The Bechdel Test as Microcosm

In the last year or so there has been increasing fervor for applying the Bechdel Test when discussing movies. For those of you who have never heard of the test, congratulations on being a normal person with an exciting and active lifestyle.

Oh, fine... I'll explain.

The Bechdel Test is a feminist ideal that any given movie should have at least two named women characters who have a conversation in the film that isn't about a man.

If a movie passes the test, it is acceptable for feminist viewers, or something.

Of course, rather amusingly, it can be hard to determine if a movie passes the test, as if it isn't really adequetely feminist then all manner of excuses can be used to force it to violate one of the rules. For example, the Book of Eli passes the test on its face, as the female lead talks to her mother about their captivity (at the hands of men!), and the mother (Claudia... so officially a named character) only has two or three scenes in the film, yet is incredibly plot relevant.

The Book of Eli is almost entirely built around the male characters, yet passes the test, so women have to come up with marginal rulings to exclude it, you see.

There is a good reason for it. The only thing the Bechdel Test actually tests for is, in fact, itself. It literally has no relevance to the quality of the film, its relative merits as entertainment or feminism or pretty much anything.  At best it can tell you that, yes, two women have a conversation on screen in the film.

Compare that to the much simpler 'how much did it make' test.   That test is measuring only one thing, the actual number of tickets sold, yet it can give you a lot of relative information that is actually objectively useful for evaluating a movie. Not perfectly, of course, but still far more accurate than the test.

Let us explain by way of example.

Assume a movie that only includes a single character, a woman. This film is a deep meditation on the human condition, and follows the premise that a feminine perspective is more accurate and relevant than a male perspective.  Deep, meditiative, insightful and undeniably feminist.  Possibly even good and entertaining.

Fails the test on two points at a minimum, and all three on a technicality (with no other characters, we have no reason to expect the sole character's name to be relevant or revealed).

Assume a movie in the vein of Birth of a Nation, only from a manospherian/gorean point of view. THe main character is still a woman, modeled after Sarah Palin. She spends the entire movie chasing down, capturing and brainwashing other women characters to be little more than meek servants and slaves.  For the sake of argument, we'll assume that any number of conversations with the movies antagonist (a free, liberal feminist woman) do not, in fact, even mention men, but instead talk about what it means to BE a woman.

Passes all three elements of the Bechdel Test.  It might be entertaining, but probably not to people who actually tend to evaluate movies with "the Test". It is undoubtedly misogynistic, possibly even exploitative. We still don't need male characters, but we could assume that this is only a significant subplot to a bunch of men capturing and raping women and it would STILL pass the test with flying colors.

Hell, I don't even have to imagine that second film.  Ilsa, She-Wolf of the whatever (There were some three or four of these) passes the Bechdel Test. True, most of those conversations would be about torture and pain and so forth, but again... not about a man.

Not that I expect anyone to actually put that film on the Bechdel Test website any time soon. They may be willing to admit that the test is flawed, but I somehow suspect that such an obvious counter-example would break them.

Because, ultimately, the Bechdel Test is a tool... not for evaluating movies, which it singularly fails at, but for political power.  The strength of the test, in many ways, is that it is utterly unconcerned with what the movie is about.  Lots of movies beloved of women include multiple female characters talking about what so many women already love to talk about... their love lives. And these films fail the test.

Think about it: A genre of films that is made for women, catering to their tastes, and employing far more actresses than any other genre is just as likely to fail the test as a film like Riddick (or for that matter, Alien, which famously passes!), which is more or less a 'guy flick' from the word go.

Not that anyone is seriously attempting to evaluate Rom-coms and other 'chick flicks' with the test. I note that most, if not all, the Harry Potter films fail, despite being written by a woman, and with the female character (hermione) being the most competent and capable character of the trio, to an almost insulting degree, simple because all the scenes involve people talking to, or about, Harry Potter, and not about, say... their hair.

It is also notable that Allison Bechdel, the creator of the test doesn't actually think much of it. She created it as a punch line in a cartoon in 1985, and noted in that very punchline that only Alien passed the test (at that time), and the women are talking about the monster (technical foul: The monster is clearly a man! Penetration, phallocentric, yadda yadda, rape analog beast!)

Which brings me to the post title.

Here we have a test that measures nothing but itself, can be easily subverted to produce the opposite of its purported intent, was a punchline to a comic strip and is essentially disavowed by its original creator, yet is used and protected, as a bludgeon for political purposes.

It is essentially modern progressivism in a nutshell. Not just feminism, which is merely one facet of modern progressivism (and in fact may be described essentially the same as the Bechdel Test, as I just did...).

Modern Progressivism is literally about nothing but itself, though it purports to be about a great many important and good things. Civil Rights? Only useful as a tool for more progressivism. Feminism? Only  useful to shut down debate and quash the opposition... national health care? Only important in that it forces you to come to the Progressives to get life saving medicine, making you dependent upon them.

Progress? Don't make me laugh. The Progressive Elite would much rather rule over a village of dirty, dark age peasants than a vast space empire. The Global Warming Fraud is proof enough of that. So long as they have marginally better stuff than you, they're happy.

In short, we have a political ideology that describes nothing but itself, has been entirely subverted to produce the opposite of what it claims, is a punchline to one grim, dark joke on humanity, and would be eagerly disavowed by most of its original adherents if they saw what had become, and yet it continues to exist as a useful bludgeon for political power.

Thus endeth the lesson.