I’ve been thinking about the Bechdel Test as I often do during or after consuming media, and recently I thought of it as I started the Apple TV series Shrinking, featuring Harrison Ford (adorbs), Jason Segal (meh) and the amazing Jessica Williams. There are three main female roles in the show, with three or four men (if you count the supporting character of Brian), so okay to good representation for women with regards to the series. But. There are other aspects to representation, ya’ll, and (spoiler alert) when yet another mother – Jason’s wife Tia – is dead as the series begins in order to make dad both available and vulnerable, automatically sympathetic to an audience while setting a series up, it gets my feminist goat, y’know?
There is a long history of this obnoxious, sexist, convenient/dead female plot line in Hollywood, both in TV and film: My Three Sons. Bonanza, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. Family Affair (yes, both parents were dead but…were there no aunts or married couples on either side of the family equation?!!) or Three Men and a Baby. Sleepless in Seattle. Legends of the Fall. Or, for variety’s sake, we see the mom – briefly – but then, pow, she’s dead and revenge must be got because real men kill lady killers (I suspect there’s a whole set of these starring Charles Bronson, but I didn’t see them…) as in Road Warrior, and Gladiator.
Meh. Worse yet are films that have few speaking or named parts for women at all. Sigh. It has also been pointed out by others that Hollywood loooooves posters and advertising that show only the female torso, decapitating ‘hot’ women from the collarbone down because that’s the only part that matters when selling a film, and who cares about how women are represented in print, on TV, on film? FEH. Once you see it, once you notice it, the lack of speaking roles for women, you can’t not see it in future, so be warned when reading the following on the Bechdel Test and how it came to be, with all due respect to Alison Bechdel, Virginia Woolf, and women everywhere who have been pointing this out for far too long, to little or no effect, dammit.
Are things getting better? Not really. But, we live in hope. From Wiki – a much shortened trio of highlights:
“The Bechdel test also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test, is a measure of the representation of women in film and other fiction. The test asks whether a work features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man. Some versions of the test also require that those two female characters have names.
A work of fiction passing or failing the test does not necessarily indicate the overall representation of women in the work. Instead, the test is used as an indicator for the active presence (or lack thereof) of women in fiction, and to call attention to gender inequality in fiction.
The test is named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, in whose 1985 comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For the test first appeared. Bechdel credited the idea to her friend Liz Wallace and the writings of Virginia Woolf. Originally meant as “a little lesbian joke in an alternative feminist newspaper”, according to Bechdel, the test became more widely discussed in the 2000s, as a number of variants and tests inspired by it emerged.”
“In film, a study of gender portrayals in 855 of the most financially successful U.S. films from 1950 to 2006 showed that there were, on average, two male characters for each female character, a ratio that remained stable over time. Women were twice as likely as men to be involved in sexual activity, and this only continued to increase over time.”
“The “reverse Bechdel test” asks whether a work features men who talk to men about something other than a woman. A 2022 study that analyzed 341 popular films of the last 40 years showed that almost all (95%) passed the reverse Bechdel test, speaking to a much stronger representation of men than women.”
Duh.