[ SECRET POST #2890 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2890 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.



__________________________________________________



09.











Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 042 secrets from Secret Submission Post #413.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[kallanda_lee]

To me it's more like I think the test itself is inherently flawed.

As someone else said the other day: a film where two female cops talk about catching male criminal would not pass the test, while a film where two women talk to each other about washing powder would.

And this is basically why I think the test is completely useless in filtering out interesting or good female characters in a realistic way.

I can see how the original comic was interesting, and it's thought-provoking to think about the media you consume that way, but that's about it.

[diet_poison]

I think of it more as a springboard. "Movie B technically passed the Bechdel test, but it was still not really pro-women because [reasons]" and then you talk about it?

But then I never saw the use of using a test like that purely for a single datum and not analyzing it further. I guess people do that? eh.

[kallanda_lee]

I thought there was a site that basically tells you if a film passes the test or not? Which without context is pretty useless, I think.

[ozaline]

Yeah there are a couple sites that keep track of it... and really I only use it in aggregate (at least I do now)...

I actually at one point dissected an issue of Batgirl... to see if it passed the comic, in the issue Batgirl (Stephanie Brown) has conversations with Oracle and Proxy two female computer hackers and those conversations fill up most of the dialogue in the book... the central topic of the conversation is a thief (whom Stephanie refuses to gender not knowing the theifs identity) the thief turned out to be male (in fact it was Bruce Wayne running her through a test.. and I could not decide if it was a pass or not, because while there were tangential discussions the main focus of all the conversations was the investigation into the activities of a man.

I think the first two layers of the Bechdel test are the most important, but you can have a movie with only one female character of note and no dialogue and still have it be good. But in aggregate, ie (less than 15% of films released in year X pass) it is interesting...

[kallanda_lee]

Yeah, but in that sense I find it a bit like BMI: something intended and useful to say something about populations, but utterly flawed if you're talking about one individual case.

It's good to know if 95 percent of films coming out of Hollywood don't pass, of course, because that does say something about cultural trends. But applied to a single movie it doesn't say much.

[diet_poison]

ah, I've never heard of that site, but I agree, it's not very useful on its own.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree about the Bechdel test, though I was referring more to a secret thread where someone said that internalized misogyny was just a thing that SJWs used to beat down others (which they do, but it's still a sound theory). But people basing their opinion of something bases solely on how it's handled by internet bullies is something that I've been noticing more of lately.

[kallanda_lee]

Well, I must say I'm not entirely innocent in that respect. The problem is that some terms just do get sullied by people like that.

Hell, I don't think I'll ever be able to use the word "problematic" in a serious way ever again, even though it definitely is the correct term in some contexts.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree that the test is useless as a filtering mechanism.

I don't think that means that it's fatally flawed; I just think that means that it's fatally flawed as a filtering mechanism. It's still an interesting concept and an interesting way of looking at movies and a first-pass analysis on gender lines. And I think people are too quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater, because some people use it in an annoying way.

[duaedesigns]

It's more trying to point out that women are 50% of the population. Having movies and shows that either don't have two named female characters or have them interact about anything but a guy should be silly and stupid and everyone laughing at how unrealistic it is. It should be guy in terrible rubber suit slowly swinging at Shatner levels of fake.

Instead it's accepted as ordinary story telling and that's weird.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah -- Bechdel never meant it as a major litmus test where if a work passes, hooray, it's feminist! (Or if a work doesn't pass, boo, it's sexist!) The entire point of it is to point out that it's a trivially low bar to pass -- and most media out there *still doesn't pass it*. It's a way to open your eyes to something that's so ubiquitous and pervasive that most of us don't even notice it.

[duaedesigns]

Yeah. Just like a lack of rubber suit monsters doesn't mean a movie is Oscar worthy, or that rubber suit monsters automatically mean a movie is terrible and unwatchable. It's just trying to point out exactly how many rubber monster suits there are in movies to the point they're accepted as normal and realistic.

But people get weirdly defensive of their rubber monster suits.

[(Anonymous)]

"the test is completely useless in filtering out interesting or good female characters in a realistic way"

Right, but... that's not what it's for. That wasn't ever what it was for. That's like complaining that a pregnancy test doesn't tell you if you have an STD.

All the Bechdel test does is provide an OBJECTIVE measure of female representation in a film, and thus it's useless for judging any individual movie. However, when applied over large numbers, it's a useful measure of prevailing trends and attitudes.

[(Anonymous)]

Generally, I think the Bechdel test isn't about sorting films into Feminist and Non-feminist piles -- I think it's about showing how lots of different forms of media have SUCH a dearth of women that it's a nontrivial occurrence when something passes a test that, if the genders were reversed, would be trivial to pass. Ultimately, it's not about having strong or well-written female characters but trying to get rid of the idea of "male as default" where the vast majority of minor and filler characters are male by default when they don't need to be (if characters in movies were 50-50 male-female, the Bechdel test would also be trivial to pass), and also developing extra/"gratuitous" (relatively speaking) female characters i.e. female characters not strictly necessary to the plot or the romantic plotline, giving female main characters female friends in their social network, etc.