7 ms·

Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating

28 points by tomcrisp 13y ago

Hoozt 13y ago
A population so small, making so much noise... :)
Jun8 13y ago
Swedes evidently think "too much of a good thing can be wonderful": they have had a Minister of Gender Equality since the 50's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_for_Gender_Equality_(Sweden) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_for_Gender_Equality_(S...) and there are efforts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun (http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_sweden_s_new_gender_neutral_pronoun_causes_controversy_.html http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_s..., although this has been tried in English, too). In the Global Gender Gap Report 2012, Sweden is named as a world leader in gender equality (http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2012 http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2012), etc. etc. I mean, the country even has an official gender equality webpage in English (http://sweden.se/society/gender-equality-in-sweden/ http://sweden.se/society/gender-equality-in-sweden/). It seems they can't go any further. And then this. Even Jezebel (http://jezebel.com/sweden-introduces-new-movie-rating-system-based-on-the-1459696241 http://jezebel.com/sweden-introduces-new-movie-rating-system...) has to admit the "test" is not perfect: "Sure, the Bechdel test is imperfect (Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker doesn't pass, for instance, but you could hardly argue that a female-helmed war movie doesn't empower at least one woman), but that doesn't make it useless as a starting line for sniffing out broad trends in gender bias. And that's what we're talking about here. Trends. Analysis. Examination. Critical thought. Information. I'm sure there are plenty of people who consider themselves scrupulously egalitarian who never even noticed that there are only like THREE WOMEN IN ALL OF MIDDLE EARTH." I understand that this is just a thing introduced by a a few movie theaters, i.e. it's not the law or anything (yet). Yet, that's what riles me most: as librarians are the first to defend any censorship, movie professionals should push back on any arbitrary limitation on what can be shown. Some examples of movies that fail the test are given, e.g. LOTHR Trilogy, Pulp Fiction, Pacific Rim, etc. However, the test would also exclude many art films such as Tarkovski's Stalker and Solaris. How about movies with only a single female lead that don't quite fit the purpose of the test, e.g. Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly? How to handle movies with no dialog, or experimental movies such as Eraserhead? One can easily see that this sort of simplistic testing can have little artistic or practical merit.
- fryguy 13y ago
  a recent movie that's similar is Gravity. It doesn't even pass the reverse test since there are so few characters.
  - vacri 13y ago
    The point of the test isn't to be definitive (and it was recognised as so when it was created). Of course it's going to fail in extremely contrived films like Gravity or dialogueless films. It's not even about showing women in power - so the comment about The Hurt Locker empowering the producer is kind've irrelevant. It's about movies in general not showing women and relationships between women as entities in their own right. It's about trying to move the needle back to the centre, not shoehorning women's dialogue into Koyaanisqatsi.
  - gph 13y ago
    Haven't seen that one, but the first thing that popped into my head was "What about a movie like Moon?" I mean there was really just the one main character, and I suppose he talked to his wife and daughter who were both named so it gets an A grade. But they were the only two female characters that I remember and I don't think they really added a lot to the gender equality context seeing as they were the stay-at-home family back on earth. The formula is just so simplistic. If you wanted to build a comprehensive metric you'd probably want to take a few factors into consideration. Maybe a ratio of dialogue to on-screen time for female characters vs. male characters. Perhaps number of non-traditional female roles vs. traditional roles. I don't know. There should be something better than an eye-test some comic from the 80's threw out there.
    - sixothree 13y ago
      In my opinion they do not even populate the denominator, much less the numerator; but according to this test it gets a 0/1. But then again, Moon does have two female characters so maybe it deserves a 1/3.
  - klipt 13y ago
    It's a one sided test so obviously biased. Like rolling a bunch of dice, then pointing at all the 5-6s and saying "too high!"
kunai 13y ago
This has to be one of the most absurd things I've heard all day. And when you work where I do, you hear a lot of absurd things. People have often lambasted those who scream and wince whenever an ounce of political correctness shows up in society/media. Well, to those people: look at your work. Did you want to encourage censorship? Of course, I'm overblowing this thing way too much. But 5, ten, maybe even 20 years ago, if this kind of thing happened, people would revolt. For some reason, censorship in the name of equality seems to be the norm in today's world. Harrison Bergeron, indeed.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  Censorship? Did you read the same article I did?
- siegecraft 13y ago
  maybe people aren't revolting because they're more tolerant now? it isn't censorship.
stolio 13y ago
Having seen both the Swedish and American versions of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo I have to say Sweden is a bit ahead when it comes to gender representation, so they're doing something right somewhere. On the other hand, Harry Potter was written by a self-proclaimed feminist and has a very empowering female in Hermione Granger, if that series fails the Bechdel Test then I'm left wondering how many other false-positives the test throws. Even The Vagina Monologues fails the Bechdel Test (to be fair, because monologues).
- mchaver 13y ago
  It's definitely a flawed metric, but I doubt most metrics start out perfectly and there is nothing wrong with that. It's value is in starting a dialogue and I am sure it can be improved with iteration. Some minor issues fact-based movies, documentaries: biographical movies (if it is the story of a man and there are no women in his life that doesn't necessarily make it chauvinistic), historical movies (if it is a movie about anti-feminist or chauvinistic events, does that necessarily make it anti-feminist even if the goal is to educate?)
  - stolio 13y ago
    The test has had almost 30 years to develop The general problem that I see in both the test and the problem it's designed to solve is this mental shortcut of an either/or grouping. Male/female, pass/fail. But if it helps some people start dialogue then that's wonderful, at the same time I think the intersectionalist feminists deserve some positive attention for searching out new ways to get the conversations going.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      > at the same time I think the intersectionalist feminists deserve some positive attention for searching out new ways to get the conversations going. I'm confused that you say this, but do not actually link any such ways. I'd personally be happy to give them some positive attention, but feminism isn't something I spend much time on so I don't know the latest stuff going on.
biff 13y ago
This is a strange blind spot for film to have, especially with regard to genres like science fiction or fantasy where the art is limited only by the creator's imagination and conventional boundaries are expected to be tested. Maybe Hollywood's worried that target audiences won't identify with a female lead, maybe the formula's considered too risky for a blockbuster. But surely there's an alternate universe somewhere with aliens or magic where (hold on to your hats) a matriarchal society somehow evolved and manages to be part of the fabric of the story without characters constantly drawing attention to it, comparing it to Earth, having it set up a battle of the sexes, etc.
- Jun8 13y ago
  A movie from Tiptree's story Houston, Houston, Do You Read would be exactly what you mention.
- Buzzzz 13y ago
  Maybe they should try to make movies out of Katherine kerrs books they are both good reads and has varied genders (if I remember correctly). Buzzz
tzs 13y ago
Much of mainstream hard core porn passes that test.
- saraid216 13y ago
  Prove it. Offer a way to develop a representative sample of "mainstream hard core porn" and then quantify what "much" actually means as a percentage. Good luck.
- vacri 13y ago
  I wouldn't class much of the female-to-female dialogue in hardcore porn as being worthy of the label 'conversation'.
roarroar 13y ago
Maybe if feminists (part of the parasitic political class) spent less time being resentful of what others have built and built something themselves they'd have less reason to be resentful in the first place. Now we're living not just with the reactive feminist losers, but the reactive-reactive super-loser MRA types.
- vectorjohn 13y ago
  Wow, worst of HN award? This is up there with the worst garbage I've read on here. Broad generalizations and extreme sexism. You might as well have said civil rights leaders should have sucked it up and built something themselves. As if that's not what they were doing. Or excellent troll. But out of place - this is for serious discussion.
  - roarroar 13y ago
    >Broad generalizations and extreme sexism. Your comment is up there with the "worst garbage" on HN. An inconvenient opinion that you have no answer to (see next paragraph), answered with a laughable accusation of "extreme sexism". Get a life, loser. >You might as well have said civil rights leaders should have sucked it up and built something themselves. You might as well have brought the slaves of Sparta into the discussion. The conditions of women trying to produce their own films aren't even in the same _sport_ as the broad issues facing blacks during the civil rights movement. This is one mark of the egalitarian: to covertly exploit those weaker than him in order to press forward his own interests. >But out of place - this is for serious discussion. Yes, like your moronic attack on me. Grow a brain.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    I glanced through roarroar's comment history and it only seems to appear to be an account for being anti-feminist.
    - roarroar 13y ago
      In other words, you ignored the content of my comment and went looking for _dirt_ you could use against me. Bravo, you complete imbecile. And I am anti-egalitarian - feminism is just the current vogue in the tech scene, which is currently degenerating both technically and socially. And your behavior of gossiping about my account is a prime example.
skaevola 13y ago
Pulp Fiction passes the Bechdel test. http://bechdeltest.com/view/91/ http://bechdeltest.com/view/91/

28 points by tomcrisp 13y ago

Hoozt 13y ago

A population so small, making so much noise... :)

Jun8 13y ago

Swedes evidently think "too much of a good thing can be wonderful": they have had a Minister of Gender Equality since the 50's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_for_Gender_Equality_(Sweden) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_for_Gender_Equality_(S...) and there are efforts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun (http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_sweden_s_new_gender_neutral_pronoun_causes_controversy_.html http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_s..., although this has been tried in English, too). In the Global Gender Gap Report 2012, Sweden is named as a world leader in gender equality (http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2012 http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2012), etc. etc. I mean, the country even has an official gender equality webpage in English (http://sweden.se/society/gender-equality-in-sweden/ http://sweden.se/society/gender-equality-in-sweden/). It seems they can't go any further. And then this. Even Jezebel (http://jezebel.com/sweden-introduces-new-movie-rating-system-based-on-the-1459696241 http://jezebel.com/sweden-introduces-new-movie-rating-system...) has to admit the "test" is not perfect: "Sure, the Bechdel test is imperfect (Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker doesn't pass, for instance, but you could hardly argue that a female-helmed war movie doesn't empower at least one woman), but that doesn't make it useless as a starting line for sniffing out broad trends in gender bias. And that's what we're talking about here. Trends. Analysis. Examination. Critical thought. Information. I'm sure there are plenty of people who consider themselves scrupulously egalitarian who never even noticed that there are only like THREE WOMEN IN ALL OF MIDDLE EARTH." I understand that this is just a thing introduced by a a few movie theaters, i.e. it's not the law or anything (yet). Yet, that's what riles me most: as librarians are the first to defend any censorship, movie professionals should push back on any arbitrary limitation on what can be shown. Some examples of movies that fail the test are given, e.g. LOTHR Trilogy, Pulp Fiction, Pacific Rim, etc. However, the test would also exclude many art films such as Tarkovski's Stalker and Solaris. How about movies with only a single female lead that don't quite fit the purpose of the test, e.g. Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly? How to handle movies with no dialog, or experimental movies such as Eraserhead? One can easily see that this sort of simplistic testing can have little artistic or practical merit.

fryguy 13y ago
a recent movie that's similar is Gravity. It doesn't even pass the reverse test since there are so few characters.
- vacri 13y ago
  The point of the test isn't to be definitive (and it was recognised as so when it was created). Of course it's going to fail in extremely contrived films like Gravity or dialogueless films. It's not even about showing women in power - so the comment about The Hurt Locker empowering the producer is kind've irrelevant. It's about movies in general not showing women and relationships between women as entities in their own right. It's about trying to move the needle back to the centre, not shoehorning women's dialogue into Koyaanisqatsi.
- gph 13y ago
  Haven't seen that one, but the first thing that popped into my head was "What about a movie like Moon?" I mean there was really just the one main character, and I suppose he talked to his wife and daughter who were both named so it gets an A grade. But they were the only two female characters that I remember and I don't think they really added a lot to the gender equality context seeing as they were the stay-at-home family back on earth. The formula is just so simplistic. If you wanted to build a comprehensive metric you'd probably want to take a few factors into consideration. Maybe a ratio of dialogue to on-screen time for female characters vs. male characters. Perhaps number of non-traditional female roles vs. traditional roles. I don't know. There should be something better than an eye-test some comic from the 80's threw out there.
  - sixothree 13y ago
    In my opinion they do not even populate the denominator, much less the numerator; but according to this test it gets a 0/1. But then again, Moon does have two female characters so maybe it deserves a 1/3.
- klipt 13y ago
  It's a one sided test so obviously biased. Like rolling a bunch of dice, then pointing at all the 5-6s and saying "too high!"

kunai 13y ago

This has to be one of the most absurd things I've heard all day. And when you work where I do, you hear a lot of absurd things. People have often lambasted those who scream and wince whenever an ounce of political correctness shows up in society/media. Well, to those people: look at your work. Did you want to encourage censorship? Of course, I'm overblowing this thing way too much. But 5, ten, maybe even 20 years ago, if this kind of thing happened, people would revolt. For some reason, censorship in the name of equality seems to be the norm in today's world. Harrison Bergeron, indeed.

MartinCron 13y ago
Censorship? Did you read the same article I did?
siegecraft 13y ago
maybe people aren't revolting because they're more tolerant now? it isn't censorship.

stolio 13y ago

Having seen both the Swedish and American versions of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo I have to say Sweden is a bit ahead when it comes to gender representation, so they're doing something right somewhere. On the other hand, Harry Potter was written by a self-proclaimed feminist and has a very empowering female in Hermione Granger, if that series fails the Bechdel Test then I'm left wondering how many other false-positives the test throws. Even The Vagina Monologues fails the Bechdel Test (to be fair, because monologues).

mchaver 13y ago
It's definitely a flawed metric, but I doubt most metrics start out perfectly and there is nothing wrong with that. It's value is in starting a dialogue and I am sure it can be improved with iteration. Some minor issues fact-based movies, documentaries: biographical movies (if it is the story of a man and there are no women in his life that doesn't necessarily make it chauvinistic), historical movies (if it is a movie about anti-feminist or chauvinistic events, does that necessarily make it anti-feminist even if the goal is to educate?)
- stolio 13y ago
  The test has had almost 30 years to develop The general problem that I see in both the test and the problem it's designed to solve is this mental shortcut of an either/or grouping. Male/female, pass/fail. But if it helps some people start dialogue then that's wonderful, at the same time I think the intersectionalist feminists deserve some positive attention for searching out new ways to get the conversations going.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > at the same time I think the intersectionalist feminists deserve some positive attention for searching out new ways to get the conversations going. I'm confused that you say this, but do not actually link any such ways. I'd personally be happy to give them some positive attention, but feminism isn't something I spend much time on so I don't know the latest stuff going on.

biff 13y ago

This is a strange blind spot for film to have, especially with regard to genres like science fiction or fantasy where the art is limited only by the creator's imagination and conventional boundaries are expected to be tested. Maybe Hollywood's worried that target audiences won't identify with a female lead, maybe the formula's considered too risky for a blockbuster. But surely there's an alternate universe somewhere with aliens or magic where (hold on to your hats) a matriarchal society somehow evolved and manages to be part of the fabric of the story without characters constantly drawing attention to it, comparing it to Earth, having it set up a battle of the sexes, etc.

Jun8 13y ago
A movie from Tiptree's story Houston, Houston, Do You Read would be exactly what you mention.
Buzzzz 13y ago
Maybe they should try to make movies out of Katherine kerrs books they are both good reads and has varied genders (if I remember correctly). Buzzz

tzs 13y ago

Much of mainstream hard core porn passes that test.

saraid216 13y ago
Prove it. Offer a way to develop a representative sample of "mainstream hard core porn" and then quantify what "much" actually means as a percentage. Good luck.
vacri 13y ago
I wouldn't class much of the female-to-female dialogue in hardcore porn as being worthy of the label 'conversation'.

roarroar 13y ago

Maybe if feminists (part of the parasitic political class) spent less time being resentful of what others have built and built something themselves they'd have less reason to be resentful in the first place. Now we're living not just with the reactive feminist losers, but the reactive-reactive super-loser MRA types.

vectorjohn 13y ago
Wow, worst of HN award? This is up there with the worst garbage I've read on here. Broad generalizations and extreme sexism. You might as well have said civil rights leaders should have sucked it up and built something themselves. As if that's not what they were doing. Or excellent troll. But out of place - this is for serious discussion.
- roarroar 13y ago
  >Broad generalizations and extreme sexism. Your comment is up there with the "worst garbage" on HN. An inconvenient opinion that you have no answer to (see next paragraph), answered with a laughable accusation of "extreme sexism". Get a life, loser. >You might as well have said civil rights leaders should have sucked it up and built something themselves. You might as well have brought the slaves of Sparta into the discussion. The conditions of women trying to produce their own films aren't even in the same _sport_ as the broad issues facing blacks during the civil rights movement. This is one mark of the egalitarian: to covertly exploit those weaker than him in order to press forward his own interests. >But out of place - this is for serious discussion. Yes, like your moronic attack on me. Grow a brain.
- saraid216 13y ago
  I glanced through roarroar's comment history and it only seems to appear to be an account for being anti-feminist.
  - roarroar 13y ago
    In other words, you ignored the content of my comment and went looking for _dirt_ you could use against me. Bravo, you complete imbecile. And I am anti-egalitarian - feminism is just the current vogue in the tech scene, which is currently degenerating both technically and socially. And your behavior of gossiping about my account is a prime example.

skaevola 13y ago

Pulp Fiction passes the Bechdel test. http://bechdeltest.com/view/91/ http://bechdeltest.com/view/91/