Sexual Politics

Abstract

By obtaining quantitative results on readers’ responses to male and female characters, and by comparing those results with readers’ responses to good and bad characters and to major and minor characters, we can give decisive evidence as to whether responses to Sex vary independently of responses to Valence (good versus bad) and Salience (major versus minor). The results are unequivocal. Sex has no correlation with either Valence or Salience. (In appendix 4, see the section “The Independence of Sex from Valence and Salience.”) Sex does not explain any of the variance in Valence (whether a character is good or bad) or Salience (whether a character is major or minor). On the categories of emotional response and character success, there are no statistically significant differences between the sets of all male and all female characters (appendix 6). Our respondents do not like males or females more; they do not wish one sex to succeed more than the other; and they do not regard the success of either sex as more frequently a main feature in the outcome of the narratives. What this means is that “agonistic structure” does not divide along lines of male and female. Characters are not good or bad, major or minor, because they are male or female. Sex is a separate, independent category.