Long before it became trendy to splice movie clips together on TikTok based on whether or not they “pass the Bechdel Test”, Virginia Woolf described the following on how women are portrayed in fiction:

“All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. … And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. … They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception, they are shown in their relation to men.”

While the Bechdel Test outlines specific rules for the representation of women in media, Woolf’s words provide the essential idea: women are often relegated to being accessories to men. Be it wives, mothers, or some vessel of the male protagonist’s character development, female characters often have little room for an inner life, their own thoughts and feelings, or personal growth. 

The test, coined by American cartoonist Alison Bechdel in 1985, proposes three rules for the representation of women:

1. The film contains at least two women.
2. These women talk to each other. 
3. Their conversation is about something other than a man. 

Other rules frequently float around the internet, such as the rule that both women have to have names, or that their conversation must last more than thirty seconds, but these three rules are the only ones mentioned in Bechdel’s original comic, an installment of the series Dykes to Watch Out For.  

But how did a five-panel comic strip evolve into such a widely known but often misunderstood metric of media criticism? 

To understand this question, we first have to look at the problem Bechdel attempts to address: the historically abysmal representation of women in film. 

In the original comic, Ginger, the woman proposing the requirements of the test, says the last movie she was able to see was Alien (1979), showing that the comic (and, by extension, the test itself), is meant to point out the absurdity in the lack of representation of women on screen. Ginger apparently hasn’t been able to see a film in six years because of her stringent film-going rules, providing both the humor of the comic and the purpose of the test. 

This underlines the central purpose of the Bechdel test, complimenting Woolf’s original commentary, and watching any piece of “classic” cinema through the lens of gender politics makes this issue clear. In fact, the consumption of media pre-third wave feminism often requires viewers to accept that women will be poorly represented in some way, and that applying modern socio-political views of gender to older media is a futile task.

Even film and television today are plagued with problems of representation, sparking debates both within film journalism and on social media about the intersection between social discourse and media production. 

With a massive body of examples failing the test or failing to represent women in a positive light, it was no wonder that the term “Bechdel Test” started to gain more popularity in the 2010s. The release of 2013’s Pacific Rim, in particular, sparked a renewed interest in the test, as a similar metric dubbed “The Mako Mori Test” was coined to distinguish tokenism from positive representation. This test, named for the only woman in Pacific Rim, poses the following rules for media representation of women:

1. Does the film have at least one female character?
2. Does this female character get her own narrative arc?
3. Is this narrative arc not about supporting a man’s story?

The Mako Mori test further popularized the use of certain criteria for judging how films portray women, and by the mid-2010s, the application of the Bechdel test expanded into financial analyses, comedy sketches, and even academic literature. After this boom in popularity, the Bechdel Test cemented its place in the language of entertainment consumption and commentary. 

This trend nearly perfectly coincided with the specific brand of anti-Trump liberal feminism that bloomed across the internet beginning in 2016; think #girlboss, Buzzfeed, and Women’s March signs reading “If Hillary was president we’d be at brunch”. This era teemed with the optimistic belief that the hopelessness of being an American woman could be combated in some way by social media. Of course, this premise presents several flaws right off the bat. For the women who’d rather be at brunch, it’s clear that activism begins and ends with the potential marginalization of white women. For the girlboss, misogyny is something that stands in the way of profit. Neither of these represent an intersectional model of liberation or equality for women, yet the promise of privileged women being able to remain in power and participate in feminism offers an enticing chance to liberate oneself from patriarchy without having to do too much work. 

Liberal feminism, therefore, feeds us two lies. First, individual women are responsible for their own liberation, and fighting for marginalization that doesn’t affect you goes beyond that responsibility. And second, the mere presence of women is empowerment enough, whether that be in the board room, in the White House, or on our screens. 

While individual action and representation are invaluable to the feminist movement, it’s also true that not all women suffer equally under patriarchy, meaning the sex-based discrimination an affluent white woman may face won’t be the same as a lower-class woman of color. Intersectionality, therefore, is vital to the rhetoric of action, and specifically demands for better representation.

Moreover, the ease of communication provided by a caption or infographic slide can often reduce ideas to their most basic skeleton, removing any nuance or discussion of intersectionality. Moreover, the idea that social media can be used to radicalize people or educate them on feminism is valuable: social media has the potential to democratize feminist theories, as the availability of resources on women’s liberation is ever expanding thanks to Instagram and TikTok.

However, the ability to disseminate information quickly is both a strength and fundamental flaw of social-media-focused feminism. The combination of the Bechdel test’s mid-2010s popularity and late 2010s mainstream feminism can explain the test’s popularity today- and help elucidate some valuable critiques of it. 

As explained, the test originates from Alison Bechdel’s comic and aimed to jokingly point out the film industry’s well-established lack of women, and is only capable of measuring the criteria it sets forth. We can use it to learn about whether women talk about something other than men, but that’s essentially it. 

Bechdel herself has pointed out the limitations of the test, saying in a 2014 interview that “You can have a feminist movie that doesn’t meet the criteria. And you can have a movie that meets the criteria and isn’t feminist. So, it’s not scientific or anything. It was meant as a joke, but I still think it’s a very useful joke…. It’s a bit surprising what does and doesn’t pass.” 

This brings us to the present: the use and abuse of the Bechdel test online. The aforementioned movie clip montages all over TikTok illustrate this perfectly; something like Avatar (2009), which has been subject to valid concerns over its female characters, next to a film like Moonlight (2016), which focuses on a young black man’s coming of age. Pointing out that neither of these films pass the Bechdel test frames these two as similar in their gender politics, which is simply not true. 

On the other hand, the use of the test to prove whether a film is “feminist” or not is also flawed, as pointed out by Bechdel herself. This problem has actually been debated since the 2010s, as shown by multiple entries on the Twilight (2008) page of the Bechdel test film database:

“Although it can be argued the film sets back feminism by several decades, it does feature interactions between women that do not revolve around men,” read one comment.

And, “For movies like this, there needs to be a new type of rating. One that passes all the tests, but clearly isn’t a “good” film.”

This debate, which has found new life on social media, summarizes the exact issue of the cultural obsession over the Bechdel test: representation doesn’t indicate quality, and not all representation is good representation. If the appeal of liberal feminism is its convenience, the Bechdel test is the same way, offering the idea that the mere presence of women is inherently progressive, when this simply isn’t the case. 

The same can be said of racial (see: the Mundair Test) or LGBTQ+ representation (see: the Vito Russo test): marginalized groups can be represented in some way, while still upholding stereotypes and tropes. Again, this misuse isn’t the fault of the tests themselves, but rather the lack of nuance offered by social media posts that propagate them.

What media often misses is portraying under-represented or poorly-represented groups as real people. While these tests can offer some information on whether or not a piece of media does this, whether it’s done successfully is often more subjective. And while I enjoy female-focused media as much as the next person, it may be time to reevaluate the weight we place on representation itself, and instead, look at how this representation actually humanizes women.