Can your movie past the test?

Via Pandagon.

Through the Carnival of Feminists, I found this post by Natasha about how children’s movies fail the Bechdel Movie Measure more than even most adult movies. The measure, for those who don’t know, is described by Natasha:

It must have three characteristics:

1. There must be two or more women in it
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something other than a man.

It’s incredibly rare for movies to have this feature, but as Natasha demonstrates, all the Pixar movies fail miserably except for The Incredibles. Even though half the intended audience for children’s movies is female—and far from having an adult life that does seem at times to center around men—they’re not going to see female characters to relate to onscreen the vast majority of the time.

The invisibility of women and girls in children’s entertainment has a new twist on it, according to this article by a beekeeper about the new DreamWorks film Bee Movie. As is standard with children’s movies, all functions that aren’t being in love with and/or mothering a male character are performed by male characters, but the twist in this case is that it’s the exact opposite in real life, where female bees do most of the non-sexual work.

In Hollywood’s version, there are more than three times the number of male roles than female ones, but a cartoon of my own hive would have thousands of leading ladies and only a handful of male extras.

The nurses that tend the young and the workers that forage for pollen; the guards that keep predators like skunks away and the undertaker bees that unceremoniously haul out the dead: they’re all female. And whereas the movie’s protagonist is repeatedly told he must choose just one job and stick with it, my honeybees rotate through all of the available duties…..

That’s because non-animated drones don’t collect pollen, or make beeswax, or even have stingers. If Mr. Seinfeld wanted realism (and an R rating), his male bees would be sex workers who do little more than mate with the queen — after which their genitals snap off. Worse: when winter comes, worker bees shove the freeloading males out into the cold. If drones are required in the spring, the queen will simply make more of them.

Regendering an entire species to make sure that male primacy is preserved? The common wisdom is that boys won’t be interested in watching or reading about female characters, due apparently to some inborn understanding that women are just boring, horrible, and inferior, but I’m not buying that. If boys were brought up to believe that women were equal to men, they’d be as open to movies and books with female leads as girls are to movies and books with male leads. I remember when I was a kid, boys would often hide it if they played Barbies, for fear of getting bitched out by their parents. While there are a lot of liberal parents out there who wouldn’t do that, I imagine there are still huge numbers of parents that won’t allow their boys to get invested in female characters because they fear that it’s feminizing and not teaching the boys the “right” lessons about their place in the world relative to women’s. Blaming the boys themselves is a way of shifting responsibility off the parents, and allowing parents to indulge their sexist phobias without having to face up to their own issues.

The movie rating measure mentioned above is dazzling in its simplicity. So often when discussing sexism and women being underrepresented in meaningful roles, both in real life and film, the argument seems to get caught up in details. But using this simple measure, how many of your favorite movies (or kids' favorite movies, or cartoons) fail the test?

On another note, I didn't realize that bee hives were a matriarchal society. I wonder what it would be like if human males' genitals snapped off post-coitally? I guess concerns about cheating would be no more. Next!