The Bechdel Test (& feminist film theory type bobbins)

Because I think I would actually rather talk about this than slash, really...

http://bechdeltest.com/

The movie test:
1. It has to have at least two women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man

(Yes, another spin-off from the 13 going on 30 thread, to talk about how the film industry at the moment handles females and their roles.)

p.s. I know nothing about film theory so bear with me

Partly because I just watched Contact and that just made me think "wow, this film really passes the Bechdel test with flying colours, and wow what a kick-ass character Dr Arroway is" etc.

But I'm too tired to talk about it properly, we can pick this up later. Or Plaxico and Horseshoe can talk about these themes sensibly while I sleep.

Yeah it is sad how few films pass the test...and as "Bechdel Test" site notes, the ones that pass are defs not nec. progressive about gender.

The original comic about it:

http://indianhomemaker.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/the-rule34585797_d7fd14edfb_b.jpg?w=459&h=618

I can't believe that site tried to claim that Inception passed. It SOOOOOO didn't, on all three levels.

I'd also like to add a sub-thread where we try to list really intelligent and good works of speculative fiction that pass the test and/or have kick-ass female protagonists because Contact felt like a rarity and I can't think of another one that isn't Alien.

Help me, please coz I'd really like some more.

do books count? I can think of a lot of books that do

but there just aren't that many good sci-fi films made, tbh

The Bechdel Test is really only for film. But actually, my memory is, yeah, there's quite a bit of fantasy fic that has strong female protagonists.

Did Contact lose buckets of money or something? Because (even though Elvis Telecom was saying on twitter that it was part of radio telescope porn genre) I don't recall seeing anything like it.

eXistenZ is an obvious answer tho

hmm wait no JJL is the only major female character in it

Yeah, i think the contemporary equivalent of Alien is the Resident Evil movies

haha what about that Aeon Flux movie

I think part of the problem here is most films that have more than one protagonist are either male/male or male/female. the lady duo model is pretty much nonexistent (it's hard to argue that that's even the case with Alien)

Hrmm, wondering how Contact got around that - actually obviously Jody Foster was the lead, but there was a strong ensemble cast around her, and one of the most important/pivotal characters in the government was female, hence the dynamic.

fincher fails egregiously except for panic room which presumably passes summa cum laude

mizoguchi prob does pretty well among the old timers

iirc that film was billed as Jodie Foster + Matthew McConaheyhey

in the most non-convincing lesbian+closeted gay guy romance ever imho

jodie foster must screen all scripts w/ a bechdel algorithm

I don't understand why that romance was tacked on. They should have just made him a full on Roman Catholic priest and had done with it.

it was really stupid and unnecessary - but gotta have a romance! it's Hollywood/Chinatown...

This test has ruined all film and television for me (or more accurately it has exposed to me how ruined film/TV is). I can't help running everything I see through the Bechdel machine and usually I just get angry.

I do think it's interesting that so many films fail, even ones that shouldn't be overly gendered. However, the test doesn't really say that much to me aside from this negative status - as Abbott and others have pointed out, the ones that pass are often just as terrible in their gendered viewpoints.

On the other hand, I can look over at my DVD collection and see a bunch of films that pass straight away:

Suspiria, Footprints on the Moon, Threads, Daisies (although these are young women/girls - I'm assuming girls count?), The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, etc etc...

Also, although I haven't seen it, with regards to newer film, Whip It has to be one, right? Although going back to the 'not necessarily progressive about gender' thing, I bet Sex and the City has at least one conversation that's not about a man, and that's just... ugh.

And right now on Film 4 is 28 Days Later, which has women talking about zombies.

I think part of the problem here is most films that have more than one protagonist are either male/male or male/female. the lady duo model is pretty much nonexistent.

part of the problem, definitely, but this shouldn't necessarily be a HUGE impediment -- all it'd take to pass the test is to have the female protagonist have even ONE substantive conversation with another woman about something other than the male protagonist

(the "about something other than a man" part of the test is the most fun part, especially since it nicely explains why romantic comedies don't count)

Yeah looking over my shelf the only ones I see right away that pass are Pleasantville, Human Highway, and...Silence of the Lambs.

(okay well TECHNICALLY, in romantic comedies, before the meet-cute, there might be some minor conversation between a woman and her quirky friend about her clothes or how she hates her job or something, but her need for a man will probably slip in there on some level)

(also in confessions of a shopaholic there MAY be one conversation about debt that does not immediately segue into a conversation about the dude)

It bums me out how little American animation passes. (IDK much about any other country's animation.)

http://bechdeltest.com/view/213/harold_and_kumar_go_to_white_castle/

I think horror is probably going to have a lot of films that pass, partly because horror films often have ensemble casts, and partly because there are monsters to talk about, so any romantic storyline tends to take place as part of fighting side-by-side, rather than agonising about it. Although I would be interested if anyone wanted to propose that horror was actually progressive gender-wise? It's so often painted as being one of the most conservative: women in constant peril etc. But it is possible that the trope was so well-known early on that it became more fun to subvert it earlier in film history than in less genred narratives. Or I could be talking shit in this here musing.

It is flipping me out that I have so many sketch comedy DVDs that are all men famous for dressing up as women & hardly any women to be found (Kids in the Hall & Monty Python, as you probably guessed)...OTOH I kind of feel like KITH had really real things to say about the female experience from time to time! Like Cathy & Kathy are very loving portraits of women that feel really true (to me). Do Kathy & Cathy pass the test even though they're played by men?

http://www.brucio.com/images/photos/P7_A.jpg

xpost -- there's a noted book about that, with horror films, though I can't remember the name -- as I understand it, it winds up suggesting that the women-in-peril thing actually led to the whole idea of the Last Girl, always the last survivor who successfully finishes off the monster/killer/whatever. so in that sense horror movies wind up doing well in terms of female protagonists with ultimate agency and victory and such.

ah, it's carol j. clover's men, women, and chainsaws -- she termed it the "final girl"

and is also the mother of music critic who I'm pretty sure used to post to ILX

-all- they talked about was guys! maybe that's just an inescapable part of the female experience
(xxp)

How about the haunting of hill house? Two women and they rarely talk about guys.

If i r rong, sorry, staying up way too late and brane melt

whoah, I wonder what the two women talked to one another about in Human Centipede

Yeah, I think the Clover position may be the case. Similarly, I remember the trope of 'the black guy' being killed first being referenced and subverted in horror from the '70s, which I'd consider much earlier than 'mainstream' film attempting to address its own prejudices.

Horror discussion reminds me: The Beyond passes the test.

Also, hahaha:
http://bechdeltest.com/view/978/the_human_centipede_%28first_sequence%29/

xpost, dammit!

Did Contact lose buckets of money or something? Because (even though Elvis Telecom was saying on twitter that it was part of radio telescope porn genre) I don't recall seeing anything like it.

Contact was a troubled production for a long time: industry troublemaker Peter Guber was backing the movie for awhile, then director George Miller was fired in the middle of pre-production, Coppola sued Sagan a couple days after Sagan's death, etc. and that black cloud seemed to follow it around. McConaughey + Foster was criticized, no one liked the use of Clinton's speech and the use of CNN's branding, conservatives (who already hated Sagan for being anti-nuke in the 80s) didn't like the Rob Lowe character, progressives/libertarians (who are a big part of SF fandom) didn't like the religion, and everyone had their own pre-conceived ideas of what Carl Sagan stood for without really understanding anything he said.

Ultimately I think that audiences just wanted to see Forrest Gump (Zemeckis' previous movie) over again. Sigh.

http://bechdeltest.com/view/829/birdemic/

Horror discussion reminds me: The Beyond passes the test.

So does The Descent

http://bechdeltest.com/view/379/the_descent/

This test has ruined all film and television for me

can sympathize with this! it was a nagging thought throughout There Will Be Blood. iirc no woman even gets a line in that movie. To a degree, I think that might be one of the points of the film, but still.

IDK much about any other country's animation

Hayao Miyazaki passes with aplomb. I haven't seen the animated version of Persepolis, but it should too. Pixar doesn't do as well with this as I wish they would.

Ha, yes, Miyazaki is great! He's forever got my heart for this & thousands of other reasons.

I can't remember if it literally passes the test, but Satoshi Kon's "Millennium Actress" is also great.

pretty sure persepolis does pass, although i haven't seen it since it was in theaters.

Persepolis definitely passes!

the runaways totally doesn't talk about "men," unless the girls are talking about how they despise fowley.

I know Kate doesn't like me posting to feminism threads because she's irrationally unforgiving towards naivety but I gotta say thinking about it in this way is blowing my mind slightly - so fucking many films I like almost certainly fail this test (although that great paean to veneral disease and heterosexuality, La Ronde, doesn't really have any men speaking to each other either)

love that the site totally misses the point of the test and like every thread devolves into "The presidents wife and that running-away lady said hello to each other"

xp
Ha, for Persepolis the movie not to pass would be an insane violation of the original book!

alcoleuthic, you might want to avoid the word "irrational" in the context of discussions about feminism (see also: hysterical, emotional, sentimental), there's a history there I don't think you mean to be evoking. But yeah, the Test is a great shortcut to seeing what it's like to just be erased by the dominant culture.

alcoleuthic, you might want to avoid the word "irrational" in the context of discussions about feminism

awesome - two guys telling another guy about whether he should feel comfortable discussing feminism ... yay

ugh guys can we please not make this thread about the posters in it?

Yeah, LJ, a lot of films I love don't pass (and yeah, some of them because they're essentially monologues). But I was pleased to see that my shelves seem relatively balanced. And none of my ones that pass would be maligned as solely "women's films", either.

awesome - two guys telling another guy about whether he should feel comfortable discussing feminism ... yay

― sarahel, Friday, August 20, 2010 10:31 PM (56 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

morelike one guy telling another guy about whether he should feel comfortable discussing feminism and one guy who just like raggin on LJ

are you on the rag today, Whiney?

trying to think of a film that would fail an inverse bechdel test (only female discourse)

argh I misspelled 'venereal' I have a REPUTATION to keep up here

Daisies, dude!

xpost

yeah i haven't seen that

or any czech nu wave tbh

xp
I am sorry, i was trying to word that so it wouldn't end up being a derail or sound like a personal attack on LJ I swear.

daisies is fun, but it can be tiring.

ok let's input my Facebook 'fave films' into this

That Obscure Object of Desire - oh god I think this is a fail :(
Network - wait wait Faye Dunaway and the revolutionary woman talk about PROGRAMMING this is a PASS
Rear Window - uhhhhh fail
La Ronde - fail
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise - fail (oh, Bunuel! Do any of his films pass?)
Alphaville - fail
Mulholland Drive - HUGE pass
Oldboy - HUGE FUCKEN FAIL
The Rules of the Game - pass iirc? don't know why I think that
North by Northwest - faaaaaail (oh, Hitchcock! Do any of YOUR films pass?)
Being John Malkovitch - it's complicated
Night of the Hunter - PASS!! I think. Old lady + girl at end iirc?
Spirited Away - pass
Bringing Up Baby - really want this to be a pass, can't quite remember
The Conformist - gay PASSris!
Citizen Kane - no
F for Fake - noooo
A Scanner Darkly - fuck, this is a fail as well
Braindead - fail
In the Loop - fail I *think*
The Exterminating Angel - I think this is a pass! GREAT WORK LUIS I BELIEVED IN YA
The White Ribbon - PASS WOOHOOOOOO
A Serious Man - um look at the title
Irréversible - why is this still one of my favourite movies for fuck's sake *deletes*
The Phantom of Liberty - can't remember but I think ANOTHER PASS FOR LUIS

I wondered about Discreet Charm - does that definitely fail? I can't think properly.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls passes!

In the Loop - fail I *think*
nah, don't Anna Chlumsky and her boss talk? there's that horrid scene about her teeth for instance

Discreet Charm MIGHT not be a fail but I suspect Rule 3 damns it

oh wait, I need to add Pierrot Le Fou to my list - but that's a fail too I think

oh yeah In The Loop passes wahey

the purpose of that little exercise was not to initiate a listathon - it was to illustrate graphically how failsome even art film can be, or at least how non-immediate many of these films' pass-mark is

*pass-marks are

-> bed ->

"even" "art" film = yeah but yr godard, bunuel, hitchcock types scarcely concerned themselves w/ intra-female discourse

and this is noteworthy/interesting - why? did you gain any insights from this exercise?

yes I did, see nakhchivan's post - the illustration was as much for my benefit as anyone's - and yeah those are 3 of my all-timers - it hasn't really been a great concern of mine before now, clearly

vivre sa vie might fail, despite having karina in almost every frame iirc

A lot of art film is (or has been) incredibly led by the masculine sensibility. I don't think that's surprising, particularly.

Not to say that pointing it out and considering it isn't worth doing. I mean, if a realm that is supposed to allow transgression and free-thinking is so constantly one-sided, where does that leave other, more mainstream film?

huh, i'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that hitchcock would "fail" - he's got a rep as a misogynist.

man oh man my friend and I need to stop putting off watching Celine And Julie Go Boating (we saw the first half in the small hours of the morning once, agreed it was shaping up to be the greatest film ever, put it off until the 'right moment' because we were falling asleep)

It's dated but I would recommend Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape as a good look at how the rise of the auteurist art film/ New Hollywood was a regressive step back from women being represented in film as well as being involved in film production and direction.

while i think the "test" illustrates something about the roles of women as portrayed in film, reducing the issue to whether a film passes this "test" is kinda frustrating and reductionistic

well sarahel this is true but the test, like my favourite-film-entry into the test, is an illustration rather than a dissertation - illustrations are persuasive

vivre sa vie (eg) might fail, but then it's about the limits of female autonomy so.....

malkovitch has gotta pass, diaz and keener totally have conversations about each other (and raising their kid at the end maybe?)

hahaha I only said 'it's complicated' because most of their conversation is thru the conduit of a man, it's a pretty clear pass rly

death proof

Ha ha, the only film I found that failed the anti-Bechdel test was The Devil Wears Prada.

There are actually no less than 3 men in the film but they NEVER talk to one another! They only exist to provide romantic interest/career grist for the female protagonists! That was one of the few things I really liked / found completely amusing about that film.

Did we talk about that here? (Or was that on twitter because I remember talking to Suzy about it, but also ShadowDancer and I don't think he's made it over to ILX despite prodding.)

Contact was a troubled production for a long time: industry troublemaker Peter Guber was backing the movie for awhile, then director George Miller was fired in the middle of pre-production, Coppola sued Sagan a couple days after Sagan's death, etc. and that black cloud seemed to follow it around. McConaughey + Foster was criticized, no one liked the use of Clinton's speech and the use of CNN's branding, conservatives (who already hated Sagan for being anti-nuke in the 80s) didn't like the Rob Lowe character, progressives/libertarians (who are a big part of SF fandom) didn't like the religion, and everyone had their own pre-conceived ideas of what Carl Sagan stood for without really understanding anything he said.

The film for me, despite its troubles, really just kind of knocked home why I would *still* 100x rather have Sagan than the Dawkins-worshipping Skeptik hordes that have come after. That he managed to *get* and portray that "Religion: It's complicated" thing in a way that went beyond simple dichotomies.

Rob Lowe! That's who that was. My recognition of actors is admittedly terrible but I was trying to work out where I'd seen him before. Funny thing is, all those things that you recognised as being problematic at the time where the things I really rather appreciated. It's a bit of a tough movie (despite the simplifications and convoluted flashbacks for time saving effect) and a lot to take in all at once. Watching it from The Future the inclusion of current president & current CNN staff seems very different from how it must have felt at the time. It feels dated to a specific period of time - but now that seems good, like it's a historical drama about the mid 90s and the influence of the media within political affairs.

I understand why there was a romance (partly because they wanted to get across that Joss is a hip priest, not a sex-hating fundie priest, partly because they wanted to show a deep-level connection between these characters and sex looked like a good shortcut for that - even though honestly, I think many people would love to blast inconvenient exes 26 light years away to Vega but that might be just me)

dang i just saw this now!

this might be WAY off topic, but wrt to the Last Girl issue in horror movies, i'm fairly ambivalent abt whether or not that is *really* an empowering notion of femininity.

I had an argument recently with a friend, we were talking about how all girls i know will always say "oh you cant walk down there at night when you're a girl" and we were looking at crime figures and while sexual assault does severely skew in the direction of women, the figures for assault, minor assault manslaughter and murder all skewed, not to the same severity but still fairly sharply towards having male victims (also crimes against men are more likely to happen on the street involving a stranger than crimes against women)***. I feel like there's a def. analogue the way women are made to feel the social responsibility for violent crime much moreso for men, and in a way that is disproportionate to what actually happens.

And going back to horror movies, it does seem like quite often there are just as many male victims as female victims (well i'm kindof thinking more slasher movies which were popular when i was growing up so) and yet, the female deaths tend to be the memorable ones and especially the "last girl" is tends to be in some way the ultimate "object" of the killers motives. And I feel like there's this weird relationship b/w violence and sexuality that kindof makes the "killer" a stand in for the male romantic protagonist here as well.

***please dont misconstrue this as some sort of "why isnt there a WHITE history month" bs please, i know it kindof reads like that by itself.

I do appreciate that the Last Girl is still subject to a particularly prurient version of the male gaze in many of these films, plax, but I think it is still an advance to have a woman's sexuality in the face of violence as kick-ass rather than passive.

On the other hand, the films that actually first sparked my musing on the subject were not Last Girl type films (bear in mind that nothing about the Last Girl trope ensures a pass on this test), but rather films with strong female interactions, i.e. Suspiria, The Beyond, Tenebrae... Is it simply because they are European rather than American that their treatment differs? I would doubt it, particularly with regard to the brief conversation above about the masculinity of the art-house.

Ha ha, the only film I found that failed the anti-Bechdel test was The Devil Wears Prada.

There are actually no less than 3 men in the film but they NEVER talk to one another! They only exist to provide romantic interest/career grist for the female protagonists! That was one of the few things I really liked / found completely amusing about that film.

Yeah, but as I hinted at above, I bet Sex and the City passes the anti-Bechdel, and that show is one of the most derogatory things about women ever. So passing Bechdel/going reverse-Bechdel really is no guarantee that a film will be even vaguely respectable. (Also, would prefer NO characters to be crappy ciphers.)

The film for me, despite its troubles, really just kind of knocked home why I would *still* 100x rather have Sagan than the Dawkins-worshipping Skeptik hordes that have come after. That he managed to *get* and portray that "Religion: It's complicated" thing in a way that went beyond simple dichotomies.

I think a read of The Demon Haunted World might disabuse anyone of the notion that Sagan felt any differently about religion than Dawkins does. Yeah, he might have been more empathetic to the apparent human need for it, but that book may as well have been titled You People Are All Idiots.

yeah sorry if i was strawmanning there, but i do think it goes beyond issues of gaze *specifically* and has something to do w/ how we conceptualise violence as gendered w/n public space.

I have no doubt that Sagan was a man of science and a sceptic and all - however, the big difference between him and the Dawkins generation is that Sagan didn't feel the need to make a whole *movement* (which is increasingly resembling a crusade itself) out of his own philosophy. But this really isn't the thread for that.

emil.y - yeah, I know. Just because a film passes Bechdel doesn't make it non-problematic. And obviously I love a lot of films which still completely fail Bechdel. So that's why it's a test, not a rule or a guide or anything.

But I think that part of the whole shorthand of fiction - or even art in general - is that of focus. You are always going to have cipher characters because a film cannot be about every single person that crosses the camera - some characters *have* to be sketches. I think the thing is, it'd be nice if those characters were just character sketches, rather than one dimensional "the Love Interest" or "the Sassy Black Sidekick" characters who are nothing more than their gender or their othered-cultural-signifier. (Is there something like a Bechdel Test for race? That'd be something to ponder, because "token hard-talkin' black dude" does seem to be a thing in action films, or "magical brown person who is in touch with magic and/or the wonders of the natural world" in fantasy)

huh. the first google result for 'action film two female leads' is the xkcd guy's blog. oyyyy

You are always going to have cipher characters because a film cannot be about every single person that crosses the camera - some characters *have* to be sketches.

Yes, this is true. Also, of course, film doesn't have to be social-realist character-based drama, and if employed as part of a set of considered choices then cipher characters can work very well. I suppose what I was thinking of, and reacting against, was this form of cipher character:

one dimensional "the Love Interest" or "the Sassy Black Sidekick" characters who are nothing more than their gender or their othered-cultural-signifier.

(Probably not explaining very well what sort of characters do work, but in general I'm thinking of art-type films that necessarily have characters as objective correlatives for more abstract ideas. Actually, shit, can characters be objective correlatives? I don't even know any more.)

xpost Charlie's Angels! Action film three female leads!

I'd imagine that there's an Almodovar or two that passes the reverse-Bechdel, in a good way. Oddly the first Bechdel pass besides him that comes to mind is Sarah Connor talkin bout shit to her doomed flatmate early on in The Terminator.

Ah, OK, clearly I don't see enough art-type films to understand. I guess objective correlative for an abstract idea isn't so bad ... actually, wait, I can see how that would be problematic - 1) if there's always that shitty and/or "soft" abstract ideas are always "female" etc. thing* or 2) the only females in the whole film are these projected concepts (personifications of the male protagonist's id or anima or whatever)

*or perhaps I'm just thinking of that terrible comedy where the male protagonist's "emotions" in his head were portrayed by other actors, and his "empathy" was a woman. Like, why would a man have to have a *female* empathy? Is "empathy" such a "female" trait (rather than a just plain human trait) that only women are allowed to have or express or personify it? Or, rather, if a male can have "female" parts of his personality (I mean, why not, really?) why couldn't it be something other than the sucky, "soft" aspects like "empathy"?

But this is mine own hobby horse, I know, which is *why* have the human emotions been divided up a certain way, and half of them called "male" and the other half called "female" - and why are the "female" ones usually the derided ones? Is it because 1) females are traditionally devalued, so they've been given the sucky emotions or 2) these emotions are the ones traditionally associated with women, and women are devalued and sucky, so these emotions must be the bad ones?

Little from column A, little from column B? OPINIONS 4 U.

Is 'empathy' really sucky? I totally agree with the rest of your assessment re: it being 'soft', and that sort of emotion being constantly gendered in a way that doesn't tally with actual humanity. But surely empathy is an incredibly important part of being human?

Some excellent films that fit the test:
Fish Tank
Red Road (two films by one of the best directors around at the moment - Andrea Arnold)
The Piano Teacher
Morvern Callar
Persona
Three Colours Blue and a few Dekalog episodes

I don't think of it as necessarily sucky. I think that it is indeed an incredibly important part of being human. But there are many situations (capital-S Science, capital-J Justice etc.) where one is supposed to put away one's empathy because it will distract you from those good and proper Man-emotions like Logic and Rationality.

Obviously I am simplifying greatly, but this kind of thing irks me on several levels.

I think that movie Please Give fails the anti-Bechtel. There's only like one guy in the movie and he's a cheating husband!

I think there should be more interesting parts for women in movies, but I can't bring myself to care about the Bechdel Test.

pls no more please give spoilers itt.

I have to go down south for a while, but I have time to post this: Kate, there has been a recent movement to put empathy back into the justice system. It's called the victim rights movement, and it's caused a lot of major setbacks in the battle for treating prisoners and the accused like human beings. Also, equal rights didn't make much headway until those male traits that you disparage became widespread.

Um, she wasn't disparaging those traits. She was disparaging the gendering of them.

while sexual assault does severely skew in the direction of women, the figures for assault, minor assault manslaughter and murder all skewed, not to the same severity but still fairly sharply towards having male victims

I'm aware of this, actually. It's what kept me safe in a couple of crazy neighborhoods when guys were getting held up all the time.

Watched "Julie & Julia" tonight. It definitely passes the test, and with flying colors. In fact, I don't think, in scenes in which the various woman are speaking to each other, they EVER talk about a man.

is there a "whining about your relationship on your food blog" test?

More like "whining about everything on your food blog".

haha otm

"blogging" in movies is its own can of worms entirely

eat pray blog

Um, she wasn't disparaging those traits. She was disparaging the gendering of them.

Yeah, absolutely OTM.

There's a whole spectrum of *human* emotions which are pretty much required for any human being to live a full, meaningful life, regardless of their gender. One needs both sides of one's brain. It's a false dichotomy to think otherwise.

What I want to know is, how they got split down the middle and half of them seemingly assigned to one gender or another, and that the ones assigned most often to females are also the ones most often rubbished by our society. Are the "soft" ones assigned to females because they're thought of as rubbish, or are they rubbished because they are *thought* of as female?

WRT what CGLF brings up about empathy within the judicial system, what you omit is the idea that empathy is something that can go both ways. Empathy is something that, IMO, should also be used when dealing with perps and the accused - trying to understand why people commit crimes, not from an "OMG we must punish these evil creatures!" POV but "how can we prevent people from having the need to do these things in the first place?" That requires empathy - in terms of seeing people not as "Thief" or "Drug Dealer" but asking questions of social justice, like why are these really dangerous occupations seen as the most valid career choice? And it goes double when dealing with the really emotive topics like pedophilia and child abuse where people are most prone to demonisation of the perps - again, was reading crime stats recently and the shocking thing was how high the percentages were of perps that had been victims themselves - like we have this huge empathy gap that shuts off the moment they move from one side to another. Like, becoming a perp doesn't negate the fact that this person is still a victim (survivor, not sure of the terminology here when moving from psychology to criminal justice) and does not stop being so.

But this stuff is very complicated, and it's actually the vast oversimplification of it that I really distrust so I'll shut up and try not to contribute to it.

Also, I really really really hate this thread for putting these ideas so at the forefront of my head and keeping the Bechdel test so central in my thoughts recently, while watching films that I ended up accidentally confronting a repeat offender director about why a film which could SO EASILY have passed seemed to repeatedly GO OUT OF ITS WAY to fail.

That was fucking embarrassing because I had been trying so hard thinking "do not mention the Bedchel test, do not mention the Bedchel test" - but the moment that he mentioned female characters in his work, I just kind of blurted out "WHY DID YOUR FILM GO OUT OF ITS WAY NOT TO PASS?!?!" (not realising he could hear me or would answer) which he was kind of taken aback by and tried to think of a scene in which the two female characters had talked to each other - and then realised that they hadn't.

He did actually say that it was one of his regrets about his career that he had never done a film with a female protagonist. But then the conversation derailed into a slightly embarrassing derailment about pig semen in outer space - but I guess, is that indicative of the problem? That women = sex, and sex = sniggering about fluids, which is unsuitable for Serious Art?

But I suppose it's easier to end up sniggering over pig semen than to admit that actually it is REALLY FREAKING WEIRD to have your only two female characters sitting by themselves in a spaceship and NEVER ONCE TALK TO ONE ANOTHER - like, not even to say "hey, why is the light for the airlock flashing?" - because I guess that would point out a GIANT GAPING PLOTHOLE in your movie.

Also, I really really REALLY need to learn to shut up. Seriously.

This test has ruined all film and television for me

I don't understand this. For example, Reservoir Dogs is a great film but fails the test completely. Would it be a better film if Tarantino had added two female characters? Do people in this thread really like their favorite films less because they realised that those films fail the test?

its not so much that individual films such as RD fail this, but that the fact that so many do, or only narrowly pass reflects so badly on how women are represented generally in television and cinema.

Yeah, but what's the solution? Fulfill the criteria of the test even if the story does not demand it?

How about just writing/producing/fulfilling more stories that *do* fufill it so that the "stories that don't demand it" are the exception not the rule?

First "fulfilling" should = "filming" but whatever works.

You don't think filmmakers should have the right to explore the themes/stories they want to?

well obviously that goes back to the point that ppl were making upthread that its reductionistic to think of this purely in terms of "passing the test." What the test *is* successful in pointing out is the extent to which cinema seems partic. egregious in perpetuating an image straight-white-male centred normativity so even so-called women's pictures like romantic comedies largely seem to operate w/ this character as its fulcrum. It kind of bothers me that a more inclusive attitude would be seen as tokenism, bc I think that kind of thinking is foregrounded in a way of thinking that still thinks of this particular cultural myth as being somehow universal (that is, gender-less, race-less, sex-less) I think its more impt to alleviate the disease than the symptoms but yeah.

yeuch thats bad even for me but i think u get what i mean

Yeah I totally get what you mean, Plax.

And I think Groovemaaaan is just bringing up the old "Why is there no WHITE history month" derail, which I'm really not interested in exploring.

I'm interested in the stories that don't get told & if only one kind of viewpoint gets shown, why is that?

Also looking at how *odd* it looks & how unnatural it views when you have a film like the one I saw last night where there are 2 women & they never talk to one another.

Yeah, but what's the solution? Fulfill the criteria of the test even if the story does not demand it?

but the question is: why does the story demand it? 50% of the US workforce is female - women presumably must be spending at least some time talking about their jobs, or their interests, or anything that isn't men and babies and romantic entanglement. Why don't films reflect that?

If a film is set on a oil rig then, yeah, it's not a surprise if the non-romantic/plot-relevant conversations are all conducted by men. In any other world, it's weird and artificial to have women not taking primary roles and not talking to one another, the same way it's weird and artificial for Richard Curtis' Notting Hill to have been so heavily populated by white middle-class professionals.

this is q a good blogpost on how the idea of 'what the audience wants' militates against films that do pass the bechdel test.

women presumably must be spending at least some time talking about their jobs, or their interests, or anything that isn't men and babies and romantic entanglement. Why don't films reflect that?

Mainly because film characters aren't "real" and film dialogue usually has to advance the plot?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLtwFugudZE

film dialogue is often used to establish certain types of relationships b/w characters which will be integral to the plot. In this scheme the relationship between two women doesnt really feed into this?

Why don't you read that link that Cis posted? Because it really covers all this kind of thing.

Revive since the Bechdel Test is mentioned towards the end of this collection of thoughts assembled by Laura H. for Comics Alliance -- this quote in particular coming from Rachel Edidin at Dark Horse Comics:

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/10/13/female-characters-superhero-comics/

Women have significant relationships with other women. The Bechdel Test is a good shortcut for dialogue, but you can apply it on a larger scale, too. Are there two women in your comic who have a relationship based on something other than a) shopping, or b) mutual relationship to a man? ...Chris Claremont gets held up a lot in superhero circles as a guy who writes good female characters, and a BIG part of that comes from the fact that those characters have real and independent friendships with each other. In fact, just go ahead and write women who aren't defined primarily by their relationships with men. If they're supporting characters, their roles in stories might be defined by their relationships to the protagonist, but give them lives and stories outside of that, even if they never make their way to the page. Like a lot of these, this one is really just Storytelling 101.

whoa @ that link cis posted - for some reason i didn't notice this thread first time round but yeah it's remarkable how few films (esp critically acclaimed, well known ones) pass the bechdel test, but the idea that it's deliberately taught is so mindblowingly backwards.

films i've seen recently...

tree of life - passes, there's not much dialogue at all but the mother and her maid (nanny?) talk about losing a child. sadly it's still a dreadful film in every other respect
attack the block - well this one's interesting cuz it's ALL ABOUT casually inserting social commentary into the dialogue and action, and i really appreciated the scene where the aliens attack and a) one of the female characters actually emerges from her hiding place to fight them/save the male lead, b) one of the aliens ends up in the bedroom where all the girls are and they take it on/kill it without any male help - both scenes which make you realise how little you see those things in action films but i don't think it passes the bechdel test - there are scenes where girls are talking to each other but it never shows that actual dialogue
the devil's double - great film but massive fail on this front
hanna - passes!
black swan - passes!

The Bechdel Test is really only for film.

which is probably just as well, as my suspicion is that Alison Bechdel's best known book would fail it.

The Ides Of March was a disgusting movie

which is probably just as well, as my suspicion is that Alison Bechdel's best known book would fail it.

Hahaha! To be frank though, if it fails, it's because it basically has only two characters, a father and daughter.

I see no reason why the Bechdel test couldn't be used to analyze stuff like superhero comics, though. Most likely you'd find the same thing happening as in Hollywood films, but in an exaggerated form, since the main audience for those comics is straight guys.

attack the block - well this one's interesting cuz it's ALL ABOUT casually inserting social commentary into the dialogue and action, and i really appreciated the scene where the aliens attack and a) one of the female characters actually emerges from her hiding place to fight them/save the male lead, b) one of the aliens ends up in the bedroom where all the girls are and they take it on/kill it without any male help - both scenes which make you realise how little you see those things in action films but i don't think it passes the bechdel test - there are scenes where girls are talking to each other but it never shows that actual dialogue

i forgot the scene with the elderly neighbour - ATB passes!

Fun Home would certainly pass, but not in maybe the most exemplary way. Her mom is a character, too. All that talk about whatever Wilde play they're putting on. Plus "lols mom I got my first period." blah blh blh

Unless by "best known book" you meant Dudes Doing Dudes: A Mansploitation.

Nerrr. No, I agree, "Fun Home" would technically pass, but it is a book about her father and her relationship to him, so it is a bit man-oriented.

Guys, there are lesbians in Fun Home--it definitely passes.

happy to realize that 'a taste of honey' passes this test.

It's funny that I can easily think of way more comics (a male-dominated field if ever there was one) than movies that pass the test.

wonder how many of ILE's top 75 action movies would pass

the punchline to the strip is mo saying man this whole thing is a drag, the last movie i got to see was 'alien'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH8JuizIXw8

doesn't aliens and terminator pass, too? pretty much all early cameron passes.

Every time I hear someone mention the Bechdel test, I feel the urge to watch a Statham movie.

Glad FemFreq clarified that the Bechdel test is not about the quality.

Though I do not understand why she makes the point that the son speaks to Brad Pitt when he also speaks to Jessica Chastain but nitpicking hey.

wonder how many of ILE's top 75 action movies would pass

I haven't seen all of them, but maybe we could try to do a "pass or not" list as a collective effort. I'll start:

75 APOCALYPTO: Haven't seen.
74 INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM: Don't think it passes, IIRC correctly it doesn't even have other female characters with a speaking role besides the protagonist's love interest.
73 GOLDFINGER: Don't think it passes.
72 VANISHING POINT: Haven't seen.
71 DIRTY HARRY: Can't remember if it passes.
69 (TIE) THE HURT LOCKER: Haven't seen.
69 (TIE) DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE: Does this one even have female characters?
67 (TIE) CON AIR: Haven't seen.
67 (TIE) BRANDED TO KILL: Haven't seen.
66 ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13: Can't remember if it passes.
65 SIN CITY: Doesn't pass, I think.
64 INFERNAL AFFAIRS: Haven't seen.
62 (TIE) DEMOLITION MAN: I don't think it passes, Sandra Bullock is pretty much the only female character.
62 (TIE) TAKEN: Haven't seen.
61 MAD MAX: Haven't seen.
60 JAWS: Can't remember if it passes.
59 THE FUGITIVE: Haven't seen.
58 CASINO ROYALE: Doesn't pass.
57 COLLATERAL: Doesn't pass, just one female character.
56 THE INCREDIBLES: Passes.
55 ENTER THE DRAGON: Can't remember if it passes.
53 (TIE) MIAMI VICE: IIRC it doesn't pass, just one female character.
53 (TIE) KUNG FU HUSTLE: Haven't seen.
52 GET CARTER: Haven't seen.
51 AKIRA: Doesn't pass.
50 LA FEMME NIKITA: Can't remember if it passes.
49 DISTRICT 9: IIRC it doesn't pass, no important female characters.
48 TOTAL RECALL: Can't remember if it passes.
47 THE WILD BUNCH: Haven't seen.
46 THE GREAT ESCAPE: Doesn't pass, no female characters (though this is justified by the setting.)
45 COMMANDO: Can't remember if it passes.
44 THE KILLER: Haven't seen.
43 THE FIFTH ELEMENT: Doesn't pass.
42 SPEED: Can't remember if it passes.
41 BULLITT: Haven't seen.
40 YOJIMBO: Haven't seen.
39 LE SAMOURAI: Can't remember if it passes.
38 DAWN OF THE DEAD: Haven't seen.
37 TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.: Haven't seen.
36 THE MATRIX: IIRC it doesn't pass, just two female characters and they don't talk to each other.
35 INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE: Doesn't pass.
34 CRANK: Doesn't pass.
33 THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: Doesn't pass, just one female character.
32 THE BOURNE IDENTITY: Haven't seen.
31 THE WARRIORS: Haven't seen.
30 THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM: Haven't seen.
29 THE BOURNE SUPREMACY: Haven't seen.
28 ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST: Haven't seen.
27 BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA: Passes. Kim Cattrall talks with her journalist friend about other things than men.
26 THE DARK KNIGHT: Doesn't pass, just one female character.
25 PREDATOR: Doesn't pass, no female characters.
24 POINT BREAK: Can't remember if it passes.
23 BATTLE ROYALE: Haven't seen.
22 THE THING: Doesn't pass, no female characters.
21 KILL BILL VOL. 1: Passes.
20 POINT BLANK: Haven't seen.
19 THE TERMINATOR: IIRC it doesn't pass, just one female character.
17 NORTH BY NORTHWEST: Haven't seen.
17 STARSHIP TROOPERS: Passes, I think.
16 THE ROAD WARRIOR: Haven't seen.
15 THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY: Can't remember if it passes.
14 THE FRENCH CONNECTION: Can't remember if it passes.
13 THE SEVEN SAMURAI: Can't remember if it passes.
12 ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK: Haven't seen.
11 HARD BOILED: Haven't seen.
10 BLADE RUNNER: IIRC it doesn't pass. Three significant female characters, but I don't think they talk to each other at all?
9 LÉON: THE PROFESSIONAL: Doesn't pass, just one female character.
8 HEAT: Haven't seen.
7 RONIN: Haven't seen.
6 CHILDREN OF MEN: Passes.
5 ROBOCOP: Can't remember if it passes.
4 TERMAINTOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY: Doesn't pass, just one female character.
3 RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: Doesn't pass, just one female character.
2 ALIENS: Passes.
1 DIE HARD: Doesn't pass, I think.

Terminator: passes, Sarah and her flatmate talk about clothes and their pet lizard.
Le Samourai: watched this last night, doesn't pass.

52 Does not pass: Does anybody talk to anyone except Jack Carter?

Dirty Harry doesn't pass: three main female characters (Chico's wife, the mother of the boy who is murdered, the bus driver), none of them speak to another woman.

that was a great video!

too often bechdel conversations turn into "does x pass? does y pass?" but really whether any individual film passes or fails is less relevant than the huge, systemic lack of films that pass which is the issue. are these films being made? are they any good? if so why aren't they more prominent, in both best-picture lists and more generally?

the huge, systemic lack of films that pass which is the issue.

absolutely, which is why it's telling - although not surprising in the slightest - to find that a tiny proportion of the films in the poll pass, and interesting to discover which ones do, and why.

DAWN OF THE DEAD fails spectacularly. After the opening five minutes of the film, Gaylen Ross is the only living human woman seen again, unless there are some in the biker gang that I don't remember. In any case, she never speaks to anyone but men in the movie.

Whereas STARSHIP TROOPERS succeeds spectacularly, as not only are there multiple female leads and minor characters, one of them is an extremely competent admiral. (Who is nonetheless done in during the Klendathu assault as a result of poor advance intelligence, but anyway.)

Why do I know the word "Klendathu" when I haven't seen ST in like 6 years?

PSYCHOMANIA.. does it pass? There are 2 female mains, they butt up against each other, one is Tom's g/f, they don't always talk about Tom.

Why do I know the word "Klendathu" when I haven't seen ST in like 6 years

Because it is unforgettable and amazing.

It's an ugly planet . . . a BUG planet . . .

SIN CITY: Doesn't pass, I think.

pretty sure there's one scene where a woman in underwear and heels tells another woman in underwear in heels something about their crime syndicate

4 TERMAINTOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY: Doesn't pass, just one female character.

Somewhat unfair, there's John's foster mother, some hospital orderlies, Tarissa Dyson - all minor but speaking parts. Still doesn't pass.

off the top of my head, one of the few action films I can think of that pass is Hanna.

STARSHIP TROOPERS succeeds spectacularly

Of course it does.

Fred Zinnemann's Julia

the huge, systemic lack of films that pass which is the issue.

Yes, this. The test never makes a claim that passing films are feminist, let alone any good, but rather highlights how very few films actually do pass.

Though I do not understand why she makes the point that the son speaks to Brad Pitt when he also speaks to Jessica Chastain but nitpicking hey.

Because it's two males speaking to each other, which is a direct comparison to two females talking to each other.

Indeed. If you look at the original comic, the character who introduces the test and says she always follows it tells the other woman the last movie she was able to watch was Alien, and the gag is supposed to be that such films are rare (the strip was published 5 years after Alien came out), not that Alien is a particularly feminist movie.

(x-post)

Okay, here's an updated list, I cross-referenced it with the Bechdel list site. Still a few unconfirmed ones on the list, though:

75 APOCALYPTO: Haven't seen.
74 INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM: Doesn’t pass. IIRC it doesn't even have another female speaking role besides Kate Capshaw.
73 GOLDFINGER: Don't think it passes.
72 VANISHING POINT: Haven't seen.
71 DIRTY HARRY: Doesn’t pass.
69 (TIE) THE HURT LOCKER: Doesn’t pass.
69 (TIE) DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE: Doesn’t pass.
67 (TIE) CON AIR: Doesn’t pass.
67 (TIE) BRANDED TO KILL: Haven't seen.
66 ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13: Passes.
65 SIN CITY: Passes.
64 INFERNAL AFFAIRS: Haven't seen.
62 (TIE) DEMOLITION MAN: Doesn’t pass. Sandra Bullock is the only major female character.
62 (TIE) TAKEN: Passes.
61 MAD MAX: Haven't seen.
60 JAWS: Doesn’t pass.
59 THE FUGITIVE: Doesn’t pass.
58 CASINO ROYALE: Doesn't pass.
57 COLLATERAL: Doesn't pass, just one female character.
56 THE INCREDIBLES: Passes.
55 ENTER THE DRAGON: Can't remember if it passes.
53 (TIE) MIAMI VICE: IIRC it doesn't pass, just one female character.
53 (TIE) KUNG FU HUSTLE: Haven't seen.
52 GET CARTER: Doesn’t pass.
51 AKIRA: Doesn't pass.
50 LA FEMME NIKITA: Passes.
49 DISTRICT 9: Doesn’t pass, unless you count the hermaphrodite aliens as women.
48 TOTAL RECALL: Doesn't pass.
47 THE WILD BUNCH: Haven't seen.
46 THE GREAT ESCAPE: Doesn't pass, no female characters (though this is justified by the setting.)
45 COMMANDO: Doesn't pass.
44 THE KILLER: Haven't seen.
43 THE FIFTH ELEMENT: Technically, it doesn't pass, though Diva Plavalaguna has some kind of a telepathic communication with a woman that isn’t related to men.
42 SPEED: Passes.
41 BULLITT: Haven't seen.
40 YOJIMBO: Doesn't pass.
39 LE SAMOURAI: Doesn’t pass.
38 DAWN OF THE DEAD: Doesn’t pass.
37 TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.: Haven't seen.
36 THE MATRIX: Passes.
35 INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE: Doesn't pass.
34 CRANK: Doesn't pass, has only one female speaking role.
33 THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: Doesn't pass, has just one female character.
32 THE BOURNE IDENTITY: Doesn’t pass.
31 THE WARRIORS: Doesn’t pass.
30 THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM: Haven't seen.
29 THE BOURNE SUPREMACY: Doesn’t pass.
28 ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST: Doesn’t pass.
27 BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA: Passes. Kim Cattrall talks with her journalist friend about other things than men.
26 THE DARK KNIGHT: Technically, it passes, since it has one scene where a female cop is forced under gunpoint (by a man) to call Gordon’s wife.
25 PREDATOR: Doesn't pass, no female characters.
24 POINT BREAK: Doesn’t pass, only one female character.
23 BATTLE ROYALE: Passes.
22 THE THING: Doesn't pass, no female characters.
21 KILL BILL VOL. 1: Passes.
20 POINT BLANK: Haven't seen.
19 THE TERMINATOR: Passes.
17 NORTH BY NORTHWEST: Doesn’t pass.
17 STARSHIP TROOPERS: Passes.
16 THE ROAD WARRIOR: Haven't seen.
15 THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY: Doesn’t pass, only one female character.
14 THE FRENCH CONNECTION: Can't remember if it passes.
13 THE SEVEN SAMURAI: Can't remember if it passes.
12 ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK: Doesn’t pass.
11 HARD BOILED: Haven't seen.
10 BLADE RUNNER: Doesn't pass. The female characters never talk to each other.
9 LÉON: THE PROFESSIONAL: Passes.
8 HEAT: Doesn’t pass.
7 RONIN: Haven't seen.
6 CHILDREN OF MEN: Passes.
5 ROBOCOP: Doesn’t pass.
4 TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY: Passes.
3 RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: Doesn’t pass.
2 ALIENS: Passes.
1. DIE HARD: I misremembered, this one actually passes: it has one brief conversation between Holly and her secretary.

I'm pretty sure Vanishing Point doesn't pass.

too often bechdel conversations turn into "does x pass? does y pass?" but really whether any individual film passes or fails is less relevant than the huge, systemic lack of films that pass which is the issue. are these films being made? are they any good? if so why aren't they more prominent, in both best-picture lists and more generally?

― lex pretend, Wednesday, February 22, 2012 6:40 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

also, when the bechdel test is applied to a specific film i think it's essentially getting at the quality/texture of female characterization, and less, oh, two women talk about the weather, it's fine, then.

alexis bledel test

OT but seeing this thread in SNA all day reminds me how much i miss dtwof :(

if we exclude movies that seem to be marketed predominantly to men (like most of the action film poll winners), don't a great many more films start to pass the test pretty easily? not saying we should exclude such films, just that the pass/fail rate probably varies enormously by genre/audience/etc.

Yeah, I thought she just put DtWoF on a hiatus to do a second autobiographical comic book, but it's been, what, 4 or 5 years since that, and no news of the book? Has she actually released any new comics during these years?

Not really. Most mainstream films don't pass, a large proportion of romances and romantic comedies don't pass. So what are you left with? Ensemble chick-flicks and a couple of kids' films? How does sci-fi do? Horror?

xpost

As much as liked Fun Home, I'd wish she'd rather continue doing Dykes to Watch Out For than become a "graphic novelist", because there simply isn't any other comic like DtWOF.

Most mainstream films don't pass, a large proportion of romances and romantic comedies don't pass.

yeah, that's what i'm curious about. haven't done much analysis on my own, nor seen any elsewhere, and my memory isn't consistently reliable enough for me to count on that as an indicator. i mean, i watched the recent twilight flick the other night (don't ask me why). had conversations between female characters abt stuff other than men, iirc, but not much.

"not that Alien is a particularly feminist movie."
beg to differ! certainly more feminist than juno.

also would propose that robocop passes in the sense that once murphy becomes robocop he becomes intergender, and what weller has left to emote with is oddly feminine.

Um, no.

yeah, that's what i'm curious about. haven't done much analysis on my own, nor seen any elsewhere, and my memory isn't consistently reliable enough for me to count on that as an indicator. i mean, i watched the recent twilight flick the other night (don't ask me why). had conversations between female characters abt stuff other than men, iirc, but not much.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Wednesday, February 22, 2012 6:28 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I believe there is a fansite for the Bechdel test that attempts to compile every film ever and whether it passes. But, I mean, just watch the video posted upthread, it deals with the Oscar nominations for Best Film, so surely that is supposed to be a generalist list rather than a list of films marketed to men?

In fact, that 'fansite' is the first link in this thread. Ha.

Of course, that site is a self-selecting sample. It actually currently shows that over half of the films on its database pass, but I am sceptical - I would think that the people who know about both the test and the site are probably more likely to rush on to it to add something when it passes than when it doesn't.

hurt locker being the first female oscar winner for director in its entire history is way more damning and simple a metric.

also look at how many of the "passes" are short, 10-second interactions - hence the proposed 60-second rule in the video phil d posted

Yeah. I mean, I'd even be willing to go for 30 seconds, as loads and loads of them are literally two-line exchanges.

hurt locker being the first female oscar winner for director in its entire history is way more damning and simple a metric.

not diminishing the importance of this, but this is just a manifestation of the most well-known version of sexism, ie "there are more men in positions of importance than women". the bechdel test deals with something far more insidious, something you might not realise until it's pointed out.

IIRC alison bechdel actually took this idea from a friend of hers and hence feels bad that everyone calls it 'the bechdel test.'

But, I mean, just watch the video posted upthread, it deals with the Oscar nominations for Best Film, so surely that is supposed to be a generalist list rather than a list of films marketed to men?

thanks, i missed that video (and haven't checked the fansite yet). i do wonder how indicative the oscar best picture nominees list is, as i do at least half suspect that it's going to consistently skew towards male-centric films, as a product of other sorts of institutional sexism/misogyny.

ok, just did check the fansite. v interesting and useful, but doesn't provide much by way of overall metrics.

I don't know if it's more insidious than the majority of mainstream movies having a three act structure or hitting a certain number of beats per minute or the prevalence of blue-orange color schemes. It's an implicit contract between the movie makers and the audience that they not veer too far off these marks. The audience that will go see suspiria which probably passes is different from blockbuster or oscar-goers.

I was interested in the linked video to see that Hugo, a movie where two women characters speak to one another about the main character, a young boy, was disqualified on the grounds that their only conversation was about "men". I can see where this interpretation of the rule has genuine validity, but at the same time it seems extremely misleading to say that the women 'are only shown talking about men'. Children are not a powerful group or one that women are subservient towards.

Examples like this are why I think this a silly & unhelpful "test".

I would say flawed rather than silly.

I am being hyperbolic, but having heard it discussed so much lately (this ilx thread is just the tip of the iceberg) that I'm just fed up with it.

Children are not a powerful group or one that women are subservient towards.

I don't think the test was ever meant to be any kind of be-all/end-all rating system? It was a simple metric for showing how far short the offerings fall, in a general sense, iirc.

However, re talking about children: this feels like a grey area to me, b/c children and, like, house-cleaning/-decorating are probably right after "men" in the list of "things it's okay for women to talk about" in movies. I, of all people, do not underrate the skill & labor required to make a house function smoothly but it's not exactly breaking out of the mold in promoting woman-to-woman discussion of things that aren't their typical sexualized or gendered roles.

yeah, i had a similar if momentary qualm abt the exclusion of the scene in the woody allen flick. all that's technically required is that women converse and that the subject isn't men. talking about chairs or moviestars in general counts, right, even if there are (eventually) men involved in the convo?

but the point abt brevity sticks. what possible difference could a trivial, non-plot-forwarding exchange of only a few fleeting seconds make wr2 the 1.5-to-2 hr runtime of most movies? seems sensible to require more substantial interaction, as some suggest.

being a child is a subordinate position, sure, but there are hundreds of thousands of boy-protagonists in stories to which grown people are meant to identify. so for the purposes of the thing the test is supposed to measure idk how hugo is supposed to 'pass'

that last post of mine refers back to aimless' question abt hugo

the vid points out that quibbling over edge cases like this is proof enough of a problem...

xp re Laurel and gender roles:

^^ which is why I said that I thought that interpretation had some validity. But at the same time, it is misleading in terms of how the rule is framed by the terms "talking about men".

Ah, goole makes an even better point about the viewer's identification with the young male character. (I haven't seen the movie.)

the most interesting 'failing' films are those with a female protagonist who doesn't interact with any other women! there are plenty of movies like this, ~interesting~ innit

i'm not sure how market testing goes, but i'd suspect that they see that boys will tend not to want to see cartoons with a girl lead, but girls will go see, say "Up" where all the female characters are absent or dead.

i haven't seen the transformers movies in the theaters but anecdotally what's the gender breakdown in the audience that you guys have seen?

65% men, 35% bored

it's hard to imagine that guys would as enthusiastically attend a michael bay adaptation of my little pony for example.

(also harder to imagine "bronies" being on any kind of vanguard of feminism)

i've read a bunch of articles about children's lit that say the difference between kid/teen readers of different sexes is that girls will read books with male protagonists but boys won't read books with female protagonists. i find this pretty hard to believe tbh but i suspect i was just an unusual kid.

that feeds into an issue that cropped up on the gender threads - how much of that is down to socialisation? boys are taught from a very very very early age that they should have as little as possible to do with girly stuff, to reject activities that are "for girls", and this is reinforced by peers even more than authority figures as they grow older. i'm not sure it's innate. i mean, we all know dudes who are ok with watching films w/female protagonists, right? most of us are those dudes.

i rarely buy it when industries blame their limitations on some imagined stereotypical consumer.

the bechdel test may prove nothing when applied to individual films but i think the most important thing to remember is just how low a bar it sets - it's not testing for extended, in-depth conversations between women, it's testing for the barest minimum of interaction

xp re children's books: That's the CW, yes. From my own experience and my professional experience and my personal library of children's books, I believe it.

xxxp Wrinkle in Time was one of my favorite books as a kid!

i've read a bunch of articles about children's lit that say the difference between kid/teen readers of different sexes is that girls will read books with male protagonists but boys won't read books with female protagonists. i find this pretty hard to believe tbh but i suspect i was just an unusual kid.

There was a very interesting interview w/Meryl Streep on Fresh Air to that effect, where she said it is very easy for girls and women to put themselves in the place of male protagonist but that the reverse isn't true. She said the only time men have ever told her they related to one of her characters was with the Devil Wears Prada because they could sympathize with her role as a manager having to make tough decisions.

A Wrinkle in Time is one of my favorite books in the entire world, but it is also ONE BOOK in an entire history of English-language children's and YA literature so let's not try and disprove this fairly solid standard belief of the industry using nothing but our own childhood anecdotes, okay? Also, in a very very large way, that book is essentially about Charles Wallace, and Meg is in many ways just an observer stand-in for the reader.

Are you as fond of A HOUSE LIKE A LOTUS, or THE ARM OF THE STARFISH, or any of the other L'Engle books that are from the point of view of female characters?

or Little House on the Prairie? Or the Babysitters Club?

Question, because I really don't know: Do mixed-gender classes ever have to read ISLE OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS? It's written by a man about a teenaged female character (iirc?) and is basically a survival story, should be right up the "boy's life" alley, right? Surviving alone on a deserted island? And yet somehow even to me it feels like a "girl" book, maybe because of the paperback cover art I can see in my mind.

I do remember wishing Encyclopedia Brown would show up halfway through Anne of Green Gables to solve this mystery of the missing cordial.

i was super super into the arm of the starfish but i don't really remember it now.

xpost, there was no mystery or the missing cordial, Diana drank it.

or = of

Maybe she was coerced by Bugs Meany?

the bechdel test may prove nothing when applied to individual films but i think the most important thing to remember is just how low a bar it sets - it's not testing for extended, in-depth conversations between women, it's testing for the barest minimum of interaction

Yeah. I was going to cite the old saw about "the exception proves the rule", where proves is used in the archaic sense of "tests". This is a situation where an amazingly small number of movies meet an exceptionally minimal test and quibbling over exactly how small that number is obscures the fact that the point of the test is completely proved no matter how many quibbles can be raised against it.

i read and loved a ton of books with female protagonists as a kid -- the ramona and beezus books, the l'engle books, judy blume, betsy byars -- and can't remember anyone ever indicating to me that this was 'weird.' i didn't read any of the little house books but i think that had more to do with my super-disinterest in 'frontier' stuff (still can't bring myself to read willa cather).

Question, because I really don't know: Do mixed-gender classes ever have to read ISLE OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS? It's written by a man about a teenaged female character (iirc?) and is basically a survival story, should be right up the "boy's life" alley, right? Surviving alone on a deserted island? And yet somehow even to me it feels like a "girl" book, maybe because of the paperback cover art I can see in my mind.

we read this in my elementary school but it takes place in the geographic region I'm from and that wasn't entirely unrelated

A Wrinkle in Time is one of my favorite books in the entire world, but it is also ONE BOOK in an entire history of English-language children's and YA literature so let's not try and disprove this fairly solid standard belief of the industry using nothing but our own childhood anecdotes, okay?

I wasn't trying to do that, but I also want to push back against the idea that every exception is just a meaningless data point against a sea of contradictory examples. Canons get challenged by counter narratives all the time - and we shouldn't minimize Wrinkle in Time (or other very popular and beloved books with female protagonists) because it doesn't fit our 'solid standard belief of the industry.' It's a wonderful, brilliant exception that maybe created a space for other exceptions too.

I'm sorry, were we "minimizing" books with female protagonists, some of my favorite books ever in existence? I wish boys read them, because I happen to believe they say important things about being human; but professional CW tells me that they read them at far lower levels than girls do, or than boys read other books ("boy books").

I would rather MAXIMIZE them!!!!! If you have ideas about how to do this, I'm all ears.

trying to think back to the books i read as a child - british children's literature seems resolutely mixed-gender actually, in fact i can't even remember whether "boys' books" as such even existed (the divide being clearer with other toys: maybe the assumption was that if you were into books, boy or girl, you were already a weirdo)

i've read a bunch of articles about children's lit that say the difference between kid/teen readers of different sexes is that girls will read books with male protagonists but boys won't read books with female protagonists. i find this pretty hard to believe tbh but i suspect i was just an unusual kid.

feel the same, tbh. some of my favorite books as a kid had female protagonists: wrinkle in time, mrs. frisbee and the rats of nimh, pippi longstocking, alice in wonderland, later a lot of more grown-up sci-fi & fantasy stuff. a lot of disney movies had female protagonists or co-protagonists, too. identification with such characters was never difficult for me, perhaps cuz i've often felt alienated by stereotypically "masculine" culture.

laurel have you read 'pushing ice' by alastair reynolds? pretty great sci-fi novel w/a sort of gender role reversal in the characters and one that seems to dispense with a lot of the typical male-centric signifiers often found even in fiction w/female leads, while not merely pulling a jolie/cruise/"salt" thing and merely plugging female characters into a male role. if that makes sense.

Here's another girls v boys thing that happens: boys are expected to read fiction less than girls, so in order to get them reading *at all*, publishers and educators are encouraged to cater to them with very easy reading level books about sports with only male characters (pretty much) in them, or non-fiction books of Facts About Things, like baseball, or how buildings are built, or famous inventions...this kind of thing.

I don't know if I think that's good or bad, or both--I mean books about inventions are p cool. But there's a strong belief that those are the kind of books boys will read more than anything else, lest other things prove to be secretly "girly."

I haven't read that, omar! I bet I would really like it, though?

i don't remember ANY books like that from my childhood - the idea of children's literature about football is odd...there were a lot of "fantasy" type series with self-contained worlds (à la lord of the rings i guess) that seemed to have predominantly male readerships (stuff like redwall, though i doubt that reference will mean much to americans - or a lot of enid blyton too, actually)

mrs frisbee and the rats of nimh was AMAZING <3

i took this description from another site, which gives a vague idea about the story w/o giving anything away:

Rockhopper is an asteroid-mining ship about to be sent on a rather extraordinary mission. Janus, one of Saturn’s moons, suddenly starts acting in a most un-moon-like manner, which is of course something to be investigated.

What happens during the chase, and after catching it, is what the plot revolves around. But it’s not a story about technology, or a first-contact story (although there is some of that), or even really about the exploration of space. Instead, it’s about the human interactions that take place in situations like this: a small number of people confined together for an extended period of time; a small number of people forced to make difficult, sometimes lift-threatening decisions. And at heart it revolves around the friendship of two women: the captain of Rockhopper, Bella Lind, and her best friend Svetlana.

my brother seemed only to books about sports and more-or-less realistic/true tales of male heroism, so i do recognize that as a guy thing. i was also heavily into david mccauley's illustrated books on architecture and history, anything about cars & trucks, "how things work" type info dumps, nature and science magazines, books of lists/facts (ripley's believe it or not collections, guinness records, etc), so i totally get the non-literary appeal of that kind of stuff. does seem that a lot of guys get into those sorts of things more easily than reading fiction as a pastime.

pushing ice sounds cool, need new sci-fi

(stuff like redwall, though i doubt that reference will mean much to americans - or a lot of enid blyton too, actually)

lololololol omg have you not seen any of the board discussions about Redwall? I know I'm not the only fan. The Enid Blyton, though, you are right about--unless someone is a specific fan, most of her books aren't well known here.

i read the first redwall book.

mossflower or redwall

mossflower is better

i met brian jacques once

Boo I always thought Martin the Warrior was first.

Does he really pronounce his last name like "Jakes"? Someone told me once that he does, and it stuck, but I've never spoken to him.

i always liked the evil characters in the redwall books better. the foxes and stoats iirc. the descriptions of the food have stuck in my mind more than anything else!

pretty sure every british child has read some enid blyton.

um, what else. i think my favourite book series as a child was the animals of farthing wood.

i gave my gf a boxset of blyton books for christmas -- i had to order them from the UK! i still haven't read any of them.

I find the idea that "boys don't read fiction" totally baffling on a personal level. I mean, I don't dispute whatever the research says that just seems really strange to me.

yeah he pronounces his last name jacques. he is british after all.

i guess martin the warrior is pre mossflower chronologically? but written well after.

books are very troubling in terms of species essentialism

OK good the next time someone doesn't believe me about that pronunciation thing I will refer them to you.

they consciously went against gender stereotypes iirc - there were female warriors & male characters who stayed behind and cooked

i mean, insofar as these were all mice and badgers obv

oh max is right, we did this on ilx already! redwall author brian jacques RIP

VOLES ON A BOAT or SNAKES IN A CASTLE or OTTERS IN HOT-AIR BALLOONS

^^^ award-winning

only female protagonist book apart from Alice i can definitely remember loving as a child was Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. which is awesome btw

i do wonder how indicative the oscar best picture nominees list is, as i do at least half suspect that it's going to consistently skew towards male-centric films, as a product of other sorts of institutional sexism/misogyny.

There was a survey done recently that revealed that Academy membership is like 77% dudes.

and like 95% white iirc!

Hell if I know what the average kid reads, but I probably read a lot more bechdel-passing books as a kid (blume, cleary, The Westing Game) than I did in high school when we got to the "classics".

94% iirc. how many members are there total? the Latino percentage was like 2%..is that like 20 people or half a person?

morrissey gets to vote for them

Hell if I know what the average kid reads, but I probably read a lot more bechdel-passing books as a kid (blume, cleary, The Westing Game) than I did in high school when we got to the "classics".

I'd agree -- children's books and YA seem a lot more female friendly by comparison.

google says 5765 academy members which means the latino group numbers about 115. if it's 94% white that's about 5410.

I ordered a couple of Babysitters Club books from the Scholastic Book Club in 5th grade, and I remember feeling sort of self-conscious when the books were delivered at school, but I still read and enjoyed them. Maybe I would've been more into the series if it wasn't so overtly For Girls, though. (At the very least, I was able to impress some women years later by referencing the Babysitters Club Super-Specials during a discussion of Bakhtin in college.)

the entertainment industry is vvvv white, unfortunately...the last place i worked (for four years!) had a staff of 60 or so w/a lot of revolving door positions and 99% of the staff over the years was white. the database of footage would always make a note of AFRICAN AMERICAN or ASIAN or HISPANIC whenever there was footage involving one of those minority groups (white people were never noted.) one of the two black guys i worked with during that time took it upon himself to go into the database and write WHITE PEOPLE in a lot of the descriptions b/c he was pissed at that issue (and also that lots of people mixed him up with the other black guy and therefore just called them each "hey man.")

thanks, omar. obvs i should have googled that myself.

xpost yeah i definitely felt a distinction between books about girls and books For Girls as a kid, and would have screamed like my hands were burning if you made me read a Nancy Drew book.

isn't babysitters club part of the socialization problem? i always pictured the series as some aspriational malibu stacy propaganda.

dude, Stacy was from NYC!

Dawn was from California.

To be fair, the first one I read was Kristy and the Walking Disaster, in which Kristy forms and coaches a softball team.

*gives self cooties shot*

i always pictured the series as some aspriational malibu stacy propaganda.

They really weren't. Kristy and Dawn were very awkward in many respects, and a lot of the books were built around supporting each other as friends and resolving conflicts. I would say something like the Sweet Valley series is more like the aspirational malibu stacy propaganda.

"ctl-f 'Trixie Belden'" no hits

;_;

books for girls and books for boys are packaged differently now-- books for girls will often have pink/purple/girl-signifying colors on the covers, a big frilly stupid font, a real photo instead of a cartoon, with tween girls wearing lizzy mcguire clothes or looking sexy; and they'll have a sticker that says something like "OMG! LOL along with all your friends at this prep school!" even if a grade school-aged boy was interested in the content, he'd have to take the time to make a book cover before he even got started

basically how chicklit is packaged tbh

a lot of children's/tween fiction for girls is serialized chicklit set at a private school instead of in the sexy-but-lonely world of advertising in the big city or w/e

Somewhere on ILX (possibly the girl thread) recentlyish we discussed kids' fiction where you don't find out that the protagonist is female until near the end.

I am nursing a sudden urge to make young boys read those books, if only to see if they think the protagonist is cool for 190 of 200 pages and then suddenly decide she's like totally lame, what did you make me read this GURL book for, etc

a lot of children's/tween fiction for girls is serialized chicklit set at a private school instead of in the sexy-but-lonely world of advertising in the big city or w/e

so a less prim Malory Towers with more makeup and hair tips? brr.

http://img2.imagesbn.com/images/101720000/101723422.jpg

are you there god? it's me, barfing.

Somewhere on ILX (possibly the girl thread) recentlyish we discussed kids' fiction where you don't find out that the protagonist is female until near the end.

I am nursing a sudden urge to make young boys read those books, if only to see if they think the protagonist is cool for 190 of 200 pages and then suddenly decide she's like totally lame, what did you make me read this GURL book for, etc

this sometimes happened with Metroid iirc , though I was never good enough at nintendo to get to the reveal. I also read the babysitters club books...when I was 14. my mom asked me to read the first one to screen them as garbage/okay for my little sister and i got hooked

Somewhere on ILX (possibly the girl thread) recentlyish we discussed kids' fiction where you don't find out that the protagonist is female until near the end.

There's a pretty cool Finnish fantasy book in which the protagonist's gender is never defined (Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns, so it's possible to write a third person narrative this way). Based on the social roles s/he adopts in the story, at first you might think the protagonist is male, but later on s/he feels more like a female, and then at some point you realize the books takes place on some distant planet where gender doesn't work at all like it does on ours.

plz to explain finnish pronouns

i'm familiar with people inventing sets of gender-neutral pronouns but i didn't realise that there were languages where they already existed. on the other hand i probably shouldn't be surprised by that.

this sometimes happened with Metroid iirc , though I was never good enough at nintendo to get to the reveal.

Yeah, it was the big plot twist at the end of the first Metroid, because everyone assumed that Samus, the action hero with the robot suit and big gun, was male. Though they somewhat messed up the subversive nature of this reveal, because it isn't enough that in the end Samus takes off her helmet and shows her long hair and obviously feminine face, she actually strips down to her underwear so you can see her boobs and all...

oh damn, I had no memory of that!

thomp, you might want to look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutrality_in_languages_with_grammatical_gender

plz to explain finnish pronouns

It's very simple: Finnish has just one third person singular pronoun, which is gender neutral.

This actually sometimes causes unintentional gender confusion with Finnish translations of foreign books, because in languages like English the writers often rely on the pronouns to tell the reader whether a character is male or female... But in Finnish editions, the translator can either choose to inject some gendered nouns to make things clear (like translating "she said" to "the woman said"), or just use the third person pronoun as it is and assume the reader will deduce the gender from other clues (usually from the character's name).

I remember reading several translated books where at first I had no idea what gender a character was, whereas someone reading the English edition would have known it right from the start. I guess it shows how gendered our world is that usually this kind of ambiguity sticks out, and makes the reader want to deduce a character's gender instead of just enjoying the confusion.

"he actually strips down to her underwear so you can see her boobs and all..."

i'm with rob. did this actually happen? all i remember is wondering who justin bailey was.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/Samus_at_the_end_of_Metroid.png

Here's a better screengrab:

http://chrisdlugosz.net/x/metroid_ending.png

failure of internet to cough up an animated gif exposes the failure of the entire project, imo

Despite her standard attire, a full-body armored suit, there is a scantily-clad Samus at the end of each game, almost as a reward for the player.

http://wiimedia.ign.com/wii/image/article/111/1112861/samus-through-the-ages-20100816023611860.jpg

http://wiimedia.ign.com/wii/image/article/111/1112861/samus-through-the-ages-20100816023628079.jpg

So yeah, a nice idea in general, but kinda undermined by the cheesecake.

isn't her hair purple? something's fishy about this. maybe these are hacked copies like the gay sim helicopter hack?

gay sim helicopter hack?

IIRC the bikini pic only appeared once you beat the game twice. When you beat the game for the first time, you get image on the left here:

http://metroid-database.com/features/2d_endings.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter#Controversy

I actually had to get a gay hack for Jade Empire. While it is possible for both a male and a female character to pursue a homosexual romance, which plays out almost the same as a straight one, the crucial scene where the two characters admit their love to each other fades to black just before they kiss, whereas a straight couple is shown kissing. The gay kiss was actually coded to the game but censored at some point later on, so the hack allows you to see it.

so this is where feminist film theory has led us

Well, gay kissing is fair enough because there's a certain symmetry if the game begins and ends with slash.

But you've all gone a bit Daily Mail in here with the "isn't it terrible that this game presents a 'strong' 'female' 'character' as a main role, then strips her down to cheesecake in an unreasonable bikini" - while taking this opportunity to display about half a dozen pics of said bikini.

Well, gay kissing is fair enough because there's a certain symmetry if the game begins and ends with slash.

Don't get what this refers to...?

But you've all gone a bit Daily Mail in here with the "isn't it terrible that this game presents a 'strong' 'female' 'character' as a main role, then strips her down to cheesecake in an unreasonable bikini" - while taking this opportunity to display about half a dozen pics of said bikini.

Hah, I posted them because some people didn't seem to believe the underwear thing, but I guess you're right. I'm not sure anyone today actually finds that kind of 2D sprite cheesecake titillating, though, but I guess they did in the 80s/early 90s? (When I played the first Metroid I was too young to care about such things, so I don't remember the reveal causing any other reaction than "Omigod, it's a girl!")

Duh, for "game" read "thread."

Note to self: do not post to ILX before finishing tea.

Here's another girls v boys thing that happens: boys are expected to read fiction less than girls, so in order to get them reading *at all*, publishers and educators are encouraged to cater to them with very easy reading level books about sports with only male characters (pretty much) in them, or non-fiction books of Facts About Things, like baseball, or how buildings are built, or famous inventions...this kind of thing.

I don't know if I think that's good or bad, or both--I mean books about inventions are p cool. But there's a strong belief that those are the kind of books boys will read more than anything else, lest other things prove to be secretly "girly."

― drawn to them like a moth toward a spanakopita (Laurel), Wednesday, February 22, 2012 3:16 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

http://i.imgur.com/o4wKM.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/icwls.jpg

I read so many matt christopher books as a kid, because I liked baseball. they were shitty books, I knew they were shitty at the time, but they were about baseball!

I don't think I read a book that wasn't about football (unless made to by school) until I was 18 tbh

Was the subtext of that last book "That kid sucks at the communal experience of Team-based sports that have an element of personal achievement"?

Or would it be "hray, he plays for our side!"

But who is the mysterious Mr. Baroth?

Will we ever know?

I think I read all the Matt Christopher books.

Those and the Boxcar Children series.

Can you tell us who the mysterious Mr Baroth is, then?

I'd read them myself, but, y'know, I'm a gurl.

Does the Boxcar Children series really code as male or female? I certainly read that one.

I think I read some of the baseball books because I was a tomboy who loved baseball. Then I realized reading about baseball was very boring to me.

But the kid could only hit homers!!! Exciting!

It seemed like most kids baseballs books went that way? The boy is a new kid or unpopular in some way, but then everyone finds out that he has Natural-like baseball abilities and then he's beloved and popular.

loool Matt Christopher, the man with two first names.

hmm, whereas in real life they find he has these natural abilities and they all go off him for being too good 4 the likes of them, etc.

For a brief period in middle school I was really into baseball-themed mystery novels, like

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51mA3AaswEL._SL500_AA300_.jpghttp://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515grZJyDdL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

I think the first one was only available at the library in Large Print format, which in retrospect makes sense given the likely demographic for baseball-themed mysteries.

http://i.imgur.com/o4wKM.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/38/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%90%E1%BB%A9c_self-immolation.jpg

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/07/sweden_introduces_a_gender_rating_system_for_films/

It turns out that passing this test is good for business

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-dollar-and-cents-case-against-hollywoods-exclusion-of-women/

http://www.vulture.com/2014/12/cheryl-strayed-wild-movie.html

Witherspoon kept those promises. As the star of Wild, she is grubby, unglamorous, and convincing. As a producer, she delivers a film that passes the famous Bechdel Test: At least two women talk to each other about something other than a man. In fact, it also passes a kind of Advanced Bechdel Test: A non-crazy woman talks to herself about something other than a man. Watching it, I realized that the closest analogue to Wild might be Gravity, the 2013 Alfonso Cuarón film. In it, Sandra Bullock plays Ryan Stone, a scientist on a NASA space shuttle who must find her way back to Earth after a debris strike destroys the shuttle and kills her colleagues. Gravity is fiction while Wild is a memoir, but both offer the experience — extraordinarily rare in popular culture — of watching a woman teach herself how to get from A to B under very difficult circumstances and entirely alone.

Wild is very direct about its feminism, which is nice. As a movie, though, it's strictly passable.

My wife and I were recently watching the new Star Wars cartoon show, Rebels, and I explained the Bechdel Test to her because, amazingly, the show passes it.

Just watched Sarah Jacobson's I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993) and thought it was incredible. Unapologetically hate-filled, feminist underground cinema, made when she was 21 and clearly with zero budget. It's technically a short, but at 27 minutes it's more like the best television pilot ever made. The punk soundtrack is great too.

Incidentally it does not pass the Bechdel Test, but then it doesn't so much need to.

Are there any good essays/discussions on how the male gaze (as a specific thing, not just general patriarchy/sexism) impacts on movies about gay women?

Female-led films outperform at box office for 2014-2017

Films that passed the Bechdel test - where two female characters have a conversation about something other than a man - made more revenue at the box office at every budget level than films that failed the test.

Neckbeards across the internet are currently at full-bristle.

A fact is a fact, fellas. Put enough of them in one place and you start to see an outline of reality.