The Bechdel Test

If that sounds to you like a pretty easy standard to meet, it is. That's the point! Yet, try applying the test to the media you consume for a while. There's a good chance you'll be surprised; mainstream media that passes is far less common than you might think.Now, by limiting yourself to shows/movies that pass the test, you'd be cutting out a lot of otherwise-worthy entertainment; indeed, a fair number of top-notch works have legitimate reasons for including no women (e.g. ones set in a men's prison, or on a WWII military submarine, or back when only men served on juries^note ), or with no conversations at all, or having only one or two characters; hell, if it's a romantic comedy, then it's natural that the female characters would talk about men and romance. The male characters will likely only talk about women too. You may even be cutting out a lot of works that have feminist themes (Mulan, the quintessential Sweet Polly Oliver story and generally held up as one of the most feminist movies in the Disney Canon, fails). But that's the point; the majority of fiction created today, for whatever reason, seems to think women aren't worth portraying except in relation to men. Things have changed since the test was first formulated (the strip in which it was originally suggested was written in 1985), but Hollywood still needs to be prodded to use something other than The Smurfette Principle.The test is often misunderstood. The requirements are just what they say they are; it doesn't make any difference if, for instance, the male characters the women talk about are their fathers, sons, brothers, platonic friends, mortal enemies, patients they're trying to save or murderers they're trying to catch, rather than romantic partners. Conversely, if a work seems to pass, it doesn't matter if male characters are present when the female characters talk, nor does it matter if the women only talk about stereotypically girly topics like shoe shopping or even relationships, as long as it is not relationships with men.This is because the Bechdel Test is not meant to give a scorecard of a work's overall level of feminism. It is entirely possible for a film to pass without having overt feminist themes in fact, the original example of a movie that passes is Alien, which, while it has feminist subtexts, is mostly just a sci-fi/action/horror flick. A movie can easily pass the Bechdel Test and still be incredibly misogynistic. For instance, the infamously bad "Manos" The Hands of Fate passes the test, but its treatment of women is incrediblysquicky. So does The Bikini Carwash Company, which is little more than tasteless pandering. Conversely, it's also possible for a story to fail the test and still be strongly feminist in other ways (cf. the aforementioned Mulan; see also Pacific Rim and its spinoff "Mako Mori Test", discussed in the "Web Originals" section below). There's nothing necessarily wrong with a feminist film flunking the Bechdel Test. What's a problem is that it becomes a pattern when so many movies fail the test, while very few show male characters whose lives seem to revolve around women, that says uncomfortable thingsabout the way Hollywood handles gender. There are also lesser-known variations of the test, such as the Race Bechdel Test, in which two characters of colour talk about anything other than the white leads, and the Reverse Bechdel Test, with the roles of men and women swapped.It's obviously easier for a TV series, especially one with an Ensemble Cast, to pass this test than a film, because there's far more time for the conversation to occur in. To compensate for this, Bechdel-inspired analyses of television often look episode-by-episode, giving an final average (such as 7/13 if seven episodes pass in a 13 episode season,) or compare the series' passing Bechdel's Test with its passing a "reverse Bechdel test" (even without such compensation, it's often surprising to notice how long it takes many TV shows to pass). Another tactic would be the probability that a typical two-hour collection of episodes would pass.Compare The Smurfette Principle. Works that follow The Smurfette Principle include a female character strictly for demographic appeal but make no real attempt to treat her as an interesting character in her own right, outside of her relationships with the male characters. See also Never a Self-Made Woman, which shows that even a well rounded female character with her own goals is most often only relevant to the story by her relationship to a man. Finally, see Token Romance and Romantic Plot Tumor for the effects of Hollywood's belief that both male and female audiences are generally uninterested in female characters except in the context of romance with a male character. See also Deggans Rule, which is a similar rule regarding race.For other tropes regarding the representation of gender in media, see Gender-Equal Ensemble (self-explanatory) and Chromosome Casting (works featuring only male characters or only female, but not both).And for those curious, it's pronounced Bec-tal, as in rhymes with Rectal

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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheBechdelTest

http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/the-rule