“Get out of here!”
“…I don’t understand?
“Clear out of here!”
Did you know that in 2011, only 11 films out of the top 100 films had female protagonists? The Bechdel test aims to highlight this lack of female representation in Cinema by rating films according to three criteria; in the film are there at least 2 named women(1) who talk to each other(2) about something besides a man(3)? Shockingly many of our favourite films do not pass. Is it so far-fetched that a film should contain a scene in which a female talks to her friend about literally anything in the world other than the male lead? Surely this is the bare minimum of female representation we should expect from films. Women populate more than half of the world and yet we are still so often consigned to being the ‘love interest’ whose lives centre wholly around the male protagonist even to the point where the majority of mainstream films in our cinemas seem to find it impossible, in their entire run-time, to imagine a world in which a woman conducts a conversation that is not about a man.
“Where do I belong? Where do I fit? Who are my people? Where do my loyalties lie? We all choose our tribe. It’s that need to belong, to live within boundaries, cause it’s scary on the outside, on the fringes. Some labels are forced on us. They mock us, set us apart ‘til we’re like ghosts, drifting through other people’s lives. But only if we let the labels hold. You can piss your whole life away trying out who you might be. It’s when you’ve worked out who you are that you can really start to live.”
