Given that the test first appeared in Allison Bechdel’s comic, Dykes to Watch Out For, I’d say “No.”
“Manikins” by John Varley
Sure it does. Any fictional work where the only speaking roles are filled by women is eligible. I haven’t seen The Vagina Monologues, but from what I understand it’s a work of fiction consisting of a series of monologues delivered by one or more female actors.
So it’s eligible, but only on a technicality; I was hoping we might come up with some works which fail due to violating condition #3 instead of #2 or #1.
I had the mixed fortune to watch a play in London starring both Dame Maggie Smith and Dame Judi Dench: The Breath of Life.
It is just those two, for a whole play, doing nothing but bitching about a man.
I didn’t think the play was any great shakes, but I could watch those two read a phone book, so it was an enjoyable evening nonetheless.
Here’s an articleabout the play that totally disagrees with me about the play being a bit rubbish, but you get the drift, I think.
So, yes. Very possible.
Sex and the City
Shoes and handbags are not men. 
ETA: Conversations about of course… not as speaking parts… that would just be weird…
Sex and the City also fails the OP’s requirements when it comes to speaking parts though, since men did have speaking parts on the show.
There aren’t a lot of plays, movies, or TV series with single sex casts, and I suspect that all-male casts are more common than all-female ones just because historically women had a limited role in some popular settings like the military and courtrooms.
I can think of several books where all the major characters were women, but I’m struggling to come up with any that didn’t have a single male character with dialogue. There are probably a number of short stories with only a few characters where all are of the same sex, and it wouldn’t surprise me to find one where the whole story was two women talking about a man (or the other way around), but I can’t think of any examples.
What? The OP says nothing about not allowing men to have speaking parks.
Read it again.
If there is something non-trivial (meaning not all monologues or only a single character), I suspect it will likely about somebody who lost their father/brother/friend in either the euphemistic or literal sense. Like a short story about a lost little girl trying to find her father that only happens to interact with women (maybe it’s set it a women’s shelter or something).
All You Zombies might kind of qualify in the most bizarre manner possible.
[spoiler]Every person in the story is a past/future version of the same person. However, this opens up some issues about transexuality, time travel, and the self since we’re introduced to this character as a man, and he rapes his former female self and impregnates her to give birth to him/herself, which is what causes her to change her identity to male, iirc. And even then, his “former female self” is intersex.
I can’t really recall if they ever have a conversation that’s not about one of the versions of him/her in at least an indirect way.[/spoiler]
Yup, that was my mistake. I even read it twice before too.
Y’know, you could almost make a Top Gun-knockoff movie with an all-female cast that’d fail the test. Depending on how much you want to cheat with “talking” (if you included mission briefings and only general radio chatter) and “about a man” (especially if you call an enemy plane a “he,” which may not even be the case).
It’d be kind of like writing a story without using the letter “e.” But with more MiGs.
50 Shades of Grey has some very superficial conversations between women that are not about men, but these usually turn into discussions of men, or, the whole time they are talking, at least one of them is thinking about a man.
8 Femmes?
I think it was just women. I’m sure they talked about other things, but pretty sure the plot revolved around a man that had died.
The hard requirement that *only *women can have speaking parts is going to limit you to a handful of plays or perfromance pieces.
Beyond this is it really all that big a deal? In real life women are generally more oriented than men in casual conversation to talking about people rather than things. If art reflects that reality is it being sexist?
Surely there must be some written fiction as well. There must be a lot of short stories with only female characters, or where females are the only ones with dialogue.
Of course not. This is just a fun thought exercise which playfully subverts the Bechdel test.
It’s not about being sexist as such, it’s how we use female characters in storytelling. The issue isn’t that individual movies fail the bechdel test, its that almost all of them do.
Male characters talk to each other about all sorts of things, but if two female characters talk to each other, it’s usually just to push forward the narrative of the male characters.
When that is systemic, it’s a problem, even when the individual instances aren’t.
Well, there’s a Portal film coming out at some point…
Thanks, not recalling the title was irritating.
Would it include Wheatly or Ratmann?
Even if it’s just GlaDOS and Chell, though, while there’s never any dialog between those two, GlaDOS certainly talks to Chell, and usually about topics other than men. I would argue that Portal passes the Bechdel test.