Writing Women

It's no secret that I have difficulty writing female characters -- which should not stop me from trying. Now, I have no real conscious agenda about pushing women's issues in my fiction, but it does annoy me if my fictional females end up weak, stereotypical, objectified (and worse, all three).

So it amuses me to find some interesting articles concerning the state of female characters in fiction and movies and TV. One of the most interesting ones is the Bechdel test, which I found out about here.

The rules for this test are as follows (taken straight from the site):

"1. It has to have at least two women in it

2. Who talk to each other

3. About something besides a man"

It's so simple, and yet surprisingly a lot of movies fail this test. 

Jennifer Kesler mentions in her blog, the Hathor legacy, that she had temporarily accepted the Hollywood wisdom that "the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads" only to discover that "there was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men. That, they explained nervously, was not okay."

The full blog entry can be found here.