Tried to explain the Bechdel Test to DS and ended up making him cry. Advice on doing a better job next time very welcome.

[SolidGoldBrass]

DS will be 9 next week and lately we have been having chats about Life and Ethics and Opinions and stuff. So tonight I decided to introduce him to the Bechdel Test as a way of looking at films/books/TV programmes. DS loves writing stories, and therefore immediately applied the test to his own stories. All of which failed. DS cried. I feel horrible and mean. I tried to explain that there are quite a lot of films/stories/TV programmes which are really good but which don't actually pass the Bechdel Test, and that it's not a measure of merit, but I still feel horrible and mean. Anyone got any advice?

Oh no! I guess it this could lead to a conversation about how gender norms go so deep they are part of our imaginations? It reminds me of that theory about how there are only six stories ever told or something (might need to google that!). Not sure how to put that in 9yr old terms though.

Maybe you could look at films and stories he enjoys and talk about what happens if you apply the test, it doesn't make the story worthless, but how could the characters be different? How would changing gender change the character/story? I guess it's about realising that portraying a man as a hero and woman as damsel (for example) doesn't mean you are sexist at all but just that things might be more unpredictable or interesting if gender roles were different?

I don't know if that's helpful but I thought your question was really interesting.

never heard of it til just now when i had to google it - now sitting here racking my brains about films, books etc.....

so no advice really -

Welcome to patriarchy where men are heroes and women get rescued... I don't think you should try to soften the pill with this. It's a bit like trying to explain racism in a nice way. You can't.

My opinion is that you cant tell him its not a measure of merit SGB and expect for him to accept what you say. He would have already picked up the test is important to you, which is why he looked, and important to you in a specific way. If he had picked up a vibe that you thought it was a trash test that meant little, or that failing the test was the 'good' option, there would have been no tears. He feels he has disappointed you and, as an extension of that, he has disappointed himself.

Perhaps tell him you don’t expect boys his age to be writing stories with girls talking to one another. You could gender balance it, tell him that dads don’t expect their daughters to be writing stories with boys talking to one another either- my girls did not at that age. Use google to look up stories written by other 8/9 year olds and show them to him. The very last thing I would do is give him 'Welcome to patriarchy.. heroes and heroines 101'- its not a pill a 9 year old boy could swallow.

Aw, SGB.

People write what they know, often, and children especially. I don't think I put a non-English person into a story when I was younger, for example. Can it be presented as a stretch of imagination and a development for him?

Also, take it as an opportunity for him (and for you) to develop new ways of writing next time.

Knowing that there's a whole new dimension of stories will enrich his in the future.

I think it opens up another avenue of discussion around how this is why people need to specifically think about these things, because we aren't bad people and don't intend to be sexist, but that the influence of the culture we've grown up in is so strong that if we don't watch out for it we'll start recreating the same patterns.

Also you could suggest that as an exercise he rewrites (or at least rethinks) one of his stories changing just the gender of some of the characters. Does it still work? Apparently Jodie Foster's agent is under instructions to look out for good roles written for men and then put her up for them; several of her recent supporting roles were written as men and went out to casting call looking for male actors. If he were filming his stories, how would he cast them?

Do his stories pass the gender-reversed Bechdel test?

Also, applying the test to one story is meaningless. It only makes sense applied to a body of work. You could point out that there are a lot of stories that he hasn't written yet, so there's plenty of time to redress the balance.

Perhaps gender-flip one of his stories? Make John into Jane, he/she, for every character. Point out that the result isn't better or worse. You could discuss things that seem incongruous to him and why - there's a difference between a story where the heroine saves the day and gets the boy and one where a cockerell lays an egg.

You could also point out that there's a lot of stuff that is crashingly sexist yet still passes the test - tokenism being a good way to satisfy the Bechdel test without addressing the issue. Cars, for example passes on the basis of a two-line exchange between Sally and Flo, but is most definitely a movie about men (well, cars voiced by men) doing things.

Finally, I'd stress that his stories are great - but here's a way to make them even better.

Hope that makes some kind of sense.

I'd have thought 9 was a bit young for something like that tbh, did he fully understand what you were saying, I think you tried to feed him something he was to young to swallow, but you know that now.

SpeverendRooner makes a good suggestion about reversed gender bechdel test.

Lots of good points up thread. Also, maybe a discussion about children's books, and the way (I think) the gender make-up of the casts has changed over the years. One thing that strikes me is that I think there's been a change from largish group of protagonists with reasonably even numbers of boys and girls (Enid Blyton - for all her manifest failings, or Swallows and Amazons, or EE Nesbit) to male hero, plus two sidekicks, one of each sex (e.g. Harry, Hermione, Ron). I think there's definitely a been a move from ensemble pieces as the norm (other than single-sex school stories, obviously) to male-hero-plus-sidekick as the norm.

PS your DS sounds lovely. Watching the growth of a social conscience is just great! (My DS burst into tears watching horrible histories the other day when he realised the Victorians made children work in factories).

Following with interest.

Agree that suggesting he flip a character in one of his stories from male to female would be an interesting exercise. I often do this when reading to DD (3), in a book that would otherwise have all-male characters... It'd be good to discuss it together, and to see whether he thinks the story still works. Also I think that at age 9 children just write what they know, don't they? 9yo girls will surely write characters similar to themselves, no?

And agree that your DS sounds brilliant!

I am not entirely (or at all, in fact) serious about this. And I am sure SGB's ds is lovely. but with adult men, when they cry because it has been pointed out them that they are sexist shits, they are manipulative whiney bastards who are deliberately shutting down the conversation by showing that they are so SENSITIVE they CAN'T be sexist. they just don't have time to do the washing up. and are too creative.

I'm actually very impressed that SGB's son went away and checked his stories. Mine is a few months younger and while I've talked to him about the BT I don't think it would have occurred to him to apply it to his own work (although his last story involved Victor von Frankenstein and an alien teatowel, so I'm not sure it would pass a hypothetical Bechdel test for having two members of the same species talking to each other).

Frankenstein and the alien tea towel - I want to read that story . Mine is writing about Scooby Doo and zombies (well, "sombies" - spelling isn't yet very secure).

Real men don't cry

I wonder whether two female sombies groaning "Braaaaaaiiiins..." at each other counts as a 'conversation'? If so, would it have to be made explicitly clear that they were talking about the brains of a female, rather than a male, potential victim to avoid being a conversation about a man?

Thanks everyone, some great advice here. I don't want to make my lovely, kind, clever boy feel guilty for being male, or anything, but I don't really want him to accept, unthinkingly, a very gendered and male-privileging culture, either.

SGB - it is horrible when they cry! I think taking the tack that it is to be expected because we are so heavily socialised to associate exclusively with our gender ( I bet there aren't that many of his female classmates that write much about boys or men). But that it's a good eye opener and could make him a better writer to see this now. Rather than encouraging him to write girls into his stories straight away, maybe he could start by reading/wathching some stories with female protagonists and try identifying with them.

SGB, what you said is exactly how I feel!

I think dadwashere has it. Writers generally write what they know - perhaps say to him that no-one expects a 9 year old to pass the Bechdel test - but that he now knows where he needs to be heading!

Another vote for Dadwasere - I'd expect a nine year old boy to write about the experience they know as a 9 year old boy.

Basil - but as a nine year old boy he is in a school class of about 30, about 15 of which are girls. his teachers are mostly female. Most of my friends are female. It's not that he doesn't know women and girls exist.

He rewrote one of his stories so that the main protagonist was a mother tiger rather than a father tiger. I didn't tell him to go and do that, he just went and did it. My boy is AWESOME.

He does sound awesome.

I think when I was 9 though, I would have written about little girls, just because it wouldn't have occurred to me. I mean, I knew they were there and all, it's just that I identified with girls, being one and all.

Your DS does the same. I think if you can reassure him that he's not a horrible sexist pig because he writes what he identifies with, he'll feel better. Then you can move it on to discussing what it is people do identify with and why and whether it's desirable and / or possible to identify with another group and write from that perspective.

He's a bit too young atm but funnily enough I'm right in the middle of reading The Help right now and that received lots of criticism because the author is white and has been accused of appropriating the voices of black African-American women, To Kill a Mockingbird keeps being mentioned and Jane Austen never wrote a scene where 2 men talked to each other without a woman being present (the speculation being that she didn't feel she could represent men well enough -she saw them through the eyes of a woman). All that occurred to me when reading about your DS but as he's only 9 I'm not sure that's any help but that's kind of where I'm coming from.