On a sunny day in 1985, Alison Bechdel, creater of the comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” published a comic strip entitled “The Rule,” based on a conversation with her good friend, Liz Wallace. In the cartoon, one of the characters says that she refuses to see a movie which does not meet the following three criteria:
1. The film must contain at least two named female characters.
2. These two characters must talk to one another about
3. Something other than a man.
Needless to say, the characters do not end up seeing a movie that night. Today, over 25 years later, not much has changed, and a disturbingly high proportion of movies fail the Wallace-Bechdel Test. If this claim seems to be something of a stretch to you, try to imagine a movie you’ve seen lately which passes the test. Then, pop on over to bechdeltest.com, where some rather dedicated film buffs are compiling a list of films which do and do not pass the test. According to their ongoing work, roughly half of movies on the site do not pass the test (sadly, 10% don’t even pass the first part of the test). All in all, the Wallace-Bechdel Test helps to shed light on a pretty obvious characteristic of the entertainment industry today: Women are, and always have been, severely underrepresented. The main reason for this: Women in film are unlikeable. Why are they unlikeable? Why do film schools and production studios across the country preach the doctrine of male leads and advise against complex female characters?
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| The infamous comic, reprinted here and probably breaking some copyright |
Well, to begin, women are not funny. Now, obviously, comments like that are sexist and offensive. But that does not necessarily make them completely invalid. Look over the comedy industry and its history, and you will find remarkably few funny women. Of course, there are always exceptions. Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore, Mae West, Carol Burnett, Fran Lebowitz, and more recently comediennes like Ellen DeGeneres, Kristen Wiig and Tina Fey. Of course, I could name five times as many male comic personalities without even having to try. These women are the exception and sadly far from the rule. When you consider also that “I Love Lucy” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” were both created and written by men, the role of women in comedy gets a little smaller. Meanwhile, female comics like Roseanne Barr and Lisa Lampanelli became famous for a highly-masculine, aggressive form of humor which has incurred plenty of criticism from feminists. For the most part, though, women who write and perform comedy find it almost impossible to find both success and respect.
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| Shown here: One of the wonderful, wonderful exceptions |
Outside of the entertainment industry, we see something just as interesting arise: women, according to a study done a few years at Stanford University, treat humor differently than men. Specifically, they process it differently in the nucleus accumbens (the part of the brain responsible in part for how we value rewards). In short, women were able to identify things as being un-funny faster than their male counterparts, and their brains interpreted a funny punch-line as a much more significant reward. Sociologically speaking, this all makes perfect sense. In several species, males have the obligation to try to impress the females in order to win mating rights. Gorillas pound their chests, peacocks flaunt their tail feathers, and humans (being more civilized) tell jokes. As our species evolved, physical strength became less important as intelligence became more important. Humor, it seems, has evolved as an indicator of how intelligent a man is. Rather, wit is the indicator. Several studies have shown what we already knew was true: women and men find different things funny. Women’s brains tend to use more of the pre-frontal cortex (where we keep our language centers and other higher functions) than men do when they find something funny. Put simply, men will find most things funny while women require more nuanced, intelligent humor.
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| Dear Men: You're doing it wrong |
Being funny, then, becomes an extension of the male need to impress the opposite sex. This is why average looking men who are funny can be movie stars. It’s also why men are so much more dominant in the comedy industry, especially in stand-up. Stand-up comedians have to be loud, aggressive, and dominate their audiences to get laughs (hence the term “You killed out there”). These are all traits which tend to fall into the sociological niche belonging to men. Women, in contrast, are not bound by any evolutionary imperative to impress. Their role in the reproduction game is to pick the best mates and then nurse their offspring, which requires patience, not humor. In short, men are evolving to be funnier and funnier, but women are not. Apparently, they have found some other way of attracting male attention.
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| Beats me. Maybe this nice lady can explain it to me |
The same traits which make men funny tend to make them likeable and interesting as characters. Their aggressive and impressive natures translate well to screen, where exaggerated male characters can dominate entire movies out of pure spectacle and bravado, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing (See Fight Club). Male characters are also easy to write. Traditionally males are hunters, and that aggressiveness provides a level of agency in stories which make men good protagonists. The hero pursues his love interest. The hero fights the bad guy. The hero has to save the world. These are cinematic hyperboles of the evolutionary roles we’ve pigeonholed men into.The problem, though, isn’t completely evolutionary. There’s also a lot of history that needs to be undone. Comedy and Hollywood writing tends to be very male-dominated, in a manner unseen in most other industries. The reasoning for this comes down to business. Movies are being written for the people who go to see movies: Men, aged 15-35. They tend to be immature, often single, and they simply are not, as a whole, packing the evolutionary good taste women seem to have. Hence, bad movies with crude humor and a never-ending parade of straight, white, male leads in movie after movie. That’s what, sadly enough, makes money. They teach this in film schools, too. Screenplays with multiple female characters who speak to each other about something other than a man “won’t sell,” according to the statistics, and statistics govern the industry.
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| Statistics, and men who probably look like this guy |
Television, on the other hand, is being written for the people who watch television: Women, aged 25-45. They simply watch more television than men do (by about 30%, actually). Which is why television programming is so much different on the whole than what dominates the movie industry. However, these shows don’t really have much incentive to feature funny women (since, you know, women are designed by evolution to prefer their comedians male and all) and comedy shows remain male dominated for the most part. For similar reasons, shows that feature action, adventure, crime, intrigue, and a whole host of other themes are going to be male-dominated. That leaves very little programming left over for the gals to actually STAR in.
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| Feminists LOVE this show |
However, if you look at a lot of successful programming geared towards a female audience, you will find, more often than not, that these shows have multiple female characters, all of whom talk to one another… usually about men. And these are the shows that test well with female audiences. How can we explain this? Over the last century, a number of studies have been conducted to try and determine exactly what it is that men and women talk about. Most of these studies have shown repeatedly that the most popular topic of conversation amongst real-world women is men. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, as the goal of the female is to consider and evaluate potential mates, which is made easier through discussion and comparison. It also makes sense from a sociological perspective, as women in society have historically been placed into roles in which their lives were defined by their male counterparts (daughter, wife, etc.) and they didn't enjoy the same freedoms and liberties as today.
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| Until recently, women weren't even allowed to smile |
Fast-forward to 1985, pick up Alison Bechdel, and then keep going right on into the present, where we return to our original question: why do so many films fail the Wallace-Bechdel Test? Why do women, even today, still seem more interested in men than themselves? Why is it so hard to write a complex female character and so much harder to market one to an audience? The answer in short: women aren’t talking to each other about things that aren’t men. But, we’re getting there. In a recent study conducted on a university campus, results showed that there was no difference in the conversation topics between men and women, and both groups spent most of their time talking about things totally unrelated to the opposite sex. The women in this study, as opposed to many in earlier studies, were for the most part educated, intelligent, and passionate individuals who possess a great deal of agency and control over their own lives. It would be hard, frankly, for them to only talk about men. If art imitates life, then perhaps the secret to an Wallace-Bechdel industry filled with complex and interesting female characters is a Wallace-Bechdel world, filled with complex and interesting women.
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| Unless, of course, they want to talk about me. That'd be just fine |
