Uses of Bechdel test

In 1980's cortoonist Alison Bechdel observed a frustrating trend in pop culture films only had a single female character and when there were multiple Women in a film   storylines always revolving Around men. The realisation inspired to create a comic called the rule I only go to the movie if it satisfies these three basic requirements they are

·       There should be at least two named female characters

·       Do they speak to each other

·       Do they speak to each other about something other than a male love interet.

 

This requirements for my foundation on the Bechdel test which has become a tool used to call attention to gender inequality and pop culture. Bechdel credits the idea for the test to her friend Liz Vallace Who was inspired by Virginia Woolf essay Add almost want own wounds rights all these relationships between women are two simple and I tried to remember any case in the course of my readings where two women are represented as friends day are not and then mother and daughter but almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men, Even though oops essay is over 90 years old limited female representation and pop culture Persist todayis so late both 120 films by a Geena Wavis Institute on gender and media revealed that Only 31% of the name characters were female and 23% have a female protagonist or Co protagonist.

The other woman acknowledges that the idea is pretty strict, but good. Not finding any films that meet their requirements, they go home together. The context of the strip referred to alienation of queer women in film and entertainment, where the only possible way for a queer woman to imagine any of the characters in any film may also be queer was if they satisfied the requirements of the test.

The test has also been referred to as the "Bechdel–Wallace test  the "Bechdel rule", "Bechdel's law, or the "Mo Movie Measure”. Bechdel credited the idea for the test to a friend and karate training partner, Liz Wallace, whose name appears in the marquee of the strip. She later wrote that she was pretty certain that Wallace was inspired by Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own.

Several variants of the test have been proposed—for example, that the two women must be named characters, or that there must be at least a total of 60 seconds of conversation. The test has also attracted academic interest from a computational analysis approach. In June 2018, the term "Bechdel test" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

According to Neda Ulaby, the test resonates because "it articulates something often missing in popular culture: not the number of women we see on screen, but the depth of their stories, and the range of their concerns. Dean Spade and Craig Willse described the test as a "commentary on how media representations enforce harmful gender norms" by depicting women's relationships to men more than any other relationships, and women's lives as important only insofar as they relate to men. Use in film and television industry Edit Originally meant as "a little lesbian joke in an alternative feminist newspaper", according to Bechdel, the test moved into mainstream criticism in the 2010s and has been described as "the standard by which feminist critics judge television, movies, books, and other media. In 2013, Internet culture website The Daily Dot described it as "almost a household phrase, common shorthand to capture whether a film is woman-friendly. The failure of major Hollywood productions to pass the test, such as Pacific Rim (2013), was addressed in-depth in the media. In 2013, four Swedish cinemas and the Scandinavian cable television channel Viasat Film incorporated the Bechdel test into some of their ratings, a move supported by the Swedish Film Institute.

In 2014, the European cinema fund Eurimages incorporated the Bechdel test into its submission mechanism as part of an effort to collect information about gender equality in its projects. It requires "a Bechdel analysis of the script to be supplied by the script readers”.

In 2018, screenwriting software developers began incorporating functions that allow writers to analyze their scripts for gender representation. Software with such functions includes, WriterDuet and Final Draft .