https://www.themarysue.com/star-trek-bechdel-test/
I stumbled upon an artucle on what’s called the bechdel test. This test looks at women in tv and film and asks how often are they talking about non-relationship topics. I think it would be obvious that in the early days of tv movies, releases would score very poorly.
As a man, I was oblivious to this and it is not something I had really considered.
Well someone went through all the series of star trek and scored them based on this metric. Obviously voyager scored the best having a female captain and other women on the show holding high ranks.
It reminded me of a story I read years ago. It was talking about the history of trek throughout the years and one woman commented that she wasnt a star trek fan at all, but she sat her two daughters down every week to watch star trek voyager, as she felt captain janeway was the best female rolemodel on tv. I thought that was kind of cool.
So fast forward years later and we have people applying this test to star trek and other shows to see how they score, or maybe to highlight how they fail.
Even though I do see some validity in applying this test, I feel some look for these issues with a little too much enthusiasm just to exclaim, ‘see!!’
I dont think we can ‘legislate’ writing with such scrutiny assessing each conversation, interaction, representation of minorities, transgenders etc.
Im sure some of you have seen shows recently where you felt that scene was put in because of current politics. When I experience that, more often than not it takes me out of the show.
Or is it because we have more male writers? I believe thats still true, maybe I’m wrong. If I ventured into writing, I’d probably have my protagonist as a male, not from discrimination, but simply out of my own self understsnding.
We’re in the age of everything under a microscope and ‘what was meant by that’ and maybe some of that overzealous scrutiny hurts the creative process.
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