men mind colonized by media
Out of context: Reply #38
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- TheBlueOne0
"Bechdel's Law:
Alison Bechdel, cartoonist and author of Dykes to Watch Out For, has an interesting observation on movies — a little test she applies to them. It's a very short checklist, viz:
1. Does it have at least two women in it,
2. Who [at some point] talk to each other,
3. About something besides a man.
I bring this up as a point of interest, because of what it says about the blind spots of popular entertainment. Most Hollywood movies fail this test; if you extend #3 only slightly, to read "About something besides men or marriage or babies", you can strike out about 50% of the small proportion of mass-entertainment movies that do otherwise seem to pass the test.
The reason Bechdel's test is important is because it's a diagnostic indicator for the objectification of women. It's designed to identify the kind of film where, if two women talk to each other at all, the only subject of conversation is men (or babies). What it tells us is that our current movie and (to a lesser extent) our TV culture is pathologically misogynistic — be it in in the adoption of conservative Kinder, Kuche, Kirche values or the more extreme violence of women in refrigerators.
The current decade is characterized by security anxieties writ large, a socially conservative culture of retreat from liberalism, and a strong anti-feminist backlash. Our popular media, far from being the bastions of liberal values that conservatives say they are, are actually belwethers of popular culture, amplifying, reinforcing, and reflecting our culture's normative values back at us the silver screen. What they're showing this decade is really rather disturbing if you happen to agree with the core feminist ideological belief that women are real people too, not just baby factories and sex objects. "
Read the rest (via ace Scottish Sci-Fi author Charles Stross): http://www.antipope.org/charlie/…