The Bechdel Test

One thing that is really important to all minorities is representation in the media, which includes everything from books to television shows to movies.  Feminism is no exception to this.  It's extremely important for women to be portrayed as complex characters who are vastly different from one another.  In 1985, a little thing called the Bechdel Test came into existence, and it would challenge lack of representation for decades.

The idea that shaped the Bechdel Test is certainly nothing new.  In 1929, English author and modernist Virginia Woolf wrote an essay entitled "A Room of One's Own".  In this essay, Woolf observed the literature of her time, saying, "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. [...] And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. [...] They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that [...]"  Basically, she's saying that women in popular literature of the time are only represented as relatives and usually not mentioned unless they have a relationship to a man.

The Bechdel Test first appeared in 1985 in Alison Bechdel's comic strip "Dykes To Watch Out For".  In a strip titled "The Rule", a woman explains to her friend her "rules" for which movies she watches.

"The Rule" from "Dykes To Watch Out For" by Alison Bechdel

These rules eventually came to be known as the Bechdel Test.  The rules are:
1. The movie has at least two women in it
2. The women talk to each other
3. They talk about something other than a man

The Bechdel test is also called the "Bechdel rule", "Bechdel's law", the "No Movie Measure", or even the "Bechdel-Wallace test", which acknowledges Liz Wallace, who was an inspiration for the comic strip.  An article by Dr. K. Faith Lawrence suggests that there is an extension of the rule: the two women must have names and are not just referred to by their description or job title in the credits.  In a YouTube video posted to her blog "Feminist Frequency", Anita Sarkeesian applies the Bechdel Test to the 2011 Oscar nominees for Best Picture, and proposes that an addendum that women must talk for more than 60 seconds be applied.  She argues that if women only exchange a few lines, it's kind of difficult to make the claim that the film features women of depth and character.  Even with this new rule, the bar is still set pretty low for women's representation in films.

The Bechdel Test does not judge the quality of a film.  As Sarkseesian later mentioned in her video, "This test does not gauge the quality of a film.  It doesn't determine whether a film is feminist or not, and it doesn't even determine whether a film is woman centered."  She talks about the film True Grit, which follows the adventures of Mattie Ross struggling to get by in a man's world, and how even though this film is woman-centered, it doesn't pass the Bechdel Test, because the female lead never talks to another woman except for an innkeeper, which doesn't total 60 seconds.

A surprising number of movies, some of which feature great female characters, don't pass the Bechdel Test.  According to Film School Rejects, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II actually doesn't pass the test.  It goes without saying that the Harry Potter series features several strong female characters: Hermione Granger, Ginny Weasley (maybe not so much in the films), Luna Lovegood, Molly Weasley, and even Professor McGonagall.  However, none of the female characters actually talk to each other.  Aside from a few comments between two female characters to one another, such as McGonagall to Molly Weasley when she "always wanted to use that spell", none of the women in the movie talk to each other.

A 2014 study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media shows that in 120 films made worldwide from 2010 to 2013, only 31% of named characters were female, and 23% of the films had a female protagonist or co-protagonist, and only 7% of directors were women.  Even though the Bechdel Test is over 30 years old, it still seems like a few filmmakers could do with a lesson on representation in media.

So, what do you think?  Although it is somewhat flawed, is the Bechdel Test a good basic way to measure representation in movies?  Does it have a place in modern society?