Some meandering thoughts about the Bechdel test

There are a lot of criticisms leveled against the Bechdel test (for anyone unaware, a movie passes as long as it has 2 women who talk to each other about something besides a man, sometimes people add additional qualifiers like that they have to be named, or talk for at least a minute). Some of them are more justified than others, but I have some thoughts on minor modifications that can... essentially negate most of the reasonable ones.

First, I think it's reasonable to distinguish between a technical fail and a real fail. One of the easiest ways to do that is to see if the movie also fails the reverse test -- do 2 men talk to each other about something besides a woman. If not, then the Bechdel fail is probably because of technical reasons, like "there are only two characters with speaking parts" or "this movie has almost no dialogue".

Second, specifically for action movies with little dialogue, it may be reasonable to treat a fight sequence as equivalent to dialogue. If two women are fighting each other, and the reason they are fighting is not because of a man, that could be considered a pass.

And since the test is a better measure of the overall media landscape than it is of any individual movie, and it is reasonable to ask if some movies fail just because they happen to be about specific venues (eg monasteries) with few to no women, which is a perfectly valid thing to make a movie about, I think we should look at ratios.

In a truly gender blind media landscape, you would expect Bechdel and reverse Bechdel to have similar failure rates. Eg for every movie about coal miners, or monks, there's a movie about midwives, or women's sports. Romance movies where everyone is always talking about the heterosexual lead couple would be double fails. And so on.

What does everyone else think?