Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
People have often lambasted those who scream and wince whenever an ounce of political correctness shows up in society/media.
Well, to those people: look at your work. Did you want to encourage censorship?
Of course, I'm overblowing this thing way too much. But 5, ten, maybe even 20 years ago, if this kind of thing happened, people would revolt. For some reason, censorship in the name of equality seems to be the norm in today's world.
Harrison Bergeron, indeed.
On the other hand, Harry Potter was written by a self-proclaimed feminist and has a very empowering female in Hermione Granger, if that series fails the Bechdel Test then I'm left wondering how many other false-positives the test throws. Even The Vagina Monologues fails the Bechdel Test (to be fair, because monologues).
Some minor issues fact-based movies, documentaries: biographical movies (if it is the story of a man and there are no women in his life that doesn't necessarily make it chauvinistic), historical movies (if it is a movie about anti-feminist or chauvinistic events, does that necessarily make it anti-feminist even if the goal is to educate?)
The general problem that I see in both the test and the problem it's designed to solve is this mental shortcut of an either/or grouping. Male/female, pass/fail.
But if it helps some people start dialogue then that's wonderful, at the same time I think the intersectionalist feminists deserve some positive attention for searching out new ways to get the conversations going.
I'm confused that you say this, but do not actually link any such ways. I'd personally be happy to give them some positive attention, but feminism isn't something I spend much time on so I don't know the latest stuff going on.
I can say it's a more nuanced critique of privilege then say radical feminism, but whether my positive experiences are rooted in a better theory or just in the people attracted to it I don't really know.
But it can serve as a smoke test. Harry Potter, for instance, does have a fairly empowering female in Hermione, but the series itself has a lot of problems, not all of them feminist in nature. Not sure how much spoilering or detail I really ought to go into it here.
If a tool carries a lot of weight, has little accuracy and is only used against one's opponents - that tool has a lot in common with a bludgeon.
Good luck.
Maybe Hollywood's worried that target audiences won't identify with a female lead, maybe the formula's considered too risky for a blockbuster. But surely there's an alternate universe somewhere with aliens or magic where (hold on to your hats) a matriarchal society somehow evolved and manages to be part of the fabric of the story without characters constantly drawing attention to it, comparing it to Earth, having it set up a battle of the sexes, etc.
Even Jezebel (http://jezebel.com/sweden-introduces-new-movie-rating-system...) has to admit the "test" is not perfect:
"Sure, the Bechdel test is imperfect (Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker doesn't pass, for instance, but you could hardly argue that a female-helmed war movie doesn't empower at least one woman), but that doesn't make it useless as a starting line for sniffing out broad trends in gender bias. And that's what we're talking about here. Trends. Analysis. Examination. Critical thought. Information. I'm sure there are plenty of people who consider themselves scrupulously egalitarian who never even noticed that there are only like THREE WOMEN IN ALL OF MIDDLE EARTH."
I understand that this is just a thing introduced by a a few movie theaters, i.e. it's not the law or anything (yet). Yet, that's what riles me most: as librarians are the first to defend any censorship, movie professionals should push back on any arbitrary limitation on what can be shown. Some examples of movies that fail the test are given, e.g. LOTHR Trilogy, Pulp Fiction, Pacific Rim, etc. However, the test would also exclude many art films such as Tarkovski's Stalker and Solaris. How about movies with only a single female lead that don't quite fit the purpose of the test, e.g. Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly? How to handle movies with no dialog, or experimental movies such as Eraserhead? One can easily see that this sort of simplistic testing can have little artistic or practical merit.
It's about movies in general not showing women and relationships between women as entities in their own right. It's about trying to move the needle back to the centre, not shoehorning women's dialogue into Koyaanisqatsi.
The formula is just so simplistic. If you wanted to build a comprehensive metric you'd probably want to take a few factors into consideration. Maybe a ratio of dialogue to on-screen time for female characters vs. male characters. Perhaps number of non-traditional female roles vs. traditional roles. I don't know. There should be something better than an eye-test some comic from the 80's threw out there.
But then again, Moon does have two female characters so maybe it deserves a 1/3.
The point of the test is to illustrate that, given that having a conversation between two women is such an astonishingly low bar, the fact that a large fraction of movies still can't clear it is a symptom of systematic biases within the industry.
It's fine, for instance, if someone feels a really strong need to inform you that they have a pistol in their pocket. But if everyone, or even most people, are going around telling people that they have a pistol in their pocket... there isn't actually a scenario in which this says, "Things are still okay."
It's about what everyone is doing as a whole.
If a white guy kicks a black guy in the street, then hey, maybe one or both of those guys are jerks. If thousands of white guys are kicking thousands of black guys in the street, then maybe there's an issue here.
Using less wildly provocative language may be more conducive to a rational discussion.
Cheerio.
You've never thought that the fact these little tests exists is because the level of male domination in social discourse is so high that it causes reactions such as yours when it is challenged?
Male-dominated thinking is so prevalent in society that it is second nature. As a general rule, female leads are fewer than male leads, male roles have more significance than female roles in anything that's not romance and comedies, and there are significant differences in that which go beyond a mere reflection of society or properly-reasoned discrimination in the current world.
Thus, a couple of Swedes think it would be a good idea to let people know that this goes on, a lot, without any pretention of doing much more than pointing it out.
Replace "woman" with "racial minority", or "poor", and it still makes sense, although the points of contention are different. Minorities are underrepresented in most movies (that is, they are proportionally less prevalent than even reality in the roles they cast), or in the case of, for example, black people, are cast into very clearly-defined stereotypes which do not necessarily match reality, and worse, give no possibility to the fact that black people can be anything else other than a stereotype.
Keeping with the example of black in movies, although this has been changing, such changes can also happen in the unnatural role where a minority is purposefully put into a role that breaks stereotypes. That may be fine, but there is a broad spectrum of character diversity between stereotype roles and main characters put in place to "make a point" about diversity.
Even then, positions of patriarchy are still so embedded that the way in which minorities are represented, even with the intention of breaking stereotypes, can be flawed.
That is what this test is about, with regards to gender equality, and I fail to see anything surprising about it.
You might as well have said civil rights leaders should have sucked it up and built something themselves. As if that's not what they were doing.
Or excellent troll. But out of place - this is for serious discussion.
Your comment is up there with the "worst garbage" on HN. An inconvenient opinion that you have no answer to (see next paragraph), answered with a laughable accusation of "extreme sexism". Get a life, loser.
>You might as well have said civil rights leaders should have sucked it up and built something themselves.
You might as well have brought the slaves of Sparta into the discussion. The conditions of women trying to produce their own films aren't even in the same _sport_ as the broad issues facing blacks during the civil rights movement. This is one mark of the egalitarian: to covertly exploit those weaker than him in order to press forward his own interests.
>But out of place - this is for serious discussion.
Yes, like your moronic attack on me. Grow a brain.
You are not worth my time.
Ahem.
I'm sorry you weren't able to recognize me as your better. I hope your chronic stupidity is duly cured someday.
Did I do it right?