Smurfette and similar
Mar. 26th, 2015 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have been watching MacGyver. It's... well, it's quite a lot rubbish, really. I like the Solve It With Science sections, but humans do not work like this, it's annoying.
Weirdest is the way they ration roles for women. There is one woman per episode. The only episode there appeared to be two women, one of them was immediately knocked out, presumably because there's not enough oxygen for two speaking women. More women can appear, in the background, if they are silent and wearing bikinis. Sometimes there's a couple minutes of filler of Mac rambling while women are silent in bikinis. It's so creepy it has sort of looped back around by virtue of tripping the nonsense switch in my brain. The world does not resemble this. Women exist in this world. And not just for Mac to perform compulsory heterosexuality at, while never going further than one kiss, and then only with white women. Everyone fancies him, but there's only a narrow age range of white women he'll fancy back. It's creepy weird.
And there's little point in getting into how epically racist it is. It tries, is the thing. There's good guy sympathetic people of colour. You can just bet they're going to get blown up or something. And the ethnic stereotypes are awkwardly pervasive. TV has got better than this.
Also it looks extremely 80s, and makes me wonder what stands out in the 90s through to today that'll make people wince in a while. Also makes me wonder why we gave up on colors, patterns, and more than one haircut for men. Like going through old catalogues, we seem to have backed off of color and pattern and its weird.
Why am I still watching? Because for all its flaws it delivered a lot of plots with a simple plot engine and a couple of fun tricks per episode, which makes it background viewing while I'm doing something else, and kind of a sketch instruction book for writing. Writing badly by current standards, you would have to put actual characters in there, but still, it's got a good framework. Flexible and predictable. Kind of macaroni cheese viewing.
... yet I'm getting ever more defensive purely inside my own head about why I keep watching stuff that doesn't meet my minimum standards on women and ethnicity.
I was thinking how on earth the numbers can skew so badly. I give up on the Smurfette stuff, the single woman in the Man Story, it is a depth of no sense I cannot figure.
I was thinking though about Tosh and Gwen. Different shows, Tosh in Torchwood, Gwen in Merlin. I can see how you end up with one woman of colour in a season. Not that Torchwood did that. Merlin, though... what was the quote? *googles* "Good news, though! If you're female but not white, you have a guaranteed 100% survival rate. It's just that it's also 100% likely that you are in fact Guinevere." http://such-heights.dreamwidth.org/238121.html
The tendency to kill of people of colour starts with the main cast. If the whole main cast is white, then all your people of colour are likely to be one episode plot pieces, and that means a whole lot of them are going to die. If you don't deliberately set out to keep characters around, casting them as recurring or whatever, then you're going to kill them off at a higher rate. If you forget to put diversity in the main cast (hah) then all your diversity gets killed off at the disposable people rate. It's pissing annoying, and it's a function of that first little bit of fail.
But lo! Merlin has a person of colour in the main cast. Representation!
But here's the second fail, as a function of math: Given the roughly 10% of the UK that is non white, any one person of colour is a representative proportion of a cast of up to 10 characters. (Torchwood I took Cardiff's 8%, so Tosh is representative all on her lonesome in up to about a dozen people.) If that one person of colour is in your main cast? Given Merlin's basic speaking character count, in any given episode, your math tells you that you've met basic diversity criteria. Torchwood can get as high as 20, but here's the second trick: that one woman of colour is still representative, because there's only 5% WoC in the UK. You then go looking for a man of colour to round out your diversity list, and they're likely to be in only one episode, and tada, you have set up a deadbro problem.
That math only works one episode at a time though.
If you count the main cast once and only once, you get to the end of the season and realise you've got 1/42 women of colour, 2%, because they were always the same one.
So even if people are paying attention to the maths, there has to be someone with the grand view, the whole season view, before this problem is apparent. You know, to someone with no common sense. And the thing is in UK television I'm not sure there's someone whose job that is. You don't tend to get a strong showrunner role, and while head writer is getting stronger, they're not thus far so much concerned with casting.
No this is not an excuse.
There needs to be someone who has, in their designated job, responsibility for making sure there's more than one woman of colour in the whole season.
It also really, really helps if you on occasion cast a man in the main cast who is not white. Or failing that make sure up front they're recurring. Leave it up to last minute episode fillers and just by designating them less central / important you end up with the deadbro thing.
... hmmm, no, not just, it's specific to black men and super creepy, but the math is a start.
Stargate SG1 has some interesting math on that front, since they have Teal'c, a black man, in the main cast. Every episode we have a Teal'c. Yaay diversity. It's just sometimes they have some unique to SF problems with any further diversity. I haven't seen another show that needs a level of counting for "There are two people of color but TEAL'C IS BOTH OF THEM" http://dsudis.livejournal.com/496173.html . That seems a very SF show problem. Though come to think there's the alt universe Doctor Who episodes where there's two black men and Mickey/Ricky is both of them. [ETA: But the President is also black and speaking, so he's not the only one. Two? One.] ... that doesn't seem like a problem that should happen more than once. I wonder if there's more?
I have no grand conclusions. Just that a lot of TV needs marking Could Do Better.
And it should be really simple to fix, if someone is paying attention.
Numbers:
http://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/tag/counting
http://beccaelizabeth.livejournal.com/1747350.html
http://such-heights.dreamwidth.org/238121.html
http://dsudis.livejournal.com/496173.html
http://characterscount.pbworks.com/w/page/15546210/FrontPage
Weirdest is the way they ration roles for women. There is one woman per episode. The only episode there appeared to be two women, one of them was immediately knocked out, presumably because there's not enough oxygen for two speaking women. More women can appear, in the background, if they are silent and wearing bikinis. Sometimes there's a couple minutes of filler of Mac rambling while women are silent in bikinis. It's so creepy it has sort of looped back around by virtue of tripping the nonsense switch in my brain. The world does not resemble this. Women exist in this world. And not just for Mac to perform compulsory heterosexuality at, while never going further than one kiss, and then only with white women. Everyone fancies him, but there's only a narrow age range of white women he'll fancy back. It's creepy weird.
And there's little point in getting into how epically racist it is. It tries, is the thing. There's good guy sympathetic people of colour. You can just bet they're going to get blown up or something. And the ethnic stereotypes are awkwardly pervasive. TV has got better than this.
Also it looks extremely 80s, and makes me wonder what stands out in the 90s through to today that'll make people wince in a while. Also makes me wonder why we gave up on colors, patterns, and more than one haircut for men. Like going through old catalogues, we seem to have backed off of color and pattern and its weird.
Why am I still watching? Because for all its flaws it delivered a lot of plots with a simple plot engine and a couple of fun tricks per episode, which makes it background viewing while I'm doing something else, and kind of a sketch instruction book for writing. Writing badly by current standards, you would have to put actual characters in there, but still, it's got a good framework. Flexible and predictable. Kind of macaroni cheese viewing.
... yet I'm getting ever more defensive purely inside my own head about why I keep watching stuff that doesn't meet my minimum standards on women and ethnicity.
I was thinking how on earth the numbers can skew so badly. I give up on the Smurfette stuff, the single woman in the Man Story, it is a depth of no sense I cannot figure.
I was thinking though about Tosh and Gwen. Different shows, Tosh in Torchwood, Gwen in Merlin. I can see how you end up with one woman of colour in a season. Not that Torchwood did that. Merlin, though... what was the quote? *googles* "Good news, though! If you're female but not white, you have a guaranteed 100% survival rate. It's just that it's also 100% likely that you are in fact Guinevere." http://such-heights.dreamwidth.org/238121.html
The tendency to kill of people of colour starts with the main cast. If the whole main cast is white, then all your people of colour are likely to be one episode plot pieces, and that means a whole lot of them are going to die. If you don't deliberately set out to keep characters around, casting them as recurring or whatever, then you're going to kill them off at a higher rate. If you forget to put diversity in the main cast (hah) then all your diversity gets killed off at the disposable people rate. It's pissing annoying, and it's a function of that first little bit of fail.
But lo! Merlin has a person of colour in the main cast. Representation!
But here's the second fail, as a function of math: Given the roughly 10% of the UK that is non white, any one person of colour is a representative proportion of a cast of up to 10 characters. (Torchwood I took Cardiff's 8%, so Tosh is representative all on her lonesome in up to about a dozen people.) If that one person of colour is in your main cast? Given Merlin's basic speaking character count, in any given episode, your math tells you that you've met basic diversity criteria. Torchwood can get as high as 20, but here's the second trick: that one woman of colour is still representative, because there's only 5% WoC in the UK. You then go looking for a man of colour to round out your diversity list, and they're likely to be in only one episode, and tada, you have set up a deadbro problem.
That math only works one episode at a time though.
If you count the main cast once and only once, you get to the end of the season and realise you've got 1/42 women of colour, 2%, because they were always the same one.
So even if people are paying attention to the maths, there has to be someone with the grand view, the whole season view, before this problem is apparent. You know, to someone with no common sense. And the thing is in UK television I'm not sure there's someone whose job that is. You don't tend to get a strong showrunner role, and while head writer is getting stronger, they're not thus far so much concerned with casting.
No this is not an excuse.
There needs to be someone who has, in their designated job, responsibility for making sure there's more than one woman of colour in the whole season.
It also really, really helps if you on occasion cast a man in the main cast who is not white. Or failing that make sure up front they're recurring. Leave it up to last minute episode fillers and just by designating them less central / important you end up with the deadbro thing.
... hmmm, no, not just, it's specific to black men and super creepy, but the math is a start.
Stargate SG1 has some interesting math on that front, since they have Teal'c, a black man, in the main cast. Every episode we have a Teal'c. Yaay diversity. It's just sometimes they have some unique to SF problems with any further diversity. I haven't seen another show that needs a level of counting for "There are two people of color but TEAL'C IS BOTH OF THEM" http://dsudis.livejournal.com/496173.html . That seems a very SF show problem. Though come to think there's the alt universe Doctor Who episodes where there's two black men and Mickey/Ricky is both of them. [ETA: But the President is also black and speaking, so he's not the only one. Two? One.] ... that doesn't seem like a problem that should happen more than once. I wonder if there's more?
I have no grand conclusions. Just that a lot of TV needs marking Could Do Better.
And it should be really simple to fix, if someone is paying attention.
Numbers:
http://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/tag/counting
http://beccaelizabeth.livejournal.com/1747350.html
http://such-heights.dreamwidth.org/238121.html
http://dsudis.livejournal.com/496173.html
http://characterscount.pbworks.com/w/page/15546210/FrontPage