The X-Files.
Since you didn’t remember, I thought you might be interested in knowing not only that the original Star Trek passed, but in which specific episodes.
Also, I think the nature of how they pass is kinda interesting.
The essence of the Bechdel test boils down to looking for movies that have characters who talk about something other than the other characters in the movie.
The problem isn’t (just) sexism. The problem is that movies don’t create fully realized minor characters at all, regardless of gender. But that’s not even really a problem if you want the focus of your movie to be on the leads. It’s a goal.
Scully talks to her sister and her mother sometimes. And other female abductees. I’m pretty sure she occasionally interacts with female doctors, police, coroners, victims etc. as well.
Ellis: Yet somehow, men in movies manage to have conversations that aren’t about women.
I recall there were a couple of female characters, but I bet Oz would fail. By the same token, Orange Is the New Black might fail the reverse Bechdel!
That’s a side effect of men getting most of the leading roles.
To clarify, I’m saying that the sexism in Hollywood is the disproportionate ratio of leading roles that go to men.
The Bechdel test misses the point, and in fact obfuscates it, but attaching sexism to an intentional underwriting of secondary characters that movies do on purpose. It has nothing to do with gender; it’s about keeping secondary characters secondary.
That men get the leading roles while women get secondary roles, that’s the sexism. That secondary roles aren’t fleshed out (they don’t talk to each other about something other than a man) is not. That’s just called “being a movie.”
A series can be 6-100+ hours. Saying it passes doesn’t say much. That’s why I think percent of episodes is more interesting. There’s a big difference in a series where 90% of the episodes pass vs. another with only 10%. YMMV.
American Pie talks to the Lumberjack Brother out in the woods a couple of times and the male guards regularly have conversations with each other.
This is a good point. If I’m remembering correctly, The Avengers didn’t pass the Bechdel test. It could have passed if Maria Hill and Black Widow just had a short conversation about their jobs or something. But the bigger issue than The Avengers not passing the Bechdel test is that Black Widow hasn’t gotten her own movie. And that there are so few movies with women in the lead.
It certainly does have something to do with gender, given that so many more movies fail the female version of the test than fail the male version. The Bechdel Test clearly indicates that there’s a problem of some sort. It’s a mistake, though, to think that it indicates what the problem is, and you’re probably right on that score: The problem that the Bechdel Test highlights is probably largely that movies tend to have male leads.
That doesn’t get completely to the issue, either, though. Another aspect is that, of those movies which have male or female leads, the focus of the movie tends to be different. There are plenty of movies with female leads, but many of those have a romantic relationship as the main plot, and hence conversations between women in the movie are likely to be about men. Movies with male leads, by contrast, tend to have as a plot a struggle either versus something inhuman or versus other men, and conversations are likely to be about that adversary.
Scully’s interactions with other women are few and far between. Her sister was only in 3 episodes and was killed in season 3. Her mother, Margaret, only appeared in a total of 14 episodes out of 202.
Eh, I take the Bechdel Test seriously.
Ever see the Drew Barrymore/Hugh Grant movie Music and Lyrics? I really like this movie. It has two strongly developed lead characters, a roughly gender-balanced cast, and seems to respect both male and female points of view. It passes reverse Bechdel in the first few minutes, with a conversation between Grant’s character and his manager about business.
It maybe barely passes Bechdel, or does so only ambiguously. Barrymore’s character talks to her sister, about Grant’s character. She talks to Grant. She talks to another female character, about music, a little bit, I think, but not at length onscreen–and one of their exchanges is whispered, hence “ambiguous.”
This sort of thing is common.
The Bechdel Test is about exactly what it says it’s about. Women, even in gender-balanced movies, are written to mostly talk about male characters, while men are allowed to talk about non-romance topics to other men.
I’ve recently been rewatching Cheers on NetFlix, and it might actually pass… er, I mean fail. The bar patrons are predominantly male and any dialog that doesn’t relate to the patrons almost always involves the love interest plot with Sam Malone. On top of that, half of Carla’s lines are about her various exes or her children (four of whom are boys).
With such a long-running series, I suppose there’s probably one scene somewhere that doesn’t fail the Bechdel test. If I find it, I’ll come back and update the thread.
If Ilm reading the requirements correctly {and that is a big IF, Ive been sick for two weeks} how about Cagney and Lacey?
dracoi, didn’t Frasier’s ex show up a few times on the show? You might want to start by looking at a few of those episodes, as she might have talked with Carla about something.
Why do we need a reverse Bechdel test? Are there a lot of movies and shows where men are sidelined and treated as one-dimensional characters? Designing Women is the only one I can think of offhand.
There are a few British series that would fit the bill- Call the Midwife for example. Although there are several reasonably filled out male characters, the stories definitely revolve around the women.
So, that hardly dominates, right? We can only think of a few series that are all female-centric. Which means that, what 75-80% of the media we consume is male-centric.
Um, so why do we need a reverse Bechdel test again? Because of all the misandry? :rolleyes:
Not sure about the later seasons, but Carla and Diane talked about work at times. There was one episode where they had a bet on who could make the most in tips.