DEAR SUBSCRIBERS,
We here at Third-And-A-Half Wave, one of feminism’s several competing headquarters, are excited to announce our latest software development: The Bechdel Test Test™. We hope this measure proves as revolutionary as the Seneca Falls Convention or the spoken word segment on Beyonce’s “***Flawless.” The Bechdel Test Test™ offers an OS update to Third Wave Feminism’s beta program, The Bechdel Test.
We recently discovered that The Bechdel Test runs into an underlying logic problem: The Bechdel Test fails The Bechdel Test because The Bechdel Test talks about men. Upon computing this logic flaw, The Bechdel Tests operating system instantaneously imploded into the shreds of one thousand pink pussy hats. Being that The Bechdel Test fails its own criteria, we set out to address this design defect, finally settling on a test to test if the test actually tests.
The Bechdel Test Test™ has three new & improved functionalities:
1. There has to be at least two women present
2. Who talk to one another
3. About something other than The Bechdel Test.
The Bechdel Test Test™ is part of a larger system-wide update to reboot millennialist feminism. We noticed that the third wave and its measures had been reduced to a series of memes which could be invoked at brunch without any relevant context. We are now in the process of retooling and rebranding for wider market reach. For example, we are currently creating a new and improved LENA_DUNHAM_BOT, which fixes the previous system’s bug of refusing to run INTERSECTIONALITY.exe.
We also hope to soon debut “manpointing” (whenever a man points at something) and “manoaggressions” (whenever a man commits something tinier than a microaggression) as a follow-up to the brand success of the “mansplaining” and “manspreading” series.
In the near future, we hope to introduce several new features of The Bechdel Test Test™ to assess the usage of other 21st-century fad-feminism jargon. For example, are women also having conversations sans phrases like “Free The Nipple” or “Jezebel Op-Ed”? We encourage women everywhere to try to find substantive conversations outside of this terminology. Acceptable topics include thermodynamics, scone recipes, water turbines, or target BMIs.
We hope you employ The Bechdel Test Test™ at every hour of your life. Like a working mother’s infant, feminism doesn’t sleep.
Sincerely,
The Third-And-A-Half Wave
Matriarchy Inc.