Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

Swedes evidently think "too much of a good thing can be wonderful": they have had a Minister of Gender Equality since the 50's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_for_Gender_Equality_(S...) and there are efforts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun (http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_s..., although this has been tried in English, too). In the Global Gender Gap Report 2012, Sweden is named as a world leader in gender equality (http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2012), etc. etc. I mean, the country even has an official gender equality webpage in English (http://sweden.se/society/gender-equality-in-sweden/). It seems they can't go any further. And then this.

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.

You're projecting a purpose onto the Bechdel test that it doesn't inherently possess. It doesn't tell you that any particular movie is bad for not passing it; obviously, a film can fail the test and still be a great work of art. And nobody is saying that movies that fail should be censored or limited.

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.

"Fizzbuzz for movies"

My point was that there should be no bar to clear when making a movie (or writing a novel, story, etc.). Placing artificial limits like that is exactly the type of bias you're talking about, but swinging to the other direction.

It's a rating system. Next you'll be accusing Roger Ebert of censorship.

Please tell me where in my comment I suggested that any artificial limits should be placed anywhere, because I assure you it was completely unintentional.

It's not about when making a movie.

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.

bemusing clarification. Just line one works.

a recent movie that's similar is Gravity. It doesn't even pass the reverse test since there are so few characters.

The point of the test isn't to be definitive (and it was recognised as so when it was created). Of course it's going to fail in extremely contrived films like Gravity or dialogueless films. It's not even about showing women in power - so the comment about The Hurt Locker empowering the producer is kind've irrelevant.

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.

Haven't seen that one, but the first thing that popped into my head was "What about a movie like Moon?" I mean there was really just the one main character, and I suppose he talked to his wife and daughter who were both named so it gets an A grade. But they were the only two female characters that I remember and I don't think they really added a lot to the gender equality context seeing as they were the stay-at-home family back on earth.

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.

In my opinion they do not even populate the denominator, much less the numerator; but according to this test it gets a 0/1.

But then again, Moon does have two female characters so maybe it deserves a 1/3.

It's a one sided test so obviously biased. Like rolling a bunch of dice, then pointing at all the 5-6s and saying "too high!"

I think the Bechdel test can be viewed as a first iteration or a MVP. It builds interest and gets people talking and thinking about the test and the issue. Then it can be iterated and improved upon.

The first iteration of what? Total degeneration? How can you "improve" a test designed to enforce slave morality on creative people?

Maybe the downvoters can make an argument. I doubt it, since that is the reason people abuse the downvote button - to shut off an argument they are incapable of understanding.

I didn't down-vote you (and can't), but it may not be that people "are incapable of understanding" you, and instead objecting to your claim that a method for reviewing/appraising one aspect of a film is "designed to enforce slave morality on creative people".

Using less wildly provocative language may be more conducive to a rational discussion.

My language is not more "wildly provocative" than your use of the the phrase "wildly provocative". It's only "wildly provocative" to you because you didn't bother to understand it. The whole point of the Bechdel test is to promote a slave morality (in this case feminism). Insisting that nobody embellish their language a little is unworkable, as you illustrated by embellishing your own language.

Given that your first comment is a hysterical argument labelling your opposing philosophy as 'total degeneration' and 'slave morality', I think most people would be hard-pressed to believe you were actually interested in discussion over soap-boxing. It's reinforced when you call people too stupid to understand you. What possible value can come out of engaging you?

Feminism is a slave morality by definition. I didn't invent the term. You're welcome to reject advances in Western Philosophy if you like. The value that comes out of engaging me is talking to someone who is interested in more than mere gossip. I mean, look at your comment: no more than questioning my credentials, in response to a comment of mine suggesting that maybe people put forward some _actual content_. Amazing

Despite your clumsy attempt at flowery terms, you're clearly a troll. Anyway, this exchange is exactly why the HN guidelines state: Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Cheerio.

Because patriarchy is the slaving morality of the status quo?

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?

I don't know what you mean by "slaving morality". Is that a new term for "master morality", or a typo?

You used the phrase, but perhaps if you want to not be a smartass, let's be clear about this in a way you haven't in the previous posts:

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.

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