Reality Fails the Bechdel Test

Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating

You expect movie ratings to tell you whether a film contains nudity, sex, profanity or violence. Now cinemas in Sweden are introducing a new rating to highlight gender bias, or rather the absence of it.

To get an A rating, a movie must pass the so-called Bechdel test, which means it must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.

Anyone with an ounce of sanity will be rolling their eyes at this bit of nonsense.  Nobody cares if a movie passes the Bechdel Test – not even most feminists (how many of them are sitting in the theatre, tallying a mental checklist?).  For the vast, vast majority of the viewing public, all they care about is whether a movie tells a good story.

A Bechdel Test Metaphor

But like so many other arguments that we get from Feminism, while people can inherently sense that it’s stupid, specifying why is a little bit more difficult.  That’s because it’s not truly an argument – it’s flak.  Flak shot up into the cultural discourse so that we spin our wheels arguing to their tune.  Marxists and Feminists don’t argue because they actually believe something, nor because they’ve given it a lot of thought – like a scorned woman, they argue for the sake of arguing.

If you looked like this, you’d feel scorned, too.

So with that in mind, I’d like to do a quick and definitive takedown of this Bechdel Test, so that you can move on with your day and do something interesting.

Like the title says – movies fail the Bechdel Test for the same reason that reality does.  To put it bluntly:

• Men talk more about ideas
• Women talk more about people
• Men are focused on familial “foreign policy”
• Women are focused on familial “domestic policy”

And that’s really all there is to it: men and women are different.  We have different emotional makeups, we have different drives in life, we have different attraction triggers, and we have different skills and talents.  We’re a sexually dimorphic species, evolved for productive competition with one another and role specialization; we are not turtles, who swim around on their own, both sexes filling the exact same niche, until the time comes to squirt gametes at one another and bury the eggs.

This is not how turtles work.

A movie is distilled reality; the most important aspects of what makes us human are what they put on the screen.  In real life, men have plenty of conversations about specific women, and women have plenty of conversations about non-social topics; seldom are these conversations interesting enough to include in a movie.  Somebody with a healthy psyche instinctively understands all of this.

But Feminists, out of a hatred for masculinity, femininity, and humanity in general, insist on applying masculine standards to women, and feminine standards to men.  For instance, from the above article:

Another study, by the Annenberg Public Policy Centre at the University of Pennsylvania, showed that the ratio of male to female characters in movies has remained at about two to one for at least six decades. That study, which examined 855 top box-office films from 1950-2006, showed female characters were twice as likely to be seen in explicit sexual scenes as males, while male characters were more likely to be seen as violent.

I feel like I’m trying to explain humour to Commander Data.

Show an Autist Feminist Goldfinger, and it will see the blatant sexualization of Pussy Galore, driving it to complain that Sean Connery wasn’t wearing the same outfit as he was in Zardoz:

Is this what you want?

Like the Histrionic Pod People they are, they utterly fail to realize that James Bond is just as sexualized of a character as Pussy Galore is.

• Expensive suit
• Fast Car
• Cool and indifferent demeanor
• Collection of guns
• Army of worker drones under him

Men want to be him, women want to be with him; swap the sexual pronouns, and the same thing goes for Pussy Galore. “Good Lord, in a sexually dimorphous species, the two sexes have different attraction triggers?” Yes; yes they do.

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To thoroughly hammer this home, I’d like to finish off by describing a couple of possible movies: one which is pro-feminist, and fails the test, another which is anti-feminist, and passes with flying colours.

Movie 1: The movie focuses on the daily minutiae of a 35 year old woman working in an all-female HR department, in an Office Space-like manner.  One day, she sees the man she dumped five years ago getting married to a sweet, young bride, ten years her junior, and she comes to the conclusion that she screwed up by not marrying him, that she’s unlikely to find a decent man before menopause, and that it’s her fault for following the feminist script.

This movie would pass the Bechdel Test

Movie 2: I don’t even have to make this one up: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – a film about an empowered Tank Grrrrl who kills evil, white, male, rapist, Nazis – can you get anymore Progressively Feminist than that?

This film fails the Bechdel Test.

Movies fail the Bechdel Test for the same reason that reality does: because biology has made the sexes different, but complementary, and nobody wants to watch a movie about Autistic Pod People worshipping at Cthulu’s throne.

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Ed: I’d like to apologize to any Autists who were offended by my comparing them to Feminists.  Autists have difficulties understanding human interactions, difficulties which can ultimately be overcome.  Feminists are wilfully obtuse.