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 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.”
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.
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
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 remembers 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 New York Times article, “Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. Girls exist only in relation to boys.” Basically this means that men are the default and women get to be sidekicks or sexy decorations.
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 characters 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.
I do feel the lack of female characters in films and TV, and resent when the female in comedy is 'straight.' I never thought I'd see myself claim Friends as flying the flag for feminism, but thankfully those women were given equal airtime and the opportunities for comedy and slapstick as much as the men. And the pretty dumbo, thankfully, was Joey.
Last night I caught up on ITV's new female-led cop show Scott and Bailey. Starring Suranne Jones (who I loved as Karen Macdonald in Coronation Street)and Lesley Sharp. The show is co-written by Jones, along with novice writer and ex-Corrie actress Sally Lindsay and two others: Diane Taylor and Sally Wainwright (Coronation Street writer, Shakespeare Re-Told for the BBC and At Home with the Braithwaites). The programme is good, with a strong cast, but the script doesn't inspire me and doesn't stand out above the plethora of other middle of the road TV cop shows. Obviously I'm happy to see two strong female leads, but can't help but feel the case they were handling about two rapes and a murder of young women was very female-specific. If they had been two male policemen would the cases be different? And that's a question that sometimes needs to be asked - is the character female/ black/ gay as part of their character or is it part of the storyline? There's nothing worse than a gay character being brought into a soap, only to be faced with months of coming out and homophobia storylines and then to leave again just as swiftly. Gay people have other issues to tackle apart from being gay, and women have other preoccupations other than being female. A reasonable start and will be interesting to see how Scott and Bailey develops.
And while I have my feminist high horse all saddled up I may as well also mention my anticipation of the upcoming film Bridesmaids.Zoe Williams (one of my favourite journalists) was raving about the positive effect on women's represenation in films and this week's Stylist magazine describes the film in glowing terms as "a comic breath of fresh air" being for women what The Hangover and Superbad were for men. I personally can't wait for a day when it will be commonplace for a man to say to a woman "You're really funny" and for it not to be tinged with surprise. We can be funny - get over it.
i don't know, Phoebe was pretty dim as well.
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