Alison Bechdel just won the MacArthur genius award! $625,000 Congratulations, Ms. Bechdel. In her comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For,” which ran from 1983 to 2008, she offered a basic metric used to illustrate just how male-dominated the film industry actually is. The test, which Bechdel coined in 1985 in a strip titled “The Rule,” consists of three questions which set a baseline not for gender parity, but for the simple inclusion of women in a film in any meaningful way: 1) Does it have two female characters? 2) Who talk to each other? 3) About something other than a man? If the answer to all three questions is yes, the film passes the Bechdel test. The concept has made the jump from mostly feminist circles to the mainstream as a bare-bones indicator of women’s roles in film.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 17:31:21 +0000
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