The Bechdel test will hopefully be familiar to the reader base of Unconquered Peaks, but just to make sure that everyone is with me: The Bechdel test is a measure of the inclusion of women in media, which asks whether there are two women who speak to each other about something that isn’t a man. The test was the subject of an 1985 comic strip by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, which features two women deciding to choose a film at the cinema based on the rules of the test. They are unable to find a film that passes, so they go home. Bechdel credits the rules to her friend Liz Wallace (and prefers the name Bechdel-Wallace Test), and suspects that Wallace was inspired by Virginia Woolf. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf notes that ‘All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. … And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. … They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men.’ Over fifty years later, Bechdel and Wallace sought to highlight this disparity between the depth of portrayal of women and men, and still today, this gap has not been closed.
According to the user-edited database bechdeltest.com, only 58% of over 8000 films listed pass all three requirements of the test, with the added requirement that the two women present must be named. There are several reasons why a film might fail the test other than gender bias. For instance, the film may be set somewhere like a medieval monastery or trenches during World War Two, where it would make practical sense for there to be no women present. There may also be a limited cast, consisting of only two or even one character. However, such films are not all that common, and films set in contemporary times with large casts must still answer for themselves. The film critic Kyle Smith wrote in 2017 that stories about women ‘aren’t commercial enough for Hollywood studios’, because ‘Hollywood movies are about people on the extremes of society — cops, criminals, superheroes — [which] tend to be men.’ I sincerely hope you are all bristling at this as hard as I am, as this is incredibly dismissive of the scope of women’s experiences. An obvious argument against this is the existence of Wonder Woman, introduced in the Marvel comics in 1941, and a plethora of other superheroines. As well, the denial of the possibility for women’s stories to be exciting in a sweeping blanket statement is textbook misogyny, and demonstrates why it is important that women are represented in media with the same depth and nuance as women demonstrate in real life.
The Bechdel-Wallace test has been criticised by modern feminists as a very low bar to set for a piece of media to qualify as ‘feminist’. This is absolutely right, as it is a very small thing to have just one conversation centred around women. Even if this is present, there can be other aspects of the film which are misogynistic, so a film can be distinctly ‘un-feminist’ despite passing the test. There can also be a prominent female character who is not shown speaking to other women but is still a developed character in her own right. However, these criticisms severely miss the point of the test. Bechdel and Wallace intended to point out the underrepresentation of women in film, rather than to devise an easy litmus test for a film to be categorised as feminist. Bechdel has expressed her surprise at the popularity of the Bechdel test in modern mainstream feminism and film criticism, and has described the test as a ‘little lesbian joke in an alternative feminist newspaper’.
Bechdel has said that ‘the secret subversive goal of [her] work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.’ As evidenced by Kyle Smith, people are all to willing to take for granted the impression media gives that men are inherently more interesting than women. The Bechdel-Wallace test is illuminating on the way that women are all too often represented only as their relationships to men. This is obviously a reductive view of women in general, but it is interesting to consider the test through a lesbian lens. Bechdel’s lesbianism is an important influence on and common subject of her work. While representation of women only in relation to men is limiting of all women, it is particularly alienating to lesbians, as it is impossible to see one’s lesbian self and experience reflected in an on-screen portrayal of womanhood that is centred around men. The writer Charles Stross claims that ‘if you extend [the third rule of the test] only slightly, to read “About something besides men or marriage or babies”, you can strike out about 50% of the small proportion of mass entertainment movies that do otherwise seem to pass the test’. This is reminiscent of Woolf’s observation that if women in media are anything outside of wives or girlfriends, they are mothers. Motherhood is considered as or portrayed as a central aspect of womanhood, and this further estranges lesbians. This is why intersectionality in any area of feminism is important, as overemphasis of any one aspect of womanhood fails to be effective in the fight for equality for all women.
The film critic Robbie Collin has condemned the Bechdel-Wallace test for prioritising ‘box-ticking and stat-hoarding over analysis and appreciation’. Indeed, depth of analysis is important when considering depth of female representation. However, as previously stated, the test is simply a means to quickly and easily assess whether women are represented, and should not be used as a substitute for critical thinking on the matter but as a starting point. It is indeed a box ticking exercise, but this makes it easy to apply and therefore useful in gathering statistics.
I shall leave you with this fun fact: The song ‘Baby Got Back’ by Sir Mix-A-Lot passes the Bechdel -Wallace test on account of beginning with a female speaker saying ‘Oh my God, Becky, look at her butt’.
