Bechdel Test Blues

GUYS! COOL IT DOWN! NOW! If a Flame War starts here, I'm gonna kill my own thread! You hear me? Thanks to all who helped answer my original question; you've MORE than answered it. Now go home!

You may fire when you are ready, Gridley

I honestly have never looked at my own stories to see if they pass the Bechdel test. They might not - I tend to aim for a fairly balanced cast, without usually splitting characters up by gender in any scene. I try to make sure my female characters, even the villains, are believable and well-written. But I've definitely received a review complaining that I had too many female characters in one of my stories. My response was diplomatic, but I honestly couldn't care less if that person stopped reading.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

I get that all the time too. I just tell them "Look, half the human race is female. If art is supposed to reflect life, half the characters in our fiction ought to be as well."

Some get it, some don't. More get it than don't, which tells me there's a market out there for balanced fiction.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

I'm surprised that there's actually a market for white male leads so much that people would complain that there's too many females in a balanced cast.

People like familiar aesthetics, I suppose.

edited 3rd Dec '14 2:59:24 AM by Gault

yey

Reading this thread got me curious about if a project I'm working on passes. I looked through it and 2/3rds of the chapters I've written so far passes. Probably helps that the main character is female and that I've tried to balance out the cast (it's kinda disturbing to realize that I default to most characters being male, even when there's no reason they can't be female).

People are mirrors. If you smile, a smile will be reflected.

I have to say, I'm not a huge fan of the Bechdel Test. I agree with it in theory, I think proper representation is extremely important, but in execution I don't think it can indicate whether a work is sexist or not. Sexist works can easily pass the test, and non-sexist ones can fail. Sexism isn't really something that can be measured with any sort of test (though the Mako Mori test sounds like a step in the right direction). A constantly victimised female character with no agency and whose only role is as a love interest for the hero could easily scrape past, by discussing clothes or something, whereas a developed female character with flaws, a plot and agency mightn't due to a small cast of people with whom she can have a conversation. Despite this, I think it is a good tool for examining trends in the media, just not for works on an individual basis.

'All shall love me and despar!'

It was deliberately designed to be easy to pass, the better to demonstrate just how few works even tried.

By now, it should be clear to all except the most dense of us that sheep are secretly conspiring to kill us all and steal our pants.

Hmm, true that. More than a genuine test that is supposed to ... you know, test something, it is a giant lampshade of the fact so many works nowadays don't even have women.

And I don't mean that they have all-male cast, but rather that all the allegedly female characters aren't even human because they are nothing more than satellites to the male characters. And say whatever you want, even though there are people like that in real life, when every single alleged woman in the world of the story is like that, they aren't women, not really.

So, for as long as individual authors write their female characters to actually be characters—characters of some plot significance—rather than satellites, the test is nothing they should concern themselves with.

I think the test is only meaningful if combined with the inverted test, and it only applies to certain types of work. Anything with an exclusive first person POV is automatically going to fail. The test only really makes sense for ensemble works.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

Anything with an exclusive first person male POV is automatically going to fail. That leads to the question of how many stories out there are told from a male's point of view and how many are told from a female's POV? I'm guessing a lot more from a male's.

I don't think so. It is possible for a man to eavesdrop a conversation between two women that is not about him or anyone who shares his gender.

I mean, I'm a man (or at least I was one when I woke up this morning), and right now I'm overhearing a conversation between two women and that conversation has absolutely nothing to do with me or with anyone who shares my gender. Also, I know both of them so I know their names.

Exactly. One of my current Works in Progress is told from the viewpoint of a single narrator, as it's in First Person rather than Third, who is male.

There are two women in the story and the situation is such that the narrator would have numerous occasions to report those two women having conversations about a wide variety of "not-related-to-any-male" topics - without even "eavesdropping" due to the close proximity of everyone and the fact that the women aren't necessarily having private/personal conversations that they don't want overheard.

Passing the Bechdel Test, or even the Mako Mori test, would be easy.

Personally, I think that if you're going to use a Feminism test to gauge how "good" a movie is, it might be better to go with the Mako Mori Test, which was devised in 2013 after Pacific Rim got a lot of crap for failing the Bechdel Test, despite being a feminist victory for having a female character with her own story.

To pass the Mako Mori Test, your movie has to have:

• at least one female character, who
• gets her own narrative arc, which
• is not about supporting a man's story.

I say this is better because first, it actually has some narrative complexity and second, you can pull it off pretty easily with a Gender Flip. It's also harder to jerryrig with misogyny.

edited 26th Jan '15 4:16:22 PM by AwSamWeston

Award-winning screenwriter. Directed some movies. Trying to earn a Creator page. I do feedback here.

Hmm ... true that, for individual authors the Mako Mori Test is much better.

Then again, that particular test is supposed to be a functional alternative to what is essentially a lampshade. So I'm not surprised it is more useful for authors.

edited 26th Jan '15 5:45:22 PM by Kazeto

Anything with an exclusive first person male POV is automatically going to fail. That leads to the question of how many stories out there are told from a male's point of view and how many are told from a female's POV? I'm guessing a lot more from a male's.

Hollywood blockbusters are still disproportionately male dominated, but outside of that, I think there are a lot of female leads. I mean, just look at The Hunger Games.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

Anything with an exclusive first person male POV is automatically going to fail.

I don't think so. Pick up a book with that kind of POV, and I'm sure you'll find a scene where there's two male characters besides our POV saying something to each other. Not every line of dialogue is spoken to the observer.

Okay, anything with an exclusive first person male POV is likely going to fail. I don't think there's a scene in all seven Harry Potter books of two females having a conversation that Harry just watches about something other than a guy.

Sure there are. I can think of several McGonagall - Umbridge conversations, McGonagall - Trelawney, Hermione - Trelawney, Umbridge - Mary Cattermole, Molly- Bellatrix, Bellatrix - Hermione, Hermione - Luna - Rita Skeeter and that's just off the top of my head. And I'd wager finding conversations between male characters that aren't Harry would be even easier.

I mean, if you look for male conversations that don't include Harry you don't even have to go past the first chapter of the first book to get a Dumbledore-Hagrid exchange. And even if I limit myself to just chapters where Harry is the narrator, there's still interactions between Vernon and Dudley, Vernon and Hagrid, Hagrid and most of the businesspeople in Diagon Alley, Malfoy and Ron, and that's all before Harry even reaches Hogwarts.

POV books don't limit character interactions to just the storyteller, and don't do them one at a time. Simply put, there's nothing in the format that should prohibit a male-centric POV story from passing the Bechdel test, not unless it has few female characters that are never in a scene together.

edited 2nd Feb '15 2:22:48 PM by DrDougsh

So if you have two character's who make your work pass the Mako Mori test (Girl character with own motive and plot.) and then you make the two girl's speak about literally anything other than a male, boom, Bechdel Test is passed. I wonder though why screenwriter's are told not to pass the Bechdel Test as per "The Daily Dot". Say two women talk about Formula 1 racing, would that be more boring that two men doing the same or something?

Even your typical rom-com's that all the manly men hate fail this test apparently. Huh?

edited 6th Feb '15 7:02:03 AM by SmokingBun

One or two twists in a story is fine, Shyamlan-esque even. But please don't turn the poor thing into a Twizzler!

>> "I wonder though why screenwriter's are told not to pass the Bechdel Test as per "The Daily Dot". Say two women talk about Formula 1 racing, would that be more boring that two men doing the same or something?"

The usual "oh, but most viewers are male" rot, combined with some bias, some subtle-or-not sexism that might or might not be intended, and the fact that most viewers—be they male or female—are not versed enough in the area of psychology to understand every nuance about the other gender.

Do think about it and you will find that most male characters in movies are in fact caricatures of maleness who only think about fights, explosions, being "manly", and rubbish like that. And likewise, most female characters in movies are caricatures of femaleness who only ... and so on, and so on, we could go for hours complaining about how inane that reasoning is, but that's how it goes.

Point is, characters in movies are supposed to be easy to identify with. Thus, it's risky to create something that is not an archetypal silhouette created from a caricature but rather a real character with a lot of depth, because people might not be able to not only identify with the character but even understand the character's motives and thus sympathise with the character. Many a deep character had been massively misinterpreted by viewers because they simply couldn't understand how the character came to do what the character did, and it frustrated them enough that they disliked the movie.

So it's all about the risk-to-reward ratio, really ...

edited 6th Feb '15 9:34:55 AM by Kazeto

What about genderless characters who are considered feminine?

>> "What about genderless characters who are considered feminine?"

Risky by default, so hard to gauge whether the producer decides to risk further because "why not" or stop because "risky enough". But ... well, there is this media caricature of a gender-ambiguous somewhat feminine gay person who never goes fully into any direction on the gender scale no matter what he does and always remains gender-ambiguous, so that might be an answer to your question.

edited 6th Feb '15 9:34:28 AM by Kazeto

I'm just gonna pass this link along: One of the YouTubers I'm subscribed to made a video with the (admittedly clickbait-y) title "Is Disney/Pixar Sexist?" It mostly talks about how most Pixar movies fail the Bechdel Test with some opinions from the people in the video.

I immediately thought of this thread when I saw it, and my comment on the video took a lot of information from this thread. So thanks, people!

edited 6th Feb '15 12:06:47 PM by AwSamWeston

Award-winning screenwriter. Directed some movies. Trying to earn a Creator page. I do feedback here.

The Mako Mori test is not an acceptable substitute for the Bechdel Test because it's not at all addressing the same issue. The Bechdel Test exists to shed light on how gender representation is ridiculously biased in favour of men (I dare you to find movies that fail a gender-reversed version of the Bechdel test). The Mako Mori test doesn't address that at all, and in fact it's very easy for a movie (including Pacific Rim itself) to pass it while having just one major female character in a huge cast of males.

Is the fact that Pacific Rim has only one major female character in its large cast sexist? Well, yeah, it is, or at least it's emblematic of a very gender-biased approach to storytelling where male is the "default" sex for any proposed character. Whatever value Mako Mori as an individual character has doesn't change that, or even concern the issue.

edited 7th Feb '15 3:26:01 AM by DrDougsh