The Wallace-Bechdel Test or: Why Men Get All the Good Parts

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unless, of course, they want to talk about me. That'd be just fine

Homo-phobia or: The War that Everyone Forgot

                Homo sapiens, human beings, are a unique species in several ways. They are the dominant species on this planet, the only sentient species, the most intelligent species, and the only species who can truly appreciate good blogging. Creationism aside, the history of our species from our lower primate ancestors has been on the forefront of our curiosity, from anthropology and philosophy to genetics and evolutionary biology. Despite our fervor, however, the specifics of the unique journey which resulted in the pinnacle of evolution that is us are still very unclear. When thinking of the origins of man, the most common image is that of an ape slowly standing erect and morphing through a series of intermediates into man. This image is so iconic and so widely reproduced, so central to our understanding of ourselves and the connection that we as sentient beings still share with the natural world, that it is a crying shame how inaccurate of an image it really is.

This would be less funny if I weren't on my computer right now.

                Classical anthropology would suggest that the path from bestial ape to thinking man was, like that image, roughly linear. A lower primate slowly evolved more and more intelligent descendants until, eventually, the first hominid (one of those figures standing somewhere between Bobo and Bob.) came to be. Roughly 2 million years ago, a fellow named Homo ergaster originated somewhere in northeast Africa. He used tools, lived in more or less complex social groups, and was considerably more sophisticated than its predecessor, Homo habilis, whose anatomy and behavior more closely resembled that of modern-day apes. On the evolutionary timeline, ergaster marks the most definitive spot at which the primitive brain functions which would lead to self-awareness and sapience first began to develop (note: human prehistory is really messy and there is at least one highly respected anthropologist who will disagree with even the most widely-held theories that I reference here. Feel free to ignore them.)  Homo ergaster lived for roughly half a million years before splitting up into Homo erectus (in Asia) and Homo antecessor (in Europe and the Middle East). Homo antecessor would then go on to produce Homo rhodensis (half a million years ago), Homo heidelbergensis (400,000 years ago), Homo neanderthalensis (350,000 years ago) and Homo sapiens (still here). This evolutionary path is still pretty linear, since a few hundred thousand years ago erectus and neanderthalensis died off, leaving human beings as the winning product of evolution’s greatest experiment.

No joke this time. Just a helpful diagram.

                Except for the case of Homo floresiensis. This hominid’s remains were found in southeast Asia back in 2004, and it is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, its skull looks a lot like a human’s. Secondly, it’s pretty small, with much of its anatomy very similar to that of the chimpanzee. Thirdly, this species very likely was walking around and using tools less than 15,000 years ago, right around the time that we as a species were slowly spreading over the entire world. This means that, in all probability, Homo sapiens could have encountered floresiensis in the wild. There is further evidence to support the notion that human beings also coexisted with the Neanderthals and perhaps even Homo erectus, at least briefly. Recent breakthroughs in technology along with new fossil finds are showing us a very different image of our evolutionary history, with diversity anywhere you look. In all likelihood, human beings, or at least their most direct and recent ancestors, coexisted with several other species of hominids, all of them using tools and walking upright.

Homo floresiensis? It's a pretty obscure anthropological find.
You've probably never heard of it.

                We are the only sentient species on the planet and by far the most intelligent. Behind us are the chimpanzee (fairly restricted to a small part of western Africa), and the dolphin (a marine mammal), neither of which come close to our intelligence or even the intelligence of the hominids with which we once shared the world. Why such a gap? Why so geographically far apart? The answer, of course, is that intelligence has its drawbacks on the evolutionary stage. While it greatly increases an animal’s fitness, intelligence also carries with it a certain role to play within an ecological niche. And where there is a specific role and a specific niche, there is competition. We have no competition with the dolphin and hominids left the chimpanzee’s habitat a long time ago, but a few hundred thousand years ago, when Homo sapiens was walking the plains amongst its semi-sentient cousins, competition almost certainly existed. In nature, competition is almost always indirect. Two species of birds which eat the same kind of seed will compete for seeds, but they’re not fully aware that they are competing. The bird’s only thought is “get more seeds;” it never considers the possibility that actively removing the competition will free up all the seeds. It’s not smart enough. Homo sapiens, we know, are smart enough.

"Those seeds are all mine now!"

                At some point in time, multiple hominid species coexisted with us, and there is evidence to support the notion that all of these species would have been capable of evolving into a more sophisticated and perhaps even sapient species. Some were smaller, others larger, and when compared to the human’s most recent ancestor, some may have been just as smart or even smarter. The details of those millennia are shaky, vague, and uncertain. What we know is that at one point they were all in the same place at the same time and then, sometime later, only we remained to inherit the earth. There are two possibilities for how this occurred. Option one: homo sapiens were the most fit out of all these species and were able to in all cases survive where others could not and natural selection alone killed off all other hominids. Option two: these species did not coexist peacefully, and the competition for niche and for resources eventually led to homo sapiens, in the course of their spread across the world, killing off other hominids. There is some evidence to support this: Neanderthals and Homo floresiensis both died off around the same time that Homo sapiens are predicted to have migrated to their respective areas. If this is true, then it is possible that we survived not because we were smarter or more fit, but because we were the most violent.

Option 3: Aliens.

                This is all speculation, of course. Even if such a pre-historical genocide had occurred, no record would exist and there would be virtually no way of proving it and if there were, I doubt we’d really want to know. However, there is something in our nature which is unusually aggressive towards our own kind, especially towards humans who look differently. Racial violence predates even language, and humans have been warring with each other for as long as we’ve been around. It would seem that we picked up our aggressive tendencies somewhere down the evolutionary line. In many ways, because humans have no natural predators, war between different groups of humans has acted as a major factor in determining which groups of human beings have survived. And while intelligence factors heavily in an individual’s ability to kill others of its kind, aggression, strength, and size are other heritable factors which contribute to this sort of survival. Humans have grown tremendously since the earliest fossils, the largest surviving to pass on their genes, while highly isolated groups such as the pygymys remain much smaller. Competition, war, drives our evolution now.

               

Another isolated group. Note the height.

          Our evolution was not linear. We were not the only human experiment. From the first hominids, a family tree grew and branched off. Not so long ago, all but one branch either died or was cut off. How we came to be the lucky ones to inherit the earth I do not know, but it probably was not through meekness. We are a species which, more so than any other, has the capacity and drive to expand its territory from an original location to the entire world in a very short period of time. We do not adapt, we alter. We do not compete, we eliminate. We do not survive, we dominate. This is our history and our present. The Homo sapiens of a hundred thousand years ago, not unlike the other hominids, were crude and savage. We have evolved since then, in ways nature does not select for. We have learned to think and to feel and to believe. In this, we are unique in all the world. And while our past may be dark or violent or troubled, we are our own selection now. We control our own evolution. Just as we invented war, we as a species are capable of ending it and driving ourselves forward, ever further from our primitive beginnings and towards our bright future.

Or, you know, we could do it tomorrow.