The Foster Test

Let me start by disclosing that I absolutely loathe the Bechdel-Wallace Test. The fact that someone thought this was a concept we needed speaks more of their own neuroses than anything else, but it keeps coming up.

Basically, the Bechdel Test attempts to measure how women in fiction are portrayed. If a work features at least two (as opposed to one; smirk) [named] women talking to each other about “something” other than a man, then it passes.

I despise the identity politics behind it, but also the disregard of genre and the needs of the story. It seeks to impose a politically motivated, self-serving radical feminist agenda on Story. The Bechdel test has been incorporated into submission mechanisms and into screenwriting software. So, basically it’s not just some ivory-tower gender-warrior’s academic rants.

I first ran into the Bechdel test a few years back when I was on a writer’s critique site and one of the people giving me feedback suggested I revamp a major portion of my story in service to the Bechdel test, because otherwise “no women were going to read it.”

Was there a poll, I missed? I’d been reading for decades and NOT once did I think to myself, “Where is the checkbox that tells me whether or not, as a woman, I’m allowed to read this because it passes the Bechdel test.”

Therefore, I propose the Foster Test. A work passes the Foster Test if it features a woman who succeeds at whatever her goal is without weakening the man/men in the story or eliminating them from her life altogether.