In 1985, cartoonist Alison Bechdel came up with a test to judge whether or not she would want to watch a movie. The test states that in order for Bechdel to want to watch a film, it has to have (1) at least two women who (2) talk to each other about (3) something other than a man. The qualification that the characters have to be named is sometimes added. These qualifications have come to be known as the Bechdel Test.

Bechdel has said that at the time, the test was simply a joke between her and her friend. Today, it is a tool that many critics and movie-watchers use to determine whether a film is feminist or not. However, the Bechdel Test should not be used to decide this, as it is too simplified to be an actual judge of whether or not a film is woman-friendly.

The Bechdel Test’s main flaw as it is used today is that oftentimes, very sexist films can pass and very feminist films can fail. For example, a movie like 50 Shades of Grey, which is known to promote non-consensual BDSM and abuse, passes the test, while Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film with a lot of feminist undertones about viewing a woman as a person rather than a way to fix a man, does not pass the test. This is because the test does not take into account subject matter. Even if a film’s entire theme is misogynistic, it can still pass the Bechdel test as long as it has two (named) women who talk to each other about something other than a man.

The Bechdel Test is also unfriendly to films about relationships, which is a great many of them. Any film that depicts a heterosexual relationship will almost always fail the test, because in such films, the characters usually spend the most time with each other or talking about each other. For example, Her, which I consider to be a very feminist film, doesn’t pass the test even though it has three main male characters and five main female characters simply because all those characters really talk about is each other. Because of the way people use the Bechdel Test, films with feminist themes are getting a bad wrap.

The bottom line is that the Bechdel Test is merely a way to measure the degree to which women are present in a film, and not whether a film is feminist or not. This is not really the fault of the test, but the fault of the critics who place an unnecessary amount of weight on it. Rather than using such a simple measure as the Bechdel Test as a judge of whether or not a film is feminist, we should analyze the content of the film, which can’t really be narrowed down to three qualifications.

So let’s not completely do away with the test, but instead hold films and filmmakers to higher standards. Asking if there are two women in a film who talk to each other about something other than a man seems to be setting the bar pretty low. Upon viewing a film, let us ask ourselves about the themes of the film. Does it have misogynistic undertones, or feminist ones? Perhaps it has neither. But if we really want to find out if a film is feminist or not, we need to look at it as a whole rather than use a test that wasn’t even made for that purpose in the first place.