standards to other women or to ourselves, thus the feeling of liberation one can experience by internally rejecting these imposed values.
But if we’re talking fiction, then: how does applying those stereotypes help build a character that is anything but a shell wrapped around patriarchal ideology?
And because women live in patriarchies and are inevitably influenced by patriarchal ideology, we may also apply men’s standards to other women or to ourselves, thus the feeling of liberation one can experience by internally rejecting these imposed values.
I was thinking this morning about how a lot of feminist criticism gets bogged down in a … shall we call it … internalized womanaphobia? That a feminist character has to explicitly reject female roles or stereotypes or it is by definition not a feminist character.
When I first came on this site, I remember a certain amount of horror about the last two minutes of Pirates of the Caribbean at World’s End. It was assumed … by the feminist writers on this forum … that because Keira Knightly’s character had stopped being The Pirate King in the intervening 10 years. This conclusion was based on no other evidence other than she appeared with a child.
It later turned out that this had not been the intention of the (male) writers of the film. *They* assumed she was a Pirate King who happened to be a mom.
Now in real life, mothers have entire lives, work, study, have sex, fight in wars … but not in fiction! especially not genre fiction! In fiction it is assumed that mothers retire from life and live for and through their children and never have adventures or do anything of consequence.
And instead of saying, HEY! Why are there not more fully developed mothers in genre fiction, there is a tendency to buy into this … excuse me … ENORMOUSLY SEXIST GENRE TROPE. Unconsciously, we have accepted this womenphobic attitude.
Feminist criticism is much more comfortable with characters who reject feminine roles … but motherhood is biologically a female function and uncritically accepting it as an inherently patriarchal limitation is denying and devaluing a large part of what women do and are. (I think ageism might also be a factor here.)
Likewise with prostitutes.
The Frank Miller test asks that we accept the patriarchal definition of what a prostitute *is*, and does not ask us to consider other aspects of the work. Is the prostitute a well developed character? Is the writer being lazy or is there a point to this choice. A story about prostitutes is negative for no other reason than it is a story about prostitutes. Prostitute=bad. Another sexist trope that we accept uncritically. Why is prostitution bad? If it is bad, then does it follow that prostitutes are bad, have no other adventures, do nothing but be sexist eye candy?
Now if that story is written by Joss Whedon … a writer who has made a name for himself taking a sexist stereotype of the imperiled blonde girl in an alley and turning it inside out … I’m inclined to give it a chance before dismissing it out of hand. This is a story with a lot of sex workers in it. Okay. What are you going to do with that Mr. Whedon?
So if the FM test does point out something odd about a work–by pointing out that a majority of its female characters are prostitutes–what’s the next question?
I find it’s not the fact that there are sex workers in a story that sets my teeth on edge, but the way in which they are presented. Thene’s points about the happy hooker and the victim are good ones.
I have to add that in mind mind, stories about prostitution that ignore the role of race and class (or their sf analogues) cease to be feminist. Sex work and prostitution are so deeply racialized in the world we live in–and so many conversations about sex work actually wind up being about race by proxy–that to simply ignore, or whitewash, those topics is as intellectually dishonest as creating a world in which all women are whores.
[N.B.: this is a response to Anna The Pirate King's comment, written before I'd seen Zahra's.]
The Frank Miller test doesn’t say that the characters are good or bad: it tells us that they relate to men in a particular way.
The “good woman” / “bad woman” labels are qualifiers that are attached to women through relationships to men, in patriarchal ideology. They are subjective appreciations. The existence of the relationship itself is not subjective.
From a feminist standpoint, we do not have to buy into the dyad that attaches the labels “good” and “bad” to the women in those relationship in order to put forward an opinion on the relationship.
Anna, you raise so many interesting points that I don’t know which to respond to first. I agree with you that the limitation of women’s public space (past, present, future) is important and a valid subject for literature. And I agree with your implicit point that a test has to work across different genres to be useful–after all, the DTWOF test was originally about films.
But I have to argue with the idea that “fallen” women have autonomy that “non-fallen” women don’t. They may have certain freedoms, or access to certain public spaces. But in history most “fallen” women have been both by definition marginalized, and disempowered by other oppressions.
Many societies have put a lot of constraints on their upper-class women (veils, rigid ideas of virginity, separate women’s quarters, etc.), but let women of the lower classes, particularly slaves, out on the street, unveiled, every day. “Let” isn’t the right word–forced is more like it.
They had a lot more freedom of movement, sure, but they were also bought and sold, beaten, raped, prostituted, forced to work long hours for little or no pay, and subjected to racism and povery to a far greater degree. They didn’t have the money, or the social connections “non-fallen” women were able to use to maneuver, whether they were in line or not. Most of them were “fallen” by default–because men thought the color of their skin or their social status made them sexually available automatically. They didn’t have any choice about being in the category.
(Medieval European nuns, by contrast, who were mostly upper-class, had much more autonomy than most women in their social context–that’s why they fought so hard when the Reformation forced them to marry, and that’s why almost all the artists and composers, and a disproportionate number of the writers in Europe before the 19th c are nuns.)
If your point is that in fiction, rather than historical reality, “fallen” women are often portrayed as having more autonomy, then sure. But isn’t that because the stories were written mostly by men, who found “fallen” women unthreatening/attractive for their own purposes, and by women who had enough social privilege to envy the “fallen” women’s outsider status without having to deal with the very real constraints (poverty, racism, subjection to violence) that went along with it?
And if that’s the case, don’t we need new stories? Not stories that don’t include “fallen” women, but those that talk about their experiences, their strengths, their strategies, their struggles, honestly?
The Frank Miller test doesn’t say that the characters are good or bad: it tells us that they relate to men in a particular way
…and that’s supposed to be *bad* right?
Or why have the test at all?
Oh, and regarding Laura’s question:
Do you mean, according to the patriarchal model itself?
No. Independent motivations for women are not a direct function of the patriarchal model. Men may imagine that women’s entire lives revolve around men, or for pragmatic reasons choose to take women’s independent motivations into account — if they become aware of them — but measure them by how they affect men, directly or indirectly. (When a woman’s wishes make her less receptive to relationships to men, say, or diminish a man’s appreciation of her in his eyes.)
Back to Anna The Pirate King:
To digress onto the topic of Elizabeth, briefly (pirates threadjack LQ’s post!): I don’t think that it’s so muh the presence of a child that leads to the reading of Elizabeth’s life as having been reduced to motherhood, so much as the absence onscreen of, say, her wearing pirate clothing, or a sword, or a ship of her own moored at sea awaiting her while she’s on land. We don’t see the Pirate King in that brief shot. She has no crew seen or implied behind her. We just see the woman as a mother, awaiting her husband’s return. It’s disingenuous to blame the audience for making easy assumptions, because cinematic language relies on those assumptions to fill in the blanks unless something suggests otherwise.
Zahra first:
I think you are conflating “poor” with “fallen” and “upper class” with “respectable.”
Plenty of poor women would have fallen neatly into the “non-fallen” category and been subject to all the restrictions and dependency placed on so-called “respectable” women for chastity’s sake in addition to the dangers of poverty and racism.
While a “fallen” woman of the upper classes could rise to positions of relative power. Madame du Pompadour comes to mind and the well-educated prostitutes of ancient Athens.
Also, I question whether this assumption is in fact true:
had a lot more freedom of movement, sure, but they were also bought and sold, beaten, raped, prostituted, forced to work long hours for little or no pay, and subjected to racism and povery to a far greater degree.
Respectable women of *every* class have always been beaten, raped, and forced to work long hours for little or no pay. The safety and comfort of married women prior to the 19th century was entirely dependent upon the character … if not whim … of the men they marry. If it is less remarked upon than the abuse of prostitutes and courtesans, it is because until very recently, marital abuse was normalized. not considered a “real” crime.
Indeed, until the 19th century in most Western countries married women of any class were little better than slaves to their husbands in the eyes of the law.
Well into the 20th century in the US it was legal for a man to rape his wife. In pre-modern Europe wife-beating was expected, and the Church only regulated how big a stick a husband could use. Adulteresses are still stoned in parts of this world.
Indeed, “non-fallen” women in many societies were bought and sold … in marriage … quite literally so in the middle ages, even among the upper classes, and it still goes on in India today.
What’s more, Virginia Woolf wrote a bit on how married upper class women are actually *more* vulnerable than lower class women because while they have all these advantages … it is all based on dependency on powerful men. They own nothing themselves and and it can all be taken away at any time. And there is no mechanism more powerful to create calamity in the lives of such woman than the perception not even the reality, of unchastity.
My feeling is that it often is because they’re writing about sex work. It’s a fantasy rather than an act of empathy or exploration or speculation. There could be an analogy with women who write slash; it can be good writing, it can be thought-provoking and full of serious content, but the genre is about sexual/romantic fantasising over the opposite gender and that basis is (imho) not something the writer can just switch on and off.
I don’t think anyone would argue with that, least of all me. :P
I think cringeworthiness varies a lot, depending on how good/bad the writing is and whether the stereotypes are just hovering in the background or being laid on inch thick with a trowel. I confess I don’t see exactly how that connects to the male author’s excluding of female characters, though. I’m also not sure there’s a correlation between sex worker characters and ‘bad women’ – the ‘whore with a heart of gold’ is a cringeworthy stereotype in its own right. And in popular culture as a whole it seems like prostitutes are often portrayed as ‘nice people’, but women who have a lot no-strings-attached sex but are not sex workers often aren’t; they seem to be judged more harshly by male-centred culture than sex workers are.
Word. (See also; popular culture’s erasure of trans* sex workers, which I think intersects with classism and racism here).
I think that constant look to how women’s lives affect men is, paradoxically, why the role of men as a class in creating the sex industry is never considered in these works. It’s never about how men have affected the women, how the men have drawn a line between ‘good women’ and ‘bad women’ and made women divide (so often along class & race lines); only about how the women affect men.
It’s disingenuous to blame the audience for making easy assumptions, because cinematic language relies on those assumptions to fill in the blanks unless something suggests otherwise.
I can’t help but blame the audience.
Because when I saw the film I thought Elizabeth *had* remained the Pirate King. My original impression apparently matched the intention of the screenwriter.
Only later was I informed that *my* interpretation of that scene was “incorrect” by people who had seen the same shot through very different eyes.
I have to assume that the audience is bringing their assumptions into the mix.
My feeling is that it often is because they’re writing about sex work. It’s a fantasy rather than an act of empathy or exploration or speculation. There could be an analogy with women who write slash; it can be good writing, it can be thought-provoking and full of serious content, but the genre is about sexual/romantic fantasising over the opposite gender and that basis is (imho) not something the writer can just switch on and off.
Well, and here we get to something that I think is fundamental: no man, no matter how feminist he attempts to be, no matter how insightful and talented he is, can write about women’s experience better than a woman can.
They can try. Some do try. But they are going to have blind spots because they are writing from lack of experience. This is not always laziness or intentional bad faith of any kind. But its because what women know about our lives is often obscured from male experience.
This is not a bad thing, but an enormous and wonderful challenge for us as women who write!
This is why I find the DTWOF test far superior and more insightful than the Frank Miller test.
I don’t think anyone would argue with that, least of all me. :P
Fabulous! then we are agreed!
copied from Yonmei’s Dollhouse post per Yonmei’s request:
Laura, I agree Whedon has at least some honest tension with centralized authority. So on the broadest level, Firefly doesn’t radically depart from his beliefs… but then it’s hard to see how anything could. What I was going off was his frequent proclamation that he’d personally tend to side with the Alliance but that he’s trying to tell Mal’s story. And there’s some truth to that. Whedon’s far more of a liberal than some bitter free-market libertarian. (Frankly I don’t even see all that strong of anti-authoritarianism in anything he’s written, it’s more just casual mainstream liberal politics.)
My re-phrasing was, admittedly, not a full solution, but, in line with the spirit of the test, I think I’d react more positively to a story featuring female sex workers overwhelmingly if the male cast either didn’t exist or was primarily fellow sex workers. (While obviously hooker roles in our society are overwhelmingly female, there are other socially-depreciated sex-worker roles filled by men–peep show clean up boys. So it needn’t break realism in order to balance the cast.)
Ide Cyan, that’s precisely what I was saying! ;p
I apologize if I wasn’t clear in my writing. I’m not saying we should stop attacking patriarchy. Just that more nuanced and subtle attacks (the ones that don’t glare in your face) make for better art. You can’t tell me Buffy wouldn’t have been as effective if Whedon had gone beyond some of those cookie-cutter reversals (or non-reversals, as was also unfortunately often the case).
I think the FM test is useful, but only as a tool to call out and shame the worst. I feel it’s rather flawed as an actual litmus test. (Just as the DTWOF test would suck as a serious litmus test–it would be ridiculous to dismiss a short story with only two characters just because they were both male, or to attack a alt-hist story focusing on the Nixon administration–but at the same time the DTWOF test is a nice launching point for investigating and critiquing stories, whether or not it’s always applicable.)
Sorry to intrude on this scholarly debate, I only wish to offer a truncated alternate formulation to the Frank Miller test:
If (Female Prostitutes)>(All Other Women) then [WTF?!?]
(Where [WTF]= cause for inquisition into what the heck is going on here.)
C A Monteath-Carr – I really like that suggestion. Could I add it to the original blog post, and to the FSF wiki?
william – (While obviously hooker roles in our society are overwhelmingly female …Are they? One issue here is the total erasure of male sex workers and of trans* sex workers of any gender in these sci-fi stories. I can’t recall a single named male sex workers in sci fi, and the real world has a good number; I can’t recall any trans* sex worker characters at all. It’s hard to survey these things while the profession remains borderline legal at best, but the fact is that not all sex workers are cissexual women, but all sex workers in sci-fi are cissexual women, and the difference is well worth questioning.
Thene: Be my guest! I suppose technically it should be (# of Female Prostitutes) > (# of All Other Women), because it kind of parses weird the way I first wrote it.
The Miller Test is *very* useful, as a diagnostic tool, as a canary-in-coal-mine alarm, as a mind-expander:
Do I/We/They only think of women as sex objects/potential sex objects for straight men?
If so, *why* is this the whole of my/our/their conception of women’s place in society?
Why are we incapable of recalling/using/imagining women in any other roles?
Why are we not making use of the full imaginitive (and, yes, historical, sorry, Anna – real world history is full of women shopkeepers, artisans, brewers, writers, and even political leaders, no matter how embattled) range of possibilities?
Especially when it comes to SF: that was one of the glories of Farscape, in fact, at least at the beginning – of the main female characters, one was a Warrior, a fighter pilot from a ruthless Spartanesque society, one was a Cleric who was at ease with her body but not a Temple Prostitute, an important if minor recurring female chara was a nerdy technician, there were used spaceship repairwomen and so forth. Even the main female character who was evidently occasionally a sex worker was mainly a Rogue, a thief and con artist doing whatever came along to survive on the fringes of society.
It wasn’t as paradigm-shattering as it could have been, and it went downhill after the first season – but still, just the mere fact of having main female characters AND extras whose roles weren’t primarily built around ZOMG!Breasts!Vulvas! What on earth can we do with a being who HAS these, except rent out those items to the real people in the story?
…which is what the Frank Miller Test points out is going on, for whatever reason. Just like the WiR test – yes, *this* particular story about a woman killed off to motivate her Significant Male Other, may be justifiable and great and non-stereotypical and non-exploitative (I’m personally a big fan of Ford/Jones’ The Fugitive but it fails the Bechdel Test badly) – but if there’s a huge pattern of this, and nothing else out there for all practical purposes (if you have to use a telescope/microscope to find counterexamples) then yes, Houston, we *do* have a problem. And especially in a futuristic/fantastic setting, where the argument “But that’s how it IS irl today/back then” doesn’t apply.
“Three times is enemy action.”