Hollywood is crushing on the romantic comedy again. With much of the female audience having lost their appetite for male-centered stories, the Bechdel Test has resurged, too. The famous test is simple: a film must have one scene where two women speak about something that isn’t a man. While romcoms are the only corner of cinema overtly for the girls, pop music is similarly dominated by divas.  

Pop has fought for its legitimacy since Diana Ross twirled into American history as arguably the first female pop star. In the decades since, pop has often been discounted as unserious fluff thanks to the patriarchy’s serious chokehold on the arts, like everything else that turns a profit. Despite this, pop music has evolved exponentially, producing art that ranges from Britney’s infectious belly rolling to Beyoncé’s masterminded opus of generational curses.

Decentering men is the cultural moment, so the question occurred: how much are my favorite girls singing about boys these days?

Alison Bechdel’s test (unassumingly born of a lesbian comic strip that merged into the mainstream in the 2000s) has a place in music, especially with pop being run by powerhouses with professed feminist ideals. I designed the Bopdel Test and applied it to the most commercially and culturally successful albums of the last calendar year, not to discredit the art form, but to further validate its value by exploring how standardized feminist thought plays out in popular music.

The Bopdel Test

An album must meet three basic requirements. One, it has to have a song with at least two distinct female perspectives that, two, build off each other, about three, something besides a man, free of audible male vocals.

Like the spirit of the Bechdel test, this means a song does more than overtly avoid singing to or about a man or his actions (songs that can most easily be understood to be about hetero love do not count, even if other interpretations are available). The qualifying song incites a layered conversation, invoking the voice of more than one woman, just between us girls. 

Sabrina Carpenter, Man’s Best Friend

Man’s Best Friend incited feminist outbursts before the music dropped, thanks to Sabrina’s polarizing cover. But the album itself amounts to more than a dog-walking of Sabrina’s sex-positive persona. From the semi-titular single, Man’s Best Friend begins a cutesy romp through modern dating, with no shortage of autonomy. 

The 12 tracks, judiciously produced to have no more than a 3:45 run time and rarely less than 100 BPM, dabble in disco, ABBA synth, and country-lite. Rarely do they stray from the topic of men — loving them or leaving them — and never for the entire song. Sabrina covers how men please her on “Tears” (“I get wet at the thought of you / Being a responsible guy / Treating me like you’re supposed to do / Tears run down my thighs”) or piss her off on “My Man On Willpower” (“My slutty pajamas not temptin’ him in the least / What in the fucked up romantic dark comedy / Is this”). By the test’s standards, none of the songs pass, though “Nobody’s Son” holds feminist truth. It’s one of four songs where Sabrina doesn’t sing to an implied beau, but rather to the boy moms of the world for raising the unreliable dudes keeping Sabrina employed as headmistress of the school for promising fuckboys. Like a slumber party after several bad dates, Sabrina’s girl talk uses boys as featured entertainment. 

Taylor Swift, The Life of a Showgirl

Taylor Swift’s latest is 41 allegorical minutes of theatrical AP English fanfic. The aptly named Life of a Showgirl continues Taylor’s era of calling out celebrities, like on “Father Figure.” Swift dons a mafioso persona (“I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger”) to invoke her known nemesis, Scooter Braun. The majority of the songs are understood to be odes to Taylor’s relationship with fiancé, Travis Kelce, automatically failing the Bopdel Test. 

But “CANCELLED!” invites others who have “girlbosse[d] too close to the sun” to join her tribe of non-baddie “wicked” women. “They’re the ones with matching scars” from media scrutiny. The song starts with the perspective of the newfound canceled woman, then builds to how the leader of the canceled gang (Taylor) can free her from sweating the haters. 

The lyrics mention men’s existence, but only as a passing monolith in a sentiment about women (“Did you make a joke only a man could?”). The artist who’s battled boy-crazy allegations since 2012 might’ve been able to score two, had “Actually Romantic” (her alleged Charli XCX diss track) not allegedly grounded the beef in Matty Healy. Though had it passed, the condescending takedown conflating rivalry with same-sex obsession would only claim pro-woman credit on a technicality. 

Billie Eilish, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT

Fans were quick to connect the alleged dots between Billie’s ex Jesse Rutherford (the 34-year-old lead of The Neighbourhood) and many of HIT ME HARD AND SOFT‘s ambient ballads. Anti-love songs like “WILDFLOWER,” “BLUE,” and “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE” are a masterclass in progressive pop, a sub-genre combining populist melodies with technically ambitious musicality. 

Equally ambitious are the tracks where Billie moves away from perceived hetero romance. She drools over a female love interest (“she dances on my tongue / tastes like she might be the one”) on “LUNCH,” eventually dipping into her catch’s mind too (“Now she’s smilin’ ear to ear / she’s the headlights, I’m the deer”), providing two hungry gazes of a woman-on-woman encounter. 

HIT ME HARD AND SOFT also instigates entirely unromantic conversations that don’t pass. “THE DINER” embodies the parasocial mind of a stalker, but from an implied male POV, aligning with a stalking incident the star experienced in 2023. “CHIHIRO” tackles self-realization through the lens of one of Billie’s favorite movies, Spirited Away. Though lyrics like “did you take my love away from me?” can indicate self-love, they superficially read as words to a male counterpart, like Haku in the movie. 

Ariana Grande, eternal sunshine

As one of the most famous lover girls on the planet, Ariana’s exploration of finding love again after her divorce from Dalton Gomez is unsurprisingly focused on relationships with men. 10 of the 13 titles include the word boy, he, or love. The three that don’t are “don’t wanna break up,” “i wish i hated you,” and “Saturn Returns interlude.” While the first two still discuss boy-induced heartbreak, the third taps into one of Ari’s other interests, astrology. The short spoken track covers the coming of age catalyzed by Saturn returning to the position it was in at a person’s birth. It’s an emotional and introspective topic, but not tied here in a way specific to women. 

The album’s first single, “yes, and?” celebrates another universal theme: defiant identity. Given the hook kicks off speaking to the other sex (“boy, come on, put your lipstick on”), Ariana’s 7th studio hit doesn’t pass.

Lady Gaga, MAYHEM

The ethereal simplicity of eternal sunshine is a foreign concept in Lady Gaga’s lyrical labyrinth, MAYHEM. Gaga sings to or about men, like her “boyfriend for the night” (“Garden of Eden”), or implied men, like “The Beast” she wants to come inside, on 11 of 13 tracks. She also chants of finding self-empowerment on the dance floor by order of The Lady In Red (“Abracadabra”) and screaming out her inner demons (“Disease”).  While the core of the album’s monstrous power comes from exposing elements of the human experience that are bigger — darker — than the mere shadow of man, there’s only one track that explicitly explores women-centered discourse to the test’s satisfaction. “Perfect Celebrity” recalls the commodified version of her being from Chromatica’s “Plastic Doll,” moves onto the real version of Stefani that’s “asleep on the ceilin'” wherever Gaga goes, and even references another woman poisoned by celebrity, Princess Diana. The punk rock rant is an emblem of female fame.

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The three of the five albums that passed — The Life of a Showgirl, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, and MAYHEM — all created space distinct to women, an evidently hard-earned feminist effort. They’re also very different. The latter two are considered critically acclaimed, while The Life of a Showgirl invited a divided reception (from fans and critics alike), largely due to the simplified lyricism. The way Gaga packaged themes of love and passion allowed MAYHEM to skirt the celebrity relationship discourse that typically colors Taylor’s work (the price of writing about relationships after publicly dating the rich and famous). Still, Billie’s project showed there’s a way to have it all (accolades and sensationalization). That all of the albums considered, regardless of sophistication, held a majority of songs with male narratives indicates the music industry’s interest in commissioning this part of female artists’ worldview. 

Dealing with men is universal to the female experience, so songs with lines about boys, romance, or bad men are a safe sell, and thus are demonstrably prioritized. With the handful of compelling outliers on these albums, it’s hard not to imagine what’s been left on the cutting room floor for mass appeal’s sake. 

Bechdel herself said that her original test isn’t scientific, since “you can have a feminist movie that doesn’t meet the criteria, and you can have a movie that meets the criteria and isn’t feminist.” Maggie Rogers’ “Don’t Forget Me” (about remembering your girlfriends when you get married) would not pass, despite boasting an inherently progressive message, for example.

More albums passing the Bopdel test means pop artists are finally being granted more creative freedom to engage with broader parts of their existence, an objective win for female listeners wanting to dance or cry to that representation on a Friday night. That doesn’t mean the art we have now is definitively lacking girl power, even if you have to engage with several verses about some dude to feel it.