Yes. It doesn’t stop me from loving Action movies (The Dark Knight ruled!)
but I usually am disappointed by the female character (usually there’s only one) or disappointed that there aren’t more female characters.
Even movies written by women often don’t pass the test. When Harry Met Sally is one of my all time favorites. Meg Ryan and Carrie Fisher only ever talk about men. But I usually justify that because Billy Crystal and Bruno Kirby (RIP) only talk about women.

Kill Bill kicked ass though and brought out the most tender feelings for me (I know, weird isn’t it?) because it combined two things I love: great female characters and action. Thank you, Tarantino.
I also heard D.E.B.S. is fairly good.

That’s my two cents.

Fun Home is excellent. I was going to try to recommend you more books, but then I realized a good proportion of my books are in boxes waiting to be shifted to another room. I think in Ghost World (Daniel Clowes) they talk about something besides guys.

The movie Juno has female characters in it (plus it’s really damn funny) but because it’s about teen pregnancy, I guess you can’t get away from the fact that there was a man involved. But it’s a great movie.

They’re making it into a movie, FYI. Think they’ll take enough liberties with it to turn it into something that passes the test?

I remember as a kid hating Cagney and Lacey because they spent too much time talking and not enough time chasing baddies and crashing through cardboard boxes. I don’t think was the intended audience though.

Brian, I’ve heard good things about Mad Men, I’ll check it out. In my opinion the greatest female characters to appear on TV in the last ten years are the glorious women of Deadwood. Trixie, the Widow Garret, Calamity Jane, Joanie Stubbs, and Jewel. My God, what women! I’d give my eye teeth to write female characters half as good as those.

Tadmack, Asimov’s female characters are dire. It’s truly an undiscovered country for him. As if he’s never spoken to a woman in his entire life, only read about them in books or seen pictures in Time magazine. With Foundation it felt like Asimov had neither the desire nor the interest in writing a female character, but in fairness I have not read his later work.

Neil, I agree with you, the perception of the inverse do things happen without men getting involved? is another worthwhile thought experiment. As to Bechdel’s Law becoming a prescription for writing, perhaps ‘law’ is too strong a connotation, rule of thumb may be more appropriate. It would certainly be a beneficial exercise to apply it to my own work on occasion to push me out of my comfort zone.

Ah, Melvin.

I think the most interesting thing highlighted by Bechdel’s Law is the popular perception of the inverse, and how this perception reveals itself in literature/media: do things happen without men getting involved?

It’s interesting. What a writer has to take away from this is not that all stories have to have a 50:50 ratio of male to female characters, or that all female characters have to be impressively deep thinkers, but just that when writing women, you must be aware of any assumptions you make based on gender.

You can choose to write a woman as a tedious, shallow-minded dolt. You have the same freedom when writing men. You can even choose not to compensate for that with added dimensions of character, just to let her be what she is, if that fits the story. But it has to be a choice and not a default state. How the fact of that choice might reveal itself in a text, I don’t know.

I would hate for this Bechdel’s Law to become a sort of prescription for all writing, even subconsciously. “Oh look at this strong female character over here! I’ve given her six pages of dialogue with no male gender-specific pronouns whatsoever! I swear I’m one of the good guys!”

This is interesting especially in light of a conversation I had with some writing peeps the other night, about how even female YA writers fall into that trope — a YA novel can be about a.) girls b.) conversing c.) about boys or their failure to fit into the popular group so that boys will notice them.

It’s limiting and very boring.

Asimov… well, he’s a product of his times, and so I forgive him his female characters. And Stephanie Meyer… well, let’s not get started on that. But it’s a bit disconcerting to think that yes, SFF really fails this one a lot of the time, and it’s one of my favorite genres. Hmmmm…

I’m going to have to think about your question. I’m not watching a lot of movies at present, nor reading a lot of adult books, but I’ll get back to this…