Feminist Frequency and bitch media
Tropes vs. Women
A trope is a common pattern in a story
or a recognizable attribute in a character
that conveys information to the audience.
A trope becomes a cliche when it's overused.
Sadly, some of these tropes often perpetuate offensive stereotypes.
#3 Smurfette Principle
What do Inception, the Transformers,
and the Muppets all have in common?
They all suffer from a trope called
the Smurfette Principle.
As defined by TVTropes:
"The Smurfette Principle is the tendency for works of fiction"
"to have only exactly one female amongst an"
"ensemble of male characters, in spite of the fact that"
"roughly half of the human race is female."
"Unless a show is purposefully aimed at a female viewing audience,"
"the main characters will tend to be disproportionately male." - TV Tropes
In 1991 Katha Pollitt, a feminist essayist
wrote an article for the NY Times
because she was disturbed by the lack of
substantive female characters
for her young daughter to watch.
She found that most of the programming
aimed at young people
had a majority of male characters,
with just one female included in the group,
she called this The Smurfette Principle.
You’ve probably guessed by now
that this trope was named after
the only female smurf in all of Smurfville.
Once upon a time,
the Smurfs were an hormonious
all-dude miniature civilization comprised entirely
of kind good natured little blue dudes
living out their cooperative-dude existence
somewhere deep in their dude forest utopia.
We’ve got Lazy, Grouchy, Jokey,
Brainy, Baby, and Papa Smurf
and all their Smurf buddies
living out their smurfy existence
free from any of those meddling, divisive,
controlling, manipulative, mean women folk.
But one day the evil wizard Gargamel
decided on a devilish plan to sabotage smurfdom.
And how will he do that?
yes that’s right, by creating a female smurf!
“That’s it, I’ll get them through their hearts,”
“I will send them a Smurfette!”
So Gargamel sent in Smurfette
to cause divisions between
the lovable blue creatures so he can capture
and eat their tender blue flesh
in a nice honey lemon sauce.
Long story short,
love and understanding won out
when Papa Smurf worked some smurf magic and
transformed Gargamel’s impostor
into a real live smurf girl,
“sexy” blond hair, high heels and all!
Down in the 100 acre woods,
we follow the adventures of
Winnie the Pooh, Rabbit, Piglet, Eeyore, Owl
and Tigger – all dudes of course…
in fact there’s only one female character,
Kanga, who shows up occasionally
as the mother of little roo.
Even Jim Hensen didn’t seem too keen on the women,
along side Kermit, Gonzo, and Fozzie the Bear,
Miss Piggy was the only female muppet.
We can even see the Smurfette Principle
outside of programming aimed at young people.
So for example you have George Lucas’
original Star Wars trilogy where
Princess Leia is the only principle female character
in the entire galactic empire.
If you’re like me then you are probably thinking
there’s got to be something wrong, I mean,
Star Trek has had a female captain,
Buffy has saved the world from a demon apocalypse
at least half dozen times,
this trope has gotta be a thing of the past right?
Ellen Page gets Smurfette’d in Inception as her character
is the only female dream team member.
Big Bang Theory has a primary main cast of brainy
men plus the smurfette that lives across the hall.
While there’ve been a small handful
of female autobots in the Transformers universe,
Arcee is the only regularly reoccurring
female cast member and she only appeared in
8 episodes out of the original series.
She was set to appear in the 1st Transformers
live action film but she was dropped and
replaced with Ironhide.
She did however appear in the second film
Revenge of the Fallen
which also happens to be one of the most sexist
and racist films I’ve ever seen.
This version of Arcee is either a hivemind
with 3 different motorcycle components
or the other two bikes are her sisters,
it’s not exactly clear.
But it doesn’t really matter anyway
because they all get blown up at the end.
Plus they only appear on screen
for a grand total of exactly…
“Follow us to the pillars — AHHH!”
39 seconds.
Even in most seasons of Jon Stewart’s
the Daily Show there has been
only one female correspondent at a time.
The Smurfette principle is especially
important to remember now because
Hollywood is currently trying to remake everything
and anything that we even vaguely remember
from the 80′s and 90′s in an attempt
to cash in on our collective nostalgia,
you know, instead of maybe taking a risk
on things that are new and exciting.
We even have a live action Smurfs movie coming out.
We’ve had 2 big blockbuster movies based on
the Transformers, and sadly
there’s another one on its way.
The 2009 Star Trek reboot by JJ Abrams
had Uhura as the only female character
in the main bridge crew.
And just like Star Trek we can be sure
that hollywood is not going to try to bring
gender equality into these reboots
but rather just stick with their Smurfettes.
The problem with narratives infused with
the Smurfette Principle is not only the lack of women
but as Katha Pollitt points out in her NY Times article:
"Boys define the group,"
"its story and its code of values."
"Girls exist only in relation to boys." - Katha Pollitt
Basically this means that men are the default
and women get to be sidekicks or sexy decorations.
Even when there’s only one female primary cast member,
as videoblogger Nostalgia Chick points out in her
Smurfette Principle video, they are usually just
“sexy” female duplicates of their male counterparts.
“Disney was the one that kinda really started”
“this interest in the whole default and”
“deviation from default complex,”
“basically this idea that men seem to want”
“a bagina’d version of themselves.”
That’s an excellent point,
thank you Nostalgia Chick.
The Smurfette Principle is an alternative name for
Tokenism or the Token Minority which is
the inclusion of one cast member
from a marginalized group in an otherwise,
white, straight male ensemble.
We see this most often when writers include
one person of colour and that character
is usually painfully stereotyped.
This is a little trick used by movie studios to pretend
to appear “multicultural” and “diverse” when really
they’re just upholding the status quo
and not changing anything substantially.
So here’s a tip for all you Hollywood writers
out there, it is in fact possible to have
more than one woman in your script.
Really, I swear it is.
You could even have 2 or 3 women or even
the majority of your cast be women.
Here’s a simple test you can ask yourself
when you’re writing your scripts:
“Does my movie have more than one woman on the primary cast?”
That’s it, that’s the whole test.
If you answered “NO” then you need to
go back to the drawing board.
If you answered “YES” then we can proceed to
the Bechdel Test.
Once you’ve got two female characters
who are talking to each other about things other then men,
then we can talk about fully developed female characters.
[Song] “la, la, la, la, sing a happy song,”
[Song] “la, la, la, la, smurf the whole day long”