Photo credit Pixabay
I first learned about The Bechdel Test from an actress friend of mine who makes a concerted effort to support films by women, films for women and/or films that prominently feature women as truly interesting characters.
This test is used to determine the female-friendly quality of a movie in its general format.
To pass The Test, a movie must meet the following criteria.
- The movie has at least two women in it.
- The movie scenes include at least one scene with women characters talking to each other.
- The women's conversation in the scene isn't about a man.
In some arenas there is an added criteria that the women characters talking must also be named.
The test is named after Alison Bechdel, whose 1985 comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For featured a strip titled The Rule in which a woman explains to another woman that she will only watch a movie if it satisfies those characteristics.
Alison Bechdel attributes her creation of the rule to her friend and karate training partner Liz Wallace (who attributes the idea to Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own where Virginia notes how poorly represented women are in the literature of her day). For this reason, Alison prefers to reference the rules as The Bechdel-Wallace Test. It's also known as Bechdel's Rule, Bechdel's Law and Mo Movie Measure.
The Bechdel Test has become adopted by film professionals and critics, in addition to movie buffs, as another way to vet movie quality. Movies that pass the test are considered superior when it comes to portrayals of women as valuable individuals versus valued as an accessory to a man of value. The test can also be applied to video games and comics.
Movies that barely fit the test criteria might have all three characteristics but the conversation is still only within the narrow range of marriage or baby topics (indirectly referencing a relationship to a man). The goal with encouraging films to pass the test is to expand perceptions of women beyond the role of wife or mother by portraying them, more realistically, as the multi-dimensional, multi-passionate humans they are with or without a romantic or support connection to a male character.
If you are ever selecting movies for an impressionable young audience, you may wish to keep this in mind to better balance the quality of your movie content in a way that is conducive to facilitating more positive relationships to and with women (valuable for boys and girls alike). Though not foolproof, of course, a movie could still pass the test and promote a sexist viewpoint.
If you're a writer of fictional stories (any format), you may want to consider checking your own work to see if it passes the test. If not, this feedback could be a guide to improve your writing's accessibility, enriching the story for a wider audience by crafting a more nuanced version of your female characters or adding interesting female characters.
The website bechdeltest.com is a crowd-sourced catalog of movies that have been tested. At this writing there are 7513 movies in the database that have been evaluated against this measure.
Sources: Wikipedia & Bechdeltest.com
What are some of your all-time favorite movies that pass The Bechtel Test?
List them in the comments!