In space, no one can hear you discuss feminist critical theory

[sesquipedality]

It's possible you've already seen my comments on the Bechdel Test, but if not, first, a quick recap.

The Bechdel Test (not in fact devised by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, but by a friend of hers, Liz Wallace) as originally expressed was a criterion for which films to go and watch. Wallace would only watch movies if they contained

Comments

[lanfykins]

The Bechdel Test is an absolute minimum, and the point is how many films fail even that.

Passing the Bechdel Test means 'your film maybe doesn't assume that males are the only True Human Beings'. That is no cause for congratulations.

[sesquipedality]

Indeed, but equally failing the Bechdel Test does not mean "your film is misogynist crap". That's my point. It's not really a test at all. Or rather it's an interesting metric in aggregate, not really in the case of individual data points.

[lanfykins]

Same as all metrics, really :)

[sesquipedality]

Well, all social science metrics. The physical ones tend to be quite useful individually. ;)

[angoel]

I believe that there will be value in having the Bechdel test until such a time as the proportion of films passing it, and the proportion of films passing the reverse Bechdel test is comparable. After all, while fixing the symptoms doesn't automatically fix the problem, it does remove some of the barriers to fixing the problem (e.g. scriptwriters being told to remove female to female dialogue because that'll prevent the film selling as well).

Of course, that doesn't mean people shouldn't also be looking beyond the test.

[angoel]

It makes me want to deliberately re-write my stuff so it doesn't pass, but that's because I'm generally contrary.

S.

[rmc28]

I've always thought it was most useful as an aggregate measure (how many films can you think of that pass this) rather than a way of evaluating individual films. There can be good plausible reasons why an individual film might not pass, but still not be hideously misogynistic, but when so few do, you have a system-wide problem.

[lnr]

That's a good way of looking at it

[naath]

Yeah, and also I think it's "interesting" (read, aggravating) not so much how many films don't pass, but the contrast between that and how many films don't pass the "reverse" test (two named men, talking to each other, about something that isn't a woman).

There are lots of films that have few characters, or a single-gendered cast, or very little talking, or all the talking is about the One Main Character... for good reasons to do with how to best tell the story that that film is trying to tell.

But IMO there are *just as many* good stories that are dominated by women as there are good stories that are dominated by men - but the men's stories are dominating film, which is not good. And looking at the aggregate figures can tell you how big that bias is.

[lord_sandwich]

It would be actually very easy to have a film pass the test and still be very inherently misogynistic. People forget when it was first introduced it was more or less as a joke- the punchline being if you really used that criterion there would be very few films you could watch. It seems now its being used as a way of judging a films feminist creditials without really thinking about the implications.