From Chick Flicks to Classics: Can you measure gender equality?

Few novels manage to pass the test: Homer’s Odyssey fails miserably, War and Peace (despite its 1300 pages) barely passes the test, and even Romeo and Juliet missed the mark.
But what could these well-thumbed classics all have failed? They failed the Bechdel test.
The Bechdel test, the invention of Alison Bechdel in her comic ‘Dykes to Watch Out For’ in 1985, is rather simple. For it to pass the test of equal gender representation, all that the piece requires is this: two named female characters having at least one discussion on a subject that isn’t men.

More surprisingly, though, there is still a large proportion of modern fiction that fails Bechdel’s infamous test. Action based movies and franchises are possibly the worst, with ‘Lord of the Rings’, ‘Star Wars’, and ‘Avatar’ all failing.
However, this is understandable when we see that across the board, writing, reviewing, and other media roles is statistically dominated by men. See stats.

But, can we really trust the Bechdel test? Many would be surprised to know that ‘Twilight’ passes the notorious Bechdel test. How, you may ask? Bella has a brief conversation with her mother about moving to a new town – weak, but it still means that it just about passes the Bechdel test.
Bella Swan: the infamously one-dimensional character whose self-professed main reason to continue living is her boyfriend, and whose obsession with being able to sleep with her boyfriend took up nearly two novels, is, according to the Bechdel test, a prime example of gender-equal representation.

So, it seems that there’s more than a couple things wrong with the Bechdel test then. For example, what if the piece is from the seen from the eyes of a man? As feminist as the piece may be, it is highly likely that the character would never witness two female characters ever discussing something alone, and thus less likely that they would be seen to be discussing something non-male-related.
Not to mention, not all conversations about men are necessarily patriarchal. It’s somewhat condescending to think that women couldn’t have a conversation with regard to men and give up their feminist rights.

Let’s assume then that the Bechdel test is utter crap then – what criteria does a piece of media need to be gender equal?
1. Is there a major female character in the story? In films such as ‘The Social Network’, women served only as dramatic subplots – like, where they’d get banged in the bathroom and never seen again.
2. Are the women in the story active or reactive? Do the women in the story take initiative, or do they only act when told to do so?

So really, it does not matter then if a piece passes the Bechdel test. After all, movies such as Interstellar and the last Harry Potter movie (the Deathly Hallows part 2) failed the test, despite it featuring strong and dimensional heroines. What seems to matter more is if it falls victim to something colloquially known as ‘The Smurfette principle’, a term coined by Katha Pollitt in 1991 in an article for The New York Times. The Smurfette principle relates to the fact that there is only one female token character in an all-male ensemble. This is still a common phenomenon in media today; the initial pilot series of the Big Bang theory made use of this, and the Muppets continue to do so with Miss Piggy.

This is certainly the more damaging phenomenon of the two. The poignant US documentary by Jennifer Siebel Newsom preaches this message well, with the motto ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’. In all practicality, this seems to be true; how can young women grow up to be strong and independent without having media role models to follow? And though the focus here has been on women, this really is a universal message – for the men who think they can’t be sentimental, for any LGBT people who have so little representation in films and books, or for everyone out there who has can only look to size supermodels for a show of beauty, we need to change the way we represent people in the media.
Granted, not every character always has to be the pinnacle of strength. What matters is that each character is individual – so no more token characters pulled out of the bag time and time again for at least a good proportion of the DVDs and films on your bedroom shelves. A good writer can continue to promote positive ideals while still creating a variety of characters along the spectrum.

Think of the last time you could relate to a character in a film or a book. For many this will be recently, though for many in the minority, it may be longer. Equal representation in our culture and media is so important: the arts are something that we need to inspire us; we need them to communicate, and they are a vital part of who we are as people. One day, hopefully, gender equality will be so ingrained into our society that we won't have to use tests like Bechdel's, or see cases of the Smurfette principle time and time again.