What Is The Bechdel Test (And Why Should I Care)

I’m prostrate on the sofa watching Parks and Recreation back to back and cursing my inability to deal with hangovers.

‘The time really got away from me,’ I explain plaintively, ‘one minute it was 7pm, then 10, then boom, 4 in the morning.’

‘What did you guys get up to?’ asks Captain Tact.

‘Chatting, mostly.’

We also drank a bottle of amaretto and danced around the living room at length, singing at the tops of our voices - but I’m not ready to think about that yet.

‘What about?’

‘Social work, politics, the impact of social media on young people growing up, The Rapture’s new album...’

‘Congratulations, your conversation passed the Bechdel test.’

The Bechdel test, for those who have not come across it, is used to identify gender bias in films, telly and so on.

The test is simply to ask ‘do two or more women have a proper onscreen conversation about something other than a man?’

If the answer is yes, the show passes. Try it yourself - although 2013 arguably did better than previous years, a disconcerting amount of popular media fails.

Having said that, almost nobody in the media is representative of normal every day conversations, irrespective of gender. Film and TV characters are good or bad; intelligent or attractive. Sometimes there’s the twist that someone good was merely pretending to be horrible, or someone beautiful was actually quite intelligent, but by and large fictional characters are broadly drawn. 

I assume the reason for this is that writers don’t deal in the everyday – or not the everyday as it actually is. Fiction is supposed to provide an escape into another world, either one close to ours but better, or like ours but awful so we come out the other end going ‘golly gee, I’m sure glad I don’t live in the popular Liam Neeson film Taken!’

Either way the fictional world is not like your actual life, because why the hell would you watch that? You’re already living real life. Why would you want to watch average looking people with average real life jobs, talking about how their kids are getting on at school or cat pictures they’ve seen in the Metro? That isn’t an escape from reality, that’s rubbing it in your face.  We want a bit of excitement from our downtime, maybe romance and adventure - something to aspire to.

Whilst I absolutely agree TV and film are bad at showing realistic conversations between women, they’re often terrible at showing realistic conversations between anyone at all.  In fact, the level of unreality is so prevalent in terms of cast and content, it’s enough to make you wonder whether very beautiful people perhaps don’t have normal conversations.

Think about this. How often in your life do you see a human woman that looks like Beyonce, or Lucy Liu, or insert-other-beautiful-celebrity-of-your-choice-here?  Not often, unless you’re doing some Grade A stalking.  The beautiful ones exist in a bubble of others like them, people whose MO is to bewitch the world with their looks and do very little else (a theory supported by all episodes of 30 Rock featuring Jon Hamm).

Therefore, is it that much of stretch to suppose that the beautiful ones don’t have conversations about normal stuff? Maybe when female celebrities get drunk, they actually do spend the entire time talking about boys.  Sure, that sounds unlikely, but the tabloids would have a hard time finding ‘sources close to the star’ to reveal all her private relationship stuff if she spent her spare time bemoaning the lack of support given to Social Workers, or arguing about whether The Rapture’s new CD needs more cowbell like me and my normal looking friends. 

Perhaps TV and film consistently fails the Bechdel test because the women beautiful enough to be on TV also fail it.  After all, it can’t be because there is a perception held by the people making and paying for film and TV that audiences want to escape into a two dimensional world where women exist to talk about men, people of colour and the LGBT community exist to provide comic relief, and people with additional support needs do not exist at all.

Can it?

19.57 From Euston

On Saturday, this was doing the rounds on Twitter:



When I watched it, I thought ‘aw, that’s nice,’ posted it to Facebook and promptly forgot all about it.

This being the internet, a few people have reacted in a more considered way.

Natalie Dzerins (Forty Shades of Grey) finds it utterly cringeworthy, which is fair enough – but more than that, she thinks it is demeaning to women; a thought that never even crossed my mind until I read her post. The woman generally speaks a lot of sense so this prompted me to re-visit my initial reaction.

When I shared the vidjo on the book of face, I did so with the tagline “anybody remember the group ‘Disney Gave Me Unrealistic Expectations of Love?’ This guy clearly does, and said, ‘no more!’”

To explain, said group united those who had reached adulthood only to discover a distinct lack of perfectly coiffed prospective partners with freakishly straight teeth and talking animal pals. Where were the dragon slayers, the perky princesses, the lovers who unexpectedly burst into song at the drop of a hat?

Members bemoaned the fact love at first sight is not as common as Disney led them to believe, and that most people are pretty much the same – everyone gets a bit crabbit when they’ve not had enough sleep, wicked stepmothers are not especially prevalent, and most men don’t even own a cloak (excepting the more dedicated Noel Fielding fan, perhaps).

However, the occasional friend will find their own Prince Charming or Cinderella, you’ll be invited to a lovely wedding with a ceilidh and a bucket of stovies, and a collective sigh will go up for lo, there is romance in the world after all. Who doesn’t want a happy ever after in a castle full of talking crockery?

Well, I wouldn’t, to be fair. It’s one thing to enjoy a bit of schmaltz in a movie, quite another to deliberately inflict it on a loved one in a public space.

But I don’t speak for everyone, and I like to think there’s a possibility that the boyfriend in 19.57 from Euston made this ridiculously over the top gesture because they are madly in love, and he knew she’d appreciate it.

Dzerins concedes that it seems to have worked out for this pair, but: “all I can think when I watch it is "but what if she wanted to say no?"”

My instinctive my reply to that would be, she would have said no.

This sort of proposal puts a lot of pressure on the woman to comply, Dzerins argues, because it’s so public. Gangs of total strangers feel they have the right to stick their oar in and tell her to agree, and if she doesn’t he will become some kind of martyr for the romantic cause.

I take her point, but to be honest I’d have thought the emotional fallout between the couple is ultimately the same whether she rejects him in public or private. Yes, if you’re unlucky there is a possibility it goes viral for a week or two and people write some nasty comments about you on Youtube. But surely that’s the least of your worries when you’ve just discovered your partner knows sod all about you – for them to have misjudged your reaction so completely belies some serious communication problems.

My other query would be why is it only the woman is demeaned by this show of affection? The man has spent a load of time and money sorting it out solely to impress her – isn’t that flattering? Couldn’t it even be said he is demeaning himself by reducing his personality to 2-Dimensional cartoon prince purely to satisfy the romantic streak of the otherwise level-headed, educated woman he fell in love with?

The notion that this type of proposal is impersonal, or designed to make strangers think you’re cool, feels overly cynical to me. Yes, it’s cheesy, and no, of course you don’t need to make a massive song and dance over a proposal to make a marriage work - but who says that’s why he did it?

I like to think he was motivated by a sense that his fiancé’s feelings of joy and being special would outweigh the embarrassment either of them felt.

It wouldn’t work for me but that’s OK, because it’s not about me - or my feminist principles, or any other stranger from the internet.

It’s about two hopeless romantics on the 19.57 from Euston.

Long may they be sick-makingly sweet.

"The Irony Made Even More Irony-y" - A Close Reading of Giles Coren on the Sky Sexism Row

Once again, Twitter has led me to read a contentious article from the Daily Mail that would probably never have entered my consciousness had it been written a couple of years ago.

This time it's by Giles Coren, a man largely famous for being the son of Alan Coren. This close familial relationship to someone famous for being good at satire, along with his friendship with the likes of the erudite and generally liberal seeming Sue Perkins, leads me hopefully in the direction that he's being ironic, or at the very least got bored and decided to write something deliberately controversial.

The premise of the piece is that it's OK for women to be sexist about men, but not the other way around - a double standard that does exist to a certain extent within the media and indeed life in general. However, his first piece of evidence is the continuing success of Loose Women vs. the sacking of Andy Gray for saying that women don't know the offside rule. I appreciate this is topical, but as arguments go it's a bit weak.

I don't know anyone in the world who likes Loose Women, male or female, alive or dead. According to the show's Wikipedia entry, everyone from Jan Moir to Karl Pilkington (and of course The Guardian) have spoken out against it. It's pointless drivel, much like all other daytime TV.

But lets explore that very point for a moment. Loose Women is only on during the day and is targeted, in a very calculated manner, at stay-at-home mums who want something trashy they don't have to think about whilst they have a break for lunch. The vast majority of people never have to see the thing. Football, on the other hand, tends to get a prime time slot on the tellybox, on account of being the country's national sport. When a big match is on, normal programming is shifted about to accommodate it. Doctor Who and Charlie Brooker would never be moved back a week in favour of Colleen Nolan carping on about her sex life, but the beautiful game is another matter.

Is there not an argument to be made, then, that football coverage ought to be accessible to everyone in the nation, irrespective of gender? Is it not potentially more important for pundits to watch what they say in front of millions, than for Kate Garroway to curb her outrageous man-hating (isn't it annoying when they leave the loo seat up girls? Not really Kate, no. Unless you don't have hands, I guess) in front of an audience of half asleep new parents, and students too hungover to move after Jeremy Kyle?

As I say, part of me hopes that this article was written to stir people up a bit, but certain passages did make me wonder if he's just an idiot. Frinstance, the part where he said:

"Here’s another of Jo Brand’s (excellent) gags. ‘What’s the way to a man’s heart? Straight through the chest with a kitchen knife!’ Again, not unfunny. But predicated on the idea that killing men is hilarious. Whereas killing women, as we all know, is a very serious affair and not to be joked about."

It seems clear that this joke is not at all predicated on the idea that killing men is hilarious, but is in fact a classic example of what Lee and Herring described in their 'lazy comedy slags' bit as "MY EXPECTATIONS WERE CONFOUNDED, AND FROM THENCE THE HUMOUR AROSE."

Jo Brand takes a well-known saying, the way to a man's heart is through his stomach (therefore you should cook him yummy food and he will never stray), and inverts it for comic effect. Technically, Coren is right in commenting that if a man tried to do the same joke it wouldn't work in the same way. This is because there's no proverb precedent - the set up in reverse, from a male point of view, would be something of a non sequitur. However, in the hands of Sean Lock or Jimmy Carr, both of whom do ironic sexism quite well, it might actually work OK. Oxford-educated Giles Coren, the son of a FAMOUS HUMORIST, must get that. Mustn't he?

"It’s not just Brand," he continues, "it’s all women." Is he exaggerating for comic effect, or bemoaning genuine male experience? If this were printed anywhere other than the Mail, I'd assume the former, but context plants a seed of doubt...

He goes on to explain that women's neverending sexist jokes ("‘What do you call the useless flap of skin attached to a penis?’ they joke. ‘A man!’") are only OK because our mothers teach us to deride men from birth. Apparently my own mother, who has never taught me any such thing, is a revolutionary. I can't remember any point when she's told me that men are only after one thing, or tried to score points against my dad because she went through childbirth and he didn't. I would hazard a guess that this is because both of my parents are interesting people in their own right, rather than ridiculous gender caricatures of the type perpetuated by Daily Mail journalists and Loose Women presenters. Coren presumably saw something very different in the way his anesthetist mother brought up his poker champion sister.

"There is no question that women today have it all," he trundles on, "and it just isn’t fair that they are allowed to be so vile about us.

"I suppose, in a way, British men are like white people were in Nineties South Africa or young Germans after the Second World War."

Really, though? Sexism has gone so far the other way that it's like some kind of socially acceptable apartheid? Again, in any other context - a gig at The Stand, for example, or a Frankie Boyle style comment on a panel show - I'd automatically consider this exaggeration for effect; or a slightly crude example of shock comedy. But what of the target audience of the paper, generally perceived as people who lean to the right (and outraged Twitter users)? Even if it is a masterstroke of ironic genius, surely the bulk of the readers won't get it?

A few points for those who read the article straight, and perhaps even agree:

Andy Gray should not have been sacked purely on the basis of one worn out old joke made to a colleague when he thought his mic was off. But I don't think that was the reason he was sacked, it was a symptom. For a bit more information, see here.

Loose Women should not get away with how they treat male guests on their show. They tend to be crass and intimidating in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator, severely underestimating the intelligence of the average female viewer and willfully alienating the male viewer. Further to this, deliberately making your interviewee uncomfortable on the grounds of his gender is stupid, and I resent the implication that their approach is indicative of how all women perceive and talk about men. It isn't.

If Jo Brand should be taken to task for anything, it's not sexism, but the point many of her jokes are lazy and not very funny. Which happens with male comedians too.

The idea that "women have it all these days" should not mean that men are somehow losing out, which seems to be the implication of Coren's argument. Double standards in the workplace go both ways, in the media more than any other industry, so surely men and women ought to work as a team to dismantle this rather than fighting each other over who is better?

It is worth reading and debating articles of this kind, rather than dismissing them out of hand because they appear in a paper whose political views are traditionally opposed to mine. Whilst I could go through life reading only the Graun and going "oh yes, I totally agree," occasionally getting riled up by the odd typo or the latest ridiculous thing our PM has come out with, that would get boring very fast. And actually, it's quite interesting to know what other people think, or what other people think their target audience probably think.

Even if they're wrong.

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