Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating
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Re: Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating
#2A population so small, making so much noise... :)
Re: Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating
#3Swedes evidently think "too much of a good thing can be wonderful": they have had a Minister of Gender Equality since the 50's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_for_Gender_Equality_(S...) and there are efforts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun (http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_s..., although this has been tried in English, too). In the Global Gender Gap Report 2012, Sweden is named as a world leader in gender equality (http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2012), etc. etc. I mean, the country even has an official gender equality webpage in English (http://sweden.se/society/gender-equality-in-sweden/). It seems they can't go any further. And then this.
Even Jezebel (http://jezebel.com/sweden-introduces-new-movie-rating-system...) has to admit the "test" is not perfect:
"Sure, the Bechdel test is imperfect (Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker doesn't pass, for instance, but you could hardly argue that a female-helmed war movie doesn't empower at least one woman), but that doesn't make it useless as a starting line for sniffing out broad trends in gender bias. And that's what we're talking about here. Trends. Analysis. Examination. Critical thought. Information. I'm sure there are plenty of people who consider themselves scrupulously egalitarian who never even noticed that there are only like THREE WOMEN IN ALL OF MIDDLE EARTH."
I understand that this is just a thing introduced by a a few movie theaters, i.e. it's not the law or anything (yet). Yet, that's what riles me most: as librarians are the first to defend any censorship, movie professionals should push back on any arbitrary limitation on what can be shown. Some examples of movies that fail the test are given, e.g. LOTHR Trilogy, Pulp Fiction, Pacific Rim, etc. However, the test would also exclude many art films such as Tarkovski's Stalker and Solaris. How about movies with only a single female lead that don't quite fit the purpose of the test, e.g. Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly? How to handle movies with no dialog, or experimental movies such as Eraserhead? One can easily see that this sort of simplistic testing can have little artistic or practical merit.
Re: Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating
#4This has to be one of the most absurd things I've heard all day. And when you work where I do, you hear a lot of absurd things.
People have often lambasted those who scream and wince whenever an ounce of political correctness shows up in society/media.
Well, to those people: look at your work. Did you want to encourage censorship?
Of course, I'm overblowing this thing way too much. But 5, ten, maybe even 20 years ago, if this kind of thing happened, people would revolt. For some reason, censorship in the name of equality seems to be the norm in today's world.
Harrison Bergeron, indeed.
Re: Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating
#5Swedes evidently think "too much of a good thing can be wonderful": they have had a Minister of Gender Equality since the 50's ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_for_Gender_Equality_(S... ) and there are efforts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun ( http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_s... , although this has been tried in English, too). In the Global Gender Gap Report 2012, Sweden is na…
a recent movie that's similar is Gravity. It doesn't even pass the reverse test since there are so few characters.
Re: Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating
#6This has to be one of the most absurd things I've heard all day. And when you work where I do, you hear a lot of absurd things. People have often lambasted those who scream and wince whenever an ounce of political correctness shows up in society/media. Well, to those people: look at your work. Did you want to encourage censorship? Of course, I'm overblowing this thing way too much. But 5, ten, maybe even 20 years ago…
Censorship? Did you read the same article I did?
Re: Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating
#7This has to be one of the most absurd things I've heard all day. And when you work where I do, you hear a lot of absurd things. People have often lambasted those who scream and wince whenever an ounce of political correctness shows up in society/media. Well, to those people: look at your work. Did you want to encourage censorship? Of course, I'm overblowing this thing way too much. But 5, ten, maybe even 20 years ago…
maybe people aren't revolting because they're more tolerant now? it isn't censorship.
Re: Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating
#8Swedes evidently think "too much of a good thing can be wonderful": they have had a Minister of Gender Equality since the 50's ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_for_Gender_Equality_(S... ) and there are efforts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun ( http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_s... , although this has been tried in English, too). In the Global Gender Gap Report 2012, Sweden is na…
a recent movie that's similar is Gravity . It doesn't even pass the reverse test since there are so few characters.
The point of the test isn't to be definitive (and it was recognised as so when it was created). Of course it's going to fail in extremely contrived films like Gravity or dialogueless films. It's not even about showing women in power - so the comment about The Hurt Locker empowering the producer is kind've irrelevant.
It's about movies in general not showing women and relationships between women as entities in their own right. It's about trying to move the needle back to the centre, not shoehorning women's dialogue into Koyaanisqatsi.
Re: Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating
#9Having seen both the Swedish and American versions of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo I have to say Sweden is a bit ahead when it comes to gender representation, so they're doing something right somewhere.
On the other hand, Harry Potter was written by a self-proclaimed feminist and has a very empowering female in Hermione Granger, if that series fails the Bechdel Test then I'm left wondering how many other false-positives the test throws. Even The Vagina Monologues fails the Bechdel Test (to be fair, because monologues).
Re: Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating
#10Swedes evidently think "too much of a good thing can be wonderful": they have had a Minister of Gender Equality since the 50's ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_for_Gender_Equality_(S... ) and there are efforts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun ( http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_s... , although this has been tried in English, too). In the Global Gender Gap Report 2012, Sweden is na…
a recent movie that's similar is Gravity . It doesn't even pass the reverse test since there are so few characters.
Haven't seen that one, but the first thing that popped into my head was "What about a movie like Moon?" I mean there was really just the one main character, and I suppose he talked to his wife and daughter who were both named so it gets an A grade. But they were the only two female characters that I remember and I don't think they really added a lot to the gender equality context seeing as they were the stay-at-home family back on earth.
The formula is just so simplistic. If you wanted to build a comprehensive metric you'd probably want to take a few factors into consideration. Maybe a ratio of dialogue to on-screen time for female characters vs. male characters. Perhaps number of non-traditional female roles vs. traditional roles. I don't know. There should be something better than an eye-test some comic from the 80's threw out there.