We all talk about the Bechdel Test all the time, because it's so simple: Does a story have two women who talk to each other, about something other than a man? But almost every time it comes up, we all dismiss it, because it's too simple or too arbitrary. But actually, the Bechdel Test is more important than anyone realizes. Alison Bechdel came up with the Bechdel Test in the panels of her comic Dykes to Watch Out For in 1985, and it was just in the form of one woman explaining her "rule" about movies to another: In the past, Bechdel herself has seemed weirded out by the attention to the Bechdel Test, and not sure whether she wanted some kind of all-encompassing metric named after herself. But she's recently become more open to the idea. In a blog post last year, she wrote: I have always felt ambivalent about how the Test got attached to my name and went viral... But in recent years I've been trying to embrace the phenomenon. After all, the Test is abou...