White Knighting

Discussed feminism with my girlfriend. She didn't understand why I kept walking in L-shapes around her. I explained that I was White Knighting her.

We broke up.

Manly?: Examining Paul S. Kemp's Criteria for "Masculine" Characters

I lied when I wrote that I hadn’t been reading anything while writing We Don’t Always Drown. One of the most interesting things on the web in the last couple weeks was Paul S. Kemp’s attempt to explain why he writes “masculine fiction,” which promptly exploded in a feminist fireball. Kemp is not an author I read frequently, which made his explanations more interesting because they were purely theoretical. They were also grossly gender-prescriptive and problematic.

My idea of a manly character.

Kemp has been taken to task by many writers, including Teresa Frohock and Sam Sykes. Most responses have either been contrasting his ideology with their own fiction, or yelling “Screw you.” Both are understandable responses. But I’d like to break down one specific paragraph from his post, in which Kemp listed criteria for what makes a character “traditionally masculine.” 

So brace yourself for some meat-headedness and follow me to the bold quotes.

 “They answer violence with violence.”

-That sounds like boring storytelling, but is hardly exclusively masculine. I know plenty of women who both respond with and instigate violence. What’s worrisome about this being the first criteria is the possible inference that women have another default – particularly that they may cower and be passive in the face of violence. If that’s your inference, you instantly resent Kemp. I hope, naively, that he means women have a broad range of reactions to violence rather than always punching back, so that some characters in his world are dynamic. But we doubt that’s what he means, right?

“They’re courageous in the face of danger.”

-No feminist is listening to you after this point. If courage in the face of danger is masculine and not human, then some other response is feminine. Even if he didn’t intend it, holy shit does it sound like he means that traditionally women are meek and need saving in the face of danger. Is it true? I don’t know, nor do most of the people who are mad at him right now. Most don’t care because the misogynist inferences are too easy, especially after…

“They’re stoic in the face of challenges/pain.”

-A marginally less offensive version of the highly offensive previous item. This one I’ve also never considered masculine because I’ve known so many women who are stoic in the face of challenges. And not to downplay the misogyny of his claim, but it’s also incredibly harmful to a young male reader’s psyche depict men’s default response to pain as stoicism. More of that in the next item.

“They have their emotions mostly in check.”

-This one speaks to me. For my whole life I’ve felt like American culture was telling me to bottle up or strangle my emotions, and that feeling and sharing were privileges for girls and women. “Be a man” means shut off your heart and serve. It’s messaging that screwed me up and several men who have been dear friends of mine, not all of whom are still alive. And thus this is the most troubling item on the list, because it suggests Kemp writes stories endorsing this psychologically scarring horse shit.

“And they act in accordance with a code of honor of some kind.”

-Hey, most of us like codes of honor, at least safely removed from our world and cemented in fiction where it never revenge-kills our families. This is the one where I’d need to be a Kemp reader to know what the heck he’s talking about. I hope that he’s not writing stories in which men are the only ones with honor or morality. However, I don’t know a tradition in which women have none of this. Systems that seek to strip it from them, yes, but that’s something grotesque that also deserves ripping apart.

"Thematic elements in a lot of my work that square with this involve the obligations of fatherhood, the depths of friendship between men who’ve faced death together, the bonds of brotherhood (figuratively)."

-If this is what he led with and emphasized, I’d be down. Who would blame any one author for being interested in these themes? That’s half The Iliad right there. But it’s hard to read it as just “my interests” after so much hard gender-prescription in front of it, and Kemp later tries to justify it by saying he believes men should die on ships before women and children, and if that doesn’t convince you, also offers the credentials of being irreligious and a Democrat.

There’s the temptation to yell at Kemp, but there are two sides to this. It’s a great service to see a man name off the things he thinks are expected of him, and Kemp makes it plain in the comments that he feels these sorts of behaviors are expected of a man. The aggravating element is that he’s also endorsing these things, and endorsing them as gendered. Saying women “can” do these things but they are still more masculine is so frustrating that… well, the internet might yell at you for doing it.

Great Ways to Fail the Bechdel Test

Some comic by somebody talking about the Bechdel Test.

In the last year the Bechdel Test has received well-deserved scrutiny. The test is simple. Does your movie have:

a) two named female characters

b) who talk to each other

c) about something other than a man.

If the movie passes A, B, and C, it’s instantly a feminist and progressive. If it fails, it’s a piece of misogynist garbage.

Does that sound wrong? That’s because it is; I made up those consequences. Culturally, we’ve never decided what passing or failing the Bechdel Test means about an individual movie. The test has become dogma for some people, however, and once their numbers grew we got the reasonable pushback. Are Pacific Rim and Gravity truly faulty films? Are they anti-feminist? Are they the enemy for not being feminist enough?

Look: I like this test. It’s dumb, but it’s a tool that’s provoked me to check my own fiction. Novelists use this thing all the time, even if our industry has a slightly better batting record than Hollywood. Since taking it to heart I’ve written about the same number of women (they’ve always been big in my work), but I’ve been more conscious about having them interact with each other. My page count of my second novel is approximately one quarter women talking to each other, and having just admitted that, let me promise they’re mostly talking about flesh-eating robots and flying cities, so please don’t close this tab and run from your browser screaming.

Martin, Grossman, Butcher, Abercrombie: all the bravest female voices.

The Bechdel Test is fundamentally useful in at least one way. We’ll talk about that starting next paragraph, but living in the now, let’s confess that it’s unhelpful in at least one significant way: criticizing an individual film. Failing the Bechdel Test is never the reason a movie sucks. In most flawed movies, it’s one of a litany of shortcomings, and it’s usually not one of the integral shortcomings. And there are many good movies that shouldn’t have had anyone question whether the screenwriter should strive to pass the test. Milk is not an inferior film for lacking two women of significant agency talking about something other than the center of the bio-pic. Alien 3 is actually an interesting movie for featuring only one woman, and flawed as its execution is, in a series that puts so many angles on women, that film uses isolation among male convicts for provocation.

And yes, I realize Alien 3 is not a good movie, and this means there are flawed movies where screenwriters still shouldn’t have striven to pass the test, but alas we’re in the next paragraph and that means we need to talk about the fundamental value of the test. In-fighting about the Bechdel Test tends to derail from its helpful function: criticizing an endemic failure of entertainment industries.

Though I still think Daredevil was okay.

If you compare the number of conversations between men about anything in film to the number of conversations between women about anything in film, you immediately find a gross disparity. Shrink the field to conversations about something other than a man, and further by speakers who are important enough to be named characters, and the results are depressing. It’s not one movie’s fault. It’s systemic, and things like Bechdel’s criticism make us more aware. Rather than succumbing to rants, we need to act on our awareness to rectify this.

Before you tell me that you don’t want stories about anybody of any gender, and that you instead only want good stories, understand that I want good stories about everything. We only get good movies about women if we have lots of movies about women, because making good art is hard, and that means lots of people need chances to make it. Generations of girls deserve better than that. If we only get Elektra and Catwoman, then probably we’ll only get Elektra and Catwoman. Yeah, I’m nauseous too.

Ask me sometime about my major gripe with the Bechdel Test and I'll probably whine about the omission of women talking in groups. We all have our nits to pick. The test doesn’t tell you how many gay characters are in popular media, or how many women are writing and directing what you consume. That’s because it’s the test tests for one thing. That part of the Torah wouldn’t have been so useful as “The One Commandments”. It’s just a thing to have in mind as we consume and create art. And it’s only a good thing if we put it to good use.

Bathroom Monologue: Axis of Feminism, Axis of Decency

Please mark the acceptable behaviors on the chart below.

____ 1. Ignoring the girl in the garish and revealing costume, whether on purpose or simply being otherwise engaged.

____ 2. Briefly glancing at the girl in the garish and revealing costume.

____ 3. Briefly glancing directly at a partially exposed erogenous zone on the girl in the garish and revealing costume.

____ 4. Properly looking at a partially exposed erogenous zone on the girl in the garish and revealing costume.

____ 5. Staring, or otherwise properly looking for a length no less than four complete seconds, at a partially exposed erogenous zone on the girl in the garish and revealing costume.

____ 6. Taking a photograph of a partially exposed erogenous zone on the girl in the garish and revealing costume.

____ 7. Demanding a girl in the garish and revealing costume defend her knowledge of the character and source material that inspired it.

____ 8. Shouting condemnations or related expletives at a girl in the garish and revealing costume if her replies are not satisfactory.

____ 9. Following a girl in the garish and revealing costume across part of the convention center, while engaging in any form of looking and/or arguing.

____ 10. Following a girl in the garish and revealing costume across the length of the convention center, while engaging in any form of looking and/or arguing.

____ 11. Following a girl in the garish and revealing costume across the length of the convention center, into an event, and demanding her attention.

____ 12. Following a girl in the garish and revealing costume out of the convention center and to a restaurant, shopping center, or her hotel.

____ 13. A felony.

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