(had to start a new thread, got too long) thanks for tagging me @loulooser ooh i like this okay - nick nelson (osemanverse) - aled last (osemanverse) - peeta mellark (hunger games) - linh song (keeper of the lost cities) - xavier hawthorne (the inheritance games)
okay but do you understand that liz wallace made the bechdel-WALLACE test because she was a dyke who wanted to go to movies and pretend the characters were dykes and her friend alison bechdel happened to put her silly little litmus assessment into a comic strip and then the rest of everyone else decided it was a bona fide way of means testing media for Feminist Content? do you know that? it doesn’t sound like you know that
i am going to explain the bechdel test for people such as those in the tags
here is the original comic strip:
what the bechdel-wallace test is not:
an academic analysis of media
a bar that determines whether or not a movie is “bad” or “good” (by which i mean if a movie doesn’t pass the bechdel-wallace test that doesn’t make it bad, and if a movie passes the test the movie is not automatically good)
supposed to be taken seriously
what the bechdel-wallace test is:
a personal litmus test created by a lesbian who was, presumably, frustrated with the fact that women could not exist in the movie without a relationship to a man
it is not a way to “police what women speak about” because it does not apply to real people. it applies to fictional characters. also, the bechdel-wallace test does not stipulate that there can be no conversation about a male love interest. the women just have to talk about something other than a male love interest.
the reason the male love interest stipulation is there is because like… this test was created by a butch lesbian woman to determine whether or not she wanted to watch a movie. removing that part of the test violates the spirit of the test. it’s silly because it’s not supposed to be serious.
tl;dr stop misinterpreting the bechdel-wallace test you losers. op is right. goodbye
As a woman who is not a lesbian, I think the Bechdel-Wallace test is incredibly valuable. But not to judge individual pieces of media on. Because it says nothing about quality of that media, and there’s a lot of other ways that media could be feminist or woman-positive. For example, two female doctors talking about a male patient is still, technically “two women talking together about a man.”
I find the Bechdel-Wallace test important as a way of talking about the state of media. Because any individual work may not pass the Bechdel-Wallace test for a variety of reasons. But when you look at how many works fail it, that tells you something about the representation of women in media. It tells you two things: that there aren’t many female characters, or at least not as many as there are men, and they’re not in leading roles (and thus not getting as many conversations per piece of media), and that when they do talk it tends to be about the men in their lives, whether romantic interest or not. Whether or not any one movie or book or TV show is good or bad is irrelevant. What’s important is the overall pattern.
And talking about the Bechdel-Wallace test gives a good shorthand for starting to talk about the patterns of how women are portrayed in media.
I feel like a good shorthand for a lot of economics arguments is “if you want people to work minimum wage jobs in your city, you need to allow minimum wage apartments for them to live in.”
“These jobs are just for teenagers on the weekends.” Okay, so you’ll use minimum wage services only on the weekends and after school. No McDonald’s or Starbucks on your lunch break.
“They can get a roommate.” For a one bedroom? A roommate for a one bedroom? Or a studio? Do you have a roommate to get a middle-wage apartment for your middle-wage job? No? Why should they?
“They can live farther from city center and just commute.” Are there ways for them to commute that don’t equate to that rent? Living in an outer borough might work in NYC, where public transport is a flat rate, but a city in Texas requires a car. Does the money saved in rent equal the money spent on the car loan, the insurance, the gas? Remember, if you want people to take the bus or a bike, the bus needs to be reliable and the bike lanes survivable.
If you want minimum wage workers to be around for you to rely on, then those minimum wage workers need a place to stay.
You either raise the minimum wage, or you drop the rent. There’s only so long you can keep rents high and wages low before your workforce leaves for cheaper pastures.
“Nobody wants to work anymore” doesn’t hold water if the reason nobody applies is because the commute is impossible at the wage you provide.