Do you keep mistaking the women in your life for sexy lamps?

How many female characters in the best movies of all time can be replaced with a sexy lamp?

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Do you keep mistaking the women in your life for sexy lamps?

Sitting in the corner looking pretty?

Shining light and warmth onto those around her?

They are just so similar, it’s easy to mix them up!

You’re not alone.

You’d be surprised just how many movie makers, authors and content creators struggle with this very same conundrum!

Kelly Sue DeConnick, a comic book writer coined the “sexy lamp test” to help male comic book writers out. In a 2012 interview DeConnick said,

“As an industry, we have to make more female-led books that are actually worth buying. Nevermind the Bechdel test, try this: if you can replace your female character with a sexy lamp and the story still basically works, you need another draft. They have to be protagonists, not devices.”

The sexy lamp test asks—do the women in this film/show/book use their agency for anything beyond supporting a man?

Take Megan Fox’s character Mikaela in Transformers 1 & 2.

Even though Mikaela says that she learned about cars so that she wouldn’t be thought of as an object—the camera shots did not get the do-not-turn-woman-into-an-object memo.

Source

Her character’s purpose is to support the male hero. She is replaceable and interchangeable, and they did in fact replace her with an even lamp-ier lamp in the third movie.

Filmmaker Michael Bay was not subtle. He had sexy lamp as his express goal¹.

Fox told Vanity Fair that when she would ask him questions about her scenes like “Who am I talking to?” and “Where am I supposed to be looking?” he would respond, “Just be sexy.”

Not all lady lamp characters are so obvious, however.

Not all have sex appeal as their sole purpose.

Some lamps are there to die tragically to motivate the male hero². Some to show the male hero’s soft side to contrast his toughness. Some to give him pep talks when he’s about to give up.

How to spot a PDG (Patriarchy Dream Girl)

If you, like me, have been swindled before in mistaking a female character for a sexy, supportive lamp, allow me to outline a few signs of a PDG—Patriarchy Dream Girl— so we won’t be fooled again:

• If the female character’s kissing/sex-having to speaking ratio is equal to or greater than 1:1, you’ve got a PDG (looking at you Florence Pugh in Oppenheimer!).

• If vast majority of the female character’s lines are either trying to attract or hype up the male lead? It’s a PDG (looking at you Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer!).

• If the female character is a bad ass—strong, smart, tough, funny—but then the only purpose her bad-assery serves is to make the male protagonist look even more bad ass when he wins her over? PDG (looking at you Wyldstyle in The Lego Movie (AND you Kitty Oppenheimer!)).³

The primary role of a PDG is to offer unfailing support of her man and look pretty while he does whatever the hell he wants. No conditions necessary. Also, no personality, desires or agency necessary.

How many of the women in the best movies of all time can be replaced with sexy lamps?

But just how wide spread is this problem?

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), an authority on movie reviews and information, compiled a list of the 250 top movies of all time.

Just for fun, let’s take the top six films and assess how the female characters fair, shall we?

Let’s examine:

1. The Bechdel test: Does the film have two named women in it who talk to each other about something besides a man?

2. The sexy lamp test: Can the women be replaced with lamps without the plot suffering?

3. PDG syndrome: Do the women have agency and character arcs of their own? Or are they only there to support the men?

4. What is the ratio of male cast to female cast? As meticulously tallied by yours truly from the cast lists on IMDb.

1 The Shawshank Redemption

1. Bechdel test: Fail. There is not one named female character. His wife is just called “wife.”

2. Sexy lamp test: NA

3. PDG: NA

4. Cast: 50 men. 3 women.

2 The Godfather

1. Bechdel test: Pass, but barely. Two women discuss bread for three lines, so it passes by the skin of its teeth.

2. Sexy lamp test: Fail. The two love interests can DEFINITELY be replaced with sexy lamps and offer nothing to the plot save one of them dying.

3. PDG: Fail. Both love interests are only there to be love interests. Mama Corleone is there to cook for the men and kiss them on the head. The sister is there to be beaten.

4. Cast: 26 men. 8 women.

3 The Dark Knight

1. Bechdel test: Debatable pass. The only conversation where two women talk to each other is on the phone when one of them is held at gunpoint with her words dictated by a man.⁴

2. Sexy lamp test: Fail. Sexy lamps could replace the women and the plot would be unaffected.

3. PDG: Fail. The female characters have no depth. The female lead impacts the plot by dying. Her only motivation is her romantic interest in Batman and Harvey Dent.

4. Cast: 82 men. 12 women.

4 The Godfather Part II

1. Bechdel test: Fail. There are two named women to talk to each other, but not about something other than a man.

2. Sexy lamp test: Fail.

3. PDG: Fail.

4. Cast: 54 men. 13 women.

5 12 Angry Men

1. Bechdel test: Fail. There are no women in this movie.

2. Sexy lamp test: NA

3. PDG: NA

4. Cast: 12 men. 0 women.

6 The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

1. Bechdel test: Fail. There are two named women, but they never talk to each other.

2. Sexy lamp test: One pass, one fail. Liv Tyler’s character could be replaced by a sexy lamp. Eowyn passes.

3. PDG: See above.

4. Cast: 45 men. 6 women.

Now. Lest your panties are starting to twist at the critique of your favorite movie- two of my faves are on that list too (LOTR and Shawshank). Yes I am aware the purpose of these movies was not to solve gender inequality. Yes I understand the telling of these stories didn’t call for women to be front and center. No I don’t think all these movies would be inherently better with more women in them. Yes I am aware of the shortcomings of the Bechdel test.

But still.

Taken together, our six best films of all time—declared so by the public on one of the most popular websites in the world— portray 269 men and 42 women.

That’s 86% men, 14% women.

Women make up quite a bit more than 14% of the population.

*devil’s advocate voice* But these movies are so old, it’s better now.

Is it devil’s advocate voice?! Is it??

In the most popular films of 2022, 65.4% of speaking roles went to men, 34.6% to women.

The ratio of two male characters for every one female character has remained remarkably stable over the past 70 years of film:

Source: Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media

Do I need to go on another rant about the film that won the Oscar for best picture last year?! Because I will!

Why any of this matters

I was a late-blooming feminist⁵. During my feminist awakening, one of the things that had me gobsmacked was the percentage of movies that pass the Bechtel test vs the percentage that pass the reverse Bechtel test—two named men speak to each other about something other than a woman.

Of the most popular 1200 movies of the past 40 years, less than half pass the Bechtel test, but 95% pass the reverse Bechdel test!

I watch at least a few movies a month and have done so since I was a young child.

How on earth did I never notice how rarely women are portrayed speaking together?! In all our family favorites- Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future—women almost never talk to each other. The inner life of a woman is never portrayed beyond her relationship to a man.

So strange. So very different from real life. From my real life.

Speaking on this strangeness, fanfic author scifigrl47 writes:

“… but seriously, women are HALF OF THE POPULATION OF THE EARTH. During the course of any given movie, you will have a hundred conversations between men, and yes, conversations between men and women.

But how is it possible that movie makers have created some sort of alternate universe where, just by sheer coincidence, two women don’t accidentally speak to each other? How does that happen? It is nine thirty am and I have already talked to about twenty women today, because as it turns out, there are are a lot of us and sometimes we interact.

Failing the Bechdel test points out a fundamental flaw in how movies are structured, how popular media is structured where the default is male (and likely white/straight male) and anything else is an actual statistical freak of nature. When in fact, guess what?

The only place where the world continues to be white and straight and male is in the goddamn media.” - scifigrl47

She brings up some good points here, but it’s her last point I want to pause on- the only place where the world continues to be white, straight and male is in the media.

I don’t think that is the only place. Because while these movies aren’t “real,” the writers who created them are real. The directors and producers who created them are real.

Meaning that in these creator’s minds, the world is male. In these creator’s minds, women don’t have anything to talk about other than men. In these creator’s minds, women and sexy lamps are interchangeable.

My fear is that these men aren’t creating alternate universes, but rather they are accurately displaying how rarely they think about women beyond their service to men.

Forget movies not passing the sexy lamp test, I want to know how many men’s minds would pass!⁶

I am a woman, so of course, I see myself as having agency, as having a purpose beyond the satisfaction and support of men. I am keenly aware of the dozens of conversations I have each and every day with women that have nothing to do with a man. I am aware of my hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, interests, goals, and accomplishments that have nothing to do with a man.

Given my daily reality, how very strange to get a glimpse inside not-an-insignificant-number of men’s heads and see only a minuscule fraction of my existence—my support of men— depicted in the films men create, in the stories they write.

Movies are fantasies. Not just for the people who create them, but for those who consume them.

When we use our time and money to support a film, collectively we say, yes, we like this fantasy. We sign off on it. We too want to entertain this fantasy.

Movies are a window into the worlds we want to escape into.

And our favorite fantasies? The ones we’ve accoladed as the best and most popular?

Are the ones where women are indistinguishable from sexy lamps.

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1. For Fox’s audition instead of reading lines, Michael had her wash his Ferrari in a bikini.

2. This phenomenon is so common it was also given a catchy name by female comic book writers: “women in refrigerators”

3. My loathing of Oppenheimer knows no bounds.

4. There’s even a double date scene at a restaurant and the two women never say one word to each other. So close.

5. But once I bloomed, boy howdy did I bloom!

6. The texts I was handed as divine and perfect do not pass the sexy lamp test. Not the Bible. Not the Book of Mormon. We either have sexy lamps (Jezebel, Delilah, Potiphar’s wife) or supportive lamps (Rachel, Sarah, Mary).