So some Swedish movie theaters have decided to institute a new rating system to let viewers know whether or not the films they show pass the Bechdel Test — that is, if at any point in the film two female characters have a conversation about something other than a man.
Over in the Men’s Rights subreddit, a fella with the classy handle classypedobear takes strong exception to this terrible affront to human decency. His argument?
Wait. WHAT IS WRONG WITH TALKING ABOUT KITTENS?
Thanks, AgainstMensRights subreddit!
And that tells you all you need to know about these jerks, really.
As a Swede I can testify that this only happened because Sweden is a hotbead for misandry. 😛
Also, I wanna defend the Bechdel test from everyone who goes “it doesn’t say aaaaaaanything about the individual movie, it’s ONLY interesting because of the PATTERN it shows”. I think it does, usually, say something about the individual movie too.
I mean, there are exceptions. Das Boot doesn’t pass the Bechdel test because it’s set on a German submarine during world war two. There are a small number of movies that are so completely centered around just one person that it’s not gonna pass any Bechdel test – usually, that one person is a man, but lately, we have Gravity where it’s mostly just Sandra Bullock and nobody else on screen.
Usually, though, movies are set in an environment that isn’t male-exclusive, with a few main characters and a number of secondary characters. When such movies don’t pass Bechdel, it’s usually because all Persons are played by men, and only people who “must” be women are women (like, if there’s gonna be a romance or Unresolved Sexual Tension ™ between a male Person and another character, heteronormativity demands that the other character is a woman; also, if a character is gonna be a mum, for instance, it’s gonna be a woman). And such a set-up is likely to lead to Bechdel fail.
Hmm, maybe they’d “get it” better if they used the same argument reversed. “Why do Men need to talk to each other? I don’t get it. I have plenty of male friends who get along better with females. If two men hav a conversation about their kitten or their baby ? I think it’s even worse.”
Had to go back and double-check that I was making all the same language mistakes.
Or maybe they’d change the references to kittens and babies, because as we all know, only chicks talk about kittens or babies, and anything to do with cute animals or children is irrelevant to men. Maybe said men would talk about their sports or their penises, and these dudes would TOTALLY go see THAT movie.
I wonder also if they’d “get it” better if they saw how many movies would pass a test requiring two men to talk to each other about something other than a woman. Just about every movie, including movies about, by, and for women, would pass that test.
@swankivy: You know, aside from the rare rom-com…I actually don’t think there are any movies in which two men don’t talk to each other about something other than a woman. Actually…I don’t think there are any movies out there (even rom-coms) in which there is only ONE male main/secondary character.
I somehow doubt that classy fellah has “plenty of female friends” if he thinks that all women talk about is kittens and babies.
Not that kittens and babies aren’t awesome! But given my long experience in talking to other feeeeeemales, I have to say that they’re not really the only acceptable topic. We also talk about shoes, shopping, more shoes, spermjacking techniques, diet plans, diet plans to make us super fat and unlovable so we can take over the world with our disgusting feeeeemale mass, abortions, killing newborns, recipes, recipes for poison, makeup, superspy makeup to fool all men into thinking we’re HB 10s, shoes, hair tips, nailpolish, shoes… you know, all the important things in life!
Exactly, Heather. And that’s because screen writers don’t write by first inventing all these female characters that do different stuff, have different personalities and play different roles in the story, and then go “right, this one’s gonna have a love interest, so I’ll enter a man for her to flirt with…”
Well duh. The only things women ever want to talk to one another about are those icky, girly things, like babies, kitties, purses, jewelry, and makeup, and who the hell wants to talk about that? And those feeeeemales who get along with males so well? It’s not like they get along with everybody or anything, because that’s impossible. You can only get along with one gender (and of course there are exactly two.)
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dvärghundspossen for all the misandering Swedes have been doing!
Btw, have you seen “the Mako Mori test”?
http://chaila.tumblr.com/post/58379322134/spider-xan-also-i-was-thinking-more-about-why
I agree that one can think it cool that a movie has even one main character who’s a WOC – representation of women period isn’t all that matters, representation of WOC is important too, and since WOC:s are so far and few between in mainstream media it might be adequate to do a little dance of joy as soon as there’s one important WOC role. But the Mako Mori test as an alternative to Bechdel? Seriously?
I read this feminist blogger who said “the first time I heard about something called “the Mako Mori test” I thought it was a feminist fail test, like, if you can say of a a character “You know, she’s the girl in [insert name of movie] then there’s feminist fail”.
And yeah, really. I think the Bechdel test is useful because it really shows something. But there being one female character with a personality arch, and then everyone can interpret for themselves whether she’s supporting a man’s story or has her own arch (and we’re all gonna be prone to wishful thinking here, and think that female characters in movies that we love for other reasons do have their own archs and aren’t primarily about Teh Menz) – that’s a crap test!
To clarify, I think that maybe ONCE there was a time where it would have made sense to check movies for ONE decent female character. But fortunately, we’re passed THAT point now. There are quite a lot of movies with ONE decent female character. That’s really no basis for giving cookies to movie-makers any more.
True story: every lesbian porn movie passes the Bechdel test…
There are films that fail or barely pass the Bechdel test that have very good female characters — Fargo, for example, which centers around a woman in the male-dominated world of law enforcement, and which may or may not pass the Bechdel test depending on how strict you are about it.
But it’s overall a useful metric, and it’s revealing just how many movies fail it. No, failing it doesn’t automatically make a movie terrible, but it’s often a sign of lazy, sexist screenwriting.
I haven’t sat down to crunch numbers on this, but it seems to me that for better or worse horror movies are actually pretty good, relatively speaking, when it comes to passing the Bechdel test. They often have female lead characters — as victim/survivors — and enough other women in them that they can pass the tests even if the main villain (a regular topic of conversation) is a dude.
I also think the Bechdel Test can say something interesting about a film even if the yearly trends are more widely reported. I watched an odd little slasher film called Black Rat last night that passed the Bechdel Test. Female characters talked to each other about their relationships with each other, a huge school function coming up, and whether or not they should be punished for their female friend’s suicide. Then it took a hard turn into standard female characters talking about male love interests even while facing the threat of a female student taking revenge for past misdeeds against her. It passed the Bechdel Test because it focused so heavily on the female characters, but decided to resolve the remaining plot threads in the third act with nothing but “you stole my boyfriend/he was mine first/why can’t I have a boyfriend” nonsense that had no real bearing on the story.
The Bechdel Test, at its best, is a starting point for a discussion about gender roles in film. It’s also not the only indicator of quality gender roles. Short Term 12 does not pass the Bechdel Test, but its focus is on the relationship between a female foster child and a female caretaker trying to prevent her abusive father from keeping any custody at all. The father’s role in the story allowed for really honest and thoughtful character development for the two leading ladies even if the exact dynamic couldn’t exist without the male influence.
The Mako Mori Test is really cool, too, but it’s so new. I remember seeing Pacific Rim and being blown away by how many different stories were being told in the context of humans versus monsters. Mako’s stood out the most for being a purely psychological conflict over her own feelings of inadequacy brought on by childhood trauma. Pacific Rim fails the Bechdel Test because there is no solely female interaction, but the female-driven story elements are focused on even more than in films that actually pass the Bechdel Test.
And Short Term 12 passes the Mako Mori Test with flying colors with two strong female leads getting their own narrative arcs that intersect at key points in both of their stories.
I actually do watch tons of movies that aren’t Bechdel-worthy, because they can still be funny, exciting and so on, and I feel my pop-cultural life would be too boring if I were to boycott everything not Bechdel (apparently one of my colleages has a wife who’s on a boycott and who thinks everyone ought to do the same until the industry changes, and I sort of admire that feminist engagement, but I can’t be bothered to myself). But I still defend it as an overall pretty good feminism test, even if it’s obviously far from perfect.
You know, yesterday I was discussing math problems and how chiropactors shouldn’t be prescribing drugs/suppliments. Was that really codeword for kitties and babies? O_o
“Why do Women need to talk to each other? I don’t get it.”
Nope, he surely doesn’t.
As someone who’s a Pacific Rim fan and writing a (decently popular, by my standard) crossover fanfiction series with it, I HATE the Mako Mori test. For god’s sake, there was another woman, a Russian pilot, in the movie. It wouldn’t have taken that much effort for the filmmakers to have Mako Mori talk to her. Aaaand that’s it. Those are the only two female characters with names in the entire film. You have a dozen named male characters–shit, you have freakin’ SEVEN who’re white in a movie set in freakin’ CHINA–with names, and two female ones, and they never speak to each other.
Guys, I like Pacific Rim too. But it’s really not the social justice haven you want to pretend it is.
(And this is why, in my fanfiction, I’m ignoring most of the cast, focusing on disability issues, and introducing women and people of color as pilots, groundcrew, and various bureaucratic jobs. I mean, Christ, I’m writing in a universe where all the countries around the Pacific band together. Why SHOULDN’T I actually take advantage of it?)
I spent a lot of time while I was in Texas talking to women (and men) about improving open access to information, curating data throughout its lifecycle, and developing methods to make rich machine-actionable information freely available online. That’s pretty much kitties and babies, right?
@swankivy
They can’t reverse the argument, because men *cannot possibly prefer the company of women.* If they do, they may become manginaified.
The in MRAology, everyone prefers the company of men, because men are that much awesomer. OTOH, they are also the most oppressed (especially the white ones). This combination of awesomer than everyone else + oppressed triggers is like female crack. It’s all science and shit.
(more shit though)
I like to think of the Mako Mori test as supplemental to the Bechdel Test. Or vice versa…Bechdel as supplemental to Mako Mori…neither one replacing the other. They’re just low-bar indicators for slightly different issues with women movie characters.
They’re both so low-bar that neither really address a lot of really tired tropes, such as “woman in a man’s world,” and whatnot.
Y’know, I don’t think Hollywood would put a character on screen who’s as much of a stereotype as that guy is, except for an easy laugh. As for the lots of women friends he claims to have, I suspect he may be counting women coworkers who’re polite & pleasant to him because they do have to work with & see him every day, he clearly sees women as an undifferentiated, interchangeable mass rather than individuals & is incapable of relationships of any depth–with either women OR men. If his disability weren’t self-inflicted he’d be pitiable.
Also, JoJo, Twilight passes the Bechdel test too. Seriously, the test isn’t an insta-feminist award. It’s intended to show how shitty the media is at even acknowledging such basic things like women talking to each other.
And actually, I think Coraline doesn’t pass the reverse Bechdel. There are plenty of male characters running around, but I don’t think they ever talk to anyone but Coraline, her mother, or her “other” mother.
RE: HeatherN
See, I have a lot less patience for the Mako Mori test is because I’m used to thinking of that… for folks with disabilities.
I have grown to accept that people like me are so rare in media, expecting more than one is an exercise in naivete. But women are 50% of the goddamned population! There should be more than one with a goddamned independent arc!
Twilight sort of proves that passing Bechdel doesn’t guarantee that the movie is a feminist one. What I would like is feminists stop pretending that there are loads of movies that doesn’t pass but are still so great from a feminist standpoint. I think there’s this tendency among many feminists who love pop culture to try to see every movie that they love for other reasons as a really feminist movie at that. They first like a movie, then thinks “since I’m a feminist, and I like this movie, this movie must be feminist”, tries to find reasons why the movie is feminist, and usually ends up at “there’s this one female character which is well-written”. That, and also “the camera lingered for a while on a hot dude’s body”, that’s usually the other argument for the movie being feminist, although it’s not used as much as “there’s one well-written female character”.
THIS IS NOT ENOUGH FOR FEMINISM COOKIES!
I actually want to propose a sort of reverse test inspired by the comment in the OP, the Man Boobz test: Two male characters in a movie having a conversation about a kitten.
Can you think of any that pass? Maybe Trainspotting.