What are you watching & reading? Will you do the Beshdel Test on it?

[Seabright]

I have been trying to apply the Beshdel Test to what I've been watching lately.

The wiki entry in the link above explains more, but basically to pass the Beshdel Test a work of fiction must have:

A) At least two female characters
B) Who Talk to each other
C) About something other than a man

This evening I have watched:

1. Rizzoli & Isles - pass, just
2. The Good Wife - pass

And I'm reading an Ian Rankin novel at the moment (yes, my choice of tv and books is pretty limited - crime & murder!) which so far fails, but I'm only part way through.

With the number of characters in WoT it'd be really disappointing if they failed. I'm up to the penultimate book in my re-read! :o

Have you read MoL yet Trills (I started a thread in Fiction :) )?
My thoughts on WoT though is that although the dragon reborn is male there are probably more powerful female characters than male - and they don't all fit neatly into gender stereotypes either.

Urgh that post didn't make much sense - I was trying to write two different sentences at once. Think the general gist is gettable though.

No, I am finishing my re-read of the others first!

I'm not sure that Robert Jordan has a very high opinion of women, for all that his characters are "strong" they are all stubborn, convinced they know better than anyone else, unwilling to ever listen to advice from a man, and generally quite patronising towards men. Pretty much every single one of them.

With such a number of women he could at least have made them have different attitudes towards men.

Watching: Revenge: no idea, everyone is insane

reading: Music for Torching: no one talks about anything, everyone is insane

The men think they don't understand women.
The women think that they do understand men, and that men need training and telling what to do.

It's all very Mars&Venus, but I guess it has to be given how the magic works. Their entire world is based on "men and women are very different".

Sorry for the diversion.

I'm about to try New Girl - as far as I kow it's about one girl (who I may want to strangle for her kookiness) and a bunch of guys, so not very optimistic about it passing.

It's awful, dd watches it.

I also hate Two Broke Girls

But they only talk about cookies (it seems to me), can that really count?!

RM76, no, you didn't say Warehouse 13 was great TV, don't worry -- I was just qualifying the positive comments that I was about to make about it.

I am rewatching BSG. The episode I watched last night from the first season passed - and I think all of the ones I have rewatched so far passed. But in at least one case because Laura Roslin is addressing groups with women in them.

Been watching:

Miranda: pass (though they do talk about men quite a lot they also talk about other things).
Call the midwife: pass. The one I watched this week they talk about being missionaries, and babies.
House of Elliot: pass. they talk about sewing as well as men.

Recently read:
Those Happy golden years (just checking it out for the dc): pass, the women there talk about sewing too.
Some of Casual Vacancy. I suppose it passes, teacher talks to a girl. social worker talks to the girl. It's very boring though, I've ditched it.

Depressingly I can't think of a single cbeebies programme that passes.

Chubfuddler - really? What about Tweenies? Or Balamory?

Talking about cbeebies and that age group I was going to say earlier that Julia Davidson is quite good on female characters. Anyone read 'hide and seek pig'? Mostly female animals, the first 5 or 6 times I read it to dd I kept saying he instead of she each time. Shows how out of the ordinary it is to have main characters and supporting characters as women.

It is so automatic for generic characters to be male. I think Julia Davidson is quite good at not falling into that too.
Funnily enough, MIL was driving me mad the other day calling the Gruffalo's child "he" and DD's toy dog (who happens to be a girl dog) "he" and something else "he".

Female isn't "other"! Argh.

Doctrine I agree. However if a book takes place in the past, two women having a political discussion about women politicians would be inaccurate.

I run an ongoing experiment on myself where I try to see whether I can call animals of indeterminate gender (you know, dogs you pass in the street, etc) 'she' without having to make a conscious decision to do so. Not managed so far. Even when talking about a field of bloody cows (i.e. they are going to be female), I find I have to consciously say 'she'. It is so ingrained to default to the male.

At least English doesn't have male and female versions of 'they', with the female only used for an exclusively female group.

Julia Donaldson is quite good. We currently have a Room on the Broom obsession. The witch is obviously female, so is the bird and I don't think you know the gender of the cat. The dog, frog and dragon are male. I also like Pearl in Zog - "Don't rescue me, I won't go back, to being a princess. And prancing round the palace in a silly frilly dress". Love her.

Amanda - I do that too. I'm starting to win. All of dd2's stuffed toys are automatically female and although I struggled to start with I am now calling all dogs and cats we pass 'she'. It was hard to train myself to do it, so I'm hoping that it will just be normal for dd2 to assume animals are female seeing as she's growing up with me doing it (dd1 is more vocal about this sort of thing than I am so I have no worries about her any more)

I'm currently reading the worst princess to dd2 and we quite like itas the princess ends up doing her own thing and going off with the dragon, but it annoys me slightly by calling her the worst princess, and she does hang around at the start waiting to be rescued instead of getting herself out of her tower. I don't think it passes though because the princess is the only female character as the dragon isn't specifically female (it is in our house but others may think of it as male)