In a household where biscuits, bedtime, and the television remote have long served as quiet instruments of feminist pedagogy, an Irish mother named Esther McCarthy brought the Bechdel Test to bear on the latest Spider-Man film — and found it barely standing. The test, born from a 1985 comic strip, asks only three modest questions of a film's female characters, yet most mainstream cinema cannot answer them satisfactorily. McCarthy's lesson, aimed at her sons and met with teenage resistance, belongs to a longer human story about who gets to matter in the stories we tell ourselves.