(October 29, 2015 at 5:08 pm)Esquilax Wrote: I dunno, I see it more as a missed opportunity. There's an interesting conversation to be had about certain sexist implications and plotlines in Moffat's work on the show, but that study wasn't interested in having it, in favor of a vaguely correlated quantitative thing. When I saw that the Bechdel Test was the first thing they looked for I just stopped taking the whole thing seriously; it's a good thought experiment, but the Bechdel Test is not a reliable indicator of sexism. It's not even an indicator of sexism at all, as far as I'm concerned.
I agree completely. The Bechdel Test is absurd. It has no way of accounting for dialogue that doesn't pass, but doesn't for non-sexist reasons. Consider the movie Alien. Ripley is one of the strongest female characters in cinema history (personal opinion of course), but I can't think of any dialogue that would pass the Bechel Test. Patently ridiculous.
Better, as you mentioned, to have a dialogue regarding potentially sexist content.
