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An Observation on Gendered Naming in Media
Sep. 4th, 2015 02:33 pmI had an interesting realization the other day, after watching some stuff with Kestrell. As you know, Bob, Kestrell is blind, so I do a descriptive track of the action. Over time, I was noticing a pattern of flaws in my descriptive tracks. Some characters, I could not identify by name, but only by their plot function. And the vast majority of those characters were women.
At first, I was embarrassed by what I thought was an expression of my own subconscious gender bias. And there may be some element of that indeed. However, after some more thought (and discussion with Kes), I realized that there was a significant element of fault in the media themselves.
Female characters are consistently NAMED far less often than male ones. A female character will get named during a proper introduction, just like a male character – but in subsequent conversation, her name won’t be used and his will. Since it takes me three or four repetitions to actually remember the name of the character, I am far more likely to know the name of a male character than a female one, even when they get the same amount of screen time.
Does anyone reading this know someone in a Women’s Studies department who might be looking for thesis material? My own “findings” are strictly anecdotal, and running actual numbers on this would be way too much work for me, but I bet there’s some interesting numbers to be run…
At first, I was embarrassed by what I thought was an expression of my own subconscious gender bias. And there may be some element of that indeed. However, after some more thought (and discussion with Kes), I realized that there was a significant element of fault in the media themselves.
Female characters are consistently NAMED far less often than male ones. A female character will get named during a proper introduction, just like a male character – but in subsequent conversation, her name won’t be used and his will. Since it takes me three or four repetitions to actually remember the name of the character, I am far more likely to know the name of a male character than a female one, even when they get the same amount of screen time.
Does anyone reading this know someone in a Women’s Studies department who might be looking for thesis material? My own “findings” are strictly anecdotal, and running actual numbers on this would be way too much work for me, but I bet there’s some interesting numbers to be run…
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