Recently, especially with the release of the movie Frozen, there has been talk skittering about the internet about women in fiction. References to the Bechdel Test have circulated around as a litmus test for gender bias in modern fiction.
The Bechdel test is simple. In order to satisfy the criteria and prove gender equality, a book or movie must satisfy three criteria.
- There are two named female characters
- They talk to one another
- About something other than men
I am all for empowering women, especially little girls, to reach their potential and not let their entire worlds revolve around what they think men want, but where does feminism, or even female characters belong in m/m?
To be entirely honest, I haven’t really made my mind up on this subject. To me, one of the major points of m/m is the empowerment of the LGBT community. I’m not saying that you can’t empower two groups of people simultaneously, but for me, the focus in my m/m stories is… well… the men. My books would fail the Bechdel test with gusto. In Keeping Sweets, I think the only female character was a waitress who had maybe one or two lines in the entire manuscript. In Hope Cove, there were certainly women, and they certainly spoke, but again, they were not the focus of the stories.
Having said that, I recently got into a discussion with another author about a woman’s place in m/m romance. She had been criticized for one of the books she’d written that featured a strong female character. This character was not one of the main characters, nor was she romantically involved with any of the other characters in the book. Still, there were people that took exception to the presence of a woman in the story. We got to talking about some readers’ preferences of having only men in their stories. I wasn’t entirely surprised. I’d heard it before, and I still don’t understand it. No women at all? But… but… women exist in the world. Most of the authors of m/m fiction are women! Ask any gay man you can find, and I’d be willing to bet he has at least one female friend.
I can’t for the life of me understand why readers would want to banish an entire gender from their stories.
Depends on the story. In a short novella, especially, there is not a whole lot of room to develop characters who are not central to the romance. In the King’s Mate, for instance, there are only two female characters – Russ’s assistant Debbie, and the finalist in the chess tournament. Making the finalist who plays Russ in the tournament a woman was a conscious choice to play against stereotypes, but I don’t know that she’s named, and as a result the story likely fails the test.
In fact I know it doesn’t, since the two never meet in order to talk.
Because women are petty and not right in the head.
This is an interesting post. I am an avid reader of m/m romance, but I do love strong, interesting female characters in the stories as well. In fact, they often become favs. I personally like my real life to be populated with men/women gay/straight. Thanks for bringing this up!
I’ve noticed that also that in a lot of m/m stories you see no women and have always thought it was odd. Most men gay or straight have at least one close woman in their lives, wether a relative or a friend. I understand in short stories were we don’t get much of anyone but the main characters but in a full length it seems their should be at least one. I know some stories would have exceptions like military were their might not fit the story but for an everyday story it does seem odd.
I’m with you here–I think we need to see a balanced representation of characters in stories regardless of genre. I can understand where the constraints of a particular story might result in excluding women for that one tale–I’ve got an upcoming short story in an anthology in which there are only two characters on stage during the entire story–but that shouldn’t be typical of the genre in general.
What I don’t get is the hate that the appearance of a strong female character seems to generate in some readers. Nor do I understand the need to portray any woman in a M/M romance as being extremely conniving or uniformly unlikeable.To me it speaks of a bias against women in general, which strikes me as particularly odd, given the number of women who read M/M romances! You have to wonder at the origins of all that self-hate!
So let’s really explore this, then. Who make up the majority of the m/m readership? Who is doing the actual complaining about the presence of women? Are they the same group? Are the majority of readers (different from the readership) complaining? I’ve seen some misogynistic posts and groups over the years, but I shake my head and ignore them, thereby depriving them of their desire for attention.
I’ve lived around women my whole life, so it would never occur to me NOT to write female characters unless there was a very specific reason to exclude them. And as the younger brother of some kick ass women, it offends me when people hate on strong female characters. This isn’t the 50’s. Women don’t have a “place” to be kept to.
Instead of fewer women in the books I read, I’d rather see more complex, 3-dimensional portrayals. No more shrill, hateful exes or delusional, hateful mothers, or cracked-out, man-dependent sisters.
Of course it’s 2 a.m. so I’m probably sounding a little cracked or cracked-out myself. Sorry about that. Good post!
Love this post. I write strong female characters because I like strong female characters. If someone doesn’t like strong female characters in M/M or in general, they don’t have to read 🙂 That’s the beauty of intellectual freedom, I’ll write what I want to write and you read what you want to read, and neither of us is wrong <3
I write m/m romance and some bromance. The reason my stories almost never pass the Bechdel test is because I write third-person limited, and my main characters are male. Therefore, my main characters might talk to female characters about many things, there won’t be any scenes where all you have are two females talking… because the conversations generally have at least one male in the dialogue. If there’s a group of people there will often be a mix of males and females and (as I write sci-fi and gender-variant) other-gendered individuals as well. Sometimes, two females will exchange words in the course of group discussion… but that’s about it.
In other words, unless you’re writing third-person unlimited, if you’re writing m/m, it’s pretty hard to pass the Bechdel test, even if you write strong female characters.