Today, as my roomates were inexplicably rewatching Captain Marvel for the upteenth time, it got me thinking about ways that MRAs can have discussions about harmful depictions of men in the media without being dismissed as "angry nerd mad that women exist in his hobby."

For some reason as I was thinking something reminded me of the bechdel test. For those of you who don't know, the bechdel test is a set of rules made by a feminist author to use as a litmus test for whether a piece of media has adequate female representation. The rules are:

  1. It has to have at least 2 women in it

  2. The two women have to talk to each other at least once

  3. They have to talk about something besides a man

That gave the idea to create a "reverse bechdel test" to identify misandric depictions of men in media. That way we'd have some sort of objective metric to point to, and it can't be deflected with "oh you're just mad at woman." The rules could be something like:

  1. A male character has to do something that intentionally advances the goals of the protagonists

  2. The male character is not helped or upstaged in any way by a woman while doing this

  3. At the end of the story, the male character is not dead and/or in an antagonistic role

I'm curious to know what other MRAs think about this. Tell me if there's any other rules you would add, or if there's some media you think is sexist but still meets all the criteria.