Swedes evidently think "too much of a good thing can be wonderful": they have had a Minister of Gender Equality since the 50's (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_for_Gender_Equality_(S...) and there are efforts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun (
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_s..., although this has been tried in English, too). In the Global Gender Gap Report 2012, Sweden is named as a world leader in gender equality (
http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2012), etc. etc. I mean, the country even has an official gender equality webpage in English (
http://sweden.se/society/gender-equality-in-sweden/). It seems they can't go any further. And then this.
Even Jezebel (http://jezebel.com/sweden-introduces-new-movie-rating-system...) has to admit the "test" is not perfect:
"Sure, the Bechdel test is imperfect (Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker doesn't pass, for instance, but you could hardly argue that a female-helmed war movie doesn't empower at least one woman), but that doesn't make it useless as a starting line for sniffing out broad trends in gender bias. And that's what we're talking about here. Trends. Analysis. Examination. Critical thought. Information. I'm sure there are plenty of people who consider themselves scrupulously egalitarian who never even noticed that there are only like THREE WOMEN IN ALL OF MIDDLE EARTH."
I understand that this is just a thing introduced by a a few movie theaters, i.e. it's not the law or anything (yet). Yet, that's what riles me most: as librarians are the first to defend any censorship, movie professionals should push back on any arbitrary limitation on what can be shown. Some examples of movies that fail the test are given, e.g. LOTHR Trilogy, Pulp Fiction, Pacific Rim, etc. However, the test would also exclude many art films such as Tarkovski's Stalker and Solaris. How about movies with only a single female lead that don't quite fit the purpose of the test, e.g. Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly? How to handle movies with no dialog, or experimental movies such as Eraserhead? One can easily see that this sort of simplistic testing can have little artistic or practical merit.
Even Jezebel (http://jezebel.com/sweden-introduces-new-movie-rating-system...) has to admit the "test" is not perfect:
"Sure, the Bechdel test is imperfect (Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker doesn't pass, for instance, but you could hardly argue that a female-helmed war movie doesn't empower at least one woman), but that doesn't make it useless as a starting line for sniffing out broad trends in gender bias. And that's what we're talking about here. Trends. Analysis. Examination. Critical thought. Information. I'm sure there are plenty of people who consider themselves scrupulously egalitarian who never even noticed that there are only like THREE WOMEN IN ALL OF MIDDLE EARTH."
I understand that this is just a thing introduced by a a few movie theaters, i.e. it's not the law or anything (yet). Yet, that's what riles me most: as librarians are the first to defend any censorship, movie professionals should push back on any arbitrary limitation on what can be shown. Some examples of movies that fail the test are given, e.g. LOTHR Trilogy, Pulp Fiction, Pacific Rim, etc. However, the test would also exclude many art films such as Tarkovski's Stalker and Solaris. How about movies with only a single female lead that don't quite fit the purpose of the test, e.g. Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly? How to handle movies with no dialog, or experimental movies such as Eraserhead? One can easily see that this sort of simplistic testing can have little artistic or practical merit.