The Romantic Bechdel Test

This story, one of countless "Facebook Love Stories" distributed by hormonal teenagers who apparently "crie evertim" they read the word "love" or "dead" and whose appreciation for the English language is underdeveloped to say the least, represents a fundamental flaw I see in humanity's collective culture.  While this is particularly narmy (and without the dramatic reading, almost painful to read), the problem is universal.

The problem is that we, as a species, have no appreciation for subtlety when it comes to love.  When we see a couple on screen, if they aren't sucking face they aren't "in love".  They're "boring".  The best they can hope for is to give the main characters bad advice (old people are exempt from this rule).

They aren't all bad, of course.  It's much like the Bechdel Test*, though: it's less a judge of a single movie and more of movies in general.  Does the movie intone that one type of love is better than another?  That's the problem to which I'm referring.

[[*At least two female characters who have at least one conversation about something other than men or a man.  Used as a litmus test of the feminism of movies: do they treat the females as actual characters, or just as accessories to the male lead?]]

Even worse, it seems like we're unable to have any movies without romance.  Again, sometimes it's okay.  Sometimes it's great.  But it gets very frustrating when every single movie decides that its lead had to close a scene with a kiss.  If there's both a male and a female in the main cast, then it's a forgone conclusion.  The last exception, at least the last exception I can currently recall, was Blade.  That came out in 1998.  It's like, no, I'm trying to get into this story, but you seem to have decided that plot isn't enough.

This also has an annoying tendency to create characters with no purpose other than being romantic partners.  This is why chick flicks like When Harry Met Sally do so much better than those like Kate and Leopold: not because of some magical non-chick-flickiness, it's because they're, y'know, good.  These characters are absolutely frustrating for me, as a connoisseur of fiction, because they are the epitome of flat characters: they don't even have that one trait that makes a flat character, their only trait is that they exist alongside another character.

Why is this so absolutely awful?  Because it means the romance won't work.  The characters aren't interesting enough for me to believe that they stand a conversation together, let alone a relationship.  Here's my "romantic litmus test", modeled after the Bechdel Test: the characters must have at least one good conversation on a topic other than themselves or each other that would work equally well (A) if they were romantically connected; (B) if they were not romantically connected and had no desire to be; AND (C) if they had already been married for twenty years.  That's what I would consider a real conversation.

If you can't fluidly do that, then don't make them romantic leads.  It would just be an awkwardly shoehorned subplot.  Next time you watch a movie, see if it passes.  Again, like the Bechdel test, it does not by itself mean the movie/romance is bad (my favorite movie of all time, Brazil, does not pass).  Plenty of wonderful movies failed the Bechdel test, too (Twelve Angry Men, any war movie).  The problem arises when you consider how rarely the test works.

It doesn't have to be a romantic movie.  The original Bechdel test used Alien as its example, which was hardly a radical feminist statement.  It was just a movie which happened to have well-written female characters.

Coming back to the "dramatic romance" part of the rant: that's just simply not how love works.  It works because two people can tolerate to be around each other so much that they begin to want to tolerate each other.  A date goes smoothly because people have common interests, not because the guy rescued the girl from the enemy ship.  I long for a movie that recognizes, yeah, just because we've done something big together doesn't mean we should get married.

Oh yeah, another pet peeve: high school romances end.  They end.  Maybe 5% of them don't.  But if your TV show or movie ends at graduation, then those romantic leads are getting married.  That's always bugged me.

Personally, I want a girl who doesn't mind that I'm flipping through Wikipedia while we talk... because she's doing the same thing.  Not someone who'd drag me to her friend's birthday party, someone whose friends are interesting enough I'd want to go anyway.  "Our Song" would be something with an awesome guitar riff and trippy lyrics, not some sappy pop ballad.  In short, the absolute opposite of nearly every rom com I've ever seen.

With the exception that I'd really like her to be hot.  Signing out.

Men and Women

You've all seen it.  Every two-bit stand-up comedian, every sitcom drained of ideas, every obnoxious adolescent girl on Facebook seems to have some fanciful, exaggerated opinion about the difference between men and women.  Well, here's a shocker.  It's nonsense.  Yes, utter garbage.

While I can't quite say "identical", I think you'll find that outside of cosmetic and biological differences, men and women are astonishingly similar.  I have determined this through years of studying social behavior.  After spending far too long being surrounded by the intolerably stupid mantra "the girl/wife is always right", I, as a person who loves being right and a man of science, decided to take it upon myself to prove just how asinine this idea is, as well as the Mars-Venus mentality upon which it is based.

"The girl/wife is always right" is in fact so stupid that even hearing it once is to be exposed to it for "too long".  Thanks to Mormons and high school girls, I had to hear it more than once.  It was dreadful.  Before I proceed to the meat of this discussion I shall expound on the unrivaled idiocy of this belief.

The most easily identifiable flaw is that "always" and, for that matter "never" hold absolutely no truth outside of a mathematics textbook.  Next, if a woman is assumed to be "right" and the man "wrong", that implies several things initially.  Firstly, that all men and all women share the same belief on everything.  Thus, every option can be divided into only two options: the "right" option selected by all women and the "wrong" option or options selected by all men.  This would mean there would always be only two political parties, one for the men and one for the women; the party run by the women would consistently make correct decisions in policy and campaigning, thus trouncing the men's party.  Why men would even allowed to vote, knowing they would only make the wrong decisions, is puzzling on its own.

Taking away the "always" modifier, even though no one who supported it ever did, and substituting the much less brief and less satisfying "a statistically significant number of women are correct more often than men with statistically significant magnitude" still fails to resolve the problem.  If you haven't been paying attention to the entirety of history before New Zealand became the first country to give women the vote in 1896, men are, in fact, capable of doing things.  In fact, up until about the 1970s it was entirely the opposite: men were the stable, capable ones taking care of their ditzy, hysterical wives.  While I'm glad that's over, I can see we've overcorrected.

It also raises philosophical questions: would a particular point of view be right because it is right, or because it is feminine?  If a man consigns his opinions to a woman's, on which scale are they judged for weight of possibility of being correct?  The point is, never, ever say that phrase ever again or I will scald you.

Moving on to the less-obvious and more-relevant matter, masculinity and femininity represent false dichotomy.  Saying a particular action, interest, or trait is "masculine" or "feminine" is as meaningless as saying it is particularly white or blue or green.  "You enjoy sports?  That's an orange trait, all right!"  Mentally, men and women are not so different.  That's to what this all boils down.

Housework and cooking are not "feminine", they are "domestic".  Playing sports is not "masculine", it is "sporty".  Likewise, paying attention to sports is not "masculine", it is "stupid"*.  And recalling that 40% of the Super Bowl's viewership is female year after year, it is easy to see that gender really has little impact on this.  At least, that's what I would have said back when I was young and optimistic about humanity.  In practice, people have yet to pick up on this.

[[*I can put a spheroid through an opening with greater accuracy and/or frequency than the layman.  Give me millions of dollars!
Alternatively: You are large and can run towards other large people without being readily knocked down.  Congratulations, you have all the qualifications to play football or mate with a female gorilla.]]

So what does cause those schisms that fill the repertoire of bad comedians and page after page after page of Dating Fails?  Purely social stigma.  This is where those years of study come in to play.  As you come closer to the social norm, gender differences become more and more pronounced.  The duck-faced pre-teen girls, the frat boy jocks, the long-married Mormons.  The further from social norms (that is, the disaffected nerds, hippies, and counterculture) the less gender roles matter.  It seems no coincidence that the only gender-integrated teams at my school of which I am aware are those populated by nerds (Quiz Bowl, Science Bowl, mock trial), though mind you, this was NOT the extent of my research.  Why?  Because the people already separated from the popular influence (and this plays up heavily the "nurture" end of the equation) in elementary, middle, and high school are those who are not, for lack of a better word, contaminated by the dichotomy model of gender theory.

Perhaps most frustrating is the "protector-protectee" dynamic seen far too often, which holds (in addition to "the girl is always right") that the girl is inherently special and deserves the adoring support of the boy.  This is a way of simultaneously building up and insulting both genders: the girls think of themselves as the magical chalices of vague virtue and the boys as lowly servants; the boys think of themselves as noble knights protecting a valuable object, but an object nonetheless.  Comforting on some level, but ever so stupid.

Boys are encouraged into sports; girls are, by and large, not.  However, the worst part about this is that it is self-perpetuating.  When a girl plays and enjoys sports, she is called a "tomboy", the implication being that her interest is not in sports but in masculinity, again tying into the false dichotomy.

This leads into the sexual double standard, which fortunately has been growing weaker in recent years. Truthfully I'm a little squicked by the whole topic (I also have trouble touching people, so perhaps I'm not the most reliable source on the topic), but to place one group as the "victors" and the other as the "prize" just represents building up these non-existent differences even more.  And while at first glance it seems unfair to women, it also means that men are assumed, by default, to be undesirable and thus forced to rise above their lowly station to score.  Yes, it strikes that rarely-seen sweet spot of stupidity where nobody wins even a little.

I am a straight male who enjoys clothes shopping and fashion, video games of most genres, Terry Gilliam and Hayao Miyazaki, alternative rock, writing, comedy (particularly dark comedy), and bashing on stuff.  I hate sports, children, rap, Michael Bay, Twilight, and sensitivity.  Notice a pattern?

Good, you weren't supposed to.  There wasn't one, because a person's interests are, by and large, not directly tied in with one another and particularly not in such broad bundles as "male" and "female".  Unless you noticed "nerdy", "tasteful", or "whiny", which are correct.  If you deduced that I had just returned from Afghanistan, then I'm afraid I must inform you that Dr. Moriarty's plan has already succeeded.  Moving on!

What does this mean for you?  Instead of worrying, "How on earth will I talk to this girl/boy?", think instead "How on earth will I talk to this person?", and then the problem seems to diminish.  Unless you have a phobia or anxiety disorder which pertains to that situation, but now I'm getting too technical.

Not that gender is meaningless, of course.  There's still sex, of course.  However, unless you are presently engaged in the active pursuit of someone with whom to hump, it's not much of a concern.  Like I said, I can't quite call men and women identical, but society plays a far more enormous role in their differences than any actual differences.

So in short, the key to figuring out women is that they have thoughts comparable to your own.  Fancy that