Quote:
Originally Posted by meeera
Seeking clarity and common ground here: what the author (plus or minus editing) wrote was "However, groundbreaking 30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago can now seem horribly out of date and shockingly offensive." That's the only time "offensive" appears in the article. Headlines are not written by the authors of the articles, and are typically designed to be as clickbaity as possible.
I like it that she has applied the Bechdel-Wallace test as it is meant to be applied, to highlight the existence of gender imbalance in a collection of different works, rather than as a single 'litmus test' to decide whether a single work is or isn't sexist.
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That's fair enough, but does that fact that a book has a gender imbalance mean that it's offensive? Jane Austen's books all have female protagonists, but that doesn't offend me as a male reader. Why should I be offended if an author chooses to write books from a female (or male) perspective? That's their free choice. I may choose not to read such a book, but I'm not offended by it. The romance genre today is completely dominated by books aimed at women. I don't find that offensive. Why should a woman be offended at works of SF and fantasy targeted at a male readership?