The Delany Test

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In one of his essays, Samuel R. Delany observed that if the number of women in a room passes a certain threshold (I think it was forty percent, but it may have been thirty or even less), men will think that they are a majority presence. It's something I've thought about, off and on, ever since reading it.

The other day, I finished watching KAOS on Netflix, an eight-part series in which the modern world is ruled by the ancient Greek gods. It's trash, but entertaining trash with some terrific performances, particularly that of Jeff Goldblum as Zeus. The ending was a little weak, but otherwise it was lots of fun. 

And it seemed to have a lot of women's roles in it, an impression bolstered by female multiples--three Furies, three Fates (but I gather they're nonbinary/genderfluid), and the Tacitas Hera surrounded herself with. I speculated that somebody had made a commitment to gender parity.

So Marianne went to the Internet Movie Data Base and counted the cast members:  a total of 85, of whom 38 were women. Doing the math, it came out to... 42%. Close enough.

Once again, the Delany Test proved to be solid. It made me wonder how overwhelmingly male-dominated the television I usually watch is.

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from my Commonplace Book . . .

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A word of explanation: A commonplace book is a collection of excerpts and quotations that strike whoever keeps the book as worth saving. It's like a diary that contains not one word of one's own. Today's entry is notable chiefly for the date when it was written.

Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes--certainly our fathers were not afraid of essays. Nevertheless, somewhere about the opening of our own day, an iron-bound tradition became erected in the publishing business, at least in the United States, that books of essays would not sell; could not be made to sell even sufficiently to avoid a considerable loss on the investment of manufacture; in fact, were quite impossible as a publishing venture.

     -- Robert Cortes Holliday, 1923

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