Quoting Rohan McLeod (rhn@jeack.com.au):
Rick Moen wrote:
..............snip The test very simply is: At any time during the movie / novel / etc., does such a conversation occur at all?
OK; so just one conversation between two female characters involving a reference to a male; is a sufficient condition to fail the test ?
No. I apologise for having somehow not been clear. A work that includes at least one scene that passes the stated criterion ('At any time during the movie / novel / etc., does such a conversation occur at all?') scores a 'yes' outcome. Very simple. E.g,, John Scalzi was wryly amused that several of his 'Old Man's War' science fiction novels pass the Bechdel Test, though IIRC he said that _Zoe's Tale_ passes on a technicality.
though no comment on :
"Also the anti-sexist context; seems to miss the more general problem of the cliched nature of story-telling;(so evident in Hollywood's view of the world). That is how to tell a story in a way which will be appealing to an audience, whose real interests are very narrow ? "
One, I've had a bit of difficulty parsing that paragraph. Two, there is no 'anti-sexist context' as such. The Bechdel Test is simply a revealing metric devoid of polemics. Three, I really had no comment.