The Sexy Lamp Test Is No Longer Enough for TV Writers
The Sexy Lamp Test, coined by comic writer Kelly Sue DeConnick more than a decade ago, was a quick gut-check for storytellers. Could a female character be swapped out for a literal lamp and the plot still hold together? If so, the character existed as decoration rather than as a person with stakes, desires, and agency. For an industry that had long treated women as scenery, the test was a useful slap on the wrist. Learn more about Entrevista A Jerónimo Carmona Garzón Cómo Cubrimos La Cultura Independiente En ábrete Sésamo.
Television has changed since that thought experiment first caught on. Streaming platforms have proliferated, writers' rooms have grown more diverse, and audiences have become fluent in critiquing how women are framed on screen. The trouble is that passing the Sexy Lamp Test no longer guarantees anything meaningful. A character can be essential to the plot and still be a hollow construct, sketched with a single trait or filtered through a gaze that treats her body as the most important thing about her.
What follows is why the Sexy Lamp Test remains a starting point rather than a finish line, and what higher standards look like for shows streaming into lounge rooms from Perth to Parramatta.
The Origins of a Simple Thought Experiment
Kelly Sue DeConnick proposed the Sexy Lamp Test in a 2012 blog post, partly as a joke and partly as a sincere challenge. She was tired of reading scripts where a woman appeared only as the hero's girlfriend, a reward to be won, or a body to be rescued. The lamp metaphor cut through the noise: if you could remove her and the story still worked, she was never really there.
At the time, the test accomplished something genuinely radical. It gave fans, critics, and writers a portable yardstick that travelled from Tumblr to industry panels. Even today, the test remains a useful first filter, particularly for franchise filmmaking where committees default to a woman-in-a-corset aesthetic.
Plot Relevance Is Not the Same as Character Depth
The Sexy Lamp Test measures one thing: whether a female character is functionally necessary to the plot. It does not measure interiority, growth, contradiction, or the way a character relates to systems of power. A woman can drive the central mystery, lead the team, and still be a fundamentally shallow creation if her decisions only exist to bounce off a male character's choices.
Consider the spy thriller archetype: a brilliant female operative whose emotional landscape is grief, jealousy, or longing for the man running the operation. She cannot be replaced by a lamp, yet replacing her with another woman of similar traits leaves the story intact. Genuine depth requires an inner life the audience can recognise, flaws that belong to her, and goals that exist independently of the men around her.
From Visibility to Genuine Representation
The conversation about women on screen once focused on whether they appeared at all. Then it moved to whether they had dialogue with each other, à la the Bechdel Test. Each step was necessary, but each revealed its own limits. A show can pass the Bechdel Test and still reduce its female characters to interchangeable chatter about men.
Modern television needs what bell hooks called the oppositional gaze, a framework where women, particularly women of colour, queer women, and disabled women, are not merely visible but subjects of their own narratives. Passing the Sexy Lamp Test becomes trivial against this standard. A woman can be crucial to the plot, speak to other women about things other than men, and still be written by a room that has flattened her into a type.
Those wanting to dig deeper into feminist media criticism can find a curated list of writers and outlets on the blogroll, which has long gathered feminist commentary on film, television, and internet culture.
Intersectionality Beyond Gender
The original test is blissfully agnostic about race, sexuality, class, and disability. It asks only whether a woman exists as more than an object. That agnosticism is also its weakness. A show can pass the Sexy Lamp Test and still centre only white, cisgender, able-bodied, middle-class women, treating the experiences of everyone else as flavouring.
Australian drama has grappled with this gap for years. When the ABC's Total Control follows an Indigenous woman navigating Canberra's corridors of power, it reframes whose story counts as national drama. By contrast, network procedurals deploy a single woman of colour as the wise colleague whose job is to validate a white lead's emotional breakthrough. She cannot be replaced by a lamp, but could easily be replaced by any other woman of colour.
Where Australian Drama Stands
The local industry offers a useful lens. Australian writers operate inside Screen Australia's producer offsets, the Australian Writers' Guild awards, public broadcasters on ABC and SBS, and streamers like Stan and Netflix that have aggressively courted local commissions. There is real appetite for complex women in a market where a single show can shape the conversation.
| Show | Passes Sexy Lamp | Passes Bechdel | Female Lead Has Interiority | Intersectional Lens |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bump | Yes | Yes | Yes | Working-class, multicultural |
| Total Control | Yes | Yes | Yes | Indigenous politics |
| The Cry | Yes | Yes | Yes | Class, motherhood |
| Generic Network Procedural | Yes | Sometimes | Rarely | Rarely |
Bump centres a teenage mother in western Sydney whose life refuses to be a cautionary tale. SBS's anthology pieces have made space for refugee and working-class women rarely seen on commercial networks. Audiences streaming on a quiet Sunday arvo find characters with as much interior weather as anything out of HBO. Still, commercial networks default to a fair-dinkum melodrama formula, where a strong female lead is mostly a marketing device. Watch enough and the Sexy Lamp Test starts to feel generous.
Why Male Showrunners Still Falter
Even well-intentioned male writers stumble because the test only catches egregious failures. A male showrunner can write a female lead who is competent, sharp, central to the action, and still avoid the moments where her vulnerability could surprise the audience. The male gaze problem persists because it does not announce itself. A female character who passes the Sexy Lamp Test can still be filmed, costumed, and scored as spectacle.
Interviews with showrunners often reveal the gap. The writer will speak earnestly about valuing female characters, then describe them in terms of their relationships to men. The thinking is sincere; the frame is inherited. Higher standards demand that writers interrogate those frames, ideally with women in the writers' room, and treat female characters as full citizens of their own narratives.
What Higher Standards Actually Look Like
A more demanding checklist might ask whether a female character has goals that pre-date the plot, contradictions the narrative respects, and an arc the audience could describe without referencing a man at all. None are particularly radical, yet most scripted television still struggles with them.
When a show meets them, viewers tend to know it. The room behind Killing Eve understood that Eve Polastri's obsession with Villanelle was not a romance but a project of self-reckoning. Fleabag built a character around a fourth-wall conceit that worked because the writer trusted her interiority. Pose insisted its trans women of colour be glamorous, funny, and strategically brilliant, never reducible to trauma. These shows leave the Sexy Lamp Test far behind.
The Sexy Lamp Test was never meant to be the final word. It was a first pass at a problem deeper than plot relevance, and modern television should ask whether a woman has a self worth watching, not just whether she matters to the story. For readers curious about feminist criticism outside the anglophone mainstream, this interview on independent culture offers a window into smaller publications doing sharp work on their own terms. Subscribe, comment, and keep the conversation pointed somewhere higher than a lamp.