The Bechdel test has been in the news a lot recently. That's the supposed "test" for whether a movie (or, in principle, any other unit of moving-picture fiction, or any fiction I suppose) is adequately feminist/non-sexist. It has three requirements:
- That there be at least two female characters;
- That they talk, to each other; and
- That their conversation be about something other than a man.
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But then along comes something like this. This, specifically, is a "study" which purports to use the Bechdel test to demonstrate that the show Doctor Who has become significantly more "sexist" under the leadership of Steven Moffat, as opposed to that of Russell T. Davies. The study finds that 78% of episodes in the RTD era passed the test, while only 58% of those in the Moffat era have done so. The disparity is even starker among episodes written by each of the showrunners, 89% to 57%. Likewise, Amy Pond, the only of the Doctor's companions they analyzed from the Moffat Era (excluding, therefore, Clara Oswald, the most recent companion), had less speaking time per episode than any of Rose Tyler, Martha Jones, or Donna Noble, the RTD-era companions. (Though just barely less than Rose.) Conclusion: Moffat has been more sexist than RTD was. Or, as the article puts it, "female character writing ha[s] taken a nose dive."
To be blunt, this strikes me as ridiculous. And it's ridiculous right from the beginning, with the choice of method. Whatever the merits of the Bechdel test, it's a little absurd to hold it up as a very useful way to tell sexist writing from feminist writing at an individual-script level. The FiveThirtyEight article, for instance, mentions that not only does Gravity fail the test but American Hustle, a way, way less progressive depiction of womankind, "passes" it, barely, because of a very brief conversation between one of the two main female characters, both of whom are largely treated as sex objects, and one minor female character, who has barely any lines and comes into play only as the wife of some politician, about nail polish. The authors of this article look to the Bechdel test to provide a quantitative answer to what is in essence a qualitative phenomenon. Whether or not a character is well-written, fully developed, and has an existence independent of other characters is pretty obviously a complex, qualitative question, and moreover it is one that we might expect would correlate only very weakly with the particular strictures of the Bechdel test, and only then over large samples.
Turning to the particulars, I think that Doctor Who is somewhere where the Bechdel test kind of breaks down for many of the same reasons it does with Gravity. There just aren't that many characters! This is not an ensemble cast show; it's a show that has one running protagonist and typically either one or two joint protagonists, who rotate in and out over the years, who go around having adventures together, and often not with very many other people. Since the show rebooted, it has never been true that at least one companion was female. (This is possibly subject to critique in its own right, but since we're viewing things through this particular lens it's good for these purposes.) Moreover, the Doctor usually takes point on interactions with the other people that they meet, in large part because those other people are often involved in some sort of alien menace that he is usually the one with the experience to handle. Also, the Doctor comes along and whisks people off to travel through time and space. He's kind of the most important person in the lives of the people to whom he does that, or at least one of them. So it's not exactly shocking that he would come up a lot in conversation.
We can expect, therefore, that Doctor Who might have a tough time passing the Bechdel test, simply because of this structure. You could at this point argue that its structure is one that should not be allowed to exist, which I think would mean arguing that you should never have a protagonist around whom the world basically revolves and who is male. I don't think that's the case, and I doubt Alison Bechdel does either. I think the point of the test is that there used to be, and to a certain but lesser degree continues to be, an unhealthy tendency in Hollywood to depict women rarely and unrealistically, and in particular to deny them character of their own rather than defining them entirely through their relationships to men, and that this tendency is bad, should be resisted, and would ideally end altogether. The point is not, cannot be, that we're not allowed ever to tell a story dominated by a central male figure. If the point is that women should automatically decline to have interest in such stories, well, that seems a little bit like being prejudiced on account of gender, once we accept that not all stories which fail the Bechdel test are in actuality sexist. Boycott sexist stuff? Of course! Sexist stuff is terrible, and should be condemned to the fiery pits of hell. Boycott something because it has very few characters, or because in addition to strong female characters and a feminist editorial point of view it has a central male character around whom things tend to resolve? If you want, but I think it'll be your loss.
How about the Moffat v. RTD issue? Well, one thing that occurs to me is that I think Moffat's stories have tended to be somewhat more intimate, to focus more closely around the central cast rather than thrusting them into a large crowd. That's gonna intrinsically make it tougher to meet the Bechdel test. In many ways the whole point of Amy Pond's story is that her life is emptier than it should be, and so she runs off with a mad man in a box. In a sense there aren't any characters at all other than Amy, Rory, and the Doctor in an episode like "Amy's Choice." The same is more or less true of "The Girl Who Waited," which this article excluded from its analysis, presumably because it's a little tough to tell whether two different versions of the same person count as two distinct characters. "Vincent and the Doctor" really has one character other than the main two, and that's Vincent van Gogh. As it happens there have also been a couple of Amy-lite episodes, as there were a bunch of Doctor-lite episodes in earlier seasons, all mostly for production reasons; in each of those episodes the Doctor has interacted mostly with Craig Owens, and some with his (girl)friend Sophie. All of these episodes were counted as "fail" episodes. On the other hand, something like "The Doctor's Daughter," which I quite like but which it must be admitted is all about one particular female character who is explicitly defined by her relationship to the Doctor, passes the test.
All of this explains why I don't think it's exactly surprising both that some Doctor Who episodes fail the test and that somewhat more of Moffat's have done so than Davies's. Going beyond this somewhat cramped angle, I think it's instructive to note that the basic dynamic of the Amy Pond Era is that Amy is constantly torn between the Doctor and her boyfriend/fianceé/husband Rory Williams. She starts out as a teenager who's gotten engaged, probably prematurely, and who (understandably) runs away with and develops a bit of a crush on the handsome, mysterious stranger who shows up on her wedding night. Over time she and Rory develop a real, stronger relationship, in which Amy is unambiguously the dominant partner. She and the Doctor also develop a strong non-romantic friendship, during the course of which she gradually discovers her independence from the Time Lord. Along the way Rory and the Doctor are routinely referred to as "Amy's boys" or the like. Consider further this dialogue, from when the Doctor magically appears at their wedding:
The Doctor: Amelia, from now on I shall be leaving the kissing duties to the brand new Mr. Pond!The Doctor basically calls everyone in Rory's family a Pond. He views Amy as the dominant figure in that group (perhaps besides himself, but the "perhaps" there is not just a formality), and sees others largely through the lens of their relationship to her. This is, you'll note, the opposite of the problematic thing that the Bechdel test is trying to get at.
Rory: No, I'm not Mr. Pond, that's not how it works.
The Doctor: Yeah it is.
Rory: Yeah it is.
Now let's consider Mr. Davies. And I don't exactly mean to attack him as sexist, because I don't think he was. I mean merely to point out that I think it's similarly easy to write critiques of his character arcs that are at least as plausible as those of the Amy Pond arc. Let's start with Rose Tyler, who like Amy meets the Doctor in her late teenage years when she has a boyfriend to whom she's only somewhat committed, and runs away with him. Unlike Amy, who sets the Doctor straight in literally her first adventure with him and prevents him from committing an atrocity, Rose does very little other than get in the way throughout her time on the show. One brief exception to this is in "The Parting of the Ways," when she absorbs the energy of the Time Vortex and becomes omnipotent for a while. That episode is rated as having failed the Bechdel test. Then, once the Doctor sacrifices one of his lives to save her from being burnt out by that energy and regenerates into a more handsome form, she gets a crush on him. Eventually she decides that she would rather never see her family again than be separated, with similar eternity, from the Doctor. When faced with exactly this choice, Amy picks her loving human husband. That is to say, with Rose though not with Amy, the female companion's infatuation with the Doctor prevents her from developing a real human relationship. Then, when Rose does in fact get separated from the Doctor (but not from her family), she spends all her energy trying to cross the walls between the worlds to reach him. In the end the Doctor leaves her with his half-human clone, and she basically discards Mickey, whom she was only ever with as sort of a second-best after she met the Doctor (or maybe even before that). All in all I can't see how it's even close who of Rose or Amy has more of an independent personality beyond their relationships to various men.
How about Donna Noble? Every single one of whose episodes passes the Bechdel test? I really like Donna Noble's story arc. However, what follows is not an inaccurate description of it: her "grand destiny," the thing that makes her the "most important woman in the world," is to trigger the creation of the Doctor's half-human clone, and in doing so to absorb his Time Lord mind into herself. That's, uh, not exactly independence from men, is it? Oh, and of course, after she achieves this destiny, the Doctor has to wipe her mind and erase all memory of him to prevent the Time Lord consciousness from burning her the way the Time Vortex would have burnt Rose. She then goes and marries some random guy whom we never really meet in much detail, off-screen. Donna is in many ways a strong character, but... I dunno, in some other ways she can be seen as kind of a sort of stereotypical caustic ditz, and she is at least intermittently kind of terrified and overmatched until she absorbs the Doctor's mind. Unlike, as for instance, Amy Pond, who never particularly acts overmatched, right from the start. She's certainly willing to talk back to the Doctor; so is Amy, and Donna's has, as I say, much more of what you could criticize as sort of stereotypically female sass. I don't honestly think that's a problem, but it's as plausible to see it as one as anything about Amy.
Finally we come to Martha Jones, and here's the thing: I'm not sure I can tell a similar story about Martha's performance in Season Three. She's great! She's a very strong female character, whose character arc is about getting over her crush on the Doctor, realizing that he's never going to be interested in her (being for some reason hung up on Rose, a much less cool character), and getting out of an unhealthy situation. That's great! Except the thing about Martha, or really rather about Russell Davies's treatment of her, is that the last time we see her in Doctor Who is really one of the only things about the show's treatment of female characters that I actually dislike. The last we had seen of her, prior to her appearance in the closing montage of The End of Time (which, except for this, is one of my favorite things about the entire show), she was walking off with Jack and Mickey, presumptively to go get involved with Torchwood. She was at that point a doctor, a woman of the cosmos, and, I think, engaged to Tom Milligan, whom she had met in an alternate timeline and then sought out once the main timeline was restored. I kinda like that as a neat little timey-wimey love story. Then, as the Tenth Doctor is dying, he pays a visit to all of his companions, including Martha, and we see her all soldiered up, fighting Sontarans, with Mickey Smith (Rose's ex), to whom she is apparently married. Now, this scene can be criticized on a lot of levels. You could argue that RTD just kind of casually paired up the two black characters. Or you could say that he just paired the spares, which, while less racist in overtone, is just bad storytelling. But the thing I want to focus on here is the "soldiered up" part, because Martha did not used to be a soldier. In particular, she was a great example of a strong female character whose strength did not take the form of violence. Sure it's nice to show that women can do the fighting thing as well as men, the way River does, the way Amy sometimes does. But if the only way women can be strong is to become violent, i.e. to adopt the traditionally male form of strength, well, what the hell kind of message is that? That's basically just a reaffirmation of the idea that "masculine" is the same as "strong," and that women should become strong by getting more man-like. Martha Jones was a great exception to that pattern, a woman who was strong, undeniably strong, but who wasn't a soldier or a fighter. And Russell Davies goes and ruins it. He takes this doctor, this healer, who earlier had been seen talking to the Doctor about how she was working to change militaristic organizations like UNIT from the inside, and has her strutting about with big ol' machine gun-style energy weapons with Mickey Smith, a man with a very stereotypically fighter's sense of strength. It's a travesty is what it is. It's so bad that I actually don't consider it canon.
Add it all up and I just don't see a drastically better record for Davies than for Moffat. And I haven't yet mentioned two of Moffat's creations who are not main companions. Sally Sparrow is the only female protagonist of a Doctor Who episode, assuming we consider the Doctor the main protagonist of any episode that he shares in the usual fashion with his companions. In "Blink," commonly considered the best episode of the show and one of the best episodes of all time, she successfully follows the Doctor's guidance, which we later learn he gave based on information he got from her, to evade and defeat the Weeping Angels, some of the deadliest creatures in the universe. Arguably she manages in a single episode to be a better-drawn character than Rose Tyler is in her thirty-something. Oh, and Steven Moffat wrote that episode, though it took place during RTD's tenure.
And then we have River Song. River Song, whom this article considers at some length. They find that she does not often herself talk to other women about something other than a man, and condemn her basically as existing for the sole purpose of having a romantic relationship with the Doctor. Her supposed "strength" as a character they dismiss as being an illusion created by her violent tendencies. Whenever the Doctor tells her to do something she doesn't like, she does it, possibly shouting "I hate you!" at him, whereas Rose, they assert, was more assertive. (They describe her as the "moral compass" of the companionship; I don't exactly see what evidence they have for this, but okay, whatever.) The way I see it, though, River Song is one of the very, very, very few people who ever addresses the Doctor as an equal. This is remarked upon time and again. He comes when she calls, and he frequently does what she tells him to do. She flies the TARDIS, better than the Doctor in fact, and she didn't even learn it from him, she learned it from the ship itself. She's really the only other character we ever see acting as an independent time traveler, and she gives every indication of understanding the physics and mechanics of time travel more or less as well as he does. Her constant "I hate you!"-ing isn't because he tells her to do something she doesn't think is a good idea (when that happens, she fights him over it, and doesn't give in until one of them has convinced the other that they were being foolish), it's usually because of some act of passing rudeness on his part or when he shows off his knowledge of her character. For instance, once when he tells her to shut up, once when he refers to her as "Mrs. Robinson," and once when, having stated earlier that the TARDIS scanner couldn't work while the ship was cloaked, he cries out "River, have you got my scanner working?!" Meanwhile, when she perceives him to have acted foolishly, as for instance when he uses some of his own regeneration energy to heal her wrist (which she had broken, and tried to conceal, to please him), she calls him out on it, as for instance by slapping him, hard. You can say that she exists only to be his romantic partner if you like, but I would say rather that she exists to be his equal, and that it's perfectly natural for a man who basically never encounters anyone his equal to fall in love with the one person who is. (And, of course, for River to fall for the only man who's her equal.)
And her strength isn't just in the violence, it's in the lying, constantly, to keep up her pretenses and keep those around her from learning things from their futures. The article quotes the time when she tells Amy and Rory that they should, as the Doctor's friends always do, do as they're told. But she's lying her ass off through that entire scene! She's manipulating everyone, albeit in a benign way, because she, alone of the people on that beach, knows that the Doctor is not in fact dead, and that they need to do what they've been told to do. She has independent knowledge of the importance of doing that thing. Amy and Rory do not. She's exploiting their loyalty to the Doctor to get them to obey her, not actually just blindly following him herself. She spends a lot of time knowing stuff that even the Doctor doesn't know. Of course, the reverse is true as well, but that's to be expected given the structure of their story, where they meet (largely) back-to-front, passing each other in opposite directions. River Song is a strong female character, and their attempt to dismiss her importance fails, I think, utterly.
And I'll also add, I'm not at all sure that I trust their analysis. Consider the following. They designate the episode "The Girl in the Fireplace" as a fail. This strikes me as ridiculous. In that episode, Rose has a lengthy one-on-one conversation with Reinette Poisson, Madame du Pompadour, while the Doctor is off making various preparations. Their conversation mainly concerns the odd time mechanics they're caught up in, and the alien menace that's coming for Reinette. Eventually it turns to when the Doctor will arrive to save her (Reinette), and about the Doctor more generally. But... really? We condemn this conversation because among its subjects is a guy? If there had been a scene break between the two halves of the conversation, would the result be the same? Except that they say explicitly that they give River Song credit for some conversations that only featured the odd line here or there that weren't about the Doctor, so that looks like an inconsistency. Judging by the same standard I don't see how "Father's Day" is a loss, since when Rose meets her mother's younger self she initially remarks on such things as Jackie's hair and the baby she's holding, a.k.a. Rose as an infant. It's not a lot of Bechdel-approved dialogue, but it's more than zero, I think. Now, those are both RTD-era episodes, though Moffat wrote the former, but I haven't bothered to think about whether some of the Moffat-era episodes they deem failures might also be just plain errors.
All of this just leaves me deeply skeptical of their whole analysis. There is stuff to criticize Steven Moffat for, certainly, including stuff about how he portrays his female characters. Particularly, in Amy and River and the two duplicate versions of Clara Oswald we meet initially one can perceive a bit of a troubling sameness to the kind of strength he gives his female characters, a very feisty-and-flirty feel that's not a problem in itself but, like every other character type, shouldn't just become the norm. (I personally do not think that actual human Clara Oswald falls into this same type, though, and Sally Sparrow definitely did not, nor Reinette Poisson [though she was certainly flirty, heh, but after all, she was French, and the king's mistress!].) But I just think that if you honestly watch the episodes and ask yourself whether either Moffat or Davies portray a world where the women are weak and helpless and dependent on men to both protect them and give their lives meaning, or whether the show's editorial point of view is that women are inferior to men and/or should have lesser rights than men, the answer for both men has to be a ringing NO!
"Quantifying" things through the Bechdel test is neither here nor there; it is what it is. If an honest and thorough qualitative analysis of Doctor Who shows that it is not sexist, as I believe it does, but the Bechdel Test says that it is, well, that is evidence of nothing except the limits of the Bechdel Test. Certainly Alison Bechdel did not, through some divine authority, define and prescribe the limits of what constitutes acceptably feminist literature in that comic; she did not intend or attempt to do so, because that would be crazy. We know the definition of acceptably feminist literature: it's literature which portrays women as the equals of men, as having the same diversity of character as men, as entitled to the same social rights and moral respect as men, and as being their own people rather than merely as extensions or possessions of men. If the Bechdel Test serves as a reasonably accurate shortcut for identifying literature which meets that standard, it's useful. In particular it has been useful in identifying one major way, though by no means the only way, in which the American film industry has fallen short of that standard, and in providing an easy way to discuss that failure and advocate its redress. But like most heuristics, it ain't perfect, and like most heuristics, in individual cases it will sometimes, or even frequently, tell the wrong story. Gravity, all would admit, is one of those times, and I think that for many of the same reasons, so is Doctor Who.
So let's use the Bechdel Test, to perform broad-brush, rough estimate analyses as FiveThirtyEight did, or perhaps to critique something like The Lord of the Rings, which features a vast number of characters who meet up in a large number of different permutations and which features almost no romance whatsoever, and yet fails the test. That there's just no real excuse for; those are the kinds of circumstances which should have led to its passing the test, and, for instance, A Song of Ice and Fire (a.k.a. A Game of Thrones), commonly described as the successor to LotR, has about half its characters women, including the important ones, and I'm sure there have been lots and lots of Bechdel-meeting conversations between women over the three-plus books I've read so far. (Not that Game of Thrones is invulnerable from other lines of attack about its gender politics, of course, although I think I think that the editorial point of view has stayed on the side of right, and that's part of the point: being Bechdel-compliant is neither necessary nor sufficient.) But you can't just use it as self-authenticating evidence of sexism. In an ideal world, where there are no sexists and everything meets the highest of feminist standards, far less than 100% of movies produced, and even further less than 100% of all individual episodes of TV shows ever aired, would meet the Bechdel Test. We're a long way from that world, of course, and will unfortunately probably never get there, but even in this world, where so many of the failures are blameworthy, you can't just assume that all of them are.
So, yeah, Steven Moffat's episodes have had two female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man less than Russell Davies's episodes did. All else being equal that might be mildly disquieting evidence, but all else isn't equal. We can watch the episodes and judge for ourselves. I am wholly convinced that the show has not been remotely sexist under either man's leadership, and I know a number of female fans of the show who agree emphatically. Disagree with that on the merits if you like, and if anyone ever convinces me that the show has become sexist that will make me a lot less inclined to keep watching it. But don't just present this "quantitative test" as some kind of superior evidence which trumps ordinary reasoned argument and persuasion. It's a shortcut, but it's not that big a shortcut.
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