The Bechdel Test: Difference between revisions

If that sounds to you like a pretty easy standard to meet, try applying the test to the media you consume for a while. There's a good chance you'll be surprised: mainstream media that passes is far less common than you might think.

Now, by limiting yourself to Bechdel-positive shows/movies, 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 (such as ones set in [[The Shawshank Redemption|a men's prison]] or on [[Das Boot|a WWII military submarine]] or [[12 Angry Men|back when only men were on juries]]), or [[The Triplets of Belleville|with no conversations at all]], or having only [[Swimming To Cambodia|one]] or [[My Dinner with Andre|two characters]]. You may even be cutting out a lot of works that have feminist themes. 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 1985 when the test was first formulated, but [[Most Writers Are Male|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 or mortal enemies 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's not relationships ''with men''. Neither was the test ever meant to be taken seriously as a benchmark for determining a work's degree of feminism, let along considered more than a joke.

This is because '''the Bechdel Test is ''not'' meant to give a scorecard of a work's overall level of feminism'''. The test was designed as a joke. It is entirely possible for a Bechdel-positive film not to have 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 clearly Bechdel-positive movie can still be incredibly misogynistic. Conversely, a Bechdel-negative story can still be strongly feminist in other ways, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that.

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. To compensate for this, Bechdel-inspired analyses of television often apply the test to individual episodes or two-hour collections of episodes. It's often surprising how long it takes many TV shows to have a Bechdel-positive episode. And some analyses compare the results of the Bechdel test to those of an [[Inverted Trope|inverted test]] with the roles of men and women swapped.

Compare [[The Smurfette Principle]] -- works that follow [[The Smurfette Principle]] include a female character strictly for demographic appeal but make no real attempt to treat her as an interesting character in her own right, outside of her relationships with the male characters. See also [[Never a Self-Made Woman]], which shows that even a well rounded female character with her own goals is most often only relevant to the story by her relationship to a man. Finally, see [[Token Romance]] and [[Romantic Plot Tumor]] for the effects of Hollywood's belief that both male and female audiences are generally uninterested in female characters except in the context of romance with a male character.

We don't list every movie's Bechdel Test result because that would be huge. If you're interested, see [http://bechdeltest.com/ Bechdel Test Movie List].

* The 2016 [[Gender Flip]]ped [[Continuity Reboot]] of ''[[Ghostbusters (2016 film)|Ghostbusters]]'' passes bigtime, with a team of four [[Badass]] women who talk science, the supernatural and money, and have to deal with a male [[Dumb Blonde]] receptionist.