Secret sauce

 My husband and I don't generally enjoy the same movies. 

He gravitates toward action adventure, primarily where CIA agents do super-secret spy stuff, trying to keep the names of other agents from getting out in the open. 

While I try to pick movies in which women talk to each other like normal human beings. Movies that make him fall asleep.

Not that he complains. 

We each know the criteria the other uses in the decision-making: He looks for heavy artillery and guesstimates explosions per minute ratios as he scrolls the listings. 

I have a different measure.

"I know ... it's called the Béchamel test and it's quite complicated. Women should have a certain percentage of all lines of dialog in keeping with the suggested demographic. And they should not be heroines, not villains. 

"Close, dear. Béchamel is a sauce made with flour, butter, and cream. Bechdel is the test named after a cartoonist, Alison Bechdel, who, inspired by Virginia Wolfe, joked in her comic strip about how women are so flatly portrayed in literature and film that they don't even address each other. And it is a pretty simple formula: All a movie or book has to do to pass is have at least two women interact with each other about something other than a man."

Of course, there might be bonus points if the women are named characters, and the conversation the two have were about something other than children or family, but it isn't a deal breaker.

The Bechdel test is an extremely low bar. One can only go up from acknowledging the presence of another person possessing XX chromosomes on the set.

It's such a low bar that movies still get made whether they pass or fail. Shocking, I know. 

We didn’t fare much better with our childhood heroes, either. Harry Potter's Goblet of Fire doesn’t pass muster, nor do any of the Lord of The Rings movies. Even my beloved Toy Story series leaves feminist icons like Bo Peep and Jessie the cowgirl following the boys but not interacting with each other in any scenes.

And, I suppose, the most shocking part is how easily we have accepted these cardboard-cutout cookie-cut shapes as our literary and cultural heroines. 

They are so expendable, their stories so mundane, they don't even acknowledge each other. 

Of course, the worst part is that even discussing this simple test can start a defensive war. 

The mere criticism of the shoot-em-up genre he takes in stride, but pointing out the misogyny feels like a personal assault on his scruples. Somehow, his ability to soak in the entertainment value of the harmless sex and violence brought to you through the Magic of Hollywood wasn’t a vice until I pointed out the women who amount to pretty veneers. 

“But you laughed at Ocean’s 11. You think those guys are funny!”

“Of course, I laughed. But to pass the Bechdel test, they had to create Ocean’s 8 and kill off Danny so he didn’t just waltz in and steal the show as well as the gems.