InsaneJournal

Current mood:	bored
Current music:	Stigmata Martyr-Abney Park
Entry tags:	feminism, memories, rl

An amusing story
My mind wanders at night, and gets into tangents...


So, I was thinking about Bechdel's Law, another one of those Internet Laws that people make up. Basically, it states that, in order for a piece of fiction to be considered feminist, it has to feature:
1. Multiple prominent female characters that
2. Have conversations about
3. Something other than a man or men, or similar.

Anyway, this got me into the memory that Henrik Ibsen's play, A Doll's House (which I read for 9th grade English) has no scenes without women in them. The reason I remember this is because we had to perform scenes for our final projects, in costume -- mostly to study how a play was different written and performed, I think. Now, few people noticed that fact above until after we had paired up, and being teenagers, most of us got into same-sex pairs with friends. A few people quickly switched into opposite-sex groups, or combined to do scenes where there were several people on-stage, but one pair of guys decided to go through with it as-is. Yes, one of the guys borrowed a dress and performed the scene in drag and falsetto*, and making the scene intentionally melodramatic (which just goes to show the power of staging). Of course, the US Government teacher picked that moment to walk into the classroom and couldn't stop laughing.

That and the U. S. Government teacher liked the green straw hat that I had worn with my costume. I need to wear more hats.

*This guy was pretty out there -- he went as Vladimir Lenin for our biography unit final, where we had to dress up and pretend to be our famous person being interviewed by various parents. Somehow I (as Lise Meitner) got stuck between him and Ayn Rand. I was late, and had wanted to be near Marie Curie (aka crisi83) or one of the two Charles Darwins**. I was new to roleplaying, but my in-character thought was 'Oh, God, this isn't going to end well at all if those two get at it'.

** Our previous unit was on short stories, and we had just did evolutionary biology in science class. As a result, we had two Edgar Allen Poes and two Charles Darwins. I also remember a blonde girl did Adolph Hitler, some kid did a really awesome Ghandi costume, and there was a Cleopatra. When my little brother did this project, he ended up as Vince Lombardi.