https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test
By the way, absolutely incredible that this Wikipedia article has two sections, Limitations AND Criticism, which both feel the need to point out that this test does not actually reflect the quality of a movie.
Check if the page on mansplaining is equally thorough
I find it endlessly amusing that an old comic about lesbian culture accidentally created such a widely used and critiqued test for media. Meanwhile I actually really like it for its original purpose: I prefer to consume media in which multiple women speak to each other about something other than a man, all else being equal.
Fr though it’s like if a gag from the L Word had become a piece of everyday media commentary where most people just assume this Shane person must be a media theorist.
yep. i don’t think the test was designed to be the all-encompassing thing it’s viewed as today.
It was really only designed to point out how many pieces of media do not pass. It seems like a low bar, but is weirdly rare.
That’s the whole point though.
It should be an insanely easy bar to clear. The fact that the fail rate is so high is the criticism.
But are there actually folks in the movie crowd, who very seriously say that a movie has got to be bad, because it fails the Bechdel test?
I heard about it for the first time with this post and immediately interpreted it to be highly tongue-in-cheek. Like it might be an additional metric to know what kind of movie to expect, but you should still look at actual quality ratings to learn of the quality…
It’s probably more for outside of movie crowd people to explain to them that movie crowd types don’t just think something is bad because it fails it
