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!

I think it's unwise for writers to fixate on the Bechdel test - it's not a feminism test, as a pp has said. I would focus on developing fully realised female characters who have motivations that don't centre around men.

It's more of a broad brush test that can tell you something about broad trends in how many roles there are for women playing characters with their own inner lives that don't revolve exclusively around men (and the bar for that is pretty low indeed). I don't think it was ever meant to be used in the way it often is.

As is often observed, films with fully realised lead female characters can fail the test (Gravity, Run Lola Run), and non-feminist films can pass it.

EATmum sorry to diss your husband's blog post but I think what he proposes is rather a poor and, tbh, anti-feminist test. A film would pass his test if a female character is admirable in some way (the test is roughly 'if this was your daughter would you be proud of her?'). The point isn't whether women are shown in an admirable light in films. It's about whether they are represented as fully-realised characters in their own right with their own motivations which don't always centre around men's needs or being a romantic object for men. They don't necessarily have to be admirable characters, in the same way that many great male characters aren't admirable.

The point is that if film were a feminist medium it would represent women in all forms of their humanity, not exclusively as sex objects, or as being on pedestals either.

I imagine what rinabean is getting at (though she may be back to correct me!) is not that two women talking to each other makes them lesbians, but that if you like femslash and want to write / read it then you need to have progs/films/books etc which have female characters which are a. interesting and b. interact with each other, in order to have some material to write your femslash in the first place.

It doesn't mean they actually have to be lesbian characters - clearly homosexuality is rarely represented in mainstream media and that doesn't prevent reams of m/m slash being written. And finding m/m to write / read about is a piece of piss obviously because popular media is stuffed full of men who are a. interesting and b. interact with each other.

Which might make more sense of that post. Whether that is what the original test was about or not, I have no idea.

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.

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.

lol

Am thinking of the thin blue line now!

not sure if that passed...

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.

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

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

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.

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

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....

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

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!

OP -

Stupid tab

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

How are the robots distinguished as male and female?

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?