The Bechdel Test - Television Tropes & Idioms

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 love interest.

Now, by limiting yourself to shows/movies that pass the test, you'd be cutting out a lot of otherwise-worthy entertainment. 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.

Works that score high on the Bechdel Test:

Anime

Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni
Sailor Moon
Fullmetal Alchemist
Black Lagoon, while simultaneously managing to preserve the dignity of the male sex, as does...
Gunsmith Cats
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. As Erica Friedman, the ever snarky Yuricon founder, mentioned in her blog after her encounter with the over-enthusiastic shippers of the fandom, all of the mostly female cast look married to their careers more than anything else.
Slayers
Card Captor Sakura (Want to know what's sad? The English dubbers deliberately tried to avert this! Because girls don't watch action series, and boys don't watch action series with a girl as the main character.)

Comic Books

The Life And Times Of Scrooge Mc Duck
B.P.R.D. from the Hellboy universe
GoldDigger
X-Men
Runaways

Films

Fried Green Tomatoes
Thelma And Louise
Kill Bill passes with flying colors: When the women talk to each other, they talk about combat. When the men talk to each other, they talk about The Bride.
Legally Blonde — The protagonist's character arc is all about finding a purpose beyond a love interest, in fact.

Literature

Animorphs
The Assassins Of Tamurin
The Chronicles Of Narnia
The Faerie Queene — Una with Caelia, Artemis with Aphrodite, Britomart with Radigund (if talking about how you're going to kill each other counts); the female leads Britomart and Amoret mostly only talk about their love interests, but they make up for it with plenty of Les Yay.
His Dark Materials
Little Women
Perry Rhodan: Capable women and relationships exist, but if anything, it's the men who discuss relationships - and not in the "conquest" sense. Might be done deliberately to avert The Smurfette Principle.
Watership Down: For all the (justified) complaints about how rabbit society as depicted in the first novel is more patriarchal than rabbit society in Real Life, as well as females being valued as nothing more than breeding stock, Hyzenthlay and her friends do meet the three terms of the Bechdel Test.
Quite a few of the Discworld novels, but most especially the Witches and Tiffany Aching series.
A Little Princess
The Secret Garden
The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, and the Oz books in general. It helps that the protagonist is female and so are most of the powerful supernatural entities in the setting.

Live Action TV

Buffy The Vampire Slayer, although Joss Whedon was disappointed people saw his "strong female characters" as the trope Girls Need Role Models. Why do people keep acting like "strong female characters" are so unusual?
Firefly, Or So I Heard.
Fraggle Rock
Stargate Atlantis, as noted above.
Star Trek Voyager passes this one with flying colors almost every episode, but Star Trek The Next Generation fails surprisingly. Yes, two strong female leads, but they are usually discussing their respective love interests.
The reimagined Battlestar Galactica was known to fail the reverse Bechdel test, in which there were episodes where two men (the Adamas junior and senior) only talked about women (usually Starbuck and Roslin).
The Middleman. Lacey and Wendy. Art crawl!

Theater

Wicked

Western Animation

Avatar The Last Airbender
Batman The Animated Series
- Along with Superman The Animated Series, and the DCAU in general...
Codename Kids Next Door
The Powerpuff Girls
Sat AM Sonic The Hedgehog
Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty: Scary thought, considering the title character is extremely passive and hardly does anything except sing songs, fall in love, and cry about her arranged marriage. But forget about the princess for a second and look at who gets the most plot time: it's the three good fairies and Maleficent, all females.
Teen Titans
Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? — The premise of the show is "Kid Heroes chase The Sandiego around the world with help from a Magical Computer." Starring an Action Girl versus a famous female Villain Protagonist is never treated as anything odd or revolutionary. That is the feminism judged by the Bechdel Test.
She Ra Princess Of Power
Jem. Most impressively, She-ra and this were released in 1985, around the time when the rule was first noticed due to the small amount of popular media that could pass it.
The Incredibles

Beauty Equals Goodness

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Works that score high on the Bechdel Test: