Why is the Bechdel test morally important?
The Bechdel test can be failed by a movie which simply only had one woman in it, or was about a genderless robot, or was mostly about a heterosexual romance, or any number of other possibilities that have nothing to do with misogyny or any other form of gender bias.
Re:The Simpsons by the Data
by anotheryou on Thursday September 29, 2016 @03:46AM
(#12603838)
As said, no individual movie should be criticized based on it.
It is however very relevant when half of all movies have no real female characters in it, while something like 95% do have strong male characters in them. It's really sad when disneys "Frozen" becomes the positive outlier.
It is fair to say though, that there are more movies that fail the bechdel test¹ than there should be. If you compare it to the reverse of the bechdel test you can see there is a bias so large, it can't be founded in the preference of movie viewers alone.
I believe very much that everyone falls prey to biases, stereotypes or even outside factors like a possible gender imbalance in voice acting. I would not criticize anyone for this, because if you fall prey to something it is never ill intend. I do however also believe that these biases are harmful to society at large and in many cases could be easily avoided by more awareness of content creators.
I'm not against stereotypes, they are even valuable to get a story across, but you should be aware of how you are utilizing them.
¹ https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bechdel_test