Bechdel test test

September 15, 2022 11:36 AM

How is "talking about something other than a man" usually defined when applying the Bechdel test?

Obviously beanplating here; I'm aware there is no National Bechdel Certification Board that publishes standards. But this criterion feels very open to interpretation and I'm just curious how people have tended to approach it (especially if anyone has ever written about this aspect). For example, if a series centers around catching a male criminal, does two women detectives discussing their work on the case count as "talking about a man"? Et cetera.

posted by dusty potato to Media & Arts (24 answers total)

Response by poster: (Also, yes, I'm very much aware that the original genesis of the Bechdel test was just a tongue-in-cheek little heuristic to make a point about representation of women in narrative media! But so much actual ink has been spilled about it by critics that what I'm seeking to engage in my question is sort of all that discourse.)
posted by dusty potato at 11:44 AM on September 15, 2022

For example, if a series centers around catching a male criminal, does two women detectives discussing their work on the case count as "talking about a man"?

Yeah, that counts - unless one of the women happened to have a crush on the criminal!
posted by coffeecat at 11:54 AM on September 15, 2022

I'm just curious how people have tended to approach it

When you run across examples that feel like they require interpretation, you could check for comments on bechdeltest.com (search interface).
posted by Wobbuffet at 12:03 PM on September 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: When you run across examples that feel like they require interpretation, you could check for comments on bechdeltest.com (search interface).

Thanks, this is perfect!
posted by dusty potato at 12:11 PM on September 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

In my experience, people tend to be VERY strict about this. I remember people arguing that the movie Bridesmaids shouldn't count because all discussion of the wedding was indirectly discussion of a man (even though there were many conversations that weren't even about the wedding).
posted by lunasol at 12:31 PM on September 15, 2022

I disagree with coffeecat - I think it absolutely does count as "talking about a man" if they're talking about a male criminal. This would not be a conversation that passes the test. It doesn't matter whether they're romantically interested or not. The Bechdel test isn't about measuring whether women are allowed to exist outside of their romantic relation to men - it's about whether women are allowed to exist outside of their relation to men, period. If a woman has all male coworkers, all her interactions at work will fail the test. If a woman has a female coworker but they only have men as the subjects of their work, then every time they talk about the men they're working on, those conversations will fail the test.

Your hypothetical scenario could pass the test if the women were talking general theory without mentioning the criminal they're trying to catch. It's a very literal test, not some kind of associative figurative thing where the women in question have to be completely removed from the very orbit of all masculinity in order to pass. (I haven't heard the type of strict interpretation Lunasol is talking about, though I don't doubt it exists on some corner of this weird wide internet!)
posted by MiraK at 12:33 PM on September 15, 2022 [29 favorites]

I agree with MiraK. The Bechdel Test isn’t meant to be nuanced, like “is this movie feminist because of the way it handles topics or has female characters.”

I believe the Bechdel Test’s most useful application is straight counting: it is asking how many movies/TV shows have female characters who EVER talk about something other than a man? Once you keep it to that strict parameter, the answer is: depressingly few. And that in itself is useful information. The fact that the bar is SO LOW (all you need for a movie to pass the BT is one conversation between two women with names that is about ANYTHING other than a man) makes the problem even more stark.

More representation of women in popular culture is important, but we need to ask ourselves how great it really is in the year 2022 if that representation is used just to keep telling all the same old male-focused stories.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:41 PM on September 15, 2022 [19 favorites]

does two women detectives discussing their work on the case count as "talking about a man"

My interpretation is that they need to be talking about the person in some way, so anything to do with that case is kind of talking about a guy. Talking about crime in general, less determinate. My talk on the Bechdel Test is that it just drives home how much the role of women in media is, for no reasonable reason, overly concerned with centering the male characters and not the feelings/actions/interactions of women (or nb folks). And the way I remember it, though this is not reflected on the website, is that the women having the conversation needed to talk about not-a-man for like 30 seconds or something. It's bizarrely difficult to find even in otherwise pretty-feminist movies.
posted by jessamyn at 12:43 PM on September 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

If the detectives are the only two women, and they only ever talk about the male criminal, they probably don't pass the test. In this case it seems like the male criminal the main character. Even if the detectives are set up to do all of the action, if they don't have anything in their lives outside of this case (and don't agonize about not having anything important outside of their jobs, as fictional police detectives tend to do), then the book is really about the male criminal using the detectives as a framing device. Which sounds cool! But it still fails the test.
posted by Garm at 12:51 PM on September 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

For your stated question, if they’re only talking about the male criminal then I don’t think it passes - they’re still talking about a man (the criminal). But if the whole movie is about the criminal and they discuss how the crime is committed (forensics, evidence, what they see or measure or find as opposed to what he did), then it’s not about him anymore and it would pass.

No - “You can see from the way the window glass shattered that he must have come in from the fire escape.”

Yes - “When you see window glass shattered in a pattern like this, it usually indicates an entry from outside, like on a fire escape.”
posted by Mchelly at 1:22 PM on September 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

And not to abuse the edit window - I’m pretty sure the whole point is (like hurdy gurdy girl said) a way to count what passes and what doesn’t, just to hammer home how easy it should be to pass - it’s a stupid low bar. It’s not even gospel that the women have to have names, FFS. And an an insane percentage of movies still don’t pass.
posted by Mchelly at 1:29 PM on September 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

I agree with people who say it doesn't count.

The test doesn't work if you try to make it nuanced. A film that centers the work of two female detectives and uses a male criminal as a plot device doesn't pass, if they only talk about his crimes; a film where two unnamed female characters talk about fashion for 10secs before the male protagonist rushes in to save them from a serial killer does pass. The first film is probably better representation, but as soon as you try to adjust the test to account for how good the representation is, it just becomes film criticism. There's no point to applying the test.

I think this is what a lot of people who object to the Bechdel test don't understand. It doesn't work as film criticism and isn't meant that way. It does work to illustrate an imbalance when you look at media as a whole, though, because even though you can nitpick the "feminism" of individual movies, you can't nitpick away the fact that so little passes it - especially in comparison to male representation.

I don't think there will ever be a very clear, agreed-upon line about what counts as "talking about a man." Here, the gray area could be at what point they're talking about their jobs in general, and not this specific male criminal. But I think any conversation we agree is about a man should count, regardless of what role that man plays in the narrative.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 1:41 PM on September 15, 2022 [13 favorites]

MiraK wrote...
The Bechdel test isn't about measuring whether women are allowed to exist outside of their romantic relation to men - it's about whether women are allowed to exist outside of their relation to men, period.

I agree with this interpretation of the test. If the conversation wouldn't exist without the male to focus on then it fails the test.

dusty potato wrote...
Also, yes, I'm very much aware that the original genesis of the Bechdel test was just a tongue-in-cheek little heuristic

Sometimes humor works because it is actually incisive commentary. I think the Bechdel test qualifies.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:03 PM on September 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

woman #1: Hello!
woman #2: Hi!
That would count. One female character says something, another female character replies to her.


woman #1: Hello!
woman #2, to man #1: She said "Hello!"
That would not count.
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:36 PM on September 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

You might enjoy the rather thoughtful discussion in the Bechdel Cast podcast.
posted by eotvos at 2:37 PM on September 15, 2022

If the two female detectives are talking about a criminal who they have no idea whether they are male or female, does it still count? I'd argue that even in the known male criminal situation, they are discussing their jobs more than a man as a man. I guess I'm not a
Bechdel test literalist
posted by Jacen at 4:44 PM on September 15, 2022

The test doesn't work if you try to make it nuanced

Yes, this! Bechdel herself has spoken about this. The simplicity and the sometimes frustratingly literal quality of the test are practically begging to be tweaked and what-if'd and argued with, but actually these are the very qualities that give the test its power. What a statement it makes when you see how few films have two women saying hello to one another! It is stunning. And this power would be diluted by tweaking it to include intentions or hedging with maybe it should count in just this special extra feminist case or whatever.

Also I've seen Bechdel discuss how it's important that this be applied to movies and not TV shows, not books, etc. The special quality of a movie is that movie scripts are TIGHT. Not just every scene but every shot has to be approved and curated by a hundred people, from script to post-production edits, because movies tend to have strict time constraints. In a book or a TV show, there's room to breathe, room to waste dialogue and pages and scenes. But in a movie, when a micro moment of two women saying hello to each other is allowed to stay in the final release, that means it actually matters to the whole movie.

I guess it's even more discouraging when books and TV shows fail the test, but what Bechdel says is that limiting the test to movies is the only objective, non-prescriptive, "non-denominational" way she could think of to make the test count meaningful instances of women existing outside of relation to men. Not just inconsequential accidents or lax editing but interactions with at least some impact to the whole.
posted by MiraK at 4:58 PM on September 15, 2022 [15 favorites]

With the movie about the women detectives and the male criminal, the story could so easily be "women are only interesting enough to make movies about if they are focusing on something to do with a man". Consider all the movies like Labyrinth where the older sister has a baby brother to care for or rescue, for instance - it was extremely rare until pretty recently to have a kids' movie with a story where an older sister rescues or cares for a younger one (My Neighbor Totoro FTW). Two girls could have exactly the same adventure as a boy and a girl, but it wasn't interesting unless it was a boy and a girl.

Every time I see a movie like Labyrinth I ask myself how the movie would feel different if the child being saved was a little girl.
posted by Frowner at 5:27 PM on September 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

That was honestly one of the reasons Frozen was such a seminal movie (for all its flaws). It was all about sisters, including turning the hero rescue narrative on its head in favor of showing how the women cared about each other. Little girls could role play both characters and also get along.

The only parallel I can think of were the Mary Kate and Ashley movies, but I’m too old to have watched them so I don’t know if they had the same impact.
posted by Mchelly at 6:45 PM on September 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

A film in which two women talk about their strategy for gathering evidence against Trump and prosecuting him would pass the Bechdel test.

A film in which two women talk about their crush, boyfriend, partner, husband, OR their male relative would not pass the Bechdel test.
posted by carriage pulled by cassowaries at 9:05 PM on September 15, 2022

There's no requirement that the man be a "crush, boyfriend, partner, husband, OR their male relative."

The man could be a suspected criminal, or their boss, or employee, or a friend, or the guy who works at the corner store.
posted by See you tomorrow, saguaro at 2:10 PM on September 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

> A film in which two women talk about their crush, boyfriend, partner, husband, OR their male relative would not pass the Bechdel test.

Unless their crush or partner were a woman. (Ah ha! The doctor was his mother!)
posted by The corpse in the library at 3:07 PM on September 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

I guess the way I understood the Bechdel test's specificity to movies was that because movies as movies are so expensive and compact, most movies will not show women talking about anything other than a man because women's stories are not interesting unless there is a man involved. Women are only interesting as appendages to men's stories, so they are always depicted in relation to a man, whether that man is their family member or a serial killer. This is in explicit contrast to all the on-screen time where it is only men talking to each other about things other than their connections to women.

It's not just what the women characters are interested in, who they are as people, if they are feminist role models or just value their connection to other women - it's what the filmmaker expects the audience to want to see. And the filmmaker usually expects the audience to view anything that is not about men as too dull for words.
posted by Frowner at 3:11 PM on September 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

in explicit contrast to all the on-screen time where it is only men talking to each other about things other than their connections to women.

Exactly! Two female cops talking about the male serial killer fails the Bechdel test equally as much as two teenage girls talking about a cute boy they both have a crush on or, indeed, two Stepford Wives talking about what their husband might want for dinner. It's not about how feminist or unfeminist the movie is. It's about noticing a certain very specific type of gender disparity: disparity in who is allowed to be the central concern of any story, disparity in whom the characters in a story are allowed to worry about and think about and talk about.
posted by MiraK at 10:38 AM on September 17, 2022 [3 favorites]