Except there were plenty of women who served in the Soviet military, in a variety of positions… including in the navy
True, there was a general purging of women in the period after the postwar, but that was never total. Whether or not women served on submarines, I was unable to dig up information on that, but probably doing a google search isn’t going to cut it. You’ll have to go to actual scholarship on women in the Soviet/Eastern Bloc/Yugoslav/Cuban/Chinese military to find actual answers to the question.
Women were in more places than fictionalized accounts often actually portray.
And yes, in some films that are based on historical events, you will get times where there aren’t any women or any men. I’d suggest however, that in reality, there is a lot more crossing over of the genders into supposedly gendered spaces that we realize… and that doesn’t even begin to bring non-binary people into the equation either. Since gender is a social construct, it’s subject to change over time, much like any other social construct. That means how we define gender and what constitutions a gendered space now isn’t necessarily how it was always defined in the past.
But the point of the bechdel test isn’t to give you some sort of neat measuring stick on these issues, it’s a means of better discussing these issues.
Yeah. In particular, as far as I can tell, the test’s purpose is to point out how little non-romantic roles women get in movies, and it was never meant as a pass/fail criterion if a movie is acceptable. Which, sadly, people are way too often seeing it as.
Though the Blood-splattered Bride spends two whole films stalking a man, she has lots to say to the other women she encounters… right before she kills or maims them.
Then why did you bring up this unnamed, non-speaking, non-female, utterly unimportant background character (who was honestly more of a “special effect” than a character anyway) to rebut my claim that the first six Star Wars movies lacked any memorable named female characters who weren’t related to Luke Skywalker?
If it uses male pronouns and it goes around sticking its data port into any available socket then it counts as a dude.
Can’t have a post that’s focused on women as multidimensional characters with agency instead of just mere window dressing intended to enhance the stories of the dominant in-group; too much like right.
I think the sitcom that first established the trope was The Honeymooners with Ralph & Alice Kramden, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it went back even further.
Lucille Ball and Eve Arden (and others) mixed it up with woman-centred roles with men whose characters were there mainly to support the women being funny, but they were horribly out-numbered by mostly less funny basic dudes in less funny series.
