Eve Tushnet promotes her review of some recent film release with a mock headline declaring it  “A terrific date movie!  Unless you’re heterosexual or something.”  I love that “or something.”  I’m not sure whether she includes her non-heterosexual self among those for whom the picture is a less than terrific date movie. 

Click to read

Friend of the blog Duncan Mitchel has recently put up two posts (here and here) about something that Tushnet’s line reminded me of.  In a 1985 edition of her strip Dykes to Watch Out For, cartoonist Alison Bechdel lays out a test for movies.  “One, it has to have at least two women in it; who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man.”  Duncan calls this “Liz Warren’s Rule,” because Alison says she got it from her friend Liz Warren.  In his first post, Duncan looks at some published works that predate the DTWOF strip and include precursors of the Rule; in his second, he describes a South Korean movie that surprises him by meeting the requirements of the Rule.  Some of the precursors seem to me a bit harsh; for example, in an essay published in 1975 Samuel R. Delany wrote that “any novel that does not, in this day and age, have a strong, central, positive relation between women can be dismissed as sexist (no matter the sex of the author) from the start.”  A woman who had written a novel which did not have such a relation at its center might be rather surprised to find Mr Delany dismissing her work as sexist, but that’s what the guy said.