[Rei]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Rei once you're done compiling all this research on sexism in Kojima's gameography it might be worth seeing if you can have it published as a feature on Insertcredit. It'd certainly be... provocative.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Iacus]

[Levi]

lol

[Vikram Ray]

^ could you not do that? this thread has so far been pretty level-headed, that kind of thing is just going to make people defensive and weird.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

And levelheadedness on these topics is fragile, to boot.

[Baseballkappe]

lol though

Well I mean, I agree that the Bechdel test isn't a very good test of whether an individual piece of media is sexist, but I don't think anyone here said that.
What it is great for, though, is analyzing trends (which is what Rei was doing btw). The fact that so many movies, and probably even more games, don't pass this simple test. This, unless you're cool with women invariably being portrayed as subordinate to men, is alarming.

[RT-55J]

Legitimately curious right now if anything ever would fail a gender-flopped Bechdel test.

[Baseballkappe]

Touhou

[schroeder]

Probably some romance novels? A first-person character study with a female narrator?

The Bechdel Test always frustrates me because it's obviously meant to examine whole genres or artists' oeuvres, but its structure suggests that it's about individual pieces.
Would a Bechdel' Test, whereby a group of works only passes if at least one of its members passes the Bechdel Test, make sense?

[LandRoverAttack]

K-On
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[Vikram Ray]

[CubaLibre]

Iacus: your problem is that you're not talking to anybody. Your point is that some people misuse the Bechdel test, but Rei did not misuse the Bechdel test. Well... Rei is the one posting. What are we debating about?

Your post comes off as a person who has Something To Say about the Bechdel test and when you saw the words pop up on your screen you were like HOLD ON I HAVE OPINIONS. That isn't conversation, it's mutual ranting.

When you start a sentence like this:

[schroeder]

Well, failing the Bechdel Test essentially means, "Women are peripheral to this work," which (I would say obviously) isn't problematic in a single work. Nearly every reference I have seen to the Bechdel Test is explicit that it doesn't rate the quality of any one work.

The structure clashes with this application because the test didn't originate as a tool of social criticism. In the comic where it first appears, it's one woman's method of choosing movies to watch. In that context, "Women are peripheral to this work" is as reasonable a disqualifier as any.

[evnvnv]

[CubaLibre]

People keep buying tickets and no one gives a shit.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

this is a pretty darn good conversation (mostly thanks to Rei). The Bechdel Test concept invites interesting discussion but in the wrong circumstances, people criticizing it (or sometimes championing it) can derail a debate into absurdities. Glad to see more measured consideration here.

I do want to add, however, that I think the test is somewhat less useful to evaluate the medium of video games due to the sheer number which, even in recent years, tend to stick with the singular perspective of the playable lead. That the lead is almost invariably male is an issue in itself, of course, but it still skews things in a way considerably different from the majority of other narrative media. Although Kojima is obviously fair game, given....well, nearly everything about how he designs the MGS series and Snatcher/Policenauts.

[schroeder]

[Iacus]

Cuba: you are absolutely correct. I apologize for getting distracted into ranting.

Let me rewind and go back to my original point, that being "the Bechdel test is pretty useless"

So, yeah. I concede the Bechdel test can be adopted to "ping" for trends in female representation in media, but as someone who strongly believes that every narrative should follow its own agenda and it's not obligated to portray women in any particular way (you can have your Reservoir Dogs AND your Death Proofs, and you aren't necessarily a misogynist for creating a story, or even many stories, where men are the primary characters) , I believe people lend too much weight to the result of a test that, individually, tells you essentially nothing. Since Rei framed her post in the context of the test, that's what I perceived her to be doing, until her clarification.

[apfEID]

I was trying to point out almost the same thing you are: the Bechdel test is not meant to be used as a "is this work misogynist?" yes/no test, it's not meant to be saying anything other than what it is saying. Which is just "hey, there's a ridiculous number of movies that are so disinterested in women that they can't meet this easy measure of representing women as people rather than as people defined by their relationship to men."

Sure, some people like to make the Bechdel test into more than it is intended to be, but that's on them, and not on the rest of us, and I don't see anyone here using it for more than it is. Rei's example of MGS4 passing the test is explicitly one of "well, this conversation was incredibly sexist, but right at the end, they actually talk about something other than living your life for dudes, so it passes."

I think John Carpenter's The Thing is a perfect movie. I'd just like to see more films that skew the other way in gender.
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Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est
http://ageoffire.tumblr.com

[Baseballkappe]

[schroeder]

Speaking of genres skewing the results, this is a pretty interesting look at various aggregated Bechdel passage rates.

[analogos]

[Ronnoc]

Bladewolf should have been a lady dog-robot.

(I'm not joking)

[CONSUME_PRODUCTS]