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!

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?!

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.