Too many people don’t understand that this test is a joke, and I mean that literally. It was published in a comic strip, with a very clear joke structure. There is a setup: The simplest, most basic, most entry-level test for whether women are treated like normal people in a movie imaginable. And there is a punchline: The world is so sexist that the vast majority of movies fail even at this super-easy test. It’s the kind of joke you laugh at because the world is shitty.
(And the few movies that do pass the test often do so by accident. The original comic strip had the punchline that Alien or Aliens passed because Ripley talked with the alien queen.)
People keep treating it like it’s this huge feminist thing that’s super important to judge whether a movie is good or not. And then other people keep pointing out that it doesn’t actually work for that. They’re right. But that’s because it was never meant to.
This test is the most simple, most meaningless hurdle for depiction of women in media to clear. The absolute bare minimum. That’s because it originally was the setup for a joke. Today, it is only useful if it is the start for a discussion of women in media; not the end of it. And I think it’s still very useful for that.
A good point to help visualise this is the inverse test: How many movies have two men, who have names, and talk to each other, about something other than a woman? Well, all of them, give or take a few. That imbalance is really the issue here.
It doesn’t really matter that much whether any given movie passes or not. What really matters is that not passing this is, still, the normal default case.
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