The Bechdel test is sometimes presented as a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for a movie or tv show to be not sexist. For example, in this blog post, “the opinioness” subjects the new Avengers movie to the test and gives an explanation of its importance as a test. The Bechdel test is explained there pretty simply: two female characters have to have a conversation with each other about something other than men. Apparently in the Avengers the female leads don’t speak to each other at all, not once in the movie.
Maybe I’m just being pesky but I have a strong suspicion that A Game of Thrones would pass the Bechdel test with flying colours. I’m pretty sure that Danaerys has had a conversation with one of her maids about the woman healer, and of course many conversations about her dragons; that Cersei has talked about her daughters with Sansa, and also about Arya; that Sansa and Arya have talked about their mother; possibly that Shea and Sansa have talked about Cersei. I think it happens in every episode. This is a testament to the strength of the female characters in this tv series, and comparing it with this report on the Avengers really makes me think that Joss Whedon, for all his many talents, is a bit of a grand-standing puffball.
Compromise and Conceit 
June 1, 2012 at 10:59 am
Thanks for linking to my post! I love ‘Game of Thrones’ and its numerous intelligent, strong, complex female characters (especially Daenerys and Arya…and Cersei and Brienne too…actually I like all the female characters). Although I do find it suffers from misogyny. But yes, it does indeed pass the Bechdel Test.
June 1, 2012 at 12:09 pm
An interesting test (and an interest post that you linked to).
I do think the standard that’s being applied is a little cruel to Joss Whedon given that he’s laden down why decades of (male dominated) Marvel history, but I agree with The Opinioness of the World that it does result in a mark of “Could do better”.
Though I’d avoid “Couldn’t the two women have talked about the upcoming battle? Or strategized, commiserated…anything??” as there was zero strategy discussion from memory and I don’t think Pepper Potts interacts naturally with the other two at all (unless you replace Agent Colins with Maria Hill – but that gives you a Women in Fridges problem for humanising her/Colins just to kill her/him off.
Can we apply this test in reverse to find out if shows focused on women are sexist? Would Sex in the city have any hope of passing? The L Word?
June 1, 2012 at 12:21 pm
Thank you for commenting, opinioness. Paul, I reckon at a complete guess that Sex in the City would struggle to pass. The L Word would pass. The big problem the L word would face is passing a reverse bechdel test – do they ever talk about men!?
June 1, 2012 at 3:13 pm
A reverse test is what I mean by “applying the test in reverse”.
My suspicion is that shows with a focused on “women living their lives” actually would struggle to pass a test to see if men were being discriminated against.
Acutally, shows centred on a viewpoint character will almost always fail this test. Take for example Being Erica, which is about a woman who’s visits to the shrink send her back in time to alter her past. (From the highly limited amount I’ve seen) every scene has her in it as a major actor. That means the odds a scene where two men talk without focusing on her is basically 0%.
Therefore single character focused shows always fail the Bechdel test. Another example would be Quantum Leap and possibly McGuyver. I suspect this shows a weakness in the test rather than a flaw in the shows.
June 4, 2012 at 6:16 am
“Therefore single character focused shows always fail the Bechdel test.”
I’d argue it’s more that the test isn’t applicable.
I’m not sure how applicable it is to Avengers, actually. Just because there are two female leads doesn’t mean the two characters would necessarily engage in conversation.
June 4, 2012 at 8:48 am
Jon: I agree.
Trying to apply a Bechdel test (or a reverse test to check if men talk of things other than women) on a single character focused show is highly likely to not “pass” as (to state the obvious) the main character is involved in most (or all) discussions, vastly lowering the chance of passing.
That means the test has something intrinsically suspect about it because it seems to deliver a high degree of false positives. It also means that a film that just happens to not be about women (say, Brokeback Mountain) comes across as sexist, instead of just a movie about gay cowboys.
As you say, this could support the idea of the test being inapplicable in movies based on the story being covered. The alternative would be demanding that movies twist their plot so that there are always women talking about something other an men.
If anyone does want to support the plot being shaped like that then I’d like to support them. On the condition that the women be discussing something trivia and insulting to the participants, such as hair stylists while the world burns. Foolishly applied tests should be satisfied by satrical responses wherever possible.
June 4, 2012 at 12:44 pm
Yes, it’s easy to imagine situations where the test will clearly be inapplicable or deliver the wrong results. But in shows with many female characters capable of interacting with each other, it seems like a reasonable minimum condition that they discuss something other than a man. Of course it’s not a blanket rule, but it seems like a good question to ask. Also, I find it really hard to believe that two female lead characters not being able to speak to each other at all is reasonable. The movie doesn’t come out here until August so I haven’t seen it, and it could be obvious once one sees it, but on the face of it this seems a little strange.
June 4, 2012 at 8:00 pm
I can understand in a movie or show where the women could speak about something other than a man, but instead spend all their time focused on him then it suggests there is something wrong with the show. [1]
For Avengers, it’s a very good movie. I think you’ll come out agreeing that packing more into there would probably do it a disservice. The Black Widow is a well developed character who interacts with others on non-sexual levels. Pepper Potts is there mostly because she was from Iron Man and is used to develop one other character. Maria Hill would not suffer as a character in any way if she did not have a name – she does stuff and questions Nick Fury, but that role could be dolled out to separate actors at the low cost of the audience maybe thinking the separate actors are important (which would then confuse the audience).
[1] Such as all the women just being there as a reminder that the man in question has a huge tonker and we should all be really impressed by him. “All women want him and all men want to be him.”
August 20, 2012 at 4:22 pm
Paul, the point of the test isn’t to gauge whether a particular work of fiction is sexist or not. The point of the test is to raise awareness that there are so many works of fiction that are so male-oriented that they don’t even have a single scene with two females talking about something other than a man.
Does The Avengers fail the test? Yes. Does that make it sexist? I don’t think so…But do I think it’s fair to assess that it is male-oriented. Of the six on the team, only one is a woman — that automatically stacks the deck against it where the Bechdel test is concerned. I don’t think it’s fair to surmise that the test doesn’t apply here because the cast of characters doesn’t include enough women…rather, I think that’s the point in this case!
In the end though, the test isn’t there to demonize any particular work of fiction — it’s there to make us ponder the focus of the collective works of fiction that our culture is producing…And I think it’s a pretty fair assessment that they collectively tend to cater more to men than to women!
August 20, 2012 at 7:49 pm
Danny,
I can understand your comment about what the test aims to achieve and that seems sensible. You’ve convinced me it’s not a bad test when used to raise awareness/consideration instead of as a sexism test.
As for collective works of fiction and who they cater to (i.e. “…I think it’s a pretty fair assessment that they collectively tend to cater more to men than to women!”), I’m not sure this is a good test. We’d probably need to define the criteria we use to determine the “target” audience then gather evidence to support the hypothesis. For example, different criteria we could use are:
1. Assess the top selling books and top grossing movies for the last year and assign them target audiences based on the Bechdel test and gut feeling.
2. Assess raw numbers of creative works.
3. Assess genres and determine a gut feel on how prevalent we think that genre is in the marketplace – but being male I’d assume that I’d identify “male” genres and then say they are dominant (i.e. I have no idea how big “chick”-lit is)
The first two are probably wonky in different ways (i.e. on simple numbers, the number of comic books alone would distort the count towards men even though numbers have very low readership and there is a small total target audience that just buys multiple titles each). The former measures spend, which is going to correlate with disposable income by gender, the second becomes very difficult to track as we’d move down the number of consumers.
If we expand the term creative works to include TV shows then things like soapies probably move it to a more female friendly count.
So I’d hesitate to agree to “…I think it’s a pretty fair assessment that they collectively tend to cater more to men than to women!”
August 21, 2012 at 9:21 pm
Thanks for the comment Danny. I’m increasing thinking it’s not a very useful test, even for judging the focus of a work of fiction. For example I bet a lot of Mills & Boon very rarely have two women talk about anything but a man, but that’s because the story is constructed around romance between a woman and a man, and often a love triangle. But those stories are aimed almost entirely at women. I’m sure it could be argued that a great many of them have a highly regressive and repressive view of sex and love, but that doesn’t change their focus. On the other hand, I bet there’s lots of lesbian porn (e.g. the Daily Mash‘s famous “five-way Belgian nun-cluster”) where lots of women don’t talk about anything but each other; yet despite the Bechdel test suggesting it’s a seemingly closed women’s world, the whole thing is clearly aimed at a male gaze. See also the Libertine novel.
So what then is the test actually telling us?
I’m hopefully going to see Avengers this week, so I’ll be able to compare. But again, if an obviously sexist work like A Game of Thrones can pass that test but a presumably more feminist (because by that great “feminist” Joss Whedon, haha) can fail – what’s the test telling us?
It could be that it has a limited purpose outside of sexual morals or politics: in any work of fiction with male and female characters, where they can interact, form alliances and have conflict, any movie that fails the Bechdel test (whatever gender it is calculated on) is probably prone to poor writing, stereotypical characters, a singular lack of anything except action (no complaints there!) and/or a really silly story or world.
But you can tell that by watching the movie. So maybe the Bechdel test isn’t very useful …
August 21, 2012 at 9:22 pm
Scratch that second to last line … you can tell a great many things about a movie by actually watching it, so that point is rather irrelevant…
August 23, 2012 at 4:30 am
Consider this– in reality, roughly half the world’s population is female. I think it’s fair to assess from that both that roughly half the collective “cast of characters” in real life is female, and that roughly half the real world stories that there are to tell would be told from a female perspective.
Contrast this with what we see in our works of fiction. Maybe it’s possible that our culture’s produced fictional works have a collective cast of characters that’s roughly half female, and more importantly that collectively roughly half of the stories are told from a female perspective…but that’s not what I’m seeing when I look around at well-promoted contemporary fiction.
To satisfy your craving for scientific data, consider these statistics collected on whether tested films pass the Bechdel test: http://bechdeltest.com/statistics/.
We can probably agree that when it comes to representing females in cinema, the Bechdel test is a pretty low bar. According to those statistics, almost 50% of movies tested do not even pass it. For sure the test does not guarantee that those that fail are sexist — but I think it’s a pretty safe bet to assume that most that do not pass are communicating a story from a male perspective (read: focused on male characters) rather than female. At the same time, passing the test does not guarantee that a movie is feminist or conveys a female perspective…Though I don’t have data on this I would venture to guess that maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of movies that pass the Bechdel test (if that) are actually set from a female perspective.
Perhaps “cater to” wasn’t the best phrase, as I really didn’t mean target audience. What I was really getting at is whose stories they’re telling, whose voices are being heard. Magic Mike is an example of a recent movie that apparently had women as the target demographic (source: http://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Magic-Mike-what-Hollywood-thinks-women-want-3677633.php) but was really telling a story from a man’s perspective, and indeed “barely” passes the Bechdel test (source: http://bechdeltest.com/view/3385/magic_mike/). My point here is that target audience is not sufficient — when it comes to movies, all that really says is what the studios think people want to see. 😛
Ultimately, the fact that we have to ask whether a work of fiction actually has two women who talk to each other about something other than a man is the point — and the reason we need to ask this question is because all too often women are effectively silenced or censored in our fiction. It’s not about demonizing any particular work of fiction, if anything it’s about demonizing the machine that’s producing the bulk of it. More to that point, here’s an interesting read — a tale of the horse’s mouth: http://thehathorlegacy.com/why-film-schools-teach-screenwriters-not-to-pass-the-bechdel-test/.
August 23, 2012 at 4:35 am
^ I wrote that directed to Paul, and hadn’t seen faustusnotes’ comments. But yeah…I agree the test doesn’t say too much conclusively one way or another by itself for any particular movie, but I think its value comes from what’s unveiled when applied in the aggregate.
August 23, 2012 at 7:24 pm
Danny, all your comments are references to movies. If you want to say “Movies are sexist” then it doesn’t follow that “work[s] of fiction” are sexist.
My understanding is that movies aren’t even the largest entertainment market by spend any more (though a couple of quick searches didn’t find any good links to spend data to back that up). Though that does open the point that computer/console games are (from memory) a bigger market and the non-casual portion of that sector is quite sexist.
August 28, 2012 at 2:23 pm
Alright, that’s fair — I meant in part to defend the Bechdel test, and emphasize the relevance of applying it as a litmus test to all kinds of fiction, and confused with that my other message which was more specifically about movies and television shows.
I don’t really like the word sexist because it comes off as a flat judgement and just isn’t adequately descriptive enough — reality is typically far more nuanced than something simply being sexist or not. Instead of saying “movies are sexist” I’d rather say we have work to do until we can see equal opportunity in the telling of stories that present women as subjects rather than objects. The Bechdel test serves as one simple measure to see how we’re doing there, and indeed applying it and talking about the results helps to spread awareness…and I think change may well take care of itself when the general consciousness of our society is awakened to this specific problem.
As for video games, there are a lot of unrealistic depictions of women for sure, and plenty of games that disproportionately depict men more than women (and that depict women disproportionately — ha!). The Bechdel test certainly applies here, and in looking around for a few minutes to see what other people have written on this topic, it looks like collections of analyses of whether games pass are in their infancy — I found one blog here http://bechdelgamer.wordpress.com/ with a few posts about a few (very contemporary) games, and a smattering of games tested here http://gamerisms.tumblr.com/post/7418442876/using-the-bechdel-test-on-video-games and a listing of 15 games that do pass here http://gameological.com/2012/07/something-other-than-a-man-15-games-that-pass-the-bechdel-test/. This is hardly a representative sample though. It seems some research may be in order!
I don’t expect to see very many games that pass though…part of the trouble is so many games don’t even really have much to speak of for dialogue to begin with. I would expect though that RPGs will often tend to pass way more than other kinds of games, and that first person shooters and other action-centric games will tend to just about never pass…with the exception perhaps of games in which the protagonist is or can be female. On that topic, I find it amusing that seemingly the most famously cited example of a game that passes the Bechdel test is Portal, which features a female protagonist pitted against a feminine robot antagonist…Except the protagonist never actually utters a single word (letting the player project their own imagined personality to the character, rather than forcing one upon them, not an uncommon practice in many games).
November 6, 2013 at 9:32 pm
The Bechdel test, from my understanding of it, is supposed to expose unequal representation in media in general, not necessarily in single piece of work. For example in cinema, less than 30% of speaking roles in Blockbuster films went to women last year. (http://www.themarysue.com/speaking-roles-in-film-women/) This is the point of the test: generating awareness. That is where it is most useful. In attempt to counteract issues like this, shows like Hannibal are starting to gender bend characters in their adaptions. Peter Jackson has gone as far (and come under much fire for it from die hard fans) as adding Evangeline Lily to his cast as a character who did not even exist in the Tolkien universe, because there are so few women in his series and Galadriel was the only one he could worm into the hobbit. Whether or not Galadriel and Tauriel will have a Bechdel passing conversation remains to be seen, but the point is that awareness is starting to make an impact.
November 11, 2013 at 10:45 am
This has become more relevant recently since Sweden proposed including the Bechdel test in its movie rating system. Since the test doesn’t guarantee the movie will actually have any decent feminist content and is easily gamed, I doubt it will lead to much improvement in the representation of women … (the linked article also supports your point that it is about awareness rather than a criterion).