Does American prosperity translate into long retirements?  Not compared to other developed countries in the world.  Flowing Data borrowed OECD numbers on life expectancy and age of retirement to calculate the average number of years in retirement for men and women across many different countries.  The portion of each bar with the line is the average number of years working, while the non-lined portion represents years in retirement.

Largely because of life expectancy, women enjoy more years than men in all states except Turkey, but the number of years varies quite tremendously, from an average of zero years for men in Mexico, to an average of 26 years for women in Austria and Italy.  The United States is way down on this list, not doing so well relatively after all.

Recently at Feministing, Maya Dusenbery wrote about an ad from Germany’s International Human Rights campaign that, as she put it, is “a lesson in how not to advocate for women’s rights.”

As Dusenbery writes,

It seems the folks who created this ad not only have a hard time seeing agency but actually went out of their way to erase it as thoroughly as possible and then stomp on it some more. And then equated women who wear the burqa with bags of trash. Literally.

I completely agree, and would like to add some broader context.  This is not at all surprising, given the recent of attempts in the West to obscure the agency of Muslim women in juxtaposition to their white, Western saviors. One of the more blatant examples of this was the discourse of the United States government that it was going to war in Afghanistan in part to save Afghan women from the Taliban. Laura Shepherd argued in an excellent 2006 article in The International Feminist Journal of Politics (which I’vecited before) that the US discursively constructed Afghan women as the “Helpless Victim” that was submissive and lacking agency, under the oppressive control of the “Irrational Barbarian.” This discourse, was used, of course, to posit the United States (specifically, its military) as the saviors who could rectify the situation for these women. Much as the agency of the women in the German PSA was erased, this narrative denied the agency of Afghan women, who, as Shepherd writes, are afforded “only pity and a certain voyeuristic attraction” (p. 20).

Of course, this specific discourse hasn’t ended. As this TIME Magazine cover from last year shows, it continues to serve as a means of justifying the US occupation of Afghanistan.

This discourse assumes, obviously, that the US presence in Afghanistan is a clear benefit for women in the country, a position at least some women’s organizations in Afghanistan contest. Samhita Mukhopadhyay at Feministing had an excellent post on this issue last summer.

I should also mention France’s recently-instituted ban on the full-faced veil, which Dusenbery argues – citing Jos Truitt – is a similar erasure of agency. I agree with her, and again would add that this fits in with this general (Orientalist) discourse about Muslim women, their uncivilized oppressors, and their White saviors.

John McMahon is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he also participates in the Women’s Studies Certificate Program.  He is interested in post-structuralism, issues relating to men and feminism, gendered practices in international relations, gender and political theory, and questions of American state identity.  John blogs at Facile Gestures, where this post originally appeared.

See also our post in which we criticize a set of public service ads that compared women the genital cutting to blow up sex dolls.

From Abi, Kieran Healy, and the Survey of Earned Doctorates: 2009 data on the gender divide among doctorate-level graduates in academic disciplines (from most to least female by percentage).   View the full pdf for even more detail.

Gwen says that y’all are gonna think I’m going too far, but I can’t resist posting this. More, readers often think we post things because they make us mad grrrr, but we usually post stuff just because we think it’s interesting or illustrative. This is a case of the latter.

Jordan G. sent me this clip of a young bobcat captured on a balcony near his house in Irvine (LA Times). They released it into the wild, but not before a news crew came by and filmed the intrepid hunters with their catch. Enter my amusement: I just love how two of them at some point feel the need to place their foot on the cage, like in a victory pose. This is recognizably masculine body language, a dominance gesture, and kind of silly. Maybe you’ll think I’m silly too, but there it is:

Also posing with your kill: Taming Nature (a personal favorite).

And, in body language, Whoopi sits, sitting like a man, and gendered anatomy.

In the U.S., Spam is usually considered a food for poor people; people make fun of it as an inexplicable meat. In contrast, Spam is very popular in South Korea. Spam was introduced to Korea during the Korean War (1950-1953) and today it is a popular food item loved by all walks of life. Growing up in Korea, I distinctly remember that it was “cool” to bring a slice of Spam in a lunch box when I was kids. Even today whenever I go home, my friends take me to eat a spicy Spam stew; it’s a special occasion.

Not at all considered a food for the poor or the “trashy,” as it commonly is in the U.S., in Korea Spam is a luxury item. Spam can be a great gift for your boss or your business clients. The photo below shows Spam for sale at a luxury hotel. The set on the top shelf cost about $60 and the set on the second sells for about $42.

Perceptions of Spam, then, are cultural. From an American perspective, the popularity and prestige of Spam in Korea may seem weird. But from a Korean perspective, it is perfectly sensible… and with boiled rice and kim-chi, totally delicious.

Sangyoub Park is an assistant professor of sociology at Washburn University, where he teaches Social Demography, Generations in the U.S. and Sociology of East Asia. His research interests include social capital, demographic trends, and post-Generation Y.

The phrase “environmental racism” was coined to draw attention to the ways in which exposure to environmental toxins like air pollution and lead is not even across cities and states, but tends to be higher in low income neighborhoods — especially those that are disproportionately Black and Latino — ones that are also more likely than others to be home to garbage dumps, sewage treatment plants, and power plants.  As a result, poor children and children of color are more likely to suffer the consequences of environmental pollution, like asthma and lead poisoning.

Prevention efforts, however, tend to focus on parents’ responsibility for protecting their children from these threats instead of the state or city’s failure to keep all neighborhoods equally safe. For example, even though it’s illegal for landlords to rent out a house or apartment with lead paint, poisoning prevention efforts tend to focus on educating parents.  I thought of this tendency to blame the victim when I noticed a set of billboards going up in my neighborhood in Los Angeles, Highland Park.  Meant to encourage parents not to smoke, they read (in English and in Spanish): “I gave you love, you gave me asthma.”

(source)

Highland Park is a low-income neighborhood.  And given what we know about the inclination for cities to tolerate environmentally harmful conditions in low income neighborhoods, this seems to me a particularly nasty message to send.  It erases the role of the city in protecting children and places 100% of the blame on parents (“you gave me asthma”), and then it twists the knife (“I gave you love”). Even if they are smokers, poor parents can only do so much to protect their children from things that the city is all-to-comfortable letting slide.

In 1991 writer and cultural critic Katha Pollitt coined the phrase “The Smurfette Principle” to draw attention to the tendency for movies, TV shows, and other cultural products to include one, and just one female (source). For the unfamiliar, The Smurfs was a children’s television show, airing from 1981 to 1989, populated by a whole world of little blue men and one (sexy) blue woman:

(source)

In her latest in the series Tropes vs. Women, Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian applies The Smurfette Principle to today’s movies and shows.  How far have we come?

——————-

For more tropes, see Sarkeesian on The Manic Pixie DreamGirl and Women in Refrigerators.

Transcript after the jump:

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.

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!

CLIP Smurfs – The Smurfette

Gargamel: 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…

Clip: Transformers Revenge of the Fallen
Female Autobot: 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 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.

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.

Clip Nostalgia Chick – The Smurfette Principle
Nostalgia Chick – 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 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.

Song – “la, la, la, la, sing a happy song, la, la, la, la, smurf the whole day long”

Photographer Peter Menzel has a habit of displaying people’s lives in illuminating ways.  Previously we highlighted a project in which he went around the world asking families to pose in front of their house with all of their stuff.  He now has a book, Hungry Planet, featuring photographs of families posting with a week’s worth of food.  It tells a fascinating qualitative and quantitative story of cultural gastronomical difference.

Go to Menzel’s website for more information.