Bechdel Test

argumate:

argumate:

It’s not something individual movies must pass, it’s something that reflects an imbalance in the overall movie population.

pabusnoodlery said: I think this is a good idea, some people think that way, but do we have any data of when it’s used that way? Like “X% of the 100 top-grossing movies of 2014 passed the Bechdel Test”?

That’s the way it was originally intended, to describe a systemic problem. If X was close to 50%, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to mention it.

This has been a hot topic since the halycon days feminist blogosphere (2005) and of course was originally coined in 1985 (!) so the problem is not new.

The trouble with criticism of an entire population is that any individual can easily escape blame, #NotAllMovies and all that. Each individual writer/producer can claim valid artistic choices for not including female characters, and dodge charges of sexism, while the industry as a whole is clearly uninterested in telling stories about women.

(Reasons for why they might be uninterested are of course controversial. But the fact that most movies are centred on men is not).

There are some statistics here, and much more readable plots in this imgur collection.  I’m not sure I understand your “if X was close to 50%” comment – over 50% pass today, and this was true in 1985 too.  (Although that is over some unclearly defined sample)

There’s also an article here that looked at the 50 top-grossing movies of 2013, finding:

Out of 50 total movies we looked at, 17, or 36 percent, passed with flying colors. An additional seven technically passed, but are deemed “dubious” by Bechdel-watchers because of the dialogue (some of it was about a man, some of it wasn’t, but not much).

More interestingly, the article claims (contra brazenautomaton if true) that within this sample, the Bechdel-passing movies made more money than the Bechdel-failing ones.  But I haven’t looked at the article in detail and it could be flawed.

(via argumate)