Back in 2011, I wrote about satirist Andy Borowitz and his habit of recycling the names of the imaginary people he quotes. The names that had caught my eye were Tracy Klugian, Harland Dorrinson (or Harlan Dorinson) and Davis Logsdon. I also observed that the pronoun "she" was a rarity among Borowitz' fictional characters. He had no choice but to use "she" when he wrote about an actual female, but even his oft-quoted Tracy Klugian, despite having a first name that is common for girls as well as boys, was always "he."
Today I noticed that Borowitz used "she" for Tracy Klugian. How refreshing! I then did a quick search on The New Yorker's website and found that so far in 2017 Tracy was "she" once - on July 31, 2017, "he" once - on Sept. 21, 2017, and without pronoun 4 times - on Jan. 22, Apr. 24, May 2 and May 4. By the way, on May 2, Tracy was a schoolkid as was Zach Dorrinson, no doubt the son of the fictional Harland. Zach was also quoted. Wonder why young Dorrinson wasn't Zelda or, to continue with unisex names and gender ambiguity, Pat, Leslie or Kim?
It was time to investigate the M/F data for Tracy. A 2007 yahoo best answer to the question whether Tracy is a boy's name or a girl's identified 7 famous people named Tracy, 4 male and 3 female. The famousbirthdays.com site's list of celebrity and celebrated Tracy Somethings included pictures for at least the first 12. The score there was 4 to 8, men to women.
The US Census publishes good data on names, too. On this page , you can scroll down to 'Popularity by Name' and enter a name, select male or female, and then choose how far back you want to go. The search automatically goes through 2016. I chose to start in the 1900s and got a bar chart showing all the years when the chosen name was among the top 1000. I looked at Tracy, both female and male. For most of the years between 1942 and 2004, Tracy was in the top 1000 names for girls, but it did not make the top 1000 before 1942 nor after 2004 when it was ranked 951 . In 1970, its high point, the rank was 10. Among boys, Tracy had a longer run but was overall much less popular. It was in the top 1000 for many of the years between 1900 and 1999 and in that last year it ranked 808th. Its high point was 1967 with a rank of 98. The question is close but on balance Tracy Klugian's preferred pronoun should really be "she."
In 2014 I added Carol Foyler to my personal list of favorite recycled names. I had discovered Carol when I revisited Borowitz' naming habits in response to a comment posted to my 2011 piece. (That writer had wondered about Borowitz' preference for the University of Minnesota.) Of course, Carol can also be a man's name but I haven't noticed Borowitz ever call Fowler "he." Carol is not in today's piece but was, sans pronoun, there with Tracy (gender M) on Sept. 21. A few days ago on Oct. 28, Carol had a husband but chose to leave him to have surgery alone in order to come to Washington and join the hopeful crowd outside Mueller's office after Friday's news. How big was that crowd? Andy writes that a policeman (a man not an officer whose pronoun was "he") thought it could reach a million, and added "We definitely didn’t see anything like this at the Inauguration.” Borowitz does seem to live in a man's (or mostly men, anyway) world, whether real or imaginary, but he does have a way with words.
If you haven't yet seen today's Borowitz piece, rest assured that it includes your old guy friends Dorrinson and Logsdon, this time a clinical psychologist at, yes, the University of Minnesota.
Showing posts with label she. Show all posts
Showing posts with label she. Show all posts
Monday, October 30, 2017
Friday, January 31, 2014
Genkster (Neologisms 01) (Advice for Story Writers 02)
Genkster: a writer who engages in GENder Knee-jerk STEReotyping. Pronunciation: See note below.
When a GENKSTER writes a story, nis important, active characters are male. The passive characters are female. Ne does not do that on purpose. It's just that gender stereotypes rule nis unconscious mind. A genkster imagines the protagonist, and the people who make the plot move, and then the doctors, lawyers, cops, criminals, politicians, scientists, writers, artists, athletes, entertainers, and teachers who also enter the story and, guess what, they are all guys. So are elderly parents and sandwich generation offspring (think of Nebraska). Victims and dupes may be women, but not if they pro-act rather than re-act. There are far more examples than counter examples among the books, movies, plays and television scripts of our time. Today's writers make Shakespeare, Thackeray, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Balzac look like feminists.
A GENKSTER with a partially raised consciousness may be so broad-minded (npi) as to make a small minority of the important characters female (think of Now You See Me) and may include a few females among the less important characters, but GENKSTERs never strive for gender equality, in number, interest, or importance to the plot. It just doesn't occur to them that art should be like life in this particular respect.
Why I felt the need TODAY to invent this word: I just read Robin Sloan's excellent Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. I recommend it, by the way. Sloan's book does have a very important female, Kat Potente, but she is not the protagonist. She is the narrator's love interest and she is the only female among the main characters. She is also the last one to appear -- we meet her on page 51 of a 288 page book -- and she is pretty much gone after page 229. Alas, Sloan is something of a genkster.
Sloan has some delightful secondary females but they are scattered, one here, one there. When they appeared, I would think "Ah. Proof that he knows that women exist. How refreshing." But then the men would take over again.
What most bothered me is the number of males in the story whose Y chromosome was irrelevant. Mr. Penumbra himself could easily have been Ms. Penumbra. A female Penumbra might have lent the plot more spice and made the character less 2-D: He is charming but rather flat. She might have been charming and alive.
When the movie rights are sold -- I couldn't find any news about that today, but maybe I didn't look hard enough -- I am available to identify for the screenwriters the other characters with male names who could as easily have female names and be played by women, all without harming the plot. The changes might in fact improve the story. They would also raise its Bechdel Test scorel.
Sloan has good intentions. I thank him for Kat and Rosemary Lapin and some other minor but beautifully drawn female characters. But he could benefit from some advice that I offered here to Pixar after seeing Up and here to playwright Kenneth Lin, and which I could have included here for Hurt Locker's Mark Boal. Here's the idea:
Write your first draft or outline the way you usually do, without bothering to think about the M/F ratio. Then ask yourself: Are all or most of the important or active characters male? Are all or most of the unimportant or passive ones female? If yes, go back and switch things around to achieve gender equality, not just in number but also in importance and interest. I bet you will find that the changes bring you more ideas and make your story better. If you do not think so, please send me both versions and I'll see if I agree. I'll even give you comments for free, at least the first time. And if your work improves by having true gender equality, please let me know that too.
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When I told a friend my views on Up, she told me about the Bechdel Test. She had learned about it when her daughter introduced her to feministfrequency.com. The movie Up had focused my attention on how much better older movies were for actresses than newer ones are. For example, most of the old Disney animated movies had female protagonists with title roles, as I noted in Up: Against. The other day I thought about She because of Her. The ads for She, both the 1935 and 1965 versions, feature a woman's face. In both, an actress had the title role. The ad for Her (2013) features a man's face. A machine has the title role. (The only good news is that the machine's voice comes from a woman not a synthesizer.) She v. Her may also have been why I wanted to write about GENKSTERism.***
In the spirit of the Bechdel test, I have now developed a test of my own, but one for all employers, not just movie producers. I call it the Morris Number. Unlike Bechdel, the Morris Number can go much higher than three and the bigger the number the worse the situation. In its ordinary form (OMN), you count how many men you pass on the way down an organization's org chart to finding the fifth-highest ranking woman. In the weighted form (WMN), the number of males between the top of the org chart and the first female are given more weight (npi) than the number of males between the first and second female, and so on. minor revs, typos corrected 2/11, 5/19/14; 1/12/15
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