One of the things I like about Sentinels of the Multiverse is that if it were a movie, it would be very easy for it to pass the Bechdel Test.
What’s the Bechdel Test? There’s a whole lot of backstory, but the simple definition of a movie that passes it is:
It has at least two [named] women in it…
Who say at least one complete sentence to each other…
About something besides a man.
It is astonishing how many movies fail this test. Even Joss Whedon’s Avengers movie fails. (Although last year’s Thor passed.)
What are your thoughts on the Bechdel Test? Does it bother you when women are token characters? Or does it bother you when people judge movies by how often women speak to each other? Or is it something that you’ve never thought about one way or the other?
It bothers me as much as the fact that gay characters as role-models in mainstream fiction are still underrepresented. At least there were women who kicked ass in The Avengers.
It bothers me. I’ll admit that I don’t notice it as quickly as my wife does.
On Avengers, I think Joss was pretty constrained by the gender of the existing characters combined with there being so many characters to fit in that there wasn’t room to introduce new ones.
btw… has anybody here read Funhome by Alison Bechdel? I dont think I would base a cardgame on it but it is one of my alltime favorite comics. Short version: it is the story of her growing up and realizing that she is a lesbian. At the same time there is a mystery… her dad may have been gay and may have commited suicide. Bechdel jumps back and forth a lot in an annecdotal style that actually reminded me a little bit of Kurt Vonnegut.
As for the Bechdel test she did not coin it (heard an interview with her on Slate recently) but yeah, it is a low bar and if a movie cannot clear that bar, it is a bad sign.
I think what bothers me is, if I’m not mistaken, the only Star Wars movie to pass the test is Phantom Menace.
(A New Hope is close, with two women, but they never talk to each other.)
I think it’s a good starting point, but ultimately too simple to really be an accurate gauge of a movie’s treatment of women. The comics chwineka posted are a good simple example of how that works.
A movie doesn’t HAVE to pass the Bechdel test to be good, but the sheer proportion of them that fail utterly at it is depressing.
It kind of doesn’t bother me at all. Most movies only feature a few main characters, usually only actually centering around two of them. And most of that time it is usually a male and female in the lead, unless it is an action movie than chances are it’ll be either one male or a male duo. Movies have such a short time frame that it just doesn’t allow too much character depth, unless they plan on making a series of movies much like Marvel is doing with the Avenger’s characters. Now could they have added in The Wasp? Sure, but who really cares about her in the long run? Not to mention it would of had to toss in Ant Man otherwise it wouldn’t make sense, thus cutting down the rest of the cast time and so on. Now they could always extend the length of movies, but I know I don’t want to sit down and watch the same movie that is going on for hours on end. That’s why T.V. shows are really interesting because I bet more of those pass the test because of the fact they can have a bigger cast and will last significantly longer than a movie so they all will get plenty of screen time.
Why does it blow your suspension of disbelief? There are no situations in which only one gender interacts in real life, therefore you can’t believe it’s happening in a movie? Do Bridesmaids, The Descent, or White Oleander seem unrealistic because they are almost entirely female casts?
I haven’t seen any of those movies. Do they pass the reverse-Bechdel test – two men having a discussion about something unrelated to the women characters?
Speaking of the test… just started reading her new book “Are you my Mother”. So far it is not as good as Funhome was, but that is because it does not have the hook that funhome had.
I haven’t seen any of those movies. I am only slightly ashamed to say that I read the book White Oleander and I loved it in that way that reserved for Oprah Book Club books. The book has lots of male characters though, and since I work in social services with children, a lot of it was, depressingly, very believable to me (honestly, the pseudo-happy ending was the least believable part). And, though I have not seen it, everything I have heard about Bridesmaids leads me to believe that I would find it obnoxious and unbelievable for a host of reasons…
Really, as a member of the community, I see who the police officers are and the female cops are A. extant and B. just as goofy looking/over weight as the male cops. I’ve served on disaster preparedness committees (so much fun, let me tell you!) and those tend to be pretty gender balanced. I have lots of friends and family in the military and again, there are lots of women there too. I can suspend my disbelief for aliens or magic, but an entire biochem lab, police department, or what-have-you with only one woman? It feels contrived. Or worse, a family wherein the women never actually speak to each other about anything other than the men in that family? I don’t think I could make that work if I tried (in my family, we have the oh-so-healthy habit of discussing everyone who is not there, regardless of gender :P).
And then, there’s the idea that all women do is talk about men. To be fair, I do sometimes talk to women about men… the last conversation I had with another woman about men was only a few nights ago, but we were specifically making fun of our husbands at the time, so I don’t know if it counts. Most of the conversations I have with women are about work, my pregnancy (I’m huge right now so this is the main topic of conversation I have with just about every human being I see), hobbies, family, politics, funny/interesting things we read/saw on the internet, planning outings, you know, the same things that I talk to men about and the same things that men talk about with men (except, I think fewer people have conversations about my pregnancy who are not me…).
Usually it’s those really basic, unassuming things like group dynamics that blow my disbelief, especially in movies where the whole premise in not super believable (like, super heros or aliens or magic).
You have to understand that movies are just a slice of the whole picture, not the whole thing. You’re not often seeing the WHOLE police department or biochem lab, you’re seeing a segment of it, the people that interact with each other. There are entire days when I leave my house and only interact with other men, there are days where I only interact with women. If, in the interest of telling a story in a 2-hour time period, a movie chooses to show you sections of a characters’ life in which they only interact with half of the populous, there’s nothing contrived or unrealistic about it. The desire for more accurate female representation is good, but the dismissal of good films as contrived because they don’t have it is overkill. Does The Godfather feel contrived? Or Citizen Kane? What about Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, or Lord of the Rings? I don’t assume that Michael Corleone only spoke to 3 or 4 women in his lifetime, or that they never interacted, but I can assume their interaction isn’t something we need to see to further the narrative. A movie isn’t meant to show you a complete portrait of reality, it’s meant to tell a story. No one’s interested in watching an ENTIRE family discussion over dinner, we just want to see the parts that are relevant to the plot.
For me the other thing (building on what beevolant has to say) is that good roles for women are often a sign of a mature writer. Most genre work can still be fairly sexist and male centric in ways that are not representative of the material so much of the authors shortcomings. “I need two doctors… and they will both be male because I have no clue what they would talk about if one was female”. That is why one of my favorite runs in comics was Exiles… the team had about as many female members as males and everyone was interesting.
Yes. This exactly. If the only piece of the picture you, as a writer, deem as “relevant” is the piece about only men (in a mixed gendered space) then there’s a high statistical likelihood that you are lazy. It’s kind of the writing equivalent of the boobs+butt pose for female comic characters - unrealistic and contrived. Or all of the female characters drawn with comically large breasts/all of the male comic characters drawn with all sorts of musculature that does not exist in nature (humans only have one set of lats people! ONE set!).
Not to say that there aren’t a lot of examples of good writing between male characters, there are thousands of them I’m sure since that’s the VAST majority of writing in popular culture. It’s the fact that that’s basically all that there is that is the problem and leads to the cop-out/laziness that so detracts from believability for me… if that makes sense.
Yeah, the boob+butt pose is a particularly embarrasing symptom of sexism in comics. Personally I’ve just had all the cheesecake I could want for a lifetime, I spent my puberty reading early 90’s marvel and image books. These days I gravitate more to “realistic” artists but hey, if I could wake up drawing like Adam Hughes or Frank Cho I would not complain.
Going back to writers, I think the funniest symptom of an inability to write women is all the lesbian characters you get in genre fiction. I think a lot of writers cannot differentiate themselves from their characters and therefore feel a little “weird” writing about having a crush on a guy… so all love interests will always be female. In video games that produced an odd effect until Dragon Age came around… but mostly romantic interests where female so your character had to either be a straight male or a lesbian woman. You know… so mostly straight male gamers don’t freak out from having to kiss a guy (either with a female or male character).
In that regard my favorite are the Hernandez Bros of Love and Rockets… they have written really honest, touching and powerful love stories around any conceivable combination of partners.
