: Re: Does this scene fail the Bechdel test? My novel has approximately a dozen women in it, but they don’t tend to talk to each other. Most of them are separated geographically or philosophically

@Debbie451

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The Bechdel Test has three rules:

It has to have at least two [named] women in it
Who talk to each other
About something besides a man

Some people who try to apply it use "man" in the romantic sense, but it doesn't have to be.

So if your scene has the two women as named characters talking about a foreclosure, it passes.

The idea is not to tick off a list of checkboxes, but to make you consider the work as a whole: Do the female characters function without male character intervention? Are the female characters interesting on their own? Do they have independent personalities, thoughts, lives, plot arcs? If you removed the male characters, would the female characters still have stuff to do?

Those questions are more important than "Do I have enough lines in this paragraph of these two characters talking about non-romantic stuff to qualify for passing this test?" If your female characters ONLY ever interact because they are talking about relationships with men, that's the problem the Bechdel test is trying to highlight. Women do stuff which has nothing to do with men at all.

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