Yuffie's Writing How-To's

The Bechdel Test

I found this great article about female presence in your stories. The original article can be found at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheBechdelTest (linked to in the External Link!):

The Bechdel Test, Bechdel-Wallace Test, or the Mo Movie Measurenote , is a sort of litmus test for female presence in fictional media. The test is named for Alison Bechdel, creator of the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, who made it known to the world with this strip.

In order to pass, the film or show must meet the following criteria:

1. It includes at least two women,

2. who have at least one conversation,

3. about something other than a man or men

If that sounds to you like a pretty easy standard to meet, try applying the test to the media you consume for a while. There's a good chance you'll be surprised; mainstream media that passes is far less common than you might think.

Now, by limiting yourself to shows/movies that pass the test, you'd be cutting out a lot of otherwise-worthy entertainment; indeed, a fair number of top-notch works have legitimate reasons for including no women (e.g. ones set in a men's prison, or on a WWII military submarine, or back when only men served on juriesnote ), or with no conversations at all, or having only one or two characters; hell, if its a romantic comedy, then it's natural that the female characters would talk about men and romance – the male characters will likely only talk about women too. You may even be cutting out a lot of works that have feminist themes (it's been revealed that Mulan, the quintessential Sweet Polly Oliver story and generally held up as one of the most feminist movies in the Disney Canon, failed - though with good reason, as she spends the majority of the movie as the sole woman in a male-only group of soldiers and the rest of the time being around women who are fixated on her wedding, something she was obviously uncomfortable with). But that's the point; the majority of fiction created today, for whatever reason, seems to think women aren't worth portraying except in relation to men. Things have changed since the test was first formulated (the strip in which it was originally suggested was written in 1985), but Hollywood still needs to be prodded to put in someone other than The Chick.

The test is often misunderstood. The requirements are just what they say they are – it doesn't make any difference if, for instance, the male characters the women talk about are their fathers, sons, brothers, platonic friends, mortal enemies, patients they're trying to save or murderers they're trying to catch, rather than romantic partners. Conversely, if a work seems to pass, it doesn't matter if male characters are present when the female characters talk, nor does it matter if the women only talk about stereotypically girly topics like shoe shopping – or even relationships, as long as it is not relationships with men.

This is because the Bechdel Test is not meant to give a scorecard of a work's overall level of feminism. It is entirely possible for a film to pass without having overt feminist themes – in fact, the original example of a movie that passes is Alien, which, while it has feminist subtexts, is mostly just a sci-fi/action/horror flick. A movie can easily pass the Bechdel Test and still be incredibly misogynistic. For instance, the infamously bad "Manos" The Hands of Fate passes the test, but its treatment of women is incredibly squicky. Conversely, it's also possible for a story to fail the test and still be strongly feminist in other ways, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. What's a problem is that it becomes a pattern – when so many movies fail the test, while very few show male characters whose lives seem to revolve around women, that says uncomfortable things about the way Hollywood handles gender. There are also lesser-known variations of the test, such as the Race Bechdel Test, in which two characters of colour talk about anything other than the white leads, and the Reverse Bechdel Test, with the roles of men and women swapped.

It's obviously easier for a TV series, especially one with an Ensemble Cast, to pass this test than a film, because there's far more time for the conversation to occur in. To compensate for this, Bechdel-inspired analyses of television often look episode-by-episode, or compare the series' passing Bechdel's Test with its passing a "reverse Bechdel test" (even without such compensation, it's often surprising to notice how long it takes many TV shows to pass). Another tactic would be the probability that a typical two-hour collection of episodes would pass.

Compare The Smurfette Principle – works that follow The Smurfette Principle include a female character strictly for demographic appeal but make no real attempt to treat her as an interesting character in her own right, outside of her relationships with the male characters. See also Never a Self-Made Woman, which shows that even a well rounded female character with her own goals is most often only relevant to the story by her relationship to a man. Finally, see Token Romance and Romantic Plot Tumor for the effects of Hollywood's belief that both male and female audiences are generally uninterested in female characters except in the context of romance with a male character. See also Deggans Rule, which is a similar rule regarding race.

And for those curious, it's pronounced Bec-tal, as in rhymes with Rectal.

So, does your story pass or fail the Bechdel Test? I plea guilty to failing with all my stories! I tend to have a predominantly male cast with only one or two prominent female characters who don't interact much, if at all. (whoops...)