"Sure, the Bechdel test is imperfect (Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker doesn't pass, for instance, but you could hardly argue that a female-helmed war movie doesn't empower at least one woman), but that doesn't make it useless as a starting line for sniffing out broad trends in gender bias. And that's what we're talking about here. Trends. Analysis. Examination. Critical thought. Information. I'm sure there are plenty of people who consider themselves scrupulously egalitarian who never even noticed that there are only like THREE WOMEN IN ALL OF MIDDLE EARTH."
I understand that this is just a thing introduced by a a few movie theaters, i.e. it's not the law or anything (yet). Yet, that's what riles me most: as librarians are the first to defend any censorship, movie professionals should push back on any arbitrary limitation on what can be shown. Some examples of movies that fail the test are given, e.g. LOTHR Trilogy, Pulp Fiction, Pacific Rim, etc. However, the test would also exclude many art films such as Tarkovski's Stalker and Solaris. How about movies with only a single female lead that don't quite fit the purpose of the test, e.g. Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly? How to handle movies with no dialog, or experimental movies such as Eraserhead? One can easily see that this sort of simplistic testing can have little artistic or practical merit.
The point of the test isn't to be definitive (and it was recognised as so when it was created). Of course it's going to fail in extremely contrived films like Gravity or dialogueless films. It's not even about showing women in power - so the comment about The Hurt Locker empowering the producer is kind've irrelevant.
It's about movies in general not showing women and relationships between women as entities in their own right. It's about trying to move the needle back to the centre, not shoehorning women's dialogue into Koyaanisqatsi.
Haven't seen that one, but the first thing that popped into my head was "What about a movie like Moon?" I mean there was really just the one main character, and I suppose he talked to his wife and daughter who were both named so it gets an A grade. But they were the only two female characters that I remember and I don't think they really added a lot to the gender equality context seeing as they were the stay-at-home family back on earth.
The formula is just so simplistic. If you wanted to build a comprehensive metric you'd probably want to take a few factors into consideration. Maybe a ratio of dialogue to on-screen time for female characters vs. male characters. Perhaps number of non-traditional female roles vs. traditional roles. I don't know. There should be something better than an eye-test some comic from the 80's threw out there.
You're projecting a purpose onto the Bechdel test that it doesn't inherently possess. It doesn't tell you that any particular movie is bad for not passing it; obviously, a film can fail the test and still be a great work of art. And nobody is saying that movies that fail should be censored or limited.
The point of the test is to illustrate that, given that having a conversation between two women is such an astonishingly low bar, the fact that a large fraction of movies still can't clear it is a symptom of systematic biases within the industry.
My point was that there should be no bar to clear when making a movie (or writing a novel, story, etc.). Placing artificial limits like that is exactly the type of bias you're talking about, but swinging to the other direction.
Please tell me where in my comment I suggested that any artificial limits should be placed anywhere, because I assure you it was completely unintentional.
It's fine, for instance, if someone feels a really strong need to inform you that they have a pistol in their pocket. But if everyone, or even most people, are going around telling people that they have a pistol in their pocket... there isn't actually a scenario in which this says, "Things are still okay."
It's about what everyone is doing as a whole.
If a white guy kicks a black guy in the street, then hey, maybe one or both of those guys are jerks. If thousands of white guys are kicking thousands of black guys in the street, then maybe there's an issue here.
I think the Bechdel test can be viewed as a first iteration or a MVP. It builds interest and gets people talking and thinking about the test and the issue. Then it can be iterated and improved upon.
Maybe the downvoters can make an argument. I doubt it, since that is the reason people abuse the downvote button - to shut off an argument they are incapable of understanding.
I didn't down-vote you (and can't), but it may not be that people "are incapable of understanding" you, and instead objecting to your claim that a method for reviewing/appraising one aspect of a film is "designed to enforce slave morality on creative people".
Using less wildly provocative language may be more conducive to a rational discussion.
My language is not more "wildly provocative" than your use of the the phrase "wildly provocative". It's only "wildly provocative" to you because you didn't bother to understand it. The whole point of the Bechdel test is to promote a slave morality (in this case feminism). Insisting that nobody embellish their language a little is unworkable, as you illustrated by embellishing your own language.
Given that your first comment is a hysterical argument labelling your opposing philosophy as 'total degeneration' and 'slave morality', I think most people would be hard-pressed to believe you were actually interested in discussion over soap-boxing. It's reinforced when you call people too stupid to understand you. What possible value can come out of engaging you?
Feminism is a slave morality by definition. I didn't invent the term. You're welcome to reject advances in Western Philosophy if you like. The value that comes out of engaging me is talking to someone who is interested in more than mere gossip. I mean, look at your comment: no more than questioning my credentials, in response to a comment of mine suggesting that maybe people put forward some _actual content_. Amazing
Despite your clumsy attempt at flowery terms, you're clearly a troll. Anyway, this exchange is exactly why the HN guidelines state: Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
That you think the terms "slave morality" and "total degeneration" are "extreme rhetoric" illustrates that you didn't understand the post. The point of reading is not to find any old interpretation, but to figure out what the poster meant. It's because of these highly superficial readings that the GP is allowed to get away with inserting the assumption that these sort of measures represent improvement, in spite of the fact that at the limit of slave morality is total degeneration.
Because patriarchy is the slaving morality of the status quo?
You've never thought that the fact these little tests exists is because the level of male domination in social discourse is so high that it causes reactions such as yours when it is challenged?
You used the phrase, but perhaps if you want to not be a smartass, let's be clear about this in a way you haven't in the previous posts:
Male-dominated thinking is so prevalent in society that it is second nature. As a general rule, female leads are fewer than male leads, male roles have more significance than female roles in anything that's not romance and comedies, and there are significant differences in that which go beyond a mere reflection of society or properly-reasoned discrimination in the current world.
Thus, a couple of Swedes think it would be a good idea to let people know that this goes on, a lot, without any pretention of doing much more than pointing it out.
Replace "woman" with "racial minority", or "poor", and it still makes sense, although the points of contention are different. Minorities are underrepresented in most movies (that is, they are proportionally less prevalent than even reality in the roles they cast), or in the case of, for example, black people, are cast into very clearly-defined stereotypes which do not necessarily match reality, and worse, give no possibility to the fact that black people can be anything else other than a stereotype.
Keeping with the example of black in movies, although this has been changing, such changes can also happen in the unnatural role where a minority is purposefully put into a role that breaks stereotypes. That may be fine, but there is a broad spectrum of character diversity between stereotype roles and main characters put in place to "make a point" about diversity.
Even then, positions of patriarchy are still so embedded that the way in which minorities are represented, even with the intention of breaking stereotypes, can be flawed.
That is what this test is about, with regards to gender equality, and I fail to see anything surprising about it.
You don't even understand what slave morality is. Why do you respond to things you don't understand? The fact that you think what you just wrote is in contradiction to my position proves it. Idiot
This has to be one of the most absurd things I've heard all day. And when you work where I do, you hear a lot of absurd things.
People have often lambasted those who scream and wince whenever an ounce of political correctness shows up in society/media.
Well, to those people: look at your work. Did you want to encourage censorship?
Of course, I'm overblowing this thing way too much. But 5, ten, maybe even 20 years ago, if this kind of thing happened, people would revolt. For some reason, censorship in the name of equality seems to be the norm in today's world.
Having seen both the Swedish and American versions of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo I have to say Sweden is a bit ahead when it comes to gender representation, so they're doing something right somewhere.
On the other hand, Harry Potter was written by a self-proclaimed feminist and has a very empowering female in Hermione Granger, if that series fails the Bechdel Test then I'm left wondering how many other false-positives the test throws. Even The Vagina Monologues fails the Bechdel Test (to be fair, because monologues).
It's definitely a flawed metric, but I doubt most metrics start out perfectly and there is nothing wrong with that. It's value is in starting a dialogue and I am sure it can be improved with iteration.
Some minor issues fact-based movies, documentaries: biographical movies (if it is the story of a man and there are no women in his life that doesn't necessarily make it chauvinistic), historical movies (if it is a movie about anti-feminist or chauvinistic events, does that necessarily make it anti-feminist even if the goal is to educate?)
The general problem that I see in both the test and the problem it's designed to solve is this mental shortcut of an either/or grouping. Male/female, pass/fail.
But if it helps some people start dialogue then that's wonderful, at the same time I think the intersectionalist feminists deserve some positive attention for searching out new ways to get the conversations going.
> at the same time I think the intersectionalist feminists deserve some positive attention for searching out new ways to get the conversations going.
I'm confused that you say this, but do not actually link any such ways. I'd personally be happy to give them some positive attention, but feminism isn't something I spend much time on so I don't know the latest stuff going on.
That's fair, I've just had positive personal experiences with the intersectionalists IRL. As a guy, I've felt the conversations have been less adversarial and more productive.
I can say it's a more nuanced critique of privilege then say radical feminism, but whether my positive experiences are rooted in a better theory or just in the people attracted to it I don't really know.
It throws a lot of false positive and false negatives; it's not actually useful for any analysis involving rigor. Never use it to make a final judgement call.
But it can serve as a smoke test. Harry Potter, for instance, does have a fairly empowering female in Hermione, but the series itself has a lot of problems, not all of them feminist in nature. Not sure how much spoilering or detail I really ought to go into it here.
This is a strange blind spot for film to have, especially with regard to genres like science fiction or fantasy where the art is limited only by the creator's imagination and conventional boundaries are expected to be tested.
Maybe Hollywood's worried that target audiences won't identify with a female lead, maybe the formula's considered too risky for a blockbuster. But surely there's an alternate universe somewhere with aliens or magic where (hold on to your hats) a matriarchal society somehow evolved and manages to be part of the fabric of the story without characters constantly drawing attention to it, comparing it to Earth, having it set up a battle of the sexes, etc.
Maybe if feminists (part of the parasitic political class) spent less time being resentful of what others have built and built something themselves they'd have less reason to be resentful in the first place. Now we're living not just with the reactive feminist losers, but the reactive-reactive super-loser MRA types.
Your comment is up there with the "worst garbage" on HN. An inconvenient opinion that you have no answer to (see next paragraph), answered with a laughable accusation of "extreme sexism". Get a life, loser.
>You might as well have said civil rights leaders should have sucked it up and built something themselves.
You might as well have brought the slaves of Sparta into the discussion. The conditions of women trying to produce their own films aren't even in the same _sport_ as the broad issues facing blacks during the civil rights movement. This is one mark of the egalitarian: to covertly exploit those weaker than him in order to press forward his own interests.
>But out of place - this is for serious discussion.
Yes, like your moronic attack on me. Grow a brain.
In other words, you ignored the content of my comment and went looking for _dirt_ you could use against me. Bravo, you complete imbecile. And I am anti-egalitarian - feminism is just the current vogue in the tech scene, which is currently degenerating both technically and socially. And your behavior of gossiping about my account is a prime example.
55 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 97.0 ms ] threadEven Jezebel (http://jezebel.com/sweden-introduces-new-movie-rating-system...) has to admit the "test" is not perfect:
"Sure, the Bechdel test is imperfect (Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker doesn't pass, for instance, but you could hardly argue that a female-helmed war movie doesn't empower at least one woman), but that doesn't make it useless as a starting line for sniffing out broad trends in gender bias. And that's what we're talking about here. Trends. Analysis. Examination. Critical thought. Information. I'm sure there are plenty of people who consider themselves scrupulously egalitarian who never even noticed that there are only like THREE WOMEN IN ALL OF MIDDLE EARTH."
I understand that this is just a thing introduced by a a few movie theaters, i.e. it's not the law or anything (yet). Yet, that's what riles me most: as librarians are the first to defend any censorship, movie professionals should push back on any arbitrary limitation on what can be shown. Some examples of movies that fail the test are given, e.g. LOTHR Trilogy, Pulp Fiction, Pacific Rim, etc. However, the test would also exclude many art films such as Tarkovski's Stalker and Solaris. How about movies with only a single female lead that don't quite fit the purpose of the test, e.g. Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly? How to handle movies with no dialog, or experimental movies such as Eraserhead? One can easily see that this sort of simplistic testing can have little artistic or practical merit.
It's about movies in general not showing women and relationships between women as entities in their own right. It's about trying to move the needle back to the centre, not shoehorning women's dialogue into Koyaanisqatsi.
The formula is just so simplistic. If you wanted to build a comprehensive metric you'd probably want to take a few factors into consideration. Maybe a ratio of dialogue to on-screen time for female characters vs. male characters. Perhaps number of non-traditional female roles vs. traditional roles. I don't know. There should be something better than an eye-test some comic from the 80's threw out there.
But then again, Moon does have two female characters so maybe it deserves a 1/3.
The point of the test is to illustrate that, given that having a conversation between two women is such an astonishingly low bar, the fact that a large fraction of movies still can't clear it is a symptom of systematic biases within the industry.
It's fine, for instance, if someone feels a really strong need to inform you that they have a pistol in their pocket. But if everyone, or even most people, are going around telling people that they have a pistol in their pocket... there isn't actually a scenario in which this says, "Things are still okay."
It's about what everyone is doing as a whole.
If a white guy kicks a black guy in the street, then hey, maybe one or both of those guys are jerks. If thousands of white guys are kicking thousands of black guys in the street, then maybe there's an issue here.
Using less wildly provocative language may be more conducive to a rational discussion.
Cheerio.
You've never thought that the fact these little tests exists is because the level of male domination in social discourse is so high that it causes reactions such as yours when it is challenged?
Male-dominated thinking is so prevalent in society that it is second nature. As a general rule, female leads are fewer than male leads, male roles have more significance than female roles in anything that's not romance and comedies, and there are significant differences in that which go beyond a mere reflection of society or properly-reasoned discrimination in the current world.
Thus, a couple of Swedes think it would be a good idea to let people know that this goes on, a lot, without any pretention of doing much more than pointing it out.
Replace "woman" with "racial minority", or "poor", and it still makes sense, although the points of contention are different. Minorities are underrepresented in most movies (that is, they are proportionally less prevalent than even reality in the roles they cast), or in the case of, for example, black people, are cast into very clearly-defined stereotypes which do not necessarily match reality, and worse, give no possibility to the fact that black people can be anything else other than a stereotype.
Keeping with the example of black in movies, although this has been changing, such changes can also happen in the unnatural role where a minority is purposefully put into a role that breaks stereotypes. That may be fine, but there is a broad spectrum of character diversity between stereotype roles and main characters put in place to "make a point" about diversity.
Even then, positions of patriarchy are still so embedded that the way in which minorities are represented, even with the intention of breaking stereotypes, can be flawed.
That is what this test is about, with regards to gender equality, and I fail to see anything surprising about it.
People have often lambasted those who scream and wince whenever an ounce of political correctness shows up in society/media.
Well, to those people: look at your work. Did you want to encourage censorship?
Of course, I'm overblowing this thing way too much. But 5, ten, maybe even 20 years ago, if this kind of thing happened, people would revolt. For some reason, censorship in the name of equality seems to be the norm in today's world.
Harrison Bergeron, indeed.
On the other hand, Harry Potter was written by a self-proclaimed feminist and has a very empowering female in Hermione Granger, if that series fails the Bechdel Test then I'm left wondering how many other false-positives the test throws. Even The Vagina Monologues fails the Bechdel Test (to be fair, because monologues).
Some minor issues fact-based movies, documentaries: biographical movies (if it is the story of a man and there are no women in his life that doesn't necessarily make it chauvinistic), historical movies (if it is a movie about anti-feminist or chauvinistic events, does that necessarily make it anti-feminist even if the goal is to educate?)
The general problem that I see in both the test and the problem it's designed to solve is this mental shortcut of an either/or grouping. Male/female, pass/fail.
But if it helps some people start dialogue then that's wonderful, at the same time I think the intersectionalist feminists deserve some positive attention for searching out new ways to get the conversations going.
I'm confused that you say this, but do not actually link any such ways. I'd personally be happy to give them some positive attention, but feminism isn't something I spend much time on so I don't know the latest stuff going on.
I can say it's a more nuanced critique of privilege then say radical feminism, but whether my positive experiences are rooted in a better theory or just in the people attracted to it I don't really know.
But it can serve as a smoke test. Harry Potter, for instance, does have a fairly empowering female in Hermione, but the series itself has a lot of problems, not all of them feminist in nature. Not sure how much spoilering or detail I really ought to go into it here.
If a tool carries a lot of weight, has little accuracy and is only used against one's opponents - that tool has a lot in common with a bludgeon.
Maybe Hollywood's worried that target audiences won't identify with a female lead, maybe the formula's considered too risky for a blockbuster. But surely there's an alternate universe somewhere with aliens or magic where (hold on to your hats) a matriarchal society somehow evolved and manages to be part of the fabric of the story without characters constantly drawing attention to it, comparing it to Earth, having it set up a battle of the sexes, etc.
Good luck.
You might as well have said civil rights leaders should have sucked it up and built something themselves. As if that's not what they were doing.
Or excellent troll. But out of place - this is for serious discussion.
Your comment is up there with the "worst garbage" on HN. An inconvenient opinion that you have no answer to (see next paragraph), answered with a laughable accusation of "extreme sexism". Get a life, loser.
>You might as well have said civil rights leaders should have sucked it up and built something themselves.
You might as well have brought the slaves of Sparta into the discussion. The conditions of women trying to produce their own films aren't even in the same _sport_ as the broad issues facing blacks during the civil rights movement. This is one mark of the egalitarian: to covertly exploit those weaker than him in order to press forward his own interests.
>But out of place - this is for serious discussion.
Yes, like your moronic attack on me. Grow a brain.
You are not worth my time.
Ahem.
I'm sorry you weren't able to recognize me as your better. I hope your chronic stupidity is duly cured someday.
Did I do it right?
http://bechdeltest.com/view/91/