aMANuensis
The most secure password is now “eveandamytalkabouttheweather”
Female, named characters of course
I always found this one weird because how hard is it to write a conversation that’s not about a man? Just take any conversation not about a man from anywhere in your work, and then make the speakers women with names.
It’s weird that anyone fails it.
The Bechdel test is meant to be a metric, not a target.
That’s the whole point. It’s a bleeding basic, simple test to pass.
The fact that so many movies, and even TV shows fail this barebones, minimal test is the problem.
The test is a symptom of whether the text has women as normal characters that do stuff.
But this actual goal is hard to define, and if none of the women do any relevant stuff, they won’t have any subject to talk about that doesn’t involve a men. That said, the proxy test fails to reflect the actual test all the time.
That test always seemed odd to me. Anytime a woman on a book/movie,/media in general is shown going to a grocery/super market they have whole entire conversations were a man isn’t the subject. Doubly so if their lady’s name is Karen.
I think the criteria is that both women talking need to be named. The point being that if the same rules were applied to men in film, it would be easy for everything to pass, but when applied to women, unfortunately it’s difficult for many films to pass the criteria, or require a lot of scrutiny.
It’s not a rigorous nor formal test of quality, but a simple indicator of representation. Per wikipedia,
A work of fiction passing or failing the test does not necessarily indicate the overall representation of women in the work. Instead, the test is used as an indicator of the active presence (or lack thereof) of women in fiction, and to call attention to gender inequality in fiction.
It wasn’t ever intended to be a mainstay of lit crit, but it’s turned out to be an extremely useful yet quick and simple test, so it’s stuck around in the toolkit.
Bechdel salt
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Omg, SecuriTay in the wild? Fucking love to see it.
Ah yes, Bechtel Security. Very difficult to break, but not widely adopted.
