The Bechdel Test

[Raikas]

I have a problem... I usually watch action or sci-fi movies. Two well known male genres. I'm fairly certain i could name a lot if i had more "feminine" tastes.

But i could already bring up GI Joe Retaliation (saw it recently so my memory is fresh enough to be 100% sure it passed the test). A typical testosterone movie and yet it easily passed. Pointless test is pointless if you ask me.

Given that the punchline of the cartoon that originated it was "The two women talk about the monster", I don't think your example actually contradicts anything.

TL;DR: Basically, people who take that test too seriously are the bane of my existence and I hate the fact that I have to deal with them on a day to day basis.

Are they aware of where it came from? I think it's useful in talking about the industry, but I'm weirded out by the number of people who talk about it as though it was proposed in some academic setting rather than as part of a comic strip that was aiming for humour.

 

[Something Amyss]

But if it cannot say anything about the merits of the film itself, what can it say about movies as a whole?

That women are grossly underrepresented? Strong women still tend to be the exception instead of the rule, and the reason that you don't see a lot of movies passing this test is because there are few significant female roles. Further, even strong women and well-written women tend to fail the test because they have strongly male-driven motivations, so it's still telling if you have a well-written woman whose raison d'etre is purely "because men."

Now, that can be a tricky one, as men make up roughly half the population. However, the fact that so many of the already meager characters still fit this niche and fail part three and one of the major underlying cultural connotations is significant.

Thor was able to have a somewhat peculiar plot-structure (not quite in medias res, but close), as far as I remember - The Avengers didn't really have time for that. Once Thor lands I'm pretty sure that that's that for Natalie Portman and Kat Dennings. Still nothing wrong with their characterisations, though.

Of course, this is one of the problems with the test. You could literally write one conversation to fulfill the "requirement" and be done with it. Even the most strict version of the test only requires a sixty second conversation. You can have one sixty second conversation between two named women and then forget about them. Not that they did THAT in Thor. Just saying they could.

Meh, I prefer a different test for movies and the like - If your female character can be replaced by an sexy carbon rod and the story doesn't change significantly, you fail the test.

Why does it have to be a rod? SEXIST!

...Just kidding.

Arent most of the writters men or something? It kind of makes sense that they might not try to write women dialog.

See Seven Psychopaths were they lampshade that.

This is generally a misconception. It may work for film, but I doubt it.

In fact, though this was originally applied to film, the fact that it's pretty standard in other media would indicate it's more than just "men are writing it."

That's why when I write stuff all of my characters are female. Because men are just so weird with their alien thought-processes and odd language.
Almost like they aren't human.

Men are so hard to figure out. Why can't they just think normally like normal people?

>.>

Or my personal favorite, listening to people engage in some incredibly convoluted mental gymnastics to make Sucker Punch fail their modified Bechdel test, while still allowing something else to pass.

This is part of the problem with people trying to use it for more than what it is. Most of this comes from trying to rectify the Bechdel Test as a test for feminism or positive female role models or whatever. None of which applies.

The Bechdel test obviously has its limitations in some contexts. Films like Master and Commander or Das Boot "fail" the test, but it would make little sense for such films set in historically exclusively male environments to pass the Bechdel in the first place.

fortunately, there's no imperative for those movies to pass.

 

[runic knight]

"Can you think of a better test?"

I can try:

Is there a reason this charter is a woman?
If the answer is something along the lines of boobs then the movie fails.
If you genuinely can't answer the movie gets a pass with a gold star

That is a pretty good test there. I like it. It asks why the character has the trait of a specific gender in the first place, thereby sort of revealing the initial flaw of presuming a female character has to have a justification for being female in the first place. If it is boobs, pretty obvious why that is terrible. But if it doesn't really have a reason, it shows that the characters are just characters with a hodge-podge of various traits, gender included.

 

[Something Amyss]

A woman can give her perspective, be a central character and drive the plot all without speaking to another woman.

Of course, the Bechdel Test doesn't address whether she is a strong character, central to the plot, or anything. To say it fails because you don't understand what the premise is kind of asinine.

Pretty much every definition of the Bechdel Test, including the video in the very post you quoted, addresses this. Which, as the author intended posting it to put us all on the same page, makes it especially weird.

Does it not concern you to not understand what you're talking about, or is it intentional?

 

[ninjaRiv]

Anita Sarkeesian did a bit about it, actually. She misses the point but not as badly as some of her critics would want.

she's done more than one. I'm sort of waiting to see her apply it to video games, too. You know it's coming. The thing about this is, her base explanation shows that she gets it (She even points out that this is not a feminist measuring stick, for example). However, pretty much everything else goes off the rails.

Probably a more useful application of characterisation.[/quote]

I agree, she does get it better than most people. I'm one of the few who don't seem to hate her guts so I'm definitely not using it as an excuse to call her out at all. But it's almost like... "Close but no cigar."

 

[broca]

Like other people already said: the bechdel test is a rather basic tool, that is useful as long as you keep it many limitations in mind. So, as always, the problem is not the test itself, but people (on both side) who misunderstand/misuse it.

But what i find much more interesting is the difference in outcome when applying it to films or tv shows. Tv shows have a much better record of female representation than films and the question is why. If one could find the cause of this difference one would have a better understanding of whats the cause of the problem in films and how to tackle it. Is the writing staff more diverse? Do tv shows make it easier to incorporate more characters (which in turn leads to more female characters) because there is simple more time? Is there are difference in audience? I don't know, but it would be really interesting to find out

 

[generals3]

Like other people already said: the bechdel test is a rather basic tool, that is useful as long as you keep it many limitations in mind. So, as always, the problem is not the test itself, but people (on both side) who misunderstand/misuse it.

But what i find much more interesting is the difference in outcome when applying it to films or tv shows. Tv shows have a much better record of female representation than films and the question is why. If one could find the cause of this difference one would have a better understanding of whats the cause of the problem in films and how to tackle it. Is the writing staff more diverse? Do tv shows make it easier to incorporate more characters (which in turn leads to more female characters) because there is simple more time? Is there are difference in audience? I don't know, but it would be really interesting to find out

Actually no, the problem with the test is that it's entirely useless and it's use is as a consequence in itself misleading. If you use a test you present it as being useful, which it is not. On top of that many people seem to constantly suffer from tunnel vision. What I mean with that is that they tend to only look at specific parts of the movie industry and extrapolate it to the entire industry. The same is often being done in discussions about Videogames. You can't just look at the typically male movies and somehow conclude: "there is a problem with the movie industry".

 

[broca]

Like other people already said: the bechdel test is a rather basic tool, that is useful as long as you keep it many limitations in mind. So, as always, the problem is not the test itself, but people (on both side) who misunderstand/misuse it.

But what i find much more interesting is the difference in outcome when applying it to films or tv shows. Tv shows have a much better record of female representation than films and the question is why. If one could find the cause of this difference one would have a better understanding of whats the cause of the problem in films and how to tackle it. Is the writing staff more diverse? Do tv shows make it easier to incorporate more characters (which in turn leads to more female characters) because there is simple more time? Is there are difference in audience? I don't know, but it would be really interesting to find out

Actually no, the problem with the test is that it's entirely useless and it's use is as a consequence in itself misleading. If you use a test you present it as being useful, which it is not.

After giving it some more thought, i do think it had primary use some time ago as a tool for showing that there might be a problem which requires further research (so it's a bit like qualitative research: more useful for determining new research areas then for the research itself), while today better methods should be used. So, i agree that it shouldn't be used today but still would say that it had it uses.

On top of that many people seem to constantly suffer from tunnel vision. What I mean with that is that they tend to only look at specific parts of the movie industry and extrapolate it to the entire industry. The same is often being done in discussions about Videogames. You can't just look at the typically male movies and somehow conclude: "there is a problem with the movie industry".

Which is exactly why i wrote that one has to keep in mind the serious limitations of the test. Using the test on male targeted films to make a point about all films would be a prime example of misusing it. But of course thats not really a problem with the test but with people that don't understand/care about test design and draw conclusions for populations from samples that don't reflect them enough.

 

[Something Amyss]

I agree, she does get it better than most people. I'm one of the few who don't seem to hate her guts so I'm definitely not using it as an excuse to call her out at all. But it's almost like... "Close but no cigar."

If anything, I find it more frustrating that she seems to get it, then takes a HARD RIGHT off the road and into a tree. But yeah, I agree. Just airing my own beliefs there. And clarifying she's covered the Bechdel test a couple of times. More than a couple if you count tweets and stuff, evidently.

I don't follow her that close, TBH. I usually don't even pay her much mind until people start pissing and moaning about how horrible she is.

I couldn't see the video at the time so I just went by what others have said about it. And I've seen a lot of people talk about it means not enough games from a female perspective my condescending friend.

That's what you're going to use as your excuse? "I saw other people being wrong, so I decided to do so myself?"

I don't think this is base-covering. And if you think pointing out a pattern in your commentary on women's issues is condescending, then maybe you should try a little harder. I'm merely stating what you seem to do repeatedly, which is to jump in with arguments that are ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst. Apparently, questioning you on that trend hurts your feelings. I'm sorry that it does, as it wasn't my intent. Simultaneously, if you're going to get offended and complain that I'm condescending, maybe you should take a few moments to bone up on the issue you're talking about rather than complain that you are being called on ignorance.

Anyway saying this shows the limited nature of women's roles is even dumber. The fact that a woman doesn't talk to other women tells us nothing about her role.

It's a useless test.

Ah, word confusion. See, even though you accused me of condescension, I'm here to help.

He says it speaks to the limited roles for women. Not about the given woman's role. He then goes on to liken it to something said in a specific movie as sort of an analogy to the point, which might have been a clue.

Really, if you can't find named women who can have even a single conversation that's not about men, that does speak volumes about the roles of women in film. It speaks to a trend of very limited scope for women.

Now that you (hopefully) understand what the video was actually saying, perhaps you would care to rephrase your statement about uselessness. Certainly it is limited both in use and application, but that doesn't make it useless.

And you see, the fact that I am able to help you through your confusion comes from the very fact that I took the time to inform myself before I bothered to post on the matter. Not only did this attitude allow me to sound off on the actual value of the Bechdel test, but it encouraged me to actually go look at the context of the word role.

For further educational purposes, here's a brief summary of some of the key points from TV Tropes:

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 WWII military submarine or back when only men served on juries), or with no conversations at all, or having only one or two characters. You may even be cutting out a lot of works that have feminist themes (it's been revealed that Mulan surprisingly failed, although it does make a twisted sort of sense ? she spends the majority of the movie as the sole woman in a male-only group of soldiers, with the rest of the time being around women who are fixated on her wedding, which she was obviously uncomfortable with). But that's the point; the majority of fiction created today, for whatever reason, seems to think women aren't worth portraying except in relation to men. Things have changed 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.

The test is often misunderstood. The requirements are just what they say they are ? it doesn't make any difference if, for instance, the male characters the women talk about are their fathers, sons, brothers, platonic friends, mortal enemies, patients they're trying to save or murderers they're trying to catch, rather than romantic partners. Conversely, if a work seems to pass, it doesn't matter if male characters are present when the female characters talk, nor does it matter if the women only talk about stereotypically girly topics like shoe shopping ? or even relationships, as long as it is not relationships with men.

This is because the Bechdel Test is not meant to give a scorecard of a work's overall level of feminism. It is entirely possible for a film to pass without having overt feminist themes ? in fact, the original example of a movie that passes is Alien, which, while it has feminist subtexts, is mostly just a sci-fi/action/horror flick. A movie can easily pass the Bechdel Test and still be incredibly misogynistic. Conversely, it's also possible for a story to fail the test and still be strongly feminist in other ways, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. What's a problem is that it becomes a pattern ? when so many movies fail the test, while very few show male characters whose lives seem to revolve around women, that says uncomfortable things about the way Hollywood handles gender. There are also lesser-known variations of the rule, such as the Race Bechdel Test, in which two characters of colour talk about anything other than the white leads and the Reverse Bechdel Test, with the roles of men and women swapped.

You're welcome.

 

[Something Amyss]

You can't just look at the typically male movies and somehow conclude: "there is a problem with the movie industry".

Which is why it's routinely applied to the Oscars, and even "women's" media frequently doesn't pass. I mean, unless you want to expand the definition of "typically male movies" to "most of Hollywood's film output," that's a pretty lousy case.

But what i find much more interesting is the difference in outcome when applying it to films or tv shows. Tv shows have a much better record of female representation than films and the question is why.

TV shows tend to be more dialogue heavy and have more time to develop larger casts. As a result, such interactions are more likely to occur, I would say almost by pure chance. It doesn't have to be chance, but I think the nature of TV v movies makes it a statistically more likely outcome.

Even over the course of a season, as more characters are built, a given episode is more likely to display this. It's not a given, but it's fairly common.

And again, these are all tendencies, not rules. But really, consider the time frame alone.

 

[Norithics]

I think the entire point of the Test is to make you think critically about women in the creations you make and consume, so whether it passes the test or not, you've got a more inclusive viewpoint.

Which I think a lot of people forget when judging critics. Critics are there not as a handy buying guide or a simple floodgate to quality, but a more discerning individual who can offer a more intricate opinion which we can then partake of and benefit from ourselves. Their sheer existence isn't a threat to whatever they're opining against; it's a more in-depth look that helps things be satisfying on more than just a base level, to the benefit of everybody.

 

[Haukur Isleifsson]

Lets do a reverse bechdel test. I challenge anyone here to name a movie where two male characters DO NOT TALK about anything else apart from women if at all. A movie that isnt total garbage. I think you might find one or two (Technically moon i guess) but they probably explore a single/two character/s only or deal with the theme of isolation and thus cant pass either test. Im even ignoring point 1. Find me a movie that fails any TWO of the 3 points for men. Its so rediculously given that a movie HAS to pass the LedCheb test to even BE a movie at all. Its difficult to name a movie that fails even 2 of the challenges. The fact its exceedingly laughably easy to name movies that fail all 3 bechdels is telling.

I'm thinking Black Swan. But I think it's the only one I can remember.

 

[ninjaRiv]

I agree, she does get it better than most people. I'm one of the few who don't seem to hate her guts so I'm definitely not using it as an excuse to call her out at all. But it's almost like... "Close but no cigar."

If anything, I find it more frustrating that she seems to get it, then takes a HARD RIGHT off the road and into a tree. But yeah, I agree. Just airing my own beliefs there. And clarifying she's covered the Bechdel test a couple of times. More than a couple if you count tweets and stuff, evidently.

I don't follow her that close, TBH. I usually don't even pay her much mind until people start pissing and moaning about how horrible she is.

I totally agree, I think I just put it into different, crappier words.

I think she's far from awful. Misguided, yes. But definitely not like SOME people say. She's one of those people with great ideas but poor execution and misconceptions.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Fuck the Bechdel test! Fuck any test, measurement, or mathmatical equation put on fiction.

People will say it's not to judge whether a movie is bad or not, but being that it's a test it's obviously suppose to reveal something either negative or positive. It's suppose to place some sort of judgement on a story by way of strict rules that have no reflection on the quality whatsoever. And as soon as you start thinking like that..., you're doing it wrong.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Fuck the Bechdel test! Fuck any test, measurement, or mathmatical equation put on fiction.

People will say it's not to judge whether a movie is bad or not, but being that it's a test it's obviously suppose to reveal something either negative or positive. It's suppose to place some sort of judgement on a story by way of strict rules that have no reflection on the quality whatsoever. And as soon as you start thinking like that..., you're doing it wrong.

Oh, FFS. You know how the video in the OP and about every third post has explained it's not about determining if a movie is good or bad, it's about observing a general trend about movies as a whole?

That's because it's not about determining if a movie is good or bad, it's about observing a general trend about movies as a whole.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Fuck the Bechdel test! Fuck any test, measurement, or mathmatical equation put on fiction.

People will say it's not to judge whether a movie is bad or not, but being that it's a test it's obviously suppose to reveal something either negative or positive. It's suppose to place some sort of judgement on a story by way of strict rules that have no reflection on the quality whatsoever. And as soon as you start thinking like that..., you're doing it wrong.

Oh, FFS. You know how the video in the OP and about every third post has explained it's not about determining if a movie is good or bad, it's about observing a general trend about movies as a whole?

That's because it's not about determining if a movie is good or bad, it's about observing a general trend about movies as a whole.

And that trend is; There are not enough prominent non-sexualized female roles in movies. Which in turn reflects badly on all those movies that don't fall in with this line of thought. If that's not it, then what point is there to the test, if not to point out something that should or shouldn't be improved?

Whether you like it or not, your brain will automatically judge a movie based on these guide lines and make either a positive or negative assessment.

You can make similar tests regarding Muslims in movies, or black people, gay people, transexuals, Asians, asexuals. "Oh no, it's not about whether a movie is good or not. Really, it isn't. But still... ey." Movies are already deathly afraid to not be as politically correct as possible, and this Bechdel test nonsense is only adding to that.

 

[Thaluikhain]

And that trend is; There are not enough prominent non-sexualized female roles in movies. Which in turn reflects badly on all those movies that don't fall in with this line of thought. If that's not it, then what point is there to the test, if not to point out something that should or shouldn't be improved?

It points out the way the movie making industry treats female characters. Again, it does not mean any individual movie is bad, just that there is a noticeable tendency to limit female roles.

Whether you like it or not, your brain will automatically judge a movie based on these guide lines and make either a positive or negative assessment.

No.

You can make similar tests regarding Muslims in movies, or black people, gay people, transexuals, Asians, asexuals. "Oh no, it's not about whether a movie is good or not. Really, it isn't. But still... ey." Movies are already deathly afraid to not be as politically correct as possible, and this Bechdel test nonsense is only adding to that.

What? Most movies fail the Bechdel test, same as they have always done. The PC police haven't gone and forced compliance.