While writing Female characters exist to promote male leads for network profits, I realized something I had never quite put together in so many words. It’s important enough to deserve its own article (thanks, Bellatrys!), so here it is: my screenwriting professors taught me not to write scripts that passed the Bechdel/Mo Movie Measure/”Dykes To Watch Out For” test, and I can tell you why, and this needs to be known.
The “Dykes to Watch Out For” test, formerly coined as the “Mo Movie Measure” test and Bechdel Test, was named for the comic strip it came from, penned by Alison Bechdel – but Bechdel credits a friend named Liz Wallace, so maybe it really should be called the Liz Wallace Test…? Anyway, the test is much simpler than the name. To pass it your movie must have the following:
1) there are at least two named female characters, who
2) talk to each other about
3) something other than a man.
So simple, and yet as you go through all your favorite movies (and most of your favorite TV shows, though there’s a little more variety in TV), you find very few movies pass this test.
It’s not a coincidence. It’s not that there aren’t enough women behind the camera (there aren’t, but that’s not the reason). Here’s what we’re up against (and for those who have requested a single post that summarizes my experiences in film for linking reference, now you’ve got it).
When I started taking film classes at UCLA, I was quickly informed I had what it took to go all the way in film. I was a damn good writer, but more importantly (yeah, you didn’t think good writing was a main prerequisite in this industry, did you?) I understood the process of rewriting to cope with budget (and other) limitations. I didn’t hesitate to rip out my most beloved scenes when necessary. I also did a lot of research and taught myself how to write well-paced action/adventure films that would be remarkably cheap to film – that was pure gold.
There was just one little problem.
I had to understand that the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads. I was assured that as long as I made the white, straight men in my scripts prominent, I could still offer groundbreaking characters of other descriptions (fascinating, significant women, men of color, etc.) – as long as they didn’t distract the audience from the white men they really paid their money to see.
I was stunned. I’d just moved from a state that still held Ku Klux Klan rallies only to find an even more insidious form of bigotry in California – running an industry that shaped our entire culture. But they kept telling me lots of filmmakers wanted to see the same changes I did, and if I did what it took to get into the industry and accrue some power, then I could start pushing the envelope and maybe, just maybe, change would finally happen. So I gave their advice a shot.
Only to learn there was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men. That, they explained nervously, was not okay. I asked why. Well, it would be more accurate to say I politely demanded a thorough, logical explanation that made sense for a change (I’d found the “audience won’t watch women!” argument pretty questionable, with its ever-shifting reasons and parameters).
At first I got several tentative murmurings about how it distracted from the flow or point of the story. I went through this with more than one professor, more than one industry professional. Finally, I got one blessedly telling explanation from an industry pro: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.”
“Not even if it advances the story?” I asked. That’s rule number one in screenwriting, though you’d never know it from watching most movies: every moment in a script should reveal another chunk of the story and keep it moving.
He just looked embarrassed and said, “I mean, that’s not how I see it, that’s how they see it.”
Right. A bunch of self-back-slapping professed liberals wouldn’t want you to think they routinely dismiss women in between writing checks to Greenpeace. Gosh, no – it was they. The audience. Those unsophisticated jackasses we effectively worked for when we made films. They were making us do this awful thing. They, the man behind the screen. They, the six-foot-tall invisible rabbit. We knew they existed because there were spreadsheets with numbers, and no matter how the numbers computed, they never added up to, “Oh, hey, look – men and boys are totally watching Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley like it’s no big deal they’re chicks instead of guys.” They always somehow added up to “Oh, hey, look – those effects/that Arnold’s so awesome, men and boys saw this movie despite some chick in a lead role.”
According to Hollywood, if two women came on screen and started talking, the target male audience’s brain would glaze over and assume the women were talking about nail polish or shoes or something that didn’t pertain to the story. Only if they heard the name of a man in the story would they tune back in. By having women talk to each other about something other than men, I was “losing the audience.”
Was I?
There certainly are still men in this world who tune out women when we talk, but – as I and other students pointed out – this was getting less common with every generation, and weren’t we supposed to be targeting the youngest generation? These young men had grown up with women imparting news on national TV (even I can remember when that was rare), prescribing them medicine, representing people around them in court, doling out mortgages and loans. Those boys wouldn’t understand those early ’80s movies where women were denied promotions because “the clients want to deal with men” or “who would take a woman doctor/lawyer/cop seriously”? A lot of these kids would need it explained to them why Cagney & Lacey was revolutionary, because many of their moms had worked in fields once dominated by men.
We had a whole generation too young to remember why we needed second wave feminism, for cryin’ out loud, and here we were adhering to rules from the 1950s. I called bullshit, and left film for good, opting to fight the system from without. There was no way Hollywood really believed what it was saying about boys who’d grown up with Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor as action heroes, and so there was no way to change the system from within. I concluded Hollywood was was dominated by perpetual pre-adolescent boys making the movies they wanted to see, and using the “target audience” – a construct based on partial truths and twisted math – to perpetuate their own desires. Having never grown up, they still saw women the way Peter Pan saw Wendy: a fascinating Other to be captured, treasured and stuffed into a gilded cage. Where we didn’t talk. To each other. About anything other than men.
Follow-up post: Why discriminate if it doesn’t profit?
Goldarn says
August 18, 2010 at 3:13 pmI’m reminded of the original Star Trek: the computer on the Enterprise had a female voice, but when they went to the alternate, evil, Spock-beard universe, the computer had a strong, male, voice.
I think it was one of the more jarring “you aren’t in Kansas” parts of the show.
Notebookinhand says
August 25, 2010 at 10:19 pmThis article is fantastic and I’ve passed it along to my forum of writers. 🙂
Would this apply to novels as well? I think it might.
I wish you could/I could make a thread on ‘what should my female characters talk about other than men and babies’ as an idea board for writers.
Some of the things in these comments I had never even thought about before, like the part about male/female voice overs and that men are seen to tune out if it’s a woman.
Tera Overstreet says
October 13, 2011 at 1:05 pmGenevieve,
It possibly fails the reverse, I believe, because when you write a cohesive mainstream narrative, your supporting characters won’t have the screen time to pass the test. If it’s a female protagonist, usually the test fails in reverse, just as often as the male protagonist version fails. The problem remains, not enough female protagonists.
Tera Overstreet says
October 13, 2011 at 1:08 pmAnemone,
Agreed re Alice in Wonderland – I was thrilled it passed this test so beautifully.
MaggieCat says
October 13, 2011 at 7:26 pmI think applying it to novels might be a little trickier, particularly if it’s written in the first person. By nature novels are more likely to center on a certain character without showing anything that doesn’t involve that character, and have less space for incidentals like walking into a room where a conversation is already happening; it’s understood that if it isn’t important to the plot it won’t get mentioned in a book, but movies have to fill in mundane interactions to make it look like the real world.
So if the protagonist is male nearly every conversation will involve him or be told to him later without letting us see the interaction happening and thus technically failing the test. I think the only reason the Harry Potter books would pass is thanks to Harry’s habit of eavesdropping, but there was still evidence that the female characters had non-Harry related lives outside the plot relevant bits.
Dani says
October 15, 2011 at 10:29 pmI’m going to school to be a visual development artist for animated movies and the like, and things like this are very, very discouraging to read; it makes me wonder if I should just get out while I can, lest I get stuck drawing for movies made by people like this 🙁
I can see the effects of his kind of thinking (that men don’t want to listen to women) all around me; many of the guys I know emulate that in how they talk to, and about, women, and I wonder how much they were influenced by the stories Hollywood chose to present to them (and how subjects like history are taught in schools, but that’s a rant for another day). I know that the TV isn’t supposed to be the babysitter, but I also know how powerful a tool storytelling can be.
Ben says
November 12, 2011 at 7:09 amUnfortunately, the big, rich dinosaurs are doing their best to make sure the Human race remains archaic and primitive.
Igor Galić says
December 7, 2011 at 8:51 amsbg, yesno. I don’t think anyone really tells us how to do shit. At least nobody taught me how to be a man.
Most of the crap I picked up from the media and from friends, and realizing that something is grossly lacking by researching it myself.
But no, I don’t recall a day or month in my life when my father and grandfather and uncle set me down and explained to me, “This is how you piss of your girlfriend, this is how you mistreat your wife.”
But I also don’t recall anyone – and I’ve been mostly raised by women, in the 1980s and 1990s – sit me down and explain to me that, “Look kid, Feminism has happened. This is what you what changed since I was a kid, and you might find it strange, because much of that crap you’ll still see on the telly.”
Casey says
December 7, 2011 at 3:25 pmNobody really DOES do that, when SBG says that this “treat women like shit and ignore them” meme is imprinted/ingrained into society that means it just kinda happens without anybody really realizing it or thinking critically about it. That’s how patriarchy works. It’s not a bunch of guys conspiring around a big table Legion of Doom-style and coming up with ways to oppress women, it’s something that’s taught, but not explicitly.
MP says
December 23, 2011 at 4:04 pmDan,
There are lots of non-white actors that Hollywood clamors to put in whatever star-vehicle they can. It doesn’t get much more bankable than Denzel, and Halle Berry has had lots of chances to shine. The same goes for Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, J-Lo, and Jackie Chan
Dan, Antonio Banderas is not a ‘person of colour’, but a white Spaniard. Of course in USA if you’re not WASPy-looking, you’re not even ‘white’ enough, eh? Especially if you speak with a Spanish accent.
sam says
March 20, 2012 at 8:31 amWell, you see, being a woman is a character attribute in film. The Smurfs demonstrates this pretty well, but it’s true of most film: you have the angry one, the artist guy, the builder guy, the nerdy one, the stupid one, etc. and then you have the one who is a woman. The woman doesn’t get any defining attribute like being the smart one or the one who solves problems: she is just there to fill the empty roll of “woman” – whatever that means.
With that perspective in mind, it’s easy to see why so few films pass the test: because the more generic woman characters you include in your film, the more you’re doubling up on character types. You don’t want a film full of characters who are all alike, and women can’t be all that different from each other, right? Right???
Carolfrances Likins says
July 30, 2012 at 10:02 pmI was at a “how to get an agent or manager” seminar for screenwriters and the man said that if we handed him a great screenplay, he could get it to a studio, guaranteed. Then he proceeded to define greatness as “an action screenplay with a male main character and a female in a subservient romantic role.” I kid you not; he said that. In the Q/A, I said I had written an “an action screenplay with a female main character and a male in a subservient romantic role,” and that I didn’t want him to get it to a studio but to an independent production company, and that I wanted to find a manager or agent with social conscience. He responded (I kid you not, part 1) “We don’t have social conscience.”
Mario says
October 16, 2012 at 7:29 pmFirst: Sorry my bad english. Anyway:
I was also upset that in the 21st century, writers, directors and producers in Hollywood continue perpetuating sexist and racist stereotypes. And I think one of the reasons why most movies fail the Bechdel Test (besides the ones you’ve mentioned) is the tendency to give to the women superficial and secondary roles. I also wondered why they could not create a dialogue that develops between two women and that make advance the story, I came to the conclusion that a dialogue like that necessarily breach the third point of the Test: if the protagonist and the antagonist and almost all other main characters are men, it is impossible that these two women would have a conversation relevant to the story without talking about men.
Sadly the whole Hollywood system is conditioned to be sexist
BetaCandy says
October 16, 2012 at 8:47 pmMario, that’s exactly it. When a movie has few women as characters, and those characters aren’t important, they really can’t have the kind of conversation we’re talking about here without it distracting from the story. If a screenwriter included a conversation just to pass the Bechdel test, it would be awkward and meaningless. What they need to do is let the women be valuable characters in the first place.
Eric Ledger says
November 6, 2012 at 1:58 amUpon reading this entry and certain related entries on this blog, I can say that Hollywood might just cut the bullshit if the ACLU steps in. Putting together said entries in this blog, any number of off-site articles about the Bechdel test, and an analysis of movies throughout Hollywood’s history regarding the roles of males and females, they’d have an epic case of gender discrimination that no other business would prevail against. Here are just a few more pages you could show them:
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/televism-the-bechdel-spectrum
http://www.feministfrequency.com/2012/02/the-2012-oscars-and-the-bechdel-test/
http://www.feministfrequency.com/2009/12/the-bechdel-test-for-women-in-movies/
As for TV shows, if we were able to legally require TV networks to host a minimum of three hours a week of genuinely educational programming (and they had to be goaded into it, and forbidden from passing shows such as The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and Leave It To Beaver as educational), then I’m sure we can use whatever methods were involved to require the inclusion of multiple full-fledged female characters whose lives don’t revolve around men in all shows where the setting would allow for it.
BetaCandy says
November 6, 2012 at 8:03 amEric Ledger,
So you’ve got to wonder why the ACLU has never shown the slightest interest, don’t you?
Eric Ledger says
November 6, 2012 at 9:07 amBetaCandy,
I’m not sure whether or not anyone even brought it up with them. They probably do need to be alerted, and I posted my initial comment to whoever wrote this post as a suggestion for action, not to ask why they haven’t done anything about it. What I’m saying is, compile as much material as possible to use as ammunition, and then contact them and ask them to look through Hollywood’s history the same way they did with Merrill Lynch and other businesses.
From what I do understand, the reason they’re feared so much is because they only tackle cases where there is no chance that the entity under scrutiny will successfully bullshit their way out of trouble (or, in short, a slam-dunk). This is in order to make it look like they always win, but this is one such case where the opponent has no real way out.
Here are some more entries on this blog (which I initially assumed were by the same person who wrote this entry):
https://thehathorlegacy.com/the-bechdel-test-its-not-about-passing/
https://thehathorlegacy.com/if-audiences-dont-want-women-as-leads-why-did-aliens-succeed/
https://thehathorlegacy.com/why-discriminate-if-it-doesnt-profit/
Want more? Look at Japan’s anime industry. And no, Japan’s interests not matching ours won’t explain anything. There are lots of titles that are *about* girls, and are successful both there and here in the US, such as Sailor Moon, Lucky Star, Azumanga Daioh, and Puella Magi Madoka Magica. In all four of those shows, a lot of what the (mostly female) characters talk about is not guys. There are even more masculine series, such as Digimon (which has had most of its seasons aired here), that still pass the Bechdel Test in just about every single episode. And that’s not counting countless other titles, which, while not *as* prominent, were at least successful enough to even be released here since the end of the 90’s, like Kanon, Pani Poni Dash, A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, Read Or Die, Popotan, Excel Saga, and more! No, different kinds of people on either side of the Pacific is not a playable card. All kinds of people like movies, and all kinds of people like anime.
Knowledge is power! Compile the pages I linked to in both this post and my previous ones, find more on your own, research how well anime and manga as twin media tends to do in America despite being much more well-rounded with their characters than movies, and compile as many excuses as the people behind movies will give you and the counterarguments you can give to each, and then present it all to the ACLU and let them take care of things from there. There is no way the guys behind the scenes will continue to fudge their way out of anything then.