Gee, a formula to detect a female thought pattern. How very simplistic. Do you have a formula to test for the Black perspective?
It's not my formula, bub. You can credit a feminist with that one, actually. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test
OK, I'm confused. She was strong, smart, and in the chain of command. In a film made in 1979--1979!!--she was in a military organization where women were equal to men. She wasn't there as a nurse or secretary or cook or "counselor". She didn't wear a miniskirt. She didn't nervously pick up a gun after all the men died; she knew how to use that gun, and being able to use it was part of her job. She didn't squeal and cry and hug the little girl and wait for some man to rescue her; she went out and blasted the little girl to safety, on her own. How is that not a feminist perspective? Now, I don't necessarily link the Bechdel test and feminism, but I was nevertheless confused by your assertion. I'm also not absolutely positive that Alien _does_ pass the Bechdel test - did Ripley have any conversations with any of the other women? (Unless you count "Get away from her, you bitch!"; the alien was female, after all.) But feminist? Oh, yeah. But it's not about feminism in a political sense, and certainly not in a modern political sense, it's about whether the women are treated as real people at all. For example, _Anne of Green Gables_ wasn't a feminist book, but it had plenty of women talking to other women about plenty of things other than men. The same for Agatha Christie's Miss Marple novels - and, of course, thousands of other novels. Think of the reverse - think of the question of whether fictional works: - Have at least two male characters - Who talk to each other - About something other than a woman. How many works that contain more than one male character, don't qualify on the second and third criteria? Sure, a perfectly good work can have zero or one man. But if you have a second man, wouldn't it feel a little creepy if the men's substantial conversations--the ones about how to win the war or fight the disease or find the magical whatsit or detect the murderer or pass the law or win the trial--were _always_ with a woman and not another man? And when the two men talk together, they're never having those conversations, or even conversations about their latest best time on the one-mile run or how the Superbowl went, but are instead _always_ talking about women? Captain Kirk and Spock, let's say, discuss the solutions to the Enterprise's problems only with Uhura and Nurse Chapel. When Kirk and Spock and McCoy and Sulu get together, they just talk _about_ Uhura and Nurse Chapel, and about Spock's mother, and that woman that McCoy used to date that became a salt vampire. Imagine that Jayne (a man) on Firefly only discusses tactics and the next job with Kaylee or Zoe. When he's with Mal, they discuss Kaylee and Zoe, and Inara, and Jayne's mother. Only when a woman walks in to join the conversation do they discuss tactics and the job. To choose a low-ranked character, imagine that Charlie, on West Wing, only discusses his job and government matters with CJ (a woman) and Zoe and Donna. When he's with the President, they never discuss the business of the country - they discuss Charlie's love life and the President's conflicts with his wife and how the President feels about Charlie dating his daughter. Imagine that Batman only discusses his plans, and that suit, with whatshername, the romantic interest whose name I can't remember. When he's talking to Commissioner Gordon, they discuss whatshername, and Gordon's wife. Most of our world is not about aspects of the opposite sex. Art, music, science, war, food, music darn near everything, can be discussed without that discussion centering around a specific person of the opposite sex. If male characters could only communicate about those elements of life through conversation with a woman, and never through conversation with a man, wouldn't that be pretty darn weird? Sure, it could happen once in a while that the male characters never talk to other male characters about anything but women, but if it _usually_ happened, in most fictional works, I'd start thinking that the authors in question didn't understand men, and that they weren't all that interest in learning about them. I haven't read it in a while, but I seem to remember that _Like Water for Chocolate_ largely fails this reverse test--the real characters are women, and the male characters only seem to exist in the context of their relationship with women. I think that it suffers as a result. I could gloat that there's _one_ work out there that treats men as objects, compared to the lots of them that treat women as such, but, no, it just bothers me. Flat characters are flat characters. Again, I'm confused. It's not the female thought pattern, it's whether the characters are treated as characters. If conversation between two characters of Category X is always conversation about characters of Category Y, while characters of Category Y talk about all sorts of things, that suggests that Category Y is being treated as the primary, "real" class of characters. You can, of course, disagree with that assertion, and I may be a bit uncertain about it myself, but it's not about a "female thought pattern."
A writer who needs to pass or use some sort of test of this nature needs to seriously consider whether they should be writing.
ChickenFreak's entire response gets my seal of approval. Feminism is not about bra burning but then again I suppose it is individual to everyone who is a feminist. For me it's about being treated like I'm on equal footing. That my thoughts, opinions, and feelings are just as valid as a man's. It's also about choice. It's the desire for freedom to make whatever choices you please in regard to your life and appearance without social backlash. I'm not a feminist that feels the need to burn bras or treat men like they are inferior. I just want to have the freedom to like what I like, express myself how I choose, and have autonomy over myself without being made to feel it is wrong, and not be made to feel like I'm just here to be seen and not heard. Wielding a weapon does not automatically make a female character strong. A strong female character is a character who is well rounded and makes her own decisions. It's that simple. There are different types of strength just as there are different types of intelligence. Not everyone is strong in the same way and that's a good thing because many situations will not call for physical strength alone.
Wow that's a bit of a blanket generalisation, don't you think? My husband doesn't talk about any of the things you claim men talk about. Or my dad, or my ex, or many of my other guy friends. I just feel like your generalisation make men sound really brainless and stupid, which is just as bad as saying all women talk about shopping and make-up and like to watch Desperate Housewives. Now, what do the men I know talk about? - work, films, philosophy/God, gaming, computers (husband's in IT, so it's inevitable), the news. Anyway, back to the Bechdel test, or whatever his name is - sounds like a really stupid test. What is a "female perspective" supposed to mean? If the main character is a woman, that it's probably from a female perspective (or if it isn't, then something is rather wrong). If I have a group of women chat about random things in my novel, but my novel is about, I dunno, alien invasion and my main character follows a macho guy who thinks all women are there to serve him - well, I have women talking to each other and I have more than one woman, and perhaps they're talking about how they're gonna miss Earth when they leave for Mars - does that mean I have represented a "female perspective"? Or does "female perspective" simply mean that the reader must relate to at least one female character in depth? Do any of those questions in the test actually assess whether there's any depth in the character and her interactions? Nope. If whether you're represented a perspective means to communicate how one side sees things in detail, to the point where the reader can understand and sympathise from that person's standpoint - then, well, you do that. Those questions bear no relation to how well you've done this. I remember I read somewhere on this forum - someone said, "Remember that your character is human before being either male or female." And I think that person's onto something here.
Based on every other post he's made in this forum, I suspect AV was being a bit facetious. Her name. Alison Bechdel, of Dykes To Watch Out For fame. The test isn't meant to be entirely serious, and the point wasn't that a movie - or anything else - that passed it was feminist or even good. The point was to illustrate just how many films didn't pass. For any individual film, you can say that maybe it wasn't needed by the plot, maybe it was set in a male-dominated environment, and that's not necessarily a problem. When 95% of the output of the film industry doesn't pass, it suggests that maybe there's something more systemic going on.
What a load of tosh this Bechdel has dreamt up. Why do you need another female character to show "the female perspective" (whatever that is)? Can't she express her opinions to a man, or have thoughts? Or actions? (I won't say what action my female perspective is expressing right now as I sit alone at my desk.)
MAJOR CLARIFICATIONS: 1. Alison Bechdel is a feminist cartoonist. She didn't come up with the Bechdel test per se, it was derived from an unnamed character in one of her comic strips from 1985 that said they were her three criteria before she watched a movie. Alison Bechdel isn't a scientist, never claimed any authority over the test, and as far as I know, has never publicly acknowledged its existence. 2. As many of you pointed out, the test is worthless if you take it one movie at a time. As I mentioned earlier, Fight Club is a fabulous movie, and there is really no need to provide a feminine perspective because it centers on male culture and identity. There's nothing wrong with movies like Fight Club, Star Wars, or any of the movies that fail the test. But when you look at all the hollywood movies out there, it becomes concerning how few movies pass this simple test. It's imbalanced. It's a systemic problem, not a problem with individual movies
It's even more concerning how few movies are worth watching, no matter how many characters of either gender are talking to whom.
I fail the Bechdel test. There's only three female characters in my novel, and two of them only meet once for the express purpose of an assassination. They talk for all of five seconds. It's not about men, but I'm not sure 'who are you? Get out!' counts as passing that third rule. As for 'getting the female perspective,' I'm going to go out on a limb and question the existence of such a thing. I remember making this argument with friends over the appointment of a 'police youth commissioner' in the UK, chosen to 'represent what young people think.' You can't represent what young people think, nor what women think, in an anywhere-near meaningful way, because social demographics do not have hive minds. They're all individuals in different circumstances with unitary factors largely irrelevant on a personal level. You can't ask 'what do women think?' about an issue any more than you can ask 'what would a Bhutanese person do in that situation?' You can have a female character: that's a female's perspective. But it's not the female perspective. The female perspective doesn't exist in any tangible sense you can put across in a book. Even if you could, you wouldn't need to pass Bechdel's test to do it. As Madhoca points out, the theoretical female perspective, if it can be expressed, can be expressed to a man, through an internal monologue, or in the narrative. Why do two women have to be present and alone? And why can't they talk about men? Don't women have a perspective on men, or a man - not even their fathers, sons, or brothers? The Bechdel test is asking for something you can't do in a way that is inherently contradictory.
Although, technically, if the object of the assassination is a man, and they were discussing him, insofar as killing him, even if the conversation were intense and even if there were multiple conversations about the target, the piece would still "fail" the test.
Sounds to me like you pass the Bechdel test. They talk, and not about a man. That's all it takes. That's why the number of movies that fail the test is so dismaying - because the test is so minimal and simple.
Really? That just makes it seem even more meaningless to me. Their brief discourse does nothing but move the plot, yet it's all it takes to get 'the female perspective' across. Incidentally I should add that the central theme in my novel is the contest between two different views on what constitutes 'masculinity.' The primary female character does regularly give her input and opinions throughout, only to men. I'd like to ask any proponents of this test why that's necessarily worse than with another woman.
No; the Bechdel test offers no assurance whatsoever of getting the female perspective across. It's three tiny steps more challenging than "someone speaks aloud in the movie". And _still_, a huge percentage of movies fail it. Females are so unimportant in movies, that a huge percentage of movies fail the test. Sadly, it's _meaningful_ that you have females that are significant enough to move the plot, and enough of them that they interact with each other without breathlessly using the opportunity to talk about a man. It's not "worse". If your book is about masculinity, then there may be no reason for you to have much interaction between female characters. Again, this is not primarily about individual works.
This test seems to be less about the "female perspective" than it is about female representation in general. But even then, the three criteria are way too vague to accurately show how women are portrayed in any sort of media - Pheonix's example definitely passed the test, but was still very sexist, while there have been characters like, say, Sarah Connor in the second Terminator film, who fails the test because she is the only main female character in the film, but she is still a strong character who gets stuff done. While sexism and other kinds of problematic elements do exist in today's media, they're a bit more complicated than something can be broken or fixed with a simple three-bullet checklist. Also, this pretty much nails it: (Not that it counts for much, but I pass the test every time. Because lesbians.)
Cogito, could you _please_ clarify what you're saying? Because right now, you seem to be saying that it's a stereotype to assert that women, when not in the company of men, retain the power of speech. I know you're not saying that. I know you're absolutely positively not saying that. But I really have absolutely no idea what you are saying. And I don't know how to communicate my complete confusion without communicating my interpretation of what you seem to be saying, however flippant it sounds.
Stereotypes such as requiring that a woman have a clique of other women to open up to, that she can't present her real self in the company of men, for example. Also, that a woman can't talk about a man without leaking IQ points. The entire model forces female characters to interact in a particular way in order to be taken seriously. Not to mention the implication that all a female character need do to qualify as "real" is to meet three arbitrary rules. Forget formulas. Observe actual people as they live real lives. Any time you draw a box around someone to define them, you are stealing their humanity.
The Bechdel test isn't a formula for writers to abide by. It's an observation of a systemic problem. If Hollywood writers did as you advise, observe people as they live real lives, then there wouldn't be the problem in the first place because they would observe multiple women talking about things other than men, and then presumably write about it.
But no one is saying that it's _bad_ for women to talk to men, or about men. They're saying that when it's _rare_ for a woman to converse in any other way in the movies, there's something wrong with that. You do understand that the test doesn't fail if a woman _does_ talk to a man, right? It fails if no woman _ever_ talks to another woman, about some subject other than a man, in the entire fictional work. Surely, if men very rarely spoke to other men in movies, you'd find that weird? Surely? But in the real world, women talk to other women. About subjects other than men. I promise, they really, really do. It's the movies that are eliminating this fact, that are stealing women's humanity. Please, tell me that you don't really believe that for a woman to speak to another woman is some strange, weird, unusual... Oh, my. My head is exploding. Please, believe me: Women speak. To other women. About subjects other than men. In real life. They really do.
Nerds. It's sad, but people talk about pretty much everything. So long as it's interesting. I've overhead men talk about jewellery for twenty minutes, and women banter about shit and farts. But if we need to generalise, it's a pretty safe bet to say; people talk about themselves. I think what Cog was saying is; as long as a female character has depth, it doesn't matter what equipment her co-characters have between their legs-- and for the record I know a girl who has exclusively male friends. I'm sure at some point she has spoken to another woman, but I see less depth in her with women around than when she's alone with males. I do not consider her any less female and if she was depicted in a film or book she would fail this test. It is a simplistic, stupid test. I find it remarkable there is 3 pages of content regarding it.
There's an actual test for that sort of thing? Wow. How horrible that there is felt to be a need for rules about how to include 50% of the human population in writing as actual characters. One of my friends sent me the below interview with Joss Whedon yesterday. He's explaining why he writes strong female characters - it seems somehow relevant to this thread. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYaczoJMRhs
