No, but if TV shows in general, or genre in particular, has a high rate of both test failing, then it isn’t really sexism driving it. It is just the format. But if we can find, say a half dozen sit-coms from the last 10 years that fail the Bechdel test, but not one that fails the reverse, then that tells us there is something different about how male and female characters are portrayed.
Right, we need the reverse Bechdel test as a control to compare the Bechdel test to. If it were common for both tests to fail, then we could shrug our shoulders and say that Hollywood sucks at creating interesting plots, but at least they’re fair about it. But it’s not common for both tests to fail, so we can point to the different rates of failure as evidence of a problem.
No, to contrast.