The Bechdel Test - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Bechdels Rule; Bechdel Test

There aren't a lot of franchises with more than one, if any, interesting and complex female characters.

The Nostalgia Chick, Top 11 Animated Nostalgic Villainesses

The Bechdel Test or the Bechdel-Wallace Test is a sort of litmus test for female presence in movies and TV. In order to pass, the film or show must meet the following criteria:

it includes at least two women,
who have at least one conversation with each other
about something other than a man or men.

Now, by limiting yourself to shows/movies that pass the test, you'd be cutting out a lot of otherwise-worthy entertainment; indeed, a fair number of top-notch works have legitimate reasons for including no women (e.g. ones set in a men's prison or on a military submarine or with no conversations at all or with only one character). You may even be cutting out a lot of works that have a feminist tone. But that's the point: too little fiction created today, particularly in TV and movies, has independent female characters. Things have improved since the test was first formulated (the strip in which it was originally suggested was written in 1985), but Hollywood still needs to be prodded to put in someone other than The Chick.

It's obviously easier for a TV series, especially one with an Ensemble Cast, to follow this rule than a film, because there's far more time for the conversation to occur in. For example, Stargate Atlantis is not an especially feminist show, but one episode features two female characters discussing a (female) alien that's attacking them, and in the fourth season the presence of a female commander, a female doctor, and a female warrior meant for a lot of conversation about something other than dudes. To compensate for this, Bechdel's Rule-inspired analyses of television often look episode-by-episode, or compare the series' compliance with Bechdel's Rule with its compliance with a "reverse Bechdel rule" with the roles of men and women swapped.

Named for Alison Bechdel, creator of the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, who made it famous with this strip

. It's also called the Mo Movie Measure, after Mo, the main character of DTWOF, but Mo wasn't yet a character when the strip appeared; it's from the early days of the strip before it moved to a serial format with recurring characters. The strip itself notes a film need not be essentially feminist to pass the test, as the last film the character saw was Alien (with two women discussing the xenomorph).

Contrast The Smurfette Principle — Works that follow The Smurfette Principle include a female character strictly for demographic appeal with no real consideration for what attracts the female demographic; works that pass the Bechdel Test have regular characters that just happen to be female and are not flat. In many ways, this makes them more feminist than works that try to be feminist. Instead of the existence of "interesting and complex female characters" being hyped and celebrated like a rare phenomenon, it's not treated as the least bit unusual. However, this doesn't necessarily mark them as independant characters. In Female Success Is Family, we can see that even a well rounded female character with her own goals is most often only relevant to the story by her relationship to a man.