on Passing the Bechdel Test

One of the things I realized in re-reading the first draft of "The Fungus", my Yuletide Larry Sanders Show story, was that it did not pass the Bechdel Test. LSS has several fantastic female characters, but they're all support characters. The show revolves around three men- Larry, Artie, and Hank. My giftee had requested those three characters. And I had written a story that revolved around them. So I had given Beverly, Larry's assistant, a meaty and funny part in the story, but it was in interacting with Artie. And otherwise the female presence in the story was limited to a couple of references- Larry flirting with Natalie Imbruglia, a throwaway line about Paula and a cancellation, maybe one other.

I've never interpreted the Bechdel Test as saying that any story without female characters talking to each other is a failure as a story. The Bechdel Test matters most to me, as a social justice issue, in aggregate. Are we as a culture creating a body of art that suggests that female voices are less important than male voices? How can we address this problem? In those terms, me writing a single story that fails the Bechdel Test isn't a problem. The problem comes when I review my body of work and find that, say, of the last ten stories I wrote, only one passes the Bechdel Test*. The problem comes when we look at ten randomly selected authors and find that most of them are like me.

So I wasn't bothered by "The Fungus" failing the Bechdel Test because I thought it meant I was a misogynist. I was bothered because when I saw the Avengers this summer, I had the following train of thought: Maria Hill, Pepper Potts, and Natasha Romanoff are all great characters. Joss Whedon describes himself as a feminist, and is unquestionably familiar with the Bechdel Test. And yet Joss couldn't have been bothered to write one scene where Maria Hill and Natasha Romanoff talk to each other?

That was my train of thought this past summer. It would have been so easy to achieve even a token pass. The characters were available. There's plenty of story logic that would explain them talking. They obviously know each other already. So why not? At minimum it makes the statement that passing the Bechdel Test matters. At minimum it posits that finding space for women's stories even in narratives that are mostly about men is a way of taking women seriously. And that's just the minimum. What I have learned in the course of all my experiments with social justice in my writing over the past few years is that the more thoughtful I am about the place my characters hold in the world, the better and richer and more real they feel. When I took the time to make sure people saw that the Vulcan scientist in "Rhapsody in Red" was female, her experience resonated with naraht and led to the creation of a beautiful remix "Naming of Parts".

So I got finished with "The Fungus" and realized it failed the Bechdel Test, and I started thinking. And eventually I came to the scene I ultimately added, with Beverly and Paula talking about a guest, and then about their regular off-hours social gatherings. I like several things about this scene. First is that at several points in the show it's made clear that Paula is being groomed as Artie's successor, and since this story revolved around Artie, including Paula talking to the same character Artie had earlier spoken with let me do some funny doubling effects. Paula thanking Beverly for her handmade present in the exact same way Artie did is, in my opinion, one of the funniest single lines in the story. And I like that it fairly explicitly sets up the dynamic that the women of the show realize that they need to bond together to protect themselves from the men. I also like that it let me throw in a few callback jokes from the series- Sister Circle, guests with absurd ideas for sketches, Larry obsessing over guest cancellations...

On the other hand, it's a plot interruption in an narratively tight story. Every other scene in the story, I can point to and say "this is what it does that moves the story forward." That's the way Larry Sanders Show stories work and the main reason this story is so effective is because I hewed closely to the model and tried to create a story that used what I liked in the Larry Sanders Show. So I was really hesitant to add in a scene, funny and character-deepening though it is, that doesn't move the story forward. I worried that it would break the story's forward momentum, give people a chance to question the ludicrous plot premise, make readers wonder if I knew where I was going.


As I was puzzling over this, naraht posted about adding Galadriel to The Hobbit movie. And it struck me as essentially the same question. Is there virtue in shoehorning in female characters for the sake of a feminist statement, if the scene is enjoyable and entertaining but nonessential? Is a story full of male stories 'saved' by adding in one or two scenes with female voices legitimized? Is the act of deliberately passing the Bechdel Test by the skin of one's teeth a statement that you believe the test matters, or is it a cheap way to try to earn social justice points (trade-in-able at Chuck E. Cheese's for fabulous prizes)?

Ultimately, I decided that the potential benefits of including the scene outweighed the downfalls. I'm not proud to have a story where I deliberately added a Bechdel Pass. It's a thing that happened, and I wasn't planning on commenting on it or in any fashion calling attention to it until I saw naraht's post. I still am a bit worried about calling attention to it. Please don't tell me "You did the right thing". I'm not looking for encouragement and I'm not looking for backslaps. I just think it's worth talking about because it's a question that comes up in my writing, and I had to make a choice, as Peter Jackson and Joss Whedon both did. I chose with Peter Jackson instead of with Joss.

And I'm happy to host a conversation here about whether that was the right choice, and about the broader questions that raises about what kinds of stories we want to read and want to write.



*This, to my chagrin, is true. In my defense, most of my last ten stories on AO3 are relatively short, just a scene or two, and most of them do feature interesting female characters. Faith Shabazz, Donna Moss, Molly O'Bannon, Tzippora, Rachel, and Rivka... I'm not really too worried if I fail Bechdel Test in a one scene story with a man and a woman. Still, the statistics say this is something I should be more thoughtful about. And both my YT stories pass, the second one naturally without any deliberate effort.