Gender and the Bechdel Test in your work

(If the above posts were in regards to mine)... Really her whole shtick is that she's too much of a badass for any kind of romance. She also loves her job and even if she did have friend who tried to 'rom-com' her, if you catch my drift, there really is no perfect guy for her to be with. All she cares about is getting the job done. Hell, the more I think about it I think she's asexual.

Also I have a question about the test, that I hope nobody else asked, out of nothing more than curiosity. Does it matter 'what' the female is. If, for instance, two female characters were to talk about the best way to open a box of crackers and one was a human but the other was a pony (And not the My Little Pony, just a regular 'ol pony that just happens to talk.) would that pass?

I would say so.

My take on the Bechdel Test is that its satire designed to expose a massive bias in visual media (remember, the test was designed for movies)...put another way, the test is easy to pass but so many Hollywood productions still manage to fail it, because women and men aren't viewed with the same value metric by the people who craft movies.

Put still another way, the Bechdel Test was designed to point out how Hollywood is very much not as liberal/progressive as it likes to believe.

So writers shouldn't sweat the test...or rather, shouldn't treat it as anything other than all the rest of the basic benchmarks, like remembering to put a period at the end of a sentence or spelling your words correctly.

I'll also point out that there are plenty of ways one can fail the test without insulting women at all. There are plenty of places where having an all-male cast is justified and forgivable (in the trenches of a World War II battlefield, for example). But, if your story's situation calls for female characters and you plan on including them, make sure to treat them as well as you would treat your male characters. You do this and you'll be honoring the spirit of Bechdel.

When it comes to the law, the spirit is more important than the letter.

Exactly.

Yes, my work (a faux-JRPG) passes the Bechdel test. Early in disc 1, two female main cast members get in a discussion of politics and class issues (The Hero Oscar, a young male, is present but the conversation has nothing to do with him. One of the girls, a soldier type, briefly mentions her (male) drill sergeant-equivalent, but I think it does not count). It's also pretty much No Hugging, No Kissing.

edited 20th Dec '13 1:18:28 AM by aurora369

I pass the Bechdel test about a dozen times in the book I just finished, but my favorite is probably when two hippy chicks have an epic fight, in German and covering subjects such as where to properly store one's own extracted bodily fluids, whilst our heroes look on mystified.