Bechtel Test

[Zkribbler]

I just heard of this test this morning on Star Talk.

A movie passes the Bechtel Test if it has at least two named female characters, talking to each other, not about a man.

Apparently, only about 40% of movies pass this test.

I thought about the novel I am currently writing, and it fails the Bechtel Test big time. But it's not my fault! I'm writing what I call a "double parody." The title and overall plot are a parody of a movie; its characters are parodies of a TV sitcom. Both the movie and the TV series are sausage fests. So, it's not surprising that I only have three named female characters in the whole book.

My first novel, a low-brow high fantasy, passes the test.
My second novel, a high-fantasy detective novel, passes the test

How is your writing, Bechtel-wise?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

*Thinks back to November NaNoWriMo...*

Nope, I guess it fails. I had two named female characters, but their conversation was about how the daughter (cute little girl about age 5) kept hanging around her father's forge because she wants to be a warrior when she grows up and do KTAATTS on the local archmage (her father is a weapons-maker and she can't wait to learn how to use a sword).

The other female character was her mother who kept trying to get her to stop bothering her father and his customer (who is the actual main character of the story) and get back indoors (presumably to do something more ladylike; I'll work that out in some future story when the little girl actually does grow up, becomes a warrior and does a great job of KTAATTS on the local archmage).

My Camp NaNoWriMo stories from April and July would pass, though. In one of them, two named female characters' conversation is not even remotely concerned with men - just with making sure the main character's immigration proceedings go smoothly when she leaves her ship to settle on the planet where it's just landed. That part of the story makes no mention at all that she is pregnant, her former captain is the baby's father, and she opts to leave the ship to raise the kid by herself (she and the captain aren't married and he doesn't have fatherhood on his personal to-do list at that time).

 

[JohannaK]

I havent really written anything complete with as much as named characters, to be honest. My 2014 NaNoWriMo was also a class project that was centered on a male protagonist and would revolve on sexual identity, but there was also a side plot with a female friend and counsel in which she would have had a girlfriend of sorts. Unfortunately I was at just 10k by the third week and had barely written the first 24 hours of a story that would span months, so I rewrote it all to fit in those 10k, and it was very much at the cost of this female character, as well as the other secondaries.

On the other hand the long poem I am trying to write only has female named characters, who are also the only ones to speak, and they actually all have the same name because they are mothers and daughters of each other.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

You didn't give your characters names? Wasn't that confusing, when writing dialogue for them, or saying what actions they were taking?

 

[JohannaK]

Aside from a 1000 word story which clearly had a boy and a girl, the rest are usually less than half that long and have at most one character, which even then is essentially a sketch, and an object, which is admittedly human but does not qualify as a character. None of them have dialogue that I remember. Actual dialogue anyhow, maybe imagined dialogue. It's been years since I finished anything in prose.

 

[sophie]

Don't try to pass the Bechdel test. It wasn't really conceived of as some grand piece of film theory, or even supposed to be the end-all be-all of defining a feminist text. It was a throwaway line that was supposed to be eye-opening. This is the bare-minimum of what constitutes a character with agency and script-writers can't even manage that on a regular basis. At the end of the day, however it's just like three-act structure, or any other literary theory. They're a fantastic way to analyze and criticize a text, but if you use film or literary theory as a starting point you're going to end up with a stilted, paint-by-numbers mess. I think the proper method is simply to educate and subsequently inculcate yourself in things like feminism and the LGBT community and then just write and let your personal lens naturally bleed into what you're writing about. You'll get a much more natural story that way and it doesn't come across like you're shoehorning in other elements for inclusion's sake. A character should be a woman because you conceived of her originally as a woman. A woman should have a conversation with another woman about a non-male topic in your plot because it feels natural and relevant to your plot (or their respective characters) that they have this conversation. Not because you post-facto go "oh I don't have enough female characters, so I'll just make Larry a Lucy and Jake a Jane, perfect!".

Oh, and don't ever ever ever ever ever EVER use rape as a plot point.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Oh, and don't ever ever ever ever ever EVER use rape as a plot point.

Because of current social issues, or...?

Some authors do use it effectively as part of the plot and characterization. As long as it's not graphic and gratuitous, it can work.

Note that I am not saying that rape is ever a positive thing, just that some authors are able to use it effectively in plots and characters.

 

[sophie]

The article I hyperlinked over the text highlights the why quite well. I was talking quite specifically within the context of "as a male, don't do this"

The tl;dr is that rape as a plot point is extremely difficult to do well and to give it the gravity it demands. If you aren't speaking from personal experience, you are probably going to do it very, very wrong, and make yourself look like a complete ass in the process. Look at Nate Parker's recent The Birth of a Nation for a good example of why using rape as a plot point, as a male writer, usually results in a crass, tone-deaf plot, and can poison whatever else good you had going for you in the text.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Sorry, the link that showed in the lower left corner of my screen stopped with "rap" and since I avoid rap music as much as possible, I hadn't clicked the link.

 

[JohannaK]

Maybe it's just me but I often do worry about wandering in the streets at night. I have a friend who was almost raped (a male friend), and also told me that he had been told he had been molested as a little kid but cant remember.

I have also written rape into one of my stories, male on male and much more murky than a blatant assault. It is two men who are having sex and the protagonist who wanted to penetrate is the one who ends up penetrated. As a gay man he was curious and certainly he would have wanted to try it on his own terms, but it not being his own terms is where it is rape. This contradiction, between something he wanted to do and it happening with the wrong partner, albeit a chosen one, paralysed him. Although he was hurt (much more in his mind that in his body) it was confused that he felt most of all. Disconcerted, and displaced. The whole bloody point of the story was to question agency and the presumed security of gender roles. The protagonist was the one who acted to initiate romance and wanted to domineer the other.

Another friend who is also gay read it and liked it, especially the 'egalitarian' portrayal of the relationship. I feel like he completely missed the rape, or maybe he identified it and with it. I dont know whether I failed or succeeded.

 

[warpus]

To be fair man make up 50% of the population, so it should be fairly common for characters to be discussing a man (or a woman). Having said that, if that's all they're discussing during the entire story, then that sounds like a big red flag to me, unless it's a sci-fi story about a cyborg woman programmed to only talk about men.

 

[sophie]

What makes failing the Bechdel test problematic isn't that a woman is talking about a man. It's rather indicative that the women in the scene don't have any discernible characters themselves. They exist to service the male character's arc, rather than their own. It's a marginally more agency-laden expression of the "put in the fridge" trope, which is when a female character is killed off or otherwise brutalized to spur a male character's character arc. You can further see real life manifestations of this problem, for instance, when seeing male politicians talk about some blatantly misogynist comment or act in current events they only ever describe the victim as "somebody's mother/sister/wife/daughter" (or, worse: "I have a daughter/sister/mother/wife so I know how disgusting this is"). It's the same thing: women only get to exist in relation to men - they are used as a rhetorical device to bolster some man's argument or justify some action of his, but they never get any agency of their own.

Now, all that being said, the Bechdel test is, again, not the end-all be-all. Just because something fails the Bechdel test doesn't mean it isn't a feminist text, nor does it mean that just because it passes the test does it mean it get a free ride. There are some horrible, vile pieces of misogynist filth that, technically, pass it. The Bechdel test wasn't intended as a manifesto. It wasn't supposed to be some grand schema outlining how to fix the problem of representation of women in media. It was, rather, a purely rhetorical device. "Here is the absolute bare minimum of what you would expect of a character with an arc and the agency to accomplish it. What does the fact that you have to struggle to think of an example involving women say about the state of their representation in media?"

 

[Ryika]

"Here is the absolute bare minimum of what you would expect of a character with an arc and the agency to accomplish it. What does the fact that you have to struggle to think of an example involving women say about the state of their representation in media?"

But that line of thought simply doesn't make sense, because there's tons of movies where you just don't have such situations, neither for female, nor for male characters - as proven by how easily you can reverse the test, switch men and women and then see that tons and tons of good movies also fail the test. The point of women being used as "plot devices" for men just doesn't stand when the reversal of that test also proves that most men are plot devices or support characters for the main character, too, and not as deep characters. That's storytelling 101, you have focal characters and everybody around is there to support those characters.

So the Bechdel Test is based on a completely false assumption of what characters (both, male and female) in movies are about, and therefor fails to make any coherent point whatsoever. Well, it makes one point, and that's basically: "Characters in most movies focus around a main character, and that one is more often than not a man." - and that's a valid observation, and while I personally don't object to that status I can understand why other people would... but that's also an observation that you can draw from... well, observing stuff, instead of using such a silly test.

Then there's also the problem of false positives and not catching a lot of movies that are genuinely portraying women in a way that the people using the test object to, simply because the requirements are so random. You explain it away by "Yeah, it's not meant to be this failproof test.", but I mean, where else would that fly? "This test detects HIV infections in about half the people who are actually infected, and falsely detects HIV infections in about half the people who are not actually infected. This test isn't perfect, but it's right about 50% of the time, so whenever it detects HIV correctly we can point at it and be like: "There. See?! Greater point about society or something!"" If it's perfectly fine for a movie to not pass the Bechdel Test as you say, that also means that you can only draw a valid conclusion if a huge percentage of all movies created failed the Bechdel test, while a huge percentage of all movies passed the reverse Bechdel test. This just isn't the case, as evidenced by how easy it is to go through a few movies and see which tests they pass. Although it does seem to be weighted in favor of the Bechdel test, I'm not contesting that. But again, that leads back to the focus characters being male more often than not. That is not a problem in itself, but people who want to change that should advocate for more female-led movies, not rely on silly tests.

So again... while there is certainly a lot to be said about how movies portrait and stereotype the two sexes, the Bechdel Test should not be taken seriously by either feminists or non-feminists. It's worthless garbage.