Believe me, typical NR reader, I get you.
July 12, 2017 8:24 PM   Subscribe

"I declare a snark battle with that dumb National Review essay comparing women to cowboys."

[The original post links to this Salon article instead, which you in turn may wish to click instead. And please, Bechdel-Wallace Test!]
posted by Evilspork (104 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
If a woman wants the next Lord of the Rings–style franchise to pass the Bechdel Test, then a woman should come up with a story with as much earning potential as J. R. R. Tolkien’s.

He's got a real point, I can't think of a woman who's written a major fantasy epic that revitalized a genre and created a multimillion-dollar empire in, oh, the past twenty years
posted by Countess Elena at 8:32 PM on July 12, 2017 [189 favorites]


He's got a real point, I can't think of a woman who's written a major fantasy epic that revitalized a genre and created a multimillion-dollar empire in, oh, the past twenty years
Do the HP movies pass the Bechdel test, though?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:34 PM on July 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


To be frank, I'm not up on HP lore enough to be sure. That actually brings me to a question I have about the Bechdel-Wallace Test: does a work still pass if women are discussing a man in a completely non-relationship-centered way? Like whether he could be the Chosen One, or similar?
posted by Countess Elena at 8:36 PM on July 12, 2017


This is an excellent takedown and I enjoyed it.
posted by emjaybee at 8:41 PM on July 12, 2017


does a work still pass if women are discussing a man in a completely non-relationship-centered way?

No, from my understanding, because the main point of the Bechdel Test is whether non-man-involved concerns have approximately equal time, under the assumption that a balanced portrayal of the human condition shouldn't have trouble finding at least one non-man-involved theme or plot point to include. If the best counterexample to the Bechdel Test you can find is a man discussed in a non-relationship way, you're still failing the test.
posted by fatbird at 8:42 PM on July 12, 2017 [6 favorites]


Like whether he could be the Chosen One, or similar?

That counts as a double-failure.
posted by fleacircus at 8:45 PM on July 12, 2017 [15 favorites]


the main point of the Bechdel Test is whether non-man-involved concerns have approximately equal time

It's not even close to that level; the bar is actually set much lower -- it tests if there is any discussion between women of a topic other than a man. A hypothetical movie where two women discuss a cheeseburger and the rest of the movie is MANLY MAN DOING AND TALKING ABOUT MANLY MAN THINGS still passes.
posted by axiom at 8:46 PM on July 12, 2017 [51 favorites]


That actually brings me to a question I have about the Bechdel-Wallace Test: does a work still pass if women are discussing a man in a completely non-relationship-centered way?
I got the smackdown over in FanFare where I insinuated that Stranger Things passed the Bechdel test due to a particular scene where two women have an intense discussion. I was assured that I was wrong because the two women have a conversation about the son of one of the women. Apparently, any man discussed, even the pre-pubescent product of one's loins, gives you an F on the Bechdel test.

I'd actually enjoy reading a well-considered criticism of the Bechdel test. Even if I fundamentally disagreed with it, I like considering challenges to bits of wisdom I'm deeply comfortable with. Unfortunately this National Review moron doesn't even understand why the test exists or what it purports to illustrate, so any criticism he has of it is immediately invalidated by his ignorance.
posted by xyzzy at 8:46 PM on July 12, 2017 [6 favorites]


But no odder than the Bechdel Test, a feminist litmus test that is currently being thrown around by movie critics as an important way to assess the quality or at least the political correctness of a film.

God hates liars, Kyle.
posted by Squeak Attack at 8:59 PM on July 12, 2017 [28 favorites]


A hypothetical movie where two women discuss a cheeseburger and the rest of the movie is MANLY MAN DOING AND TALKING ABOUT MANLY MAN THINGS still passes.

Or, hypothetically, a hypothetical song about hypothetical butts of large size which begins with two women talking about the actual large butt of a third woman.
posted by Evilspork at 9:00 PM on July 12, 2017 [65 favorites]


No one who has used the term "political correctness" since, say, 1992, has done it without at least a little nastiness at heart.

also I don't have my books with me but apparently the HP series must pass the test at least once when Tonks talks to Ginny about school, referencing a third woman; plus there was the time that Professor McGonagall gave Hermione the Time Turner, but I don't remember if that was related in narration or flashback; anyway that's all I got
posted by Countess Elena at 9:06 PM on July 12, 2017 [27 favorites]


OH MY GOD BECKY
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 9:08 PM on July 12, 2017 [20 favorites]


No one who has used the term "political correctness" since, say, 1992, has done it without at least a little nastiness at heart.

Don't mean to threadsit, and I'm going to bed, but no, really.
posted by Evilspork at 9:12 PM on July 12, 2017 [9 favorites]


I thought that when Harry encounters McGonagall visiting with Grubbly-Plank it meant they were a couple, but JKR later told us that McG was straight. We're not privy to what they were discussing, nor much of the Fat Lady and Violet's convo as they partied.
posted by brujita at 9:19 PM on July 12, 2017


Apparently, any man discussed, even the pre-pubescent product of one's loins, gives you an F on the Bechdel test.

The problem isn't that it's a bad thing to talk about your male child. It's that if the only conversation you have with another woman is about your male child, then either a) you exist only as a character in relation to your male child, which is often true of moms in film and TV, or b) there's just a serious shortage of female characters. The Bechdel test is not a test you fail because something happened. It's a test you fail because something didn't happen. If you have 8 episodes worth of a TV show and this is the best you get to, then something about the show is still seriously gender-imbalanced. Not because that conversation shouldn't happen, but because lots of other interactions between female characters should.

Most of the Harry Potter movies appear to pass. Not all of them, but given that the story is in fact entirely about a boy, this demonstrates that if you have some major female characters who are actively involved in the plot, it isn't that hard to make these conversations happen. Women writing stories have a tendency to have this sort of thing happen just automatically without thinking about it; men tend to not, even when they're otherwise doing reasonably well by their female characters.

It isn't the be-all-end-all, but when something of any length with a reasonably-sized cast can't manage it, when SO MANY things of any length can't manage it, it's notable.
posted by Sequence at 10:05 PM on July 12, 2017 [85 favorites]


I'd actually enjoy reading a well-considered criticism of the Bechdel test.

I don't know that there really can be a criticism of it as such since it measures what it measures and makes no further claims. At least directly. It isn't a test of feminism or quality or anything other than whether the movie has at least one scene with two women talking about something other than a man.

The interpretation of the relevance of that is left to the viewer. The comic the test is based on carries the suggestion of films failing the test as being inadequate or at least not worth the time of the character who mentions the idea, so you'd have to argue against that character's perspective as to whether she, or any of us, should be okay with movies consistently failing the test, or, indulge in special pleading for any given individual movie you might find worthwhile despite not meeting that low standard. The comic wasn't commenting on a specific film so much as the overall tendency, so finding worthwhile movies that fail the test really isn't the point of it anyway, but even so having to defend them for failing carries its own implicit warning on the breadth of the effect.

If most movies passed the test, then it would no longer be all that meaningful, it's only that so many don't that has caused it to gain such widespread notice.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:49 PM on July 12, 2017 [43 favorites]


None of that is to say though that there aren't arguments against how some people make use of the test, just that the test itself is pretty much criticism proof for what it is.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:56 PM on July 12, 2017 [2 favorites]


This post is a good thing and you should feel good.
posted by medusa at 10:59 PM on July 12, 2017 [3 favorites]


Cowpeople, thank you.

More seriously, fuck a National Review. Pieces of shit made of other shit shat out by animate shit.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 11:12 PM on July 12, 2017 [5 favorites]


The HP books all pass the test, I believe. The movies fare much worse.
posted by Phire at 11:20 PM on July 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


HP: Molly to Beatrix "That's my daughter, you bitch".
Best line plus it passes Bechdel.
I just learned about Wallace from the article. Nice to see the attribution to a friend's idea.
posted by chapps at 11:42 PM on July 12, 2017 [7 favorites]


The problem isn't that it's a bad thing to talk about your male child.
Oh, I don't think it is. I was just surprised that "talking about a man" included male children that one would not consider having a romantic relationship with. The Fanfare discussion actually jolted me out of a preconceived notion, which is not something that happens very often.
posted by xyzzy at 11:49 PM on July 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


Good thing Kyle was there to tell us what movies are for, though!

But honestly, he has mistaken the use of the test by a cartoon character for the shorthand ctlritique it's become in pop culture.
Afterall, Dykes to Watch Out For was kind of a loving spoof of a quirky lesbian friend group, not a prescription for how all true feminists must live!
Readers can enjoy the comment because we know someone just like her, or we were her when we were young and fired up.
posted by chapps at 11:54 PM on July 12, 2017 [5 favorites]


also I was very proud when my son finished his grade 6 year by telling me he'd noticed the assigned fiction that year had no books that "passed that test about women talking to women".
So proud of him for noticing (after one conversation about the Bechdel Test months before) but appalled to hear his review. Not one book!
That is the crux of why it matters to me; the books they did read were good books, but he and his fellow students could have benefitted from a broader view!!
posted by chapps at 11:59 PM on July 12, 2017 [33 favorites]


My girlfriend is really, really into Pam Grier Filipino women's prison exploitation movies from the early 70s, and my two biggest surprises in watching them with her have been that most of them are very politically conscious and that universally they pass the Bechdel test at a level that most movies we think of as aiming for a female audience don't come anywhere close to achieving.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 12:06 AM on July 13, 2017 [32 favorites]


After reading this, have added McJulie's book Waking Up Naked In Strange Places to my to-read list. (Currently seems a bit hard to find, but supposedly a new edition is coming out soon?)
posted by kyrademon at 1:00 AM on July 13, 2017


This made my day, thank you for posting!
posted by ipsative at 2:12 AM on July 13, 2017


If you just assume Merry and Pippin are female hobbits, Lord of the Rings becomes much better, *and* passes the Bechdel test
posted by ChuraChura at 4:27 AM on July 13, 2017 [21 favorites]


But honestly, he has mistaken the use of the test by a cartoon character for the shorthand ctlritique it's become in pop culture.

I doubt he made that mistake honestly, though.
posted by Gelatin at 4:42 AM on July 13, 2017 [8 favorites]


Maybe think of the Bechdel test like the BMI in that it should not be used to indicate the level of non-male-involved scope of a particular movie but rather to give a quick and easy way to measure the degree of health in the general population of movies at a given time or place. This would be a way of looking at trends. Using the BMI as a measure of an individual's health is bogus just like using the Bechdel test to measure a movie's balanced portrayal of the human condition.
posted by waving at 4:47 AM on July 13, 2017 [24 favorites]


Don't think that Sir Mixalot song passes, does it? Only Becky is named.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 5:09 AM on July 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


In my evaluation, Sir Mixalot's song does not pass, not because only Becky has a name but because only one of the two girls talks. The original test comic says "Has two women" who "talk to each other" (I parsed this to mean each woman has to talk, like a conversation) "about something other than a man". They don't have to have names. They could be, like Offred or whatever.

Video of the song in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JphDdGV2TU

In Mixalot's song, only one of the girls talks. The other one just listens. That is not "talking to each other"; it's not a conversation. I can't in good faith give the song a Bechdel-Wallace pass.
posted by which_chick at 5:22 AM on July 13, 2017 [12 favorites]


Holy Crap, this line:

“more of a libertarian, actually”

They have a crank father as well.
posted by habeebtc at 5:56 AM on July 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


The most infuriating thing about the National Review article is that it brings up the idea that it's not a condemnation of any individual movie but a way of drawing attention to a pattern... and then dismisses it because Hollywood movies aren't supposed to be a demographic cross section of the country.

Who gets to decide what Hollywood movies are supposed to do? Is it, as the author implies, just the invisible hand of the market? If so, then refusing to see any movie that doesn't pass is a perfectly good way of nudging that invisible hand. Or is the point that I should just accept that the Market God has decreed that the lives of women are boring and insignificant?

And if the idea is that women aren't writing sufficiently commercial stories, we have to talk about The Hunger Games and Twilight along with Harry Potter - I think both pass the test, if only narrowly, but it is striking that for women, writing a sufficiently commercial story means writing a story that doesn't center its female characters too much.

Women aren't failing to write fabulous epic stories where women are constantly talking to each other about a wide variety of topics. They're just not making it to the multiplex.
posted by Jeanne at 6:03 AM on July 13, 2017 [14 favorites]


If a woman wants the next Lord of the Rings–style franchise to pass the Bechdel Test, then a woman should come up with a story with as much earning potential as J. R. R. Tolkien’s.

Hear me now and believe me later, Kyle: people who are not women can also a) want such a thing and b) write/produce such a thing. Just not enough people do.
posted by FelliniBlank at 6:16 AM on July 13, 2017 [11 favorites]


The whole point of the Bechdel Test is to find women characters who are defined by more than their relationship to a male character. That's it. It seems like such a simple thing to ask for.
posted by muddgirl at 6:20 AM on July 13, 2017 [19 favorites]


Oh, I don't think it is. I was just surprised that "talking about a man" included male children that one would not consider having a romantic relationship with.

I always took it as a test of male-centricity, so I find the focus on whether or not it's relationship-y a bit irrelevant. It's about women existing as props to stories about men, not about women existing only as relationship material for men (though obviously they often coexist).
posted by Dysk at 6:20 AM on July 13, 2017 [16 favorites]


> "The Hunger Games ... pass[es] the test, if only narrowly ..."

??? Reasonably sure that most of Katniss's conversations with Rue, Prim, Effie Trinket, her mother, Madge, Mags, Johanna, President Coin, etc. mostly center around "how do we not die" or "how do we take down the government" rather than guys. Not arguing with your larger point, but The Hunger Games seems like an odd one to single out for the criticism.
posted by kyrademon at 6:25 AM on July 13, 2017 [10 favorites]


Not only makes the point, but so much fun to read!
posted by Obscure Reference at 6:25 AM on July 13, 2017


Yeah, most criticism of the Bechdel test that I've seen has boiled down to, "but this movie passes and its representation of women is terrible" or "but this movie doesn't pass and its representation of women is great."

But that's not really what the test is for; if you're considering a single movie and you already have enough nuanced information about its representation of women to make that judgment, what is any single yes or no question going to tell you? It's a metric that's useful for looking at trends, not the final word on whether an individual movie is "feminist" or not.

I can think of two potential avenues of criticisms that engage with the actual Bechdel test instead of a strawman version of it:

(a) Making the argument that the lack of movies that pass the Bechdel test isn't due to the lack of representation. This seems doomed; we have actualfax numbers showing that the lack of representation is real, and there is a clear and obvious relationship between representation and how likely it is women are to talk to each other in a movie.

(b) Coming up with a better metric. This might be possible, but I don't know what it would be. The Bechdel test is good at addressing the narrative centering of male characters in a relatively simple way.

It's also just a good way to start thinking about representation of women in a particular piece of media.

For example, I think the heroine of Seirei no Moribito is really good. She's strong but not "strong," she has internal motivation and growth, she isn't a stereotype, and the story is as much about her as it is about the male child she's tasked with protecting. There are also female supporting characters, including a really interesting old lady.

My first instinct was to think that this series is an example of a series that doesn't pass the Bechdel* test but still did female characters well. But ... then I started to think about why it doesn't pass. I can easily think of several scenes involving male characters talking to other male characters about another male character, so it isn't just the structure of the story.

The answer is that the ratios are off. The heroine and the old lady are both great characters, but when it comes to filling out the rest of the world,, male characters are still the default. The scholar is male and the soldiers are male; okay, it's a gendered society and there could be an argument for that. But why is the shopkeeper male? Why is the person the scholar questions about the weather male?

So on reflection I realized the Bechdel test actually told me something about this series I hadn't noticed, just by appending "Why?" to the answer.

* It might pass once or twice in a minor way. I'd have to rewatch to be sure.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:27 AM on July 13, 2017 [24 favorites]


Were we supposed to care what fresh, new bile is seeping out of the National Review? I'm pretty sure their Fortress of Hate is impervious to snark anyway, so I doubt they can be shamed into even acknowledging anything is wrong with this article, let alone neglect to publish anything from this author again.

Which is a shame.
posted by wakannai at 6:27 AM on July 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


Out of curiosity, I went looking for a real comparison to the Bechdel test, a reverse Bechdel test. Luckily, someone had already done the research. Behold, the four films on IMDB that do not:
1.) Feature two named male characters
2.) Have the two male characters talk to each other.
3.) Have the two male characters talk to each other about something other than a woman.

(This list misses DEBS, but there are probably only a few more to add to it.)
posted by Hactar at 6:39 AM on July 13, 2017 [31 favorites]


(I should have clarified that "relationship" doesn't have to mean romantic relationship - it means wives, daughters, victims, etc).
posted by muddgirl at 6:39 AM on July 13, 2017


This thread and the Gamergate thread nearby reminded me that the guardians of sexism are so fragile and hypervigilant that they cannot bear even the most mundane, anodyne criticism.

Is there anything more minimal, as film criticism goes, than the Bechdel test? It sets the bar so very low. But most movies still fail to pass, and that's the joke. It's a throwaway concept, a punch line, and yet it incites spittle-flecked rage and National Review articles and probably results in some women somewhere having to block some more dudes on Twitter because of death threats.

Simliarly, Anita Sarkeesian's videos were, actually, kind of boring. She had a fairly flat delivery and they followed a very non-flashy "concept: examples" format. She always calls out games that get it right/don't fall into sexist traps. At no point does she use insults or even snark (well maybe very dry/low-key snark, but it's a stretch).

And yet she is treated by GGs as though she wrote the sequel to the S.C.U.M. Manifesto.

And then there's the way Hilary Clinton, a fairly staid, rules-following, (and at least initially) middle-of-the-road politician, someone who would be barely noticed if she were male, but who as a woman is the Antichrist.

It's tiresome.
posted by emjaybee at 6:54 AM on July 13, 2017 [85 favorites]



??? Reasonably sure that most of Katniss's conversations with Rue, Prim, Effie Trinket, her mother, Madge, Mags, Johanna, President Coin, etc. mostly center around "how do we not die" or "how do we take down the government" rather than guys. Not arguing with your larger point, but The Hunger Games seems like an odd one to single out for the criticism.


That's fair. It's been a while since I read any of the books except the first one. I actually really like the books - it just seemed to me that as they were turned into movies a lot more emphasis got thrown onto the "love triangle" angle in a way that ignored what I liked about the books. But yeah, you're right.
posted by Jeanne at 7:05 AM on July 13, 2017


If a woman wants the next Lord of the Rings–style franchise to pass the Bechdel Test, then a woman should come up with a story with as much earning potential as J. R. R. Tolkien’s.

I'd be more convinced that this was a genuine belief in the reliability of the market to identify the art most worthy of success and acclaim if Kyle Smith didn't sound quite so discomfited by Alison Bechdel's commercial achievements.

Maybe I'm projecting, but the description of her as a very big deal and a feminist savant sound derisive and mocking in context. Somehow the fact that a show based on her work had a successful Broadway run and won a Tony seems to be a reason to doubt the Bechdel test.
posted by layceepee at 7:10 AM on July 13, 2017 [12 favorites]


MetaFilter: really, really into Pam Grier Filipino women's prison exploitation movies from the early 70s.

Also, shouldn't a proper "Cowboy Test" mean the film has two cowboys who appear together and talk to each other about something other than herding cattle? I mean sure, there's all kinds of exploitative portrayals of cowboys out there, showing off their rugged manliness and stuff. But maybe cowboys would like to see films that present them as fully realized people, not just icons for the American west or something.

Maybe cowboys would appreciate seeing their real lives reflected on screen like other male character types.
posted by Naberius at 7:18 AM on July 13, 2017 [9 favorites]


I can think of two potential avenues of criticisms that engage with the actual Bechdel test instead of a strawman version of it:

The beauty of the Bechdel test is that it's so concise and self contained. It measures what it measures and leaves the meaning behind the result implicit, which ties those who don't like it up in knots.

It isn't a measure of feminism in that way, but it is a feminist measure that has little defense outside of trying to create unworkable comparisons to other real world events or people, like cowboys. A cowboy test is perfectly fine in that it too measures what it sets out to do, but it's in the comparison between women, 50% of the population, and cowboys, a tiny usually heavily fictionalized demographic that shows the emptiness of the comparison as it would for any other demographic. The Bechdel test is hard to ignore because it points to, without unnecessary emphasis, how far removed from reality so much of our entertainment/art really is in a way that is, frankly, shocking.

It isn't even a liberal vs conservative ideal at the core of the problem, two women talking about exchanging recipes, commenting on shoes, or any other traditional conservative "women in the home" trope would allow a film to pass the test, but they still fail over and over again. At the core, even a conservative can't effectively argue this represents a plausible reality in any way.

What they do instead is gesture somewhat futilely towards what makes a "good story" and women in any form somehow can't be a part of it. There is some thread of truth in this part of the complaint when it comes to verisimilitude in historical representation and what kinds of films audiences tend to favor. By which I mean the argument that a WWII movie set with the troops in combat wouldn't have women in the cast, or a cowboy movie on the range might have scant opportunity for women conversing has something of the feel of reason to it until one looks at what movies are being made and attended in bulk, where women are present in the cast, and in whether those sorts of exceptions are in themselves justification for the absence of half the population of the planet conversing in a reasonable manner.

They aren't, but there should be some notice given to our own habits of consumption here nonetheless, where the over-emphasis on "action" of a traditionally masculine sort has led to the problem the Bechdel test is responding to. There is need then for two different avenues of repair to the problem, one is in the increase of women in these popular conventional fantasy/action films, like Wonder Woman or Fury Road or even Frozen, where there should be no excuse for lack of women in these films given they are flights of fancy that aren't tied to the physics of real world action. The second though is in the audience who cares about these things to start thinking more about what it is they are valuing so strongly in movies with such a traditionally masculine dynamic.

There needs to be more attention given to films outside that paradigm both critically and in audience attendance. You don't fix the problem of sexism in sports by trying to get more women involved in the NFL. It doesn't make sense. The same is true for movies, it isn't just the filmmakers that are the sole key to the problem, but how distorted our expectations and conventions are around art and entertainment.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:27 AM on July 13, 2017 [18 favorites]


Is there anything more minimal, as film criticism goes, than the Bechdel test? It sets the bar so very low. But most movies still fail to pass, and that's the joke. It's a throwaway concept, a punch line, and yet it incites spittle-flecked rage and National Review articles and probably results in some women somewhere having to block some more dudes on Twitter because of death threats.

Particularly when the low bar that it sets is itself is made entirely out of air. What are the consequences of failing the Bechdel test?
posted by srboisvert at 7:58 AM on July 13, 2017 [9 favorites]


Bechdel is like BMI. There are loads of ways for either to give a "false" or misleading reading, but as general guidelines they're very useful.
posted by uberchet at 8:21 AM on July 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


I feel like if the word "test" wasn't used, then people wouldn't get so hungup on how easy it is to game the theory. It's a blunt tool for broad criticism, it's not meant to be a sorting machine to identify purely feminist and non-feminist media.

I also love when conservative authors latch onto progressive concepts about 15 years after the rest of the thinking public has already dissected them to death. David Brooks has recently started talking about "intersectionality" as if it's suddenly vogue among the liberal elite.
posted by Think_Long at 8:31 AM on July 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


This cartoon successfully passes the "Doctor Naberius' Improved Cowboy Test."

So I'm sure the editors and readers of National Review (who, coincidentally, I also think of as doughy middle-aged white dudes who describes themselves as “more of a libertarian, actually") will find it meets with their approval.
posted by Naberius at 8:32 AM on July 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


By which I mean the argument that a WWII movie set with the troops in combat wouldn't have women in the cast

Maybe if they spent the entire movie in actual physical combat.
posted by praemunire at 8:40 AM on July 13, 2017 [14 favorites]


also I don't have my books with me but apparently the HP series must pass the test at least once when Tonks talks to Ginny about school, referencing a third woman; plus there was the time that Professor McGonagall gave Hermione the Time Turner, but I don't remember if that was related in narration or flashback; anyway that's all I got

I think Mrs. Weasley shouting "NOT MY DAUGHTER YOU BITCH" at Bellatrix LeStrange counts! I'm sure there are others but this is the firs tone that came to mind.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 8:43 AM on July 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


HP: Molly to Beatrix "That's my daughter, you bitch".
Best line plus it passes Bechdel.
I just learned about Wallace from the article. Nice to see the attribution to a friend's idea.


Damn it, sorry, I searched "Weasley" but not "Molly" which is my bad.

posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 8:45 AM on July 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


This guy just doesn't know anything about anything he's writing about. He doesn't understand the Bechdel test, he doesn't know anything about movies or books or film criticism. That's just a whole shitton of shallow kneejerkery and hot takes, and in any remotely reasonable world, nobody outside of this guy's social circles would have even been exposed to this low value opinion.

The Bechdel test is most valuable as a statistical model. Movies that pass the Bechdel test are not necessarily feminist or well written or worthwhile, and movies that don't pass aren't necessarily sexist or bad. I'm pretty sure that Jeanne Dielman doesn't pass the Bechdel test, although there are people here desperately trying to shoehorn it. So maybe everyone needs a reminder sometimes that it's not great at evaluating films individually.

What is enlightening about it is when you realize how common it is for movies not to meet these little minor hurdles, because it illustrates the sexism endemic to the film industry as a whole.

Way back when, when the test started gaining prominence, some guy was arguing to me that maybe an equivalent number of movies didn't pass the reverse Bechdel either, so I looked up the ten top movies in theaters at that time and watched the trailers. Every single trailer that had any dialog at all passed the reverse Bechdel, and of course, none of the trailers passed the Bechdel, and maybe one or two of the whole movies did. That's really kind of shocking, not individually, but collectively.

Then I thought to myself, "Why did I just do that guy's research for him?" and vowed to stop wasting my time explaining things to lazy assholes who can't be fucked to try to figure them out on their own. It's not like they've ever listened to anyone ever before, so I'm probably not going to be the exception, and it's not my fucking job to explain things to them anyway.

(There are other movies that don't pass the reverse Bechdel Test, notably Duke of Burgundy and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, because there aren't men in them. Jeanne Dielman, too, probably, and lots of other movies featuring small casts, especially small female character-driven stories.)
posted by ernielundquist at 8:48 AM on July 13, 2017 [21 favorites]


Imagine an all female movie that fails the Bechdel test: it's not hard. A group of woman who (are written to) only exist in service of some off screen, never shown men.

Now try to imagine the same, but with an all male cast, and the guys only talk about women, and nothing else. Ever.
posted by zippy at 9:00 AM on July 13, 2017 [10 favorites]


My first response was "what's wrong with comparing women to cowboys? Catherynne Valente did it beautifully!" and then I actually clicked on the article and oh boy. Ohhhhh boyyyyy.
posted by brook horse at 9:04 AM on July 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


By which I mean the argument that a WWII movie set with the troops in combat wouldn't have women in the cast

Maybe if they spent the entire movie in actual physical combat.


Not only that, but Saving Private Ryan, for example, does have women in it, including women doing war work (although it doesn't pass the Bechdel test). Movies solely involving men on submarines are thankfully few and far between.
posted by threetwentytwo at 9:22 AM on July 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


@ernielundquist: So maybe everyone needs a reminder sometimes that it's not great at evaluating films individually.

And if you are spending time trying to find one instance of conversation that pulls a film over the line, that's actually not very impressive. If you have to scrounge for a line or two, that doesn't make it a meaningful aspect of the movie.

Every single trailer that had any dialog at all passed the reverse Bechdel, and of course, none of the trailers passed the Bechdel, and maybe one or two of the whole movies did.

I saw a trailer for the movie Logan in the theater. At first I was like, cool! That girl is obviously totally badass. And at the end of the trailer I turned to my friend and pointed out that in the entire trailer the girl (Logan? I am not familiar with those films) never spoke. She was spoken of.
posted by Emmy Rae at 9:25 AM on July 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


That NR piece was basically the text equivalent of one of the editorial cartoons in The Onion.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:41 AM on July 13, 2017 [7 favorites]


And if you are spending time trying to find one instance of conversation that pulls a film over the line, that's actually not very impressive.

We watched both X Men: First Class and Days of Future Past this week, both of which have a ton of named female characters. It should be the simplest thing, a given,for both to pass the Bechdel test but it's borderline at best in both cases.
posted by threetwentytwo at 9:42 AM on July 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


Now try to imagine the same, but with an all male cast, and the guys only talk about women, and nothing else. Ever.

Actually this is incredibly easy to imagine and it certainly isn't some feminist heaven...
posted by Dysk at 9:53 AM on July 13, 2017


By which I mean the argument that a WWII movie set with the troops in combat wouldn't have women in the cast

This reminds me, some conservative Senators in Canada are gumming up the works of changing a line in the Canadian national anthem from "true patriot love in all thy sons command" to "true patriot love in all of us command", on the grounds that it's politically correct historical revisionism. And I really want to ask him which part is revisionist: did he think that daughters didn't exist before feminists ruined things, or that women weren't patriotic until like 1982?
posted by Phire at 9:56 AM on July 13, 2017 [7 favorites]


Bear in mind that the first movie ever cited as passing the Bechdel test, by Bechdel ('s character) herself, was Alien. It's never been The True Feminist Test To Truly Determine True Feminism.
posted by Etrigan at 9:56 AM on July 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


If I hadn't seen the source of the article I would have assumed it was a parody written to make all the points the author was purportedly arguing against.
posted by Redstart at 9:57 AM on July 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


Alien is pretty feminist tho.
posted by Phire at 9:57 AM on July 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


I've been thinking idly about a Bechdel Model, as a different way to look at this that emphasizes what's at the heart of Bechdel's original quip: that, as folks have noted, such a low bar is so hard to get over, rather than that clearing that bar is necessary and sufficient for a given film to be good or feminist or whatever.

The Bechdel Model gets away from that erroneous litmus test misunderstanding, aiming instead for more of a probabilistic examination of films akin to Drake's analysis of extraterrestrial life: instead of asking whether a given film contains at least one qualifying woman-to-woman exchange, it lays out a reasonable estimate of how many characters and topics and plot points a film would have, and then number of conversational exchanges a film would have, and says "what's the probability that none of those would be between two women about not-a-man" based on those estimates.

Imagine a film with, say, six speaking characters, two hundred lines of dialogue, and a set of core discussible topics that include those six characters, six background characters, six plot points, six props. 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 = 24 topics. I'm handwaving a lot here but that feels like a small film, but let's run with those numbers. You have two hundred events, each of which involves choosing 2 characters at random, and then one of 24 topics, and those characters have a discussion. Assuming the film has even crossed the low bar of 2 out of 6 characters being women, what are the chances that out of 200 random trials, any of them yields two women talking about anything other than a male character?

It's not as simple or as aphoristic and so it's a clumsier and wonkier way of getting at the same thing, but on the other hand it may make it clearer to people inclined to be like "a ha but what about THIS line" that the issue isn't whether it's possible to find some narrow passage of an (apparently hostile?) litmus test, it's how fucking statistically broken the odds are if you're starting from the assumption that there's anything remotely resembling equality in the way shit is written and cast and directed and so forth.
posted by cortex at 9:58 AM on July 13, 2017 [9 favorites]


So maybe everyone needs a reminder sometimes that it's not great at evaluating films individually.

There have been several similar comments, but if I recall correctly, that was exactly the purpose of the test as established in the comic strip that invented it. And I can understand how some people might find it quite useful in evaluating films individually; you might miss a few good movies and see some things that weren't very good at all, but you'd also save yourself a lot of time otherwise wasted in consuming formulaic cinematic pablum.
posted by layceepee at 10:07 AM on July 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


Well, the thing with Jeanne Dielman and a lot of similar movies is that it's just a very insular movie. There aren't many characters, particularly named characters, and it'd be unlikely to pass any dialog based test at all just because it's not a talky movie. It is, however, inarguably feminist, turning sexist film tropes right on their head and focusing the action in an explicitly feminist way.

I think that's why the commenters on that site are so dead set on having it pass the Bechdel test, but I think it's almost insulting to try to apply a sloppy statistical metric like the Bechdel test like it's individually applicable, especially for movies that aren't formulaic studio films.

People will sometimes point out that a movie passes it as shorthand for "this movie has realistic female characters whose function isn't exclusively in service of the male characters," but ideally, they should be elaborating on it and judging the movie by its individual merits.

I mean, if you've got some big genre movie, based on a franchise, backed by a big production company, being run through a bunch of committees and focus groups, designed to appeal to the largest possible audience you can, sure, it's not unreasonable to say they need to write in a certain type of representation. They write in product placements, follow prescriptive story arcs, things like that, so of course it's reasonable to expect them to be able to have some remotely reasonable representation, and maybe setting some low bar Bechdel requirement would be a start, and maybe audiences should start demanding that.*

But it's neither a measure nor a recipe for feminist film, and people trying to shoehorn a feminist film into passing the Bechdel are losing sight of that. There isn't a formula. Most formulas have the sexism baked in.

* Here is some boilerplate dialog I have just written for major movie studios who need to pass the Bechdel real quick before they release their next blockbuster:

Two women looking at mannequins in a store window.

Gladys: Ha, Jennifer, quit dreaming. You'd look like a bag of shit in that.
Jennifer: Shut up, Gladys, you fucking whore.
posted by ernielundquist at 10:16 AM on July 13, 2017 [9 favorites]


Maybe if they spent the entire movie in actual physical combat.

Yes, there are even movies about women in WWII serving overseas and involved in or around combat, So Proudly We Hail, made during the war, was a notable US example. The point wasn't that there is never occasion for women in war films, but that some films may indeed make more sense without women and still not cause significant issue for the test since it is best used in measuring the entirety of the movie industry, which in bulk provides no excuse for the exclusion of meaningful conversation for women, even if some individual films do.

(Actually, as an aside, I would almost suggest that there is something amiss about how women get added to many war films and their ilk, since it's often just to fill the expectation of having a romance involved, or to use women to represent the "homefront" or "civilization" or some such. The reliance on convention is where some of the problem arises as these tropes become "reality" for what a given genre film is "supposed to be", limiting then how people will think about these movies and the types of roles within them.)
posted by gusottertrout at 10:18 AM on July 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


You know what movie passes the cowboy test? Brokeback Mountain. Perhaps that's not what the article's author intended though.

I am also pleased that my 12 year old son always makes sure to tell me whether or not a movie he just saw passes the Bechdel test. (Virtually always no, with Wonder Woman as the major exception). He thinks it's a little weird that I care, but at least the idea is planted, hopefully to blossom later.
posted by Measured Out my Life in Coffeespoons at 10:27 AM on July 13, 2017 [7 favorites]


And if the idea is that women aren't writing sufficiently commercial stories, we have to talk about The Hunger Games and Twilight along with Harry Potter - I think both pass the test, if only narrowly, but it is striking that for women, writing a sufficiently commercial story means writing a story that doesn't center its female characters too much.

I like the Hunger Games movies so much that I'm afraid to read the books (I know), and actually one of the things I enjoy about them is that seemingly every conversation that doesn't actually involve Katniss is about Katniss. I guess there are the reality TV montages where Stanley Tucci allows some expendable male contestants to say a few words, or maybe there's a bit of dialogue that time Gale gets whipped by the male guard (before Katniss runs up and rescues him, of course), but what I mostly remember are the scenes of Donald Sutherland and Philip Seymour Hoffman holed up in some decadent Presidential meeting space fretting about the Katniss problem.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 10:28 AM on July 13, 2017 [6 favorites]


If a woman wants the next Lord of the Rings–style franchise to pass the Bechdel Test, then a woman should come up with a story with as much earning potential as J. R. R. Tolkien’s.

Harry Potter series passes repeatedly, and two of the most splendid examples are McGonagall telling Umbridge she doesn't allow questions during her lecture... later in the same book, telling Umbridge that she can fire Trelawny, but she can't make her leave the castle.

Twilight passes the Bechdel test. Bella talks to Alice constantly, about all kinds of crap (including boys.) Bella talks to Jane the Volturi; she also talks to several female werewolves whose names escape me.

Divergent passes the Bechdel test; Tris talks to her mother quite a bit, she talks to to Tori, a fellow Divergent; she talks to Evelyn, Four's mother-- mostly about Four, tbh, she talks to evil Jeanine at length...

Wow, it's almost like when women write blockbusters, they actually include women in said blockbusters. Whodathunkit?
posted by headspace at 10:31 AM on July 13, 2017 [8 favorites]


Back when they came out, there was also a lot of talk about how Mamma Mia and the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel found a huge audience amongst older women, who are generally treated like cinema poison. Weirdly, if you make films about the lives of older women, they go in droves! (Literally, my mum's bingo club went three weeks in a row to a Mamma Mia showing).

Both films also pass the Bechdel test easily, unsurprisingly.
posted by threetwentytwo at 10:47 AM on July 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


A test is useful if it (a) unambiguously (b) sorts its results into meaningful populations. The Bechdel test does both: it's simple to apply and the two populations it defines are meaningful in number: many don't pass, but enough do.

As a metric for deciding if a film is overwhelmingly male-centric, it's not a failure.

And I don't view the fact that Showgirls passes as a particular failure either. It's not about whether a movie is good or bad, serious or satire, it's about how male-centric it biases. That for instance Gravity does not pass, should perhaps, be food for thought as to why that is and what we think about female exceptionalism when it comes to showing gender diversity in technical roles.
posted by bonehead at 11:03 AM on July 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


Twilight passes the Bechdel test. Bella talks to Alice constantly, about all kinds of crap (including boys.) Bella talks to Jane the Volturi; she also talks to several female werewolves whose names escape me.

If you'll permit me one more somewhat indirect comment, Twilight is actually a good example of the problem with convention driving how audiences perceive a film. So, so, so much of the commentary around Twilight was based around some idea of it not being a "real" vampire movie or that it wasn't as good as Buffy or used other comparatives to damn the film. While I'm not going to argue it's a great movie/series or anything, it is, I think, misunderstood and a lot more interesting than it got credit for precisely because it broke from convention and placed Bella at its center instead of some guy trying to save her or Edward as cool vampire bad guy.

In short, the movie can be potentially understood as something like Dracula told from the perspective of Lucy actually desiring to be bitten in disregard for the wishes of her male hangers on. In Twilight's case though, there is the added aspect of the movie strongly suggesting Bella may be deeply depressed, so her desire for Edward and to become a vampire is actually a desire for death, hinged between suicide and the want of change in her life after her parent's divorce, difficulty with her mother, troubled communication with her father and an unsatisfying school life. I don't know or care about the books all that much, but the movies play out the tension between the desire for life and that of death pretty clearly and with a decidedly feminine conception. Feminine in more the yin sense of the idea, where there is strength to be found in passivity thwarting harmful action. Something Bella's unique power/attributes provides.

That's a severely truncated argument for there being something of interest in the movies, but the more important consideration from my perspective is in how the conversation around the films adopted ideology that comes from a history of ideology that is, at the very least, as troubling as anything shown in the Twilight series.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:07 AM on July 13, 2017 [9 favorites]


In short, the movie can be potentially understood as something like Dracula told from the perspective of Lucy actually desiring to be bitten in disregard for the wishes of her male hangers on.

... and you have given me something new to think about with regard to Twilight, gus. Dang. (I dislike it for different reasons than the ones you posited, but now I really sort of want 'Dracula but from the woman's POV.')
posted by mordax at 11:27 AM on July 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


Heck, I'd read that book too. What with the public domain and the explosion of the vampire trend ten years ago, I expect someone has written it. Does anybody know?
posted by Countess Elena at 11:40 AM on July 13, 2017


McGonagall had some scathing remarks for Umbridge that would pass the Bechdel test. I am certain that there's plenty of lines from Trelawney and Sprout to female students as well. And that's just off the top of my head. I'm pretty certain if I spun through all seven books and eight movies I'd find countless more.
posted by Ber at 11:40 AM on July 13, 2017


there is the added aspect of the movie strongly suggesting Bella may be deeply depressed, so her desire for Edward and to become a vampire is actually a desire for death

This is not a criticism of anything you say:

I quite liked the bit where she fell in love with someone, and I was reminded how lovely it is to fall in love (perhaps, especially when young(er than I am now)), and to be full of the joy that the loved person exists, feeling and enjoying the feeling of how they light up the world for you, that you know love and all its delicious and baffling and new and wonderful possibilities.

That being said: I have never experienced the human emotion called "love" because I am a toadstool.

But - Oh! To be sat upon by a toad! That is the greatest joy that can be known in this universe. You wouldn't understand, of course.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 11:42 AM on July 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


but the more important consideration from my perspective is in how the conversation around the films adopted ideology that comes from a history of ideology that is, at the very least, as troubling as anything shown in the Twilight series.

That's an excellent point. Even I have to stop and ask myself, "am I putting this down because it centers an experience that I have been raised to consider dull or silly, e.g., middle-aged or teenaged female desires, or because it is crap?" The trouble is that oftentimes the work in question, as in Fifty Shades of Grey or Twilight, is both, and it is difficult to disentangle internalized misogyny from externalized twaddle.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:43 AM on July 13, 2017 [14 favorites]


In Twilight's case though, there is the added aspect of the movie strongly suggesting Bella may be deeply depressed, so her desire for Edward and to become a vampire is actually a desire for death, hinged between suicide and the want of change in her life after her parent's divorce, difficulty with her mother, troubled communication with her father and an unsatisfying school life. I don't know or care about the books all that much, but the movies play out the tension between the desire for life and that of death pretty clearly and with a decidedly feminine conception.

I'm going to continue this derail for a moment. As someone who was a teenage girl with depression who now teaches teenage girls with depression, I feel like that's one of the things that Twilight series got right. I only ever read the books once and I haven't seen the movies, but I do remember one specific detail -- there's a period of time where Bella is seriously depressed and for a few chapters each chapter is just the word of a month on a page. So: November. December. January. February. And then it goes back into the narrative of the book... and at the time, I remember going, "That's a great way to illustrate losing time to depression." It isn't that you're sad. It's just that the time is lost. It isn't as good as Hyperbole and a Half at illustrating what that feeling is like, but it hit something pretty raw and true to me in a way that the love story did not.

To bring this back to the main discussion...

I'm a playwright. I had a reading of a new piece on Monday. It was mostly attended by women. At the talk back, one of the women said that her husband would have loved this play, but the marketing and the title made him feel that it was not for him. And I responded, "Stories about men are perceived to be universal. Stories about women are perceived to be for women."

Clearly that holds true for the NR writer who thinks women are comparable to cowboys, but it's also true for this husband of a relatively progressive woman that I know. Besides the broad answer of dismantling the patriarchy, I don't know how to fix that. I'm now thinking about how I can make my marketing pitches appeal more to men and what triggers the switch between "oh, I'd like to see that" and "Girl stuff."
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 12:07 PM on July 13, 2017 [11 favorites]


Out of curiosity, I went looking for a real comparison to the Bechdel test, a reverse Bechdel test. Luckily, someone had already done the research. Behold, the four films on IMDB that do not:
1.) Feature two named male characters
2.) Have the two male characters talk to each other.
3.) Have the two male characters talk to each other about something other than a woman.

(This list misses DEBS, but there are probably only a few more to add to it.)


It's been a long time since I watched it, but I believe (500) Days of Summer manages this because while there are multiple named male characters, virtually all they talk about is Summer and relationship stuff involving her. You'd probably have a hard time finding any other movie so monomaniacally devoted to talking about a single couple, though, so I doubt Dude-Centric Romanic Dramedies is a rich vein for further discoveries.
posted by Copronymus at 12:18 PM on July 13, 2017


Damn it, sorry, I searched "Weasley" but not "Molly" which is my bad.
I was stoked we had the same reaction...
Also it's funny because I hemmed and hawed about Weasley or Molly and decided to go with Molly because there are so many male weasleys and I didn't want her to be identified as Mrs. in a Bechdel test thing.

On the reverse Bechdel ... wouldn't it be two named male characters talking to eachother ABOUT a woman? To me this is more a reversal in that it puts the emotional labour on them ... but maybe it's not so rare!
posted by chapps at 12:49 PM on July 13, 2017


Oh my god, I just realized that he probably came up with the Cowboy Test because he was thinking of John Wayne movies, which just makes him even more of the Guy Who Writes For National Review stereotype.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:01 PM on July 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


Do the HP movies pass the Bechdel test, though?

What? Can't a man take a stab at writing a movie that passes the Bechdel test?

Chauvinists, the whole lot of you.
posted by ocschwar at 2:08 PM on July 13, 2017


Off the top of my head, Something About Mary might pass the reverse Bechdel.

It's frustrating how something as very simple as the Bechdel test is so wilfully misunderstood. It isn't a measurement of the movie's value; it's a measurement of the value of the female parts, and if they are functioning only as plot points or as actual characters. It's relevant because it measures erasure, and if the female characters are stranded in isolation orbiting the more important male characters; it's a quick test of what is narratively important. The relationships between the male characters are overwhelmingly the focus of most popular entertainments and this structure is the default. The Bechdel test is a reality check.
posted by jokeefe at 3:05 PM on July 13, 2017 [6 favorites]


(I dislike it for different reasons than the ones you posited, but now I really sort of want 'Dracula but from the woman's POV.')

As always, AO3 is your friend.

("...and your worst enemy."
"Same difference!")
posted by praemunire at 7:37 PM on July 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


I have to say I really love the analysis by Kutsuwamushi of the Bechdel test as a springboard for discussion, simply by asking "why?".

Fr instance, why doesn't "Avengers" pass the Bechdel test? it's because it has only two women with speaking roles, and neither of them interact. And then if you take this analysis to all the MCU movies, then you see the persistent problem Disney and the MCU has with representation. Which doesn't mean the movies are bad, or unenjoyable, but it points out both a problem and a solution. It also makes me suspect that Captain Marvel when it comes out, will not be able to implement the solution to the problem, in the way that say, Wonder Woman was almost forced to do so.
posted by happyroach at 11:15 PM on July 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


One problem with action movies is that once you decide on a male hero as the center of the film, you are, in genre terms, largely forced to follow certain other dictates that will push the film into an even more male-centric position. A male action hero almost always requires a male villain that they can face off against in roughly equal opposition. Having a male hero attack a female villain doesn't read right to most people, though some dudebros would surely enjoy it.

A male hero also tends to require male sidekicks or pals, if they have any, since you run into the Harry Met Sally issue if you try to provide female friends outside a single love interest. Audiences expect the most prominent male and female characters to develop a relationship, or work at purposefully not developing one as a central element of the essentialized worlds of genre fiction, where there are so few characters of note presented that any potential couple almost must couple since that is all the audience is given as options.

There is the variation with the young girl the hero becomes surrogate father to, and then may have an additional love interest that will come together as faux-parents at the end of the film, or, more rarely, an older, and therefore ineligible for attraction, female that the hero acts as something of a son figure to, where another woman may be incidentally involved through knowing both, but largely the demands of the genre limit the possibilities of many other female roles since it would throw off the expected balance for the story as they've long been realized.

A female hero can have either male of female opposition, but male is often the more popular choice since it de-feminizes the movie, ups the stakes, in the way men are naturally seen as tougher opposition than women, a connected issue, and they often add a sexual threat to the proceedings, something that plays off the same sort of dynamics as the Harry Met Sally issue. In those cases, there will often then be a "good" male that offsets the villain as the more palatable option for the woman to end up with. A female friend or relative may show up, but often the love interest will take up much of their space as confidant in order to underline the "goodness" of the potential relationship.

In group dynamics, a mixed male/female cast of heroes will usually face a mixed cast of villains, where the female hero will then be able to face off against the female villain and the men can have at each other as usual. It's something of a sop to inclusion, much like the black sidekick has been. Dialogue between women then is still mostly limited to the female hero addressing their match among the female villain characters, if it happens much at all.

The dynamics of other long standing genres aren't all that different really, just rearranged a bit to fit the demands of romance, comedy, or whatever. Of course there are exceptions to this, the recent fascination with witch movies allowed men to beat on women villains some for example (What a victory! And what a coincidence that trend occurred at a moment of women increasing their power in the world.) and there are even a few movies that manage to buck the demands of genre more thoroughly, but those are more rare and often not all that popular with mass audiences.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:34 AM on July 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


I think the point of the way the Bechdel test is used these days is to highlight some of these limitations of genre, gusottertrout, particularly around the When Harry Met Sally issue.
posted by Merus at 4:40 AM on July 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


The "When Harry Met Sally issue" is just sexist, heteronormative claptrap dressed up as some sort of objective issue with a cute name. If you mean that you can't cast a man and a woman in a film together without them being romantically involved, say that, and ideally come up with some better defense of that position than 'these are genre norms and thus holy'.
posted by Dysk at 5:11 AM on July 14, 2017 [6 favorites]


Like, gerne doesn't demand anything. Studio execs maybe do. Audiences maybe do (though the success of four example Mad Max suggests that maybe the execs' genre demands with regard to gender can be cheerfully violated wholesale without losing audiences). Using the passive voice about "genre demands" obscures that fact that these are preferences and decisions made by people, who can be held accountable for those decisions.
posted by Dysk at 5:14 AM on July 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


Just this morning as I was cycling in to work I thought, "You know what would make Bastille Day great? A MeFi Thread full of people who still don't understand the purpose of the Bechdel test."

It's like Christmas, I tell you!

FAOD: I'm in the "the bar is set deliberately low to highlight how many works slither under it" camp.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:32 AM on July 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


I'd disagree about genre in its most common variety as it does have demands that the audience expects fulfilled, and trying to get around those demands is difficult, particularly with some of the biggest budget action/spectacle films. That doesn't mean I approve of it, those are not my preferred movies generally, but that the use of violence as entertainment has some additional values carried along from real life. That's the issue surrounding who can hit who and why and how that creates some narrative expectations, the same, to a different extent, with romance and how it is filmed.

Changing the dynamics of the genres to meet the Bechdel test will likely mostly involve rearrange some deck chairs around secondary cast members, a tough as nails woman as lieutenant instead of the grizzled old male, often black to allow the movie more "diversity" through those minor roles, or a sassy sexually non-threatening old school friend instead of some male buddy, also often black. This isn't the same thing as actually changing the culture to be less white male dominant, it's just giving white male culture more breathing room as the formulas stay the same and only the accessories to it change.

If people want real change then, yes, it can happen but it will need to happen with some radical revisiting of genres as the preferred form of movie as most genres are infected with biases developed in the culture at their inception.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:40 AM on July 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


What will this guy think of when he hears about the Sexy Lamp Test? [Can the female lead be replaced by a sexy lamp and have the plot remain intact?]

Never mind the Mako Mori Test. [There must be at least one prominent woman character or color; who has her own narrative arc; which is not about supporting a man's story.]

Or my favorite, the Furiosa Test.[Does the work incite men's rights dipshits to threaten boycott or otherwise throw internet tantrums?]
posted by Karmakaze at 7:58 AM on July 14, 2017 [7 favorites]


I think gusottertrout is right on the money about the genres. I'd even take them a step further and say that the broadly applied Hero's Journey ur-story has limitations built in that, if unchecked, tend to make the problem worse.

It's not that the Hero's Journey is fundamentally a bad storyline. It's fine. But if you're just writing stories based on that model, and you start out with a straight male protagonist, any female characters are likely to end up as either obstacles or rewards. The Hero's Journey was a subjective, descriptive model meant to identify common features among myths, but then, partly because of Star Wars, it became a prescriptive model that people followed because of the perception that it was not just a good story structure, but the only good story structure. (At least broadly applied.)

My favorite example of this is Breaking Bad. It's a well written, engaging story in some ways, but holy fuck, watch the first two seasons and tell me you don't notice that the two primary women characters function entirely as obstacles.

And that's a function of the story model. Once you've got your audience primed to sympathize with the protagonist and his goals, you need to start throwing obstacles in his way. And if you're writing a story you want modern straight male audiences to relate to, one of the most obvious ways to introduce conflict is to put a bumbling, nagging wife in there throwing up constant low level obstacles because she doesn't understand or care about the protagonist's (and by extension, the audience's) goals.

Watch for this. It's really, really common. It stands out more in Breaking Bad because the rest of the writing is fairly good, so the sheer awfulness of Skyler and Maries' character development really stands out. Deep into the story, with a couple of seasons' worth of writing behind them, there are still one-off characters showing up for a single episode with a stronger backstory than either of the major female characters from the series. They did apparently hire some better writers for later seasons, but the first two seasons blew and nobody seemed to notice that, I assume because that model of bad writing is so common that it seems normal.

(I know Breaking Bad isn't a movie, but it's the most obvious and accessible example I can think of that I know a lot of people have seen. It happens in movies all the time, too.)

There are ways around these prescriptions, both the genre ones, and the general story models, but you have to actively try to avoid them to keep from falling into the patterns by intentionally swapping genders around and things like that.

But the Hero's Journey is a model that was pretty explicitly masculine. You absolutely can put women in those roles and tell a good story, but many of its elements skew traditionally male, so if it's not written really well, it's just glorifying traditionally masculine qualities in female characters. Which, again, is fine, but it shouldn't be the end goal. We need other, better stories, too.
posted by ernielundquist at 9:37 AM on July 14, 2017 [10 favorites]


Whoa, I must have been asleep for a long time...did cowboys just become 51% OF THE HECKING POPULATION?
posted by SinAesthetic at 2:40 PM on July 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


Heck that.
posted by Evilspork at 6:08 PM on July 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


Oh don't get me started on the "Hero's Journey" claptrap. It's a far better model for building Hollywood movies around than it ever was for describing myth. And that's saying something, since I consider it the worst thing to happen to Hollywood in the last 40 years. The Hero's Journay is actively toxic to mythology studies
posted by happyroach at 2:02 PM on July 16, 2017 [4 favorites]


happyroach, could you expand on that a bit for someone who is a moron?
posted by Evilspork at 3:09 AM on July 17, 2017


I too would like an expansion on that. Maybe an FPP if it'd be too much of a derail in this post?
posted by harriet vane at 6:03 AM on July 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


If people want real change then, yes, it can happen but it will need to happen with some radical revisiting of genres

I know we're talking movies here, and probably why I don't care much about movies (I mean, fuck them mostly), but I've seen TV reimagining genre without it being shocking radical - my examples being Jessica Jones, Wynonna Earp, Dark Matter, and Killjoys.

That's a superhero story, a supernatural western, and two scrappy bands of ragtag outlaws in space, current shows, all passing the Bechdel Test, three of the shows with female leads (and Dark Matter almost makes it.) I don't know that these three genres have been dramatically reimagined to make this work.

It's just that the movie industry sucks and is 20 years behind the curve.
posted by Squeak Attack at 12:26 PM on July 17, 2017 [2 favorites]


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