Is the Bechdel Test Useful?

[BvBPL]

Got into a debate about the Bechdel Test with my girlfriend recently.

The Bechdel Test, for those of you unaware, is as follows:

A movie passes the Bechdel Test if:
1.) It has two or more named women in it,
2.) Who talk to each other,
3.) About something other than a man.

(Note that it says "women" not "female." Whether or not you want to make a big deal out of that is up to you. You might claim that Finding Nemo doesn't pass because there aren't any women in it as nearly all the characters are anthropomorphic talking fish, not men and women. Or you might think that's pedantic.)

(Also note that having one conversation about something other than a man probably allows for passing the test even if every other conversation is about a man.)

A movie can pass all three tests or just one or two. Only about 53% of the movies recorded on bechdaletest.com meet all three criteria, which is striking because the bar is set so low.

So, do you think the Bechdel Test is a useful yardstick for discussing gender portrayals in movies? It seems totally bizarre that women make up half of the population but are often sidelined in popular media. The fact that so few movies pass this elemental test demonstrates this sidelining.

Note that there are plenty of movies that pass the test that don't necessarily make any sort of feminist statements or great strides towards gender equality, with Alien being a prime example. Equally, there are no doubt movies that make a strong case for equality in gender portrayals that don't pass the test, although none come immediately to mind. As such, the Bechdel Test is less a litmus test and more a yardstick that helps to frame the conversation.

Source.

 

[Lillefix]

Alien is actually a does actually have a slightly feminist slant on purpose.

 

[History_Buff]

It's plenty useful as a way to realize gender disparity in films and TV in general. Of course, the conclusion it leads you to isn't actually that interesting: films that feature your standard "manly" topics do well monetary, while historically films with many female roles do not.

Of course, one must remember the TVTropes rule: tropes are neither good nor bad. Like the Bechdel Test, they just are.

 

[AlpsStranger]

It seems like a fair bare minimum for considering the movie gender balanced.

Man, I bet virtually every movie I like fails this test, come to think of it

 

[Rashiminos]

I wonder what the statistic for the Spear-Counterpart Bechdel Test would be. Maybe that would be interesting.

 

[Leoreth]

Note that there are plenty of movies that pass the test that don't necessarily make any sort of feminist statements or great strides towards gender equality, with Alien being a prime example. Equally, there are no doubt movies that make a strong case for equality in gender portrayals that don't pass the test, although none come immediately to mind. As such, the Bechdel Test is less a litmus test and more a yardstick that helps to frame the conversation.

How is that relevant? I don't think the Bechdel test is there to measure if a film furthers the feminist agenda. It's to measure if a movie treats women as characters, instead of objects.

 

[Mise]

It's plenty useful as a way to realize gender disparity in films and TV in general.

It seems like a fair bare minimum for considering the movie gender balanced.

Man, I bet virtually every movie I like fails this test, come to think of it

I don't think the Bechdel test is there to measure if a film furthers the feminist agenda. It's to measure if a movie treats women as characters, instead of objects.

What these guys said.

As you said, the fact that it is such a low bar, and that so few films actually pass the test, is remarkable and rather depressing.



EDIT: Also,

Of course, the conclusion it leads you to isn't actually that interesting: films that feature your standard "manly" topics do well monetary, while historically films with many female roles do not.

This isn't the conclusion that it leads me to......

I can think of plenty of films that would work just as well with the genders reversed. The conclusion that this leads me to is that Hollywood has a bias towards casting males and/or choosing scripts with male lead characters. I can't think of a good reason why films with male leads are better than films with female leads.

 

[BvBPL]

How is that relevant? I don't think the Bechdel test is there to measure if a film furthers the feminist agenda. It's to measure if a movie treats women as characters, instead of objects.

Ensuring that portrayals of women are of characters and not of objects is a feminist plank.

 

[Mise]

Ensuring that portrayals of women are of characters and not of objects is a feminist plank.

Yes, obviously, but you were talking about films not "making a strong case" for feminism. Alien has portrayals of women as characters rather than objects, passes the Bechdel test, and fulfils that particular plank of feminism, but the content/script of the film does not make any kind of case for feminism at all. It's just a film that has decent, non-crappy female characters.

 

[The_J]

I think there could even be...adult films who pass this test, so I guess it cannot really be useful.

 

[Crezth]

It's a decent litmus test for sexism in media.

 

[Mise]

I think there could even be...adult films who pass this test, so I guess it cannot really be useful.

It's not what passes the test that's interesting, but what fails it.

 

[Traitorfish]

It's useful in aggregate, which is how it was intended: to illustrate how few films meet what seem like really quite modest criteria, rather than to suggest that the worthiness of a specific film hinges on meeting those criteria.

 

[SouthernKing]

It's a good litmus, but not definitive. This kind of thing is difficult to measure anyway due to its subjectivity.

 

[Leoreth]

Ensuring that portrayals of women are of characters and not of objects is a feminist plank.

As Mise said, your OP sounded as if you were more concerned with explicit feminism instead of simply having movies that treat female characters as equals.

And as a side note, even though passing the Bechdel test usually shows that a movie isn't sexist (although I'm curious if someone can find an example where it doesn't), failing it doesn't have to mean anything. For example, iirc The Hunt For Red October doesn't have even one female character of note, but it makes sense that this is the case. Similarly, A Few Good Men (and Women, I suppose ), only has Cmdr. Galloway, but she's definitely a well-rounded character in her own right.

 

[warpus]

BvBPL, you said you had a debate about this with your girlfriend. What were her points?

 

[BvBPL]

Yes, obviously, but you were talking about films not "making a strong case" for feminism.

As Mise said, your OP sounded as if you were more concerned with explicit feminism instead of simply having movies that treat female characters as equals.

I'm uncertain how having some form of equal portrayal of men and women in movies is anything but feminist. Challenging contemporary portrayals of women in a pretty big part of third wave feminism. If you were thinking of first wave feminism, which dealt with the guarantee of property and voting rights for women, then I could see where you might not think the test relevant, but feminist social critiques of Western culture have largely moved past those issues.

Consider the third part of the Bechdale Test, that the women have a conversation about something other than a man. If a movie passes the first two tests but fails on the third then the message is that women are only meaningful within the context of some kind of relationship with a man and that without that relationship then there is no purpose to woman to woman conversations. It not only colors how individual women are portrayed, but also how interactions between women are portrayed.

And as a side note, even though passing the Bechdel test usually shows that a movie isn't sexist (although I'm curious if someone can find an example where it doesn't), failing it doesn't have to mean anything. For example, iirc The Hunt For Red October doesn't have even one female character of note, but it makes sense that this is the case. Similarly, A Few Good Men (and Women, I suppose ), only has Cmdr. Galloway, but she's definitely a well-rounded character in her own right.

Yeah, there are big qualifiers on the Bechdale Test. The test applied to one movie, by itself, doesn't mean anything at all; it's merely a yardstick that can point someone in one direction or another when commenting upon the movie. However, I think the more interesting point is whether or not the output of Hollywood, in the aggregate, passes the test or not. Which is something I get into a little below.

You bring up an interesting case w/ A Few Good Men. Yes, Galloway was a full, well-rounded character and it is great that there was a woman character with as much depth as her. However, that raises the question of why that doesn't happen more often. Take Zed, Rip Torn's character from Men in Black. He's as well rounded and as thought out as any other minor supporting role. Setting aside, for the moment, that Rip Torn is a totally awesome actor who needs to be in more movies, why wasn't Zed a woman? Is there any bona fide reason Zed needs to be a man?

Zed's opposite number over in MI6 is M, James Bond's boss. The Bond movies have recently had Judi Dench as M. Now, there isn't any good reason why a woman shouldn't play a super spy's boss, but it is striking that Dench played the role simply because she is a woman. Third wave feminist critiques of portrayals of women in popular culture suggest that it shouldn't be a real shocker that a woman is in a major role of authority within a movie. That should happen just sort of automatically as women become the equals of men, but the Bechdale Test shows that this simply isn't happening.

So, yeah, A Few Good Men is a problem not because it doesn't have a strong female role, but because it doesn't have enough. Why wasn't the judge, for example, a woman? (Other than the fact that the original Sorkin play only had Galloway, that is)

BvBPL, you said you had a debate about this with your girlfriend. What were her points?

She basically dismissed the test as meaningless as she cited plenty of examples that fail test but where the test is meaningless because the movie wasn't making any sort of social point. Essentially, she suggested that unless the movie was overtly sexist or otherwise regressive in its portrayals of women then the test wasn't relevant. She thought the test was largely a silly thing that doesn't actually mean anything at all.

However, she was looking at the question on an individual, anecdotal level. Putting on my social scientist hat, I look at the test and its results from an aggregate level and I would argue that whether or not a movie, but itself, passes the test is far less meaningful than what percentage of total movies pass the test. It is the low total percentage of movies passing that the test that is far more interesting to me than whether or not Step Up 2 passes.

 

[Mise]

I'm uncertain how having some form of equal portrayal of men and women in movies is anything but feminist.

So am I, but you were the one that seemed to separate the two in the first place:

Note that there are plenty of movies that pass the test that don't necessarily make any sort of feminist statements or great strides towards gender equality, with Alien being a prime example.

Alien passes the Bechdel test, and it certainly has a strong female lead character, who, in more "traditional" films, would have been a male character instead. The entire film, in fact, is about men getting violently raped left, right and centre, while the strong female character escapes using a combination of wits and physical strength. In a more "traditional" film, the genders would have been reversed: the women would have gotten raped left and right, while the strong male lead would have escaped by virtue of his superior intelligence and strength.

Now, I believe that this is a quite a feminist thing to do in a film. It subverts the gender stereotypes that were prevalent at the time. It takes a film that would normally have had a strong male lead and weak, superfluous female "red shirts", whose only purpose in the film was to get raped, impregnated and die in a horrific and violent manner, and completely flips the roles around. That's quite a feminist thing to do, IMO.

However, the film is not an explicitly feminist film: it doesn't make "any sort of feminist statements". You yourself consider Alien something of an exception to the rule: you don't believe that it represents an equal portrayal of gender roles. I don't believe that Ridley Scott intended Alien to be explicitly feminist: from what I have read, he was using violent sexual imagery as a way of scaring the living crap out of the audience. And there are many who argue that that in itself is a rather unfeminist thing to do: it's not often a good idea to portray sex or childbirth as violent.

In any case, you don't believe that Alien "makes a strong case for gender portrayals"; you believe it is an exception. Yet Alien does, in fact, pass the Bechdel test. It does, in fact, have a fairly equal portrayal of gender roles -- one that treats women as characters rather than objects. By saying that Alien passes the Bechdel test, but does not "make a great strides towards gender equality", you force me to assume that "great strides towards gender equality" means something different to "equal portrayal of men and women in movies". I find it difficult to reconcile what you said in your OP here:

Note that there are plenty of movies that pass the test that don't necessarily make any sort of feminist statements or great strides towards gender equality, with Alien being a prime example.

with your subsequent post:

I'm uncertain how having some form of equal portrayal of men and women in movies is anything but feminist.

 

[History_Buff]

This isn't the conclusion that it leads me to......

I can think of plenty of films that would work just as well with the genders reversed. The conclusion that this leads me to is that Hollywood has a bias towards casting males and/or choosing scripts with male lead characters. I can't think of a good reason why films with male leads are better than films with female leads.

Yes, certainly that is true. I guess the thing I forgot to mention is - having heard the Bechdel Test discussed a number of times by media insider types - that is comes down to conservativism (budgetary, not social) amongst Hollywood, and to a much lesser extent, the demographics of movie-goers.

On the former point, what folks in the know always say, is that most blockbusters in the past, for whatever reason, are male-dominated, Bechdel failing films. Now, you could put women in the same lead roles played by men, and the movie would likely be just as good. But, Hollywood producers see that putting men in these roles tends to work from a sales POV, and are hesitant to rock the boat as it were.

Complimenting that, there have been a great many movies, many of them vehicles for otherwise very successful actresses, with quite varied casts. However, historically this sort of movie tends to fail from a sales POV. This probably has more to do with the plot/marketing/whatever than it does the gender of the stars, but I guess the conclusion drawn by the folks controlling the purse strings are "movies with female characters = loss". They are thus hesitant to make women more than the usual love interest/femme fatale characters.


On the latter point, I think the majority of people paying to see movies tend to be young men. For whatever reasons, they eschew films featuring lots of female characters. Again, this results in a hesitancy to replace what would normally be a male part with a female actor. Now I do believe this demographic argument will start to disappear over time, as women in the general public continue closing the gender income gap, and quite probably surpass men in terms of disposable income.


And again, I'll add that I'm not entirely sure if I believe in all of that, but I've heard that narrative more than once from more than one source, and it sounds plausible at least.

 

[Truronian]

My favourite film fails both the Bechdel test and the reverse Bechdel test.