Bechdel Test Blues

Because once you know about it, you can't un-know about it. It will always be there in the back of your mind, as well it should be.

I look at it this way: The Bechdel Test is not meant to be taken at face value. It's a sneaky way of pointing out that female characters in movies rarely move the plot along on their own, instead serving merely as adjuncts to the male characters. The first question asks "How's the gender balance in the cast? Just one token woman, or are there at least two?" The second asks "Do they ever interact directly with each other, or does every scene have to include dudes? The third question asks "Does that interaction only revolve around the (absent) dudes, or is it actually relevant to the plot?"

That's why examples such as the female doctors talking about a male patient count in my book. The test doesn't say "a conversation that's not about a man"; it says "a conversation about something other than a man." The female doctors in question are talking about a man, yes...but they are also talking about something other than a man. They're talking about their work, and about medicine. If the man's illness is part of the plot, then by their conversation they are moving the plot along. They are important characters. This interaction between women that does not directly involve men is important to the story.

Of course, it's even better when the subject of the conversation is also a woman, because then it doesn't involve men indirectly either.

edited 10th Jul '14 11:53:21 AM by Karalora

I still think that if that's the intention, then straightforwardness is much better than trying to be clever with the identity of the topic of conversation, as was the case in all of Madru's examples.

Nicely said, Karalora. I think that conversations between two women saying "Bob is totally a hunk" fail, but if they're police officers, let's say and they say "Either Bob or Charlie is the murderer" it should pass because they're not directly talking about Bob or Charlie, they're talking about the suspect. Bob and Charlie are accessories to the conversation; they're satellites. Hmm, it's a bit difficult to word this, but if the MAIN topic of the conversation isn't about men, and a man happens to be mentioned once or twice, the work should pass. Of course, that's MY thinking; the actual test would fail that conversation.

The following dialogue passes the Bechdel Test:

Sarah: Isn't it great that, as females, our only useful purpose is to tend to the home?
Becky: That is completely accurate, fellow female.

The following dialogue fails:

Sarah: Ever since I was unanimously elected president of the world, and have cured cancer, world hunger and ended all wars single-handedly, my husband feels I don't spend enough time with him and the kids.
Becky: You also convinced all world religions to join together in harmony and made peace with the alien Zyglon Emperor when his people invaded Earth. Your son Timmy must be very proud of you.

edited 10th Jul '14 11:11:29 AM by Eagal

Should we take a moment to ask WHY so many otherwise excellent works flunk the Test? Because complaining about it won't solve anything until we start looking at WHY this happens.

Because no one cares enough about gender dynamics to make it a point to have two females have a conversation that's irrelevant by way of discussing something not-connected to the plot and thus the (usually-male-)leading character.

We're pointing out that the test in its strictest form is flawed. It doesn't care about context, it doesn't care about what these women are for the rest of the work, it doesn't care if they have agency, it doesn't care what the man is to these women, it doesn't care if their lives don't revolve around the man they're talking about.

The last time this came up, someone made an excellent point on this topic- we should be worrying about whether our characters have agency, not about whether they pass a completely arbitrary 'measure' of female presence.

edited 10th Jul '14 11:55:26 AM by CrystalGlacia

Of course, the point of the test was never whether any one work does or doesn't pass. It's about the aggregate case—how few works do pass even such an incredibly low bar. Here's another way of reading the three criteria:

1. Ever notice how few important movie characters are female? At most, you usually get one token chick.
2. Ever notice how even when you have more than one woman in a movie, they never get to talk to each or do anything apart from the men?
3. You ever notice how even when they get to talk to each other apart from the men, they're still usually only talking about the men?

Yes, many excellent movies fail the test. Yes, many feminist-friendly movies fail the test. But again, the point isn't about whether any one movie passes or fails. It's about why so few pass, even when they are feminist-friendly.

edited 10th Jul '14 12:03:33 PM by Karalora

Because the test is not an arbiter of quality, and is not intended to be diagnostic of any individual work. The truth is that your attempt to apply the test to anything other than a body of works is a misuse of it.

That's the thing. Alison Bechdel noted that in a lot of works women don't have agency, they just exist as extensions of the male characters.

However, targeting a small subset of symptoms of that lack of agency, was a particularly flawed way of tackling the issue, especially when those "symptoms" can equally apply to works where the female characters do have agency and some works in which the female characters don't have agency don't display those symptoms at all.

The symptoms targeted are neither unique to flawed works nor universal amongst flawed works.

And hastily "papering over" the symptoms is not going to make a flawed work less flawed. Especially since you could hastily put in a scene where a couple of the women talk about shoe shopping, clothes, hair-styles or the fact that they still have their Barbie dolls that they got when they were kids or some other such stereotypical shit and pass the test - without doing one thing to fix the fact that the work is a steaming pile of sexist shit.

If Bechdel's test had been more to do with the inherent lack of agency of female characters in works and the solution being making the female characters more than just satellites of the male characters, it would be a lot more useful.

But then there's an issue with measuring agency- it's hard to define unless you really know what agency means. I've heard all kinds of 'tests' for measuring agency, one being that if you could replace the character with an inanimate object and still have the plot work, that character doesn't have agency... but neither does a stereotypical fantasy protagonist prophesied to destroy the Dark Lord who blindly does what everyone tells him to do.

I really don't understand what the deal is with all these people who attempt to assign objective measures to a highly subjective and interpretative art form such as literature.

There is no "easy measure". All that can be done is to judge each work on its own merits - and even then, there will be disagreement between reviewers.

You can't just distill "what makes a work sexist" into three bullet points (or even thirty, I suspect) or fix it by ensuring three things exist in it.

edited 10th Jul '14 9:10:40 PM by Wolf1066

I don't know if it helps, but the joke of the Bechdel Test strip is that because of Hollywood's inability to follow those three criteria, the character who invented the test hasn't seen a movie in theaters since Aliens, so she and her girlfriend decide to just rent that instead.

Sure. Because the test, as it was originally formulated, says that the conversation can't be about a male in any way, shape, or form. Two female detectives, talking about a suspect who could be either sex but who happens to be male? doesn't count. Two female doctors, talking about a patient who could be either sex, but happens to be male? doesn't count, not even if it's a infant. Two mothers, talking about a teacher at their childrens' school who could be either sex, but who happens to be male? doesn't count.

I was thinking about this more today and it occurred to me that as far as I can remember, Harry Potter fails. The closest it comes is at the beginning of the 6th book when Bellatrix and Narcissa Malfoy are together, but they're talking about Snape, a male.

On the one hand, they aren't talking about him romantically, so you might be inclined to give them a pass. But on further reflection, Harry Potter passes the Reverse Bechdel Test with flying colors even restricted only to the few parts where the main character isn't present. The beginning of the 4th and 6th books both feature all-male chapters. Why was there no female-only chapter?

I think the point of the test is to highlight imbalances like this, rather than to say a specific thing is or isn't feminist.

I think there needs to be an exception made for works that strictly adhere to first person point of view, because that essentially requires the main character to be a specific gender to pass and ideally you'd have a 50/50 mix.

But then again sometimes it doesn't take much of an exception to pass. For example, you get stuff like Goodbye Lenin, which technically passes despite being told almost entirely in first person by a male character, because of one brief scene where two female characters are shown talking while he's not present. And on the other hand, there's Harry Potter, which doesn't pass despite having 5 whole chapters without the main character.

the joke of the Bechdel Test strip is that because of Hollywood's inability to follow those three criteria, the character who invented the test hasn't seen a movie in theaters since Aliens, so she and her girlfriend decide to just rent that instead.

Well, she'll be happy to know she can go see X Men Days Of Future Past (thanks to the scene where Mystique talks to the nurse after the peace conference)

I mean obviously there are lots of movies like Frozen that pass, but even male dominated action movies like X Men sometimes pass just by chance.

edited 10th Jul '14 11:35:27 PM by storyyeller

It's definitely worth remembering that the Bechdel Test originated as a joke for a comic strip, and not a serious criterion for judging movies at all.

Another funny thought I had; the Elvira movie, as much as it is pretty much a delivery vehicle for Cassandra Petersen's assets, passes the test with flying colors. Elvira and Chastity Pariah feud over everything BUT men over the course of the movie, but the romantic subplot doesn't really motivate any of the conflict in the story either way.

This is probably the reason why the test is so difficult to pass, because most fiction has a male protagonist, and if the narrative is POV-oriented, than any moment where the male protagonist is not going to be around to interact with others is going to be rare. In that case, how many female supporting characters the work has may actually be irrelevant to how capable the work would be in passing the test.

A fan recently pointed out that my latest novel actually fails the reverse Bechdel test. I was skeptical so I went back and checked the text; they were right, it does fail.

Surprise, surprise.

edited 5th Aug '14 10:08:57 PM by drunkscriblerian

Really? So it always focuses on women. What's it about?

Naming The Hangman, a noir PI novel. It's quite good. It doesn't always focus on women. It's mostly a combination of gender-distribution in the cast, and POV.

The reason it fails is that the main Protagonist, half of her staff, the two secondary protagonists, and the victim are all female, and it's written first-person POV of the main character. The villains are male, as are four of the secondary characters and a secondary antagonist, but all of those secondary male characters are in different story-lines; thee are never two of them together in the same scene. Because of the POV, the main character is always present in some way anytime any of them show up. There's one conversation that may qualify for the Reverse Bechdel, depending on how strictly you set the parameters — if you use the "must last at least a minute" limit, it doesn't, unless you also use the "can be part of a larger conversation that isn't included in full" qualifier — it's an overheard fragment (six or eight lines) of what is clearly a much longer conversation that's been going on for some time.

edited 6th Aug '14 7:29:38 AM by Madrugada

Doesn't a "Reverse Bechdel Test", like, royally miss the point of the Bechdel Test?

The regular Bechdel Test royally misses the point of the Bechdel Test.

and : care to clarify what you mean? Your terse quips have about a thousand possible interpretations each.

As for me... even writing from a male first-person perspective, I passed it pretty quickly. A fair number of female characters — it doesn't have to be nearly half — and developing one's supporting characters (regardless of gender) outside the protagonist's life makes it fairly simple to pass by accident in an overheard throw-away conversation.

I am unsure I actually pass the Reverse Test due to a tight focus of the third-person limited view. It depends on how one reads the background exhanges in some parts...