She just needs to be intelligent and witty and interesting in the way women, the world over are, if we ever got a chance to really know them on the silver screen. She doesn’t have to live up to an unrealistic feminist standard. She cannot live in an inexplicably perfect apartment in an expensive city with no visible means of affording said inexplicably perfect apartment.Ħ. She has friends who look like her so they need to show up once in a while.ĥ. At least half the time, this woman needs to be a woman of color and/or a transgender woman and/or a queer woman because all these women exist! Though she is different, her story should not focus solely on this difference because she is a sum of her parts. If she must engage in a romantic storyline, she doesn’t have to compromise her sanity or common sense for love.Ĥ. Her world is populated with intelligent women who also have stories worth telling, even if their stories aren’t the focus of the movie.ģ. She is not relegated to the role of sidekick, romantic interest, or bit player.Ģ. Writer Roxane Gay went full-on fantasy league in a six-part wish list for a revised test, reproduced below.ġ. “The point of the Bechdel test has been lost in obsessive application,” which now “comes across as arbitrary.” Just because a film includes a scrap of conversation between two women about something other than a man does not necessarily mean that the film has any meaningful interest in women.” For my colleague Amanda Hess, the problem lies in trying to derive best practices from what was, originally, “a hilarious and eye-opening point about the lack of fully-realized female characters on film,” not an earnest solution. And most movies don’t meet the Bechdel test now, so I’m not sure the thing is ripe for a revision.” Yet, as film critic Karina Longworth argues, the criteria are “too easy to satisfy in a superficial way. “If movies can’t even meet that low standard, that says something. “I do think that it’s such a low bar for good reason,” writer Michelle Dean emailed to me. What should we ask of movies in terms of depicting women creatively, responsibly, compellingly? One theme I heard repeatedly was that the current BT remains a useful diagnostic tool. I reached out to some female critics and writers to get a sense of what their revised BT might look like.
![the gay test this test works on the principle that people the gay test this test works on the principle that people](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/580025f66b8f5b2dabbe4291/9575eff8-f1a6-45f7-ba7d-63dcdd4f935e/Yes_announcement10.jpg)
Not that her hesitation mattered-the BT had taken on a life of its own. “I just can’t seem to rise to the occasion of talking about this fundamental principle over and over again, as if it’s somehow new, or open to debate,” she wrote last fall, noting that calls for subtler artistic portrayals of women dated back at least to Virginia Woolf in 1926. Yet Bechdel herself expressed ambivalence about the yardstick’s viral spread.
![the gay test this test works on the principle that people the gay test this test works on the principle that people](https://rss.org.uk/getmedia/dabb8cde-abe0-49a6-956b-564db2331613/RSS-Diagnostic-tests-report-FINAL-cover400.png)
In November 2013, Swedish theaters even announced that they would begin factoring compliance with Bechdel’s three-pronged standard into their film ratings.
![the gay test this test works on the principle that people the gay test this test works on the principle that people](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Esk_Product_Inclusion-Index.jpg)
It was applied to Oscar nominations and pop music. It paved the way for countless blog posts, visualizations, and spin-off projects (See: the Deggans Rule, the Smurfette Principle, the Russo Test). The tongue-in-cheek standard caught fire, first on the Internet and then offline. The Bechdel Test, the brainchild of cartoonist Alison Bechdel, bubbled out of a 1985 comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For.It was Bechdel’s modest proposal for assessing how well a given film represented its female characters, and it went like so: Do you, movie, feature two or more named women? Do they talk to each other? About something besides a guy? If so, then congratulations! You have passed the Bechdel Test.