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As always, you make some good points with your anti-PC analysis. But a few things bother me. Legolas Send a noteboard - 30/09/2014 11:44:03 PM

View original postCommentors like to bring up the Bechdel Test, but comparing movies by different filmmakers on such a simplistic method is a bit unfair. I have an idea, lets take movies in the same genre, by the same creative people. George Lucas. The Star Wars franchise. You know which movies in that franchise fail the Bechdel test? All three of the original trilogy. You know which one passes? The Phantom Menace. Feminist-acceptable movies SUCK! Period. QED.

See my reply to Kaldric - the Bechdel test is very limited on individual movies, as you can prove with hundreds of examples of both movies that failed it while having genuinely strong/deep female characters, and movies that passed it while having nothing of the kind, but I don't think it's really intended for that.
View original postSee, men and women are different. We are socialized in a million little ways we don't even notice, to treat men and women differently. There are things you just don't say or do around women. There subtle conventions you adhere to, even if the supposedly implicit sexual or anti-feminist underpinings of those actions would not remotely occur to you to apply to the woman in question. It goes for both genders, too. Apparently, some feminists are in favor of gender-segregated schooling, because girls don't try as hard when they are in school with boys. I went to a coed high school as a freshman, and transferred to an all boys school the next, and even at that age, the difference in atmosphere was noticable, and a lot more conducive to scholastic pursuits (not to mention athletic - that all-boys high school currently has the number one football team in the nation).

If I understand you right you're saying that the all-boys school was much better academically also? That's odd because statistically, the general conclusion is that while girls perform significantly worse in coed schools, boys perform significantly better. At least that's what I've always read. Having been in an all-boy class inside a coed school for two years (our system is a bit different, students generally have all classes together with the same people), I can definitely confirm that the difference in atmosphere was noticeable, although I'm not sure the effect on academic performance was that big - it certainly wasn't a positive effect, though.
View original postLike it or not, the presence of the opposite sex alters the behavior, attention and perceptions of people. Having two women talking about something other than the male characters is, at a certain psychological level, somewhat akin to walking through the ladies room. Your male audience simply does not feel welcome. I think that takes them out of the film experience. Someone noted that Guardians of the Galaxy passed the test by having two female characters discuss a mission, but they were made up to look like aliens and wearing pants and were combat troops. Their femininity was not a thing. Another famous action movie franchise that passes is the Alien films. But Ripley and Lambert don't talk about babies or shopping or girl power or their careers, either. They just talk about the same sort of stuff the male crew members do. In the second film, they deleted a scene where Ripley is told about her daughter's death of old age, while she was adrift in space. Some might argue this was a mistake, because the loss of that scene undercuts her motivation for the final act, where she goes back into the colony to chase down a child, even confronting the biggest Alien she's ever scene. It undermines the symbolism of contrasting mother figures and all the rest of it. And that's probably true, BUT why would they do that, after going through all that trouble to write and film it, unless, watching the movie as a whole, with that scene intact, brought up too much femininity? Which is fine and has its place, but that place is not selling tickets to young men. Women are just not going to say to one another, "Oh, hey, you should go see that Alien movie - there's some really nice maternal energy there," when the rest of the movie is up to its ass in gunfights and creature effects and crude macho posturing. But young men, who might otherwise love it, might be put off, in ways they could not articulate or notice.

I have to strongly disagree with "your male audience simply does not feel welcome" if two women talk about something other than male characters. For starters, I would assume that you didn't actually mean to go that far, and that the "not welcome" part applies only when the women are discussing topics that are seen as specifically female topics. Not in cases like the Guardians scene which you mentioned, with the women discussing the mission in exactly the same way men would do. But even with that assumption, I still disagree, and in fact find it a little offensive. Yes, men and women are different, but then isn't the whole point of a movie, or a book, or any kind of fiction (or history/biographies) that you learn about the things happening to people other than yourself, and learn how these people different from yourself look at things and handle things? If a man walks through the ladies room, the main reason he feels unwelcome is that he almost certainly is unwelcome. Watching women on screen having precisely the same conversation - why should he feel unwelcome or turned off? He might on the contrary find it very interesting and gain a better understanding of women, just as if he read about it in a book, fiction or otherwise (though presumably the book would teach him more).

And I don't think I agree with your commercial conclusion here either, that the off-putting effect on the young men, just because there's something in the movie that they can't really relate to, would be bigger than the positive effect on women who feel that this at least is an action movie that takes them a bit more seriously (talking generally, not specifically about Alien II as I haven't seen it). It seems unlikely that there would be much of an effect on box office in either group, it's more a matter of how enthusiastic the people would be afterwards. And I do think there the positive effects would outweigh the negative.

To take a completely different example from a completely different context, the Lord of the Rings movies had a good amount of little details that were essentially meaningless to people not familiar with the books - but it's not as if that group of viewers felt particularly alienated, while on the other hand, the big fans of the books appreciated those enormously. I would say in general, it's often a good idea to make that kind of concessions, even if it makes the majority of your audience feel like they're missing something - that on its own is unlikely to turn them off your movie, while for the minority it may mean a lot.

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Do we really need "strong female characters"? - 30/09/2014 10:44:32 AM 779 Views
There is a loooot of truth to what you wrote... - 30/09/2014 01:49:32 PM 529 Views
Yeah - 06/10/2014 10:33:49 PM 539 Views
TL;DR - 30/09/2014 03:52:43 PM 794 Views
Oh yeah don't even get me started on the Bechdel test *NM* - 30/09/2014 10:18:24 PM 245 Views
As always, you make some good points with your anti-PC analysis. But a few things bother me. - 30/09/2014 11:44:03 PM 583 Views

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