from stross' diary

[chronovore]

Charlie's Diary: Bechdel's Law:

Alison Bechdel, cartoonist and author of Dykes to Watch Out For, has an interesting observation on movies — a little test she applies to them. It's a very short checklist, viz:

1. Does it have at least two women in it,

2. Who [at some point] talk to each other,

3. About something besides a man.

I bring this up as a point of interest, because of what it says about the blind spots of popular entertainment. Most Hollywood movies fail this test; if you extend #3 only slightly, to read "About something besides men or marriage or babies", you can strike out about 50% of the small proportion of mass-entertainment movies that do otherwise seem to pass the test.

Comments

[nattotastic.livejournal.com]

only 50%? I'm sitting here racking my brain about a movie that involves women talking about something other than those things and I am drawing up pretty short. If you extended #3 to be "About something besides men, marriage, babies, or making her son the ruler of the known world" you'd sum up 100% of the movies I've seen recently.

[ferricide.livejournal.com]

well, most action movies since the 90s have cast a woman as like a Nuclear Biologist or something so she can talk about the Mutant Virus that's taking over the world which has to be dealt with by the hero.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but she would talk about that stuff to a group, or another man -- the hero. The question is, can you find a case where two women speak with each other at any length about "something besides men or marriage or babies"?

[starchy.livejournal.com]

That is excellent; thanks for sharing the link. I haven't read anything by Stross, but that makes me want to.

Two movies I've seen recently (although both are not recent movies) which pass the test would be Persepolis and Days of Heaven. Come to think of it, Arsenic and Old Lace passes, but only just.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

Stross has a mess of stuff offered for reading online for free (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/fiction/index.html), one of which is the excellent Accelerando (http://www.accelerando.org/).

He also posted a followup to that article above:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/08/bechdel_test_roundup.html