![]() ![]() However, The Bechdel Test is not without its flaws it does not give room for women characters having conversations about concerns, troubles, frustrations or joys involving the men in their lives Fathers, Husbands, Bosses, Co-workers, which is inherently part of a woman’s wiring to share and decompress.Ĭhimamanda Adiche called it, the danger of a single story. This is not advocating that those films shouldn’t exist or those stories discard escapism, but there should be locally made films with characters a young lady can watch and aspire to be much more of herself, as a human, a member of society without marriage being her “reward”. Single shaming and painting the narrative that once a woman is of a certain age, her number one purpose must be achieving an excited “She said ‘Yes’” post from a man. The issue with films that fail the Bechdel Test is that it perpetuates the ideas of women existing for the sole purpose of bringing pleasure or being of service to men. Part of what cinema does is to explore, investigate, challenge ideas, shows a flipside and alternative to the normal narrative or what is expected. This is not solely a Nollywood issue, Hollywood and some of our favourite movies also fail the test, especially the rom-coms.īut the West does not have anything close to the level of cultural shaming Africa and Nigeria does to unmarried or single women, even when they are successful. We see characters who spend all their girl time, only ever talking about men the man they want, the useless men they don’t, how they are living up to expectations or not. There is an abundance of films about finding a man, keeping a man, desperation for marriage, worrying about the biological clock and being an old maid. Starting from the Cinema era of Nollywood, circa 2009 till date, it’s very hard to find films which pass either test. Nollywood’s report card on the Bechdel test reads, Mene Mene Terkel Urpasin. Wife, Mother, Girlfriend characters, who exist solely for the purpose of the male characters story, motivation, goal fail the test. There is also the Mako Mori test which says a film should have: at least one female character, who gets her own narrative arc, and which is not about supporting a man’s story. It explores the agency of women in works of fiction, having their arc and goals’ not being prizes for the protagonist or existing for the sole purpose of being in a romantic relationship.Īmerican reporter, Ned Ulaby said of the test “it articulates something often missing in popular culture not the number of women we see on screen, but the depth of their stories and the range of their concerns”. Feminist critics now use this as the standard in which to judge television, movies, books and other media. ![]() ![]() There two simple rules about The Bechdel Test: The movie has to have at least two women in it and, they must talk to each other about something besides a man. The Bechdel Test asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man, it is also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test, named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel who credited it to her friend Liz Wallace who was inspired by the writings of Virginia Woolf. ![]()
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