silentpunk:

malarchi:

fuckyeahsociologystudentsheep:

[Picture: Background: 6 piece pie style colour split with beige and woodland green alternating. Foreground: a head-on photo of a disgruntled looking white sheep. Top text: “Friend asks if you wanna see a movie.” Bottom text: “IDK, does it pass the Bechdel test?”]

http://bechdeltest.com/

I still find it hard to be a fan of the Bechdel Test. I understand that as a tool to demonstrate the unequal representation of gender in the film industry it works really well, which is great. But when it’s used as a tool to boycott individual films it really annoys me, as so many great films fail the test, and so many shit films pass it. And given the unequal ratio of Shit to Great films it seems inevitable that although this may have the effect of balancing gender representation, it will have the much more profound effect of encouraging shit films to be produced and seen, purely because they learn to squeeze in a couple of unrelated dialogue lines between two female characters. I’d much rather it balance out due to people only supporting great films, which will balance out the gender problem due to unique and high quality writing, instead of studios just trying to recreate The Hangover.

yeah the bechdel test is used exactly as you would like it to be used - to point out the huge inequality, not to discredit individual films at all. If there was a feminist system for opting out of anything where women are underrepresented we’d all be living in a cave.

Having two named women communicate doesn’t necessarily make a film better, it’s perfectly reasonable to say that there are some stories that can be told and are great stories but don’t even feature women.

This article explains how even passing the Bechdel test doesn’t make your film non-sexist and doesn’t guarantee it will be good: http://thehathorlegacy.com/the-bechdel-test-its-not-about-passing/

this has some great links from various blogs if you are at all interested:

http://thehathorlegacy.com/link-roundup-more-on-film-industrys-reluctance-to-promote-female-characters/

edit: also it’s important to point out that I don’t think the Bechdel test has encouraged any ‘shit films’ to be produced, I don’t think it has affected the film industry much at all, and if, as you suggest, it has made filmmakers shoe-horn in a female conversation… if it was a good film surely one tokenistic PC conversation wouldn’t ruin it?

Oh yeh, totally agree, and that link is brilliant. I think this line really sums up my feelings

“It’s not that the audience doesn’t want to hear what “women” characters have to say, as one film pro told me. It’s that we don’t want to hear what’s said by irrelevant, underdeveloped characters who have nothing to do with the plot”

I’m a huge fan of character driven story, and I’m very much of the opinion that gender has very little to do with what makes a character great. And so I’m very dubious of characters being written with their starting criteria being A Woman or A Man. Having said that however, with the current inequality being so blatant, maybe writers should be biasing towards women, just to get the ball rolling and encourage people to write more developed and interesting characters, who just happen to be women.

And yeh you’re right, that was badly written. What I’m worried about is that future writers will see the Bechdel test and misunderstand it. Exactly what I DON’T want is shoe-horned female conversations, I want something decent with depth and meaning. In film you have 90 minutes to tell a story, every minute should count, every line should be important. If all that happens is people add in unrelated female conversation in order to “pass” the test, then all it does is weaken the point Bechdel Test is making.

Writing this, I think we probably agree, we’re just looking at it from different angles. I suppose all that’s different is I don’t like how a lot of people look at the test.

(Also the Hathor Legacy site is Excellent, so thanks for that link!)