I was having lunch with a friend last week when she turned to me and said she’d discovered this awesome new thing called the Bechdel Test, and had I heard of it?
Now, one of the dangers of spending most of my time on feminist websites is that I sometimes forget that there are people who don’t know what the Bechdel Test is.
But then again, I also often forget that there are people who will watch a movie without obsessively analyzing it for weeks after (although in my defence, this is my roommate’s fault).
We usually don’t think that the films and shows we watch either require or deserve the same level of critical attention as, say, a book would. This is dangerous, since a) we consume tonnes of TV, and b) studies have shown that what we see on screen profoundly affects how we think about our world.
This is especially true for our ideas about gender.
The Bechdel Test is a crucial part of anybody’s arsenal of critical tools. Invented in 1985 by Alison Bechdel in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, it requires that a film have 1) two female characters 2) who talk to each other 3) about something other than a man.
I’m sorry to tell you this, but your favourite film probably doesn’t pass.
It’s not a litmus test for feminism; it’s solely a measure of women’s presence in media. The test deliberately sets the bar low, which makes it even more depressing when you realize how little things have improved since 1985.
Only half of the top-grossing films of 2013 pass, and most of those only dubiously. The Hobbit passes thanks to a few seconds’ conversation between two background characters (of its 20 main characters, only one is a woman); Iron Man 3 squeaks by because Natasha hands Pepper some files.
But even if a show has good female representation, such as NBC’s Hannibal, the protagonist is usually male. This can lead to “fridging,” when a female character is killed to give the male protagonist some character development; her story arc is sacrificed for his.
The phenomenon is named after an incident in a Green Lantern comic, when the hero finds his wife chopped up and stuffed into a refrigerator by the villain.
A few weeks ago, Hannibal fans raised a ruckus when the show killed off a favourite female character. Hannibal’s creator, Bryan Fuller, takes pains to make sure his show has solid female representation, but Hannibal is — at heart — a battle of wills between three men. Beverly wasn’t exploitatively fridged, but she was expendable.
It doesn’t matter how awesome your female characters are: If your protagonists are always male, your female characters are always less important.
Once we get past the problem of representation, we fall headlong into another issue, which is that the vast majority of writers, directors and producers are men. Seriously, spend some time checking out the credits next time you watch TV. It’s notoriously difficult for female screenwriters to make it, let alone change the established culture of screenwriting.
Female characters’ attitudes, ideas and goals are determined by a group of almost 100 per cent dudes. Almost everything that shows up on our screens is dictated by the perspectives of a single gender.
This leads to a myriad of problems, one of which is male gaze, the phenomenon by which the camera assumes male viewership, and treats its female characters as objects to behold rather than as subjects for the viewer to identify with.
This can be blatant (lingering shots over a character’s legs or cleavage, needlessly sexualized female bodies inserted into background shots, etc.) or subtle, like the character who emerges from an explosion with perfect hair and makeup, lest anything interfere with her attractiveness to the (presumed heterosexual male) viewer.
The implied message? The character’s integrity matters less than her attractiveness.
Clothing often reflects this. Why is that superhero wearing heels? Because they make her butt look good, not because they help her fight crime. (Listen, Black Widow would never wear wedges to fight an alien army, OK?)
So if you’d never heard of the Bechdel Test before, then huzzah! Your critical feminist film lexicon now has some new terms.
Our TV is entertainment, sure, but it’s also implicitly telling us what women should do and be — and that’s always worth talking about.
