The Bechdel Test

[illcounttothree]

Hoping someone can help me out.....

I've nearly finished writing a book. It's a young adult novel about swords and sorcery and snogging, and I want it to pass the Bechdel Test. I have some really interesting female characters and they have plenty to say that isn't about boys or men.

And because I like a challenge, I don't want there to be just one conversation not about boys or men (which I believe is the requirement) but I want the protagonist to have a non-boy conversation with every other female character.

So here's my question: for a conversation to pass the Bechdel Test, are you allowed to mention a boy/man in passing, or is it strictly No Men Allowed? There's one bit where my protagonist is talking to her mother about when her crazy, uncontrollable psychic powers started to manifest themselves in her childhood, and her dad gets mentioned in passing. In a 1700-word conversation, her dad is mentioned twice for a total of 60 words. Does this conversation pass the Bechdel Test?

I'm genuinely interested in people's thoughts on this!

[LurcioAgain]

I certainly don't write (if you can dignify what I do with that very ) mentally ticking off "must pass the Bechdel test" - it just happens because I have women characters in the stories who're there as human beings who do interesting stuff (they are not there simply as love interest for the hero, which if my watching of Hollywood blockbusters is anything to go by, seems to be the default attitude of a lot of professional screenwriters). I do think a lot about my feminism at the re-write stages, though. One of the things I find interesting writing as an amateur (so no commercial pressures) in an environment which is overwhelmingly by women, for women, is the way we still (as a group) don't shake off much of the patriarchy... it's that old canard of the extent to which female submissiveness is eroticised and internalised. So the heroes are often "Byronic", and the sex is often still described with an eye to the male gaze - so I personally think a hell of a lot about perspective, the female gaze, the choice of language in my writing - partly because I want to subvert and undermine the stranglehold the patriarchy has even on our private fantasy life, and reclaim it.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

This definitely counts as one of the most bizarre threads I've read.

I can't help feeling if you need to tick off the Bechdel test to ensure you're writing in enough woman-woman interaction, or worrying about how to gender-stereotype non-human characters, that's probably sign enough you need to go back to the drawing board, isn't it?!

[TiggyD]

Think less C3PO full body suits and think more actors with normal clothes and metallic face paints. It's going to be obvious who is what sex! The female child robot animal would be a puppet with big eyelashes. The baddie is also a human female (but she won't last more than one show).
But does the Bechdel apply to female built but non human characters?

[PetulaGordino]

How are the robots distinguished as male and female?

[TiggyD]

Quick Test question. My latest soon to be smash hit sitcom (yeah, right) poses Bechdel test issues.

When is a woman a woman? I don't mean any trans issues, but I'm currently writing with a cast of 3 robots, a child robot animal, and 2 cloned beings. 2 of the robots are 'male', the others are all 'female'. Kind of.

[LurcioAgain]

Actually (confession time) I found myself thinking of this thread with some amusement over the weekend. As I've mentioned before (insert extremely sheepish emoticon here), I write fanfic. Hey, it's a harmless hobby for once DS is finally in bed! And I tend to try to deliberately subvert the internalised misogyny and rigid gender-stereotyping which pervades a lot of fanfic (strong, dark, laconic, borderline EA heroes, swooning virginal heroines). Well, my latest story features, among many others, a female character of my own creation, and one of the female characters from the original work, who is generally reckoned by everyone to be a bit of a cardboard cutout. And I appear to have fleshed both of them out so well that I received a request from a reader that I "ship" them together! So it would appear that passing the Bechdel test (generally understood definition) can lead to requests for passing the Bechdel test (minority understood definition).

[Dervel]

Also the fact that the origin of the test is a lesbian is beside the point that was being made.

[Dervel]

This is one of the reasons why I got interested in feminism in the first place. I am working on writing myself (novels). In my tool box I want to be able to pace, write decent dialogue and well just basically write decent stories.

It's absolutely crucial that characters are well rounded and believable. In my research in improving my skills things like the Bechdel test highlights a major blind spot in the way we tell stories. Obviously the one revelation has led
down a rabbit hole of misogyny, casual and not so casual sexism.

It is my understanding that the test came about as something of a flippant observation in a comic (a medium that is becoming increasingly hostile to women as a whole). As such it's not really a complex critical approach, but it DOES highlight a problem. I suspect a module on feminist literary theory in a literature degree would reveal more depth. However the Bechdel test does work incredibly well for the layperson to highlight problems.

As far as it goes personally I want to write people well, now obviously I am not a lot of things but that doesn't mean I can't write them well. I think the more writers improve the better the stories will be, before you even get to a feminist angle. As Joss Whedon remarked in response to his writing of strong female characters why does he kept getting asked this in interviews, when it's the writers that don't bother should be asked why they don't.

[TortoiseUpATreeAgain]

The Bechdel/Wallace Test isn't "at its core a lesbian test, ie is there anyone in this that you could reasonably ship" because there is more to women's lives than shipping, just as there is more to women's lives than men. At its core its about women travelling and being economically active and participating in/having opinions about popular culture and media and science and technology and sport and well actually existing as real people rather than as plot bunnies. Bechdel and Wallace are both lesbians, but they are also both women. And there's no hint of shipping or f/f slash in the original comic that launched it on the world, unless you assume that lesbians only go to see films in order to fantasise about the characters (and if you're going to start throwing accusations of lesbophobia around, that assumption would be a good place to start).

You can't really do f/f shipping without passing the Bechdel Test (although genderswapping the entire cast of a movie is pretty popular in fanfic circles, so I suppose you can) but that doesn't mean that that's what it's about "at its core". Nor is a film that passes the Bechdel Test automatically feminist -- but the acknowledgment that women are individuals who have their own interests and interact with each other without revolving around men ought to be a pretty basic first hurdle to pass. As it is around a quarter of films don't even manage to get to step 2 (having two named female characters speaking to each other about anything) and that's pretty shocking.

[GoshAnneGorilla]

OP you may find this site useful
www.fangsforthefantasy.com/

They review fantasy novel and TV focusing on representation of women, ethnic minorities and GLBT characters. Their glossary is a good place to start.

[GoshAnneGorilla]

Stupid tab

[GoshAnneGorilla]

OP -

[EATmum]

Fair, thanks for looking at his blog and commenting, that's kind. Clearly they're just his thoughts though they are informed by lots of discussion and reading - and I guess it shows how hard any kind of helpful test is for this area. I think his aim in using the word 'admirable' was not that they had to be 'good' but that female characters should be real, not window-dressing. The Bechdel test, frustratingly not-achieved though it is, sets a very low bar for female representations in film!
I read another blog yesterday (not DH's this time) about the 'Trinity effect' (a la Matrix) where films spend time developing strong female characters, and then give them nothing to do .... was an interesting read!

[FairPhyllis]

OP you probably already know this tumblr blog if you are into SF/fantasy, but it's always worth linking to: Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor

[illcounttothree]

Love it! You look at the women on some fantasy novels or gaming books (yes, I'm looking at you Dungeons and Dragons) and you think, 'Why are you wearing a metal bikini? That's not armour. Why are you leaving your midriff exposed? What protection will you have against an orc's tusks?' And of course all the male characters are wearing head-to-toe chain mail....

[LurcioAgain]

Illcounttothree - on the subject of women in skimpy metal armour, you may like this link

[illcounttothree]

Wow, thanks for all the responses! I should have made it a bit clearer in my OP that I only found out what the Bechdel Test was a little while ago. I'd already written most of the book and was interested to see how it fared. When I started the book, my intention primarily was to write something entertaining with interesting characters and a good plot, but it was also important to me that I represented the girls as being equal to the boys - they have strengths and weaknesses, and they go out and do stuff and sometimes they succeed and sometimes they screw up and they have crushes and snog but what they don't do is let themselves be defined by their relationships to men. Which was kind of where the Bechdel Test came in. In some fantasy books, the girl/woman is just there to either wear skimpy metal armour, or to be the damsel in distress and this irritates me no end.

And FWIW, there are some pretty cool boys in it too. And some evil villains.

And just to muddy the waters further, there IS a lesbian in it. Her lesbianism isn't what defines her, though. What defines her is her fuck-off massive demon-killing bastard sword.

[TiggyD]

The Bechdel test is as much about more women as it is about better writing.

[LoveSardines]

Prisoner was great I used to watch it after the pub

probably most soaps would pass?

Oooh I bet dynasty and that passed. They certianly had plenty of, erm, fiesty female chaarcters

[TiggyD]

I wrote it as a family show. A weekend tea-time type thing. Because of that there wasn't ever going to be a lot of talk between women about relationships/goings on between them and men as it's soppy to a lot of the target audience. So as long as I had a few women acting normally it was always going to pass the test. Some shows pass or fail more easily due to what they're about.
Prisoner Cell Block H - Impossible to fail with that many women.
Early Big Bang Theory - Just not enough women to pass.
Later Big Bang Theory - Introduced good female characters so should pass.

[LoveSardines]

Am thinking of the thin blue line now!

not sure if that passed...

[LoveSardines]

lol

[TiggyD]

The sitcom I wrote passed the Bechdel test. And in the police station where it was set the 2 senior officers were female, but it didn't pass the 'very good' test according to the people I sent it to. Or the 'funny' test. Bastards.

[LoveSardines]

Also people reading f/f slash aren't necessarily going to be lesbians, which further muddies the waters of the whole thing!

To OP - I think it is a crude test to say - how much media is there out there which is broadly representing women as actual people, compared to how much is not. So we can all get nice and pissed off

It's not a prescriptive thing - write what you want to write - your book sounds fab. And anyway 1 or 2 asides about a bloke wouldn't de-bechdel it for me.