{"id":56668,"date":"2013-08-12T12:00:41","date_gmt":"2013-08-12T17:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=56668"},"modified":"2013-08-12T12:40:20","modified_gmt":"2013-08-12T17:40:20","slug":"the-banal-insidious-sexism-of-smurfette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/08\/12\/the-banal-insidious-sexism-of-smurfette\/","title":{"rendered":"The Banal, Insidious Sexism of Smurfette"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"1\"<\/a>
Columbia Pictures\/Sony Pictures Animation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Smurfs, originating as they did in\u00a0mid-century Europe<\/a>, exhibit the quaint sexism in which boys or men are generic people \u2013 with their unique qualities and abilities \u2013 while girls and women are primarily identified by their femininity. The sequel doesn\u2019t upend the\u00a0premise of Smurfette.<\/a><\/p>\n

In the original graphic novels, Smurfette (or La Schtroumpfette in French) was the creation of the evil Gargamel, who made her to sow chaos among the all-male Smurf society. His\u00a0recipe for femininity\u00a0<\/a>included coquetry, crocodile tears, lies, gluttony, pride, envy, sentimentality, and cunning.<\/p>\n

In the\u00a0Smurfs 2,<\/em>\u00a0there are a lot of Smurfs. And they all have names based on their unique qualities. According to the\u00a0cast list<\/a>, the male ones are Papa, Grouchy, Clumsy, Vanity, Narrator, Brainy, Handy, Gutsy, Hefty, Panicky, Farmer, Greedy, Party Planner, Jokey, Smooth, Baker, Passive-Aggressive, Clueless, Social, and Crazy. And the female one is Smurfette\u2013because being female is enough for her. There is no boy Smurf whose identifying quality is his gender, of course, because that would seem hopelessly limited and boring as a character.<\/p>\n

Here are the Smurf characters McDonald\u2019s is using for their Happy Meals:<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When you buy a Happy Meal at McDonald\u2019s, the cashier asks if it\u2019s for a boy or a girl. In my experience, which is admittedly limited to my daughters, girls get Smurfette. I guess boys get any of the others.<\/p>\n

The Way It\u2019s Never Been<\/b><\/p>\n

Identifying male characters by their non-gender qualities and females by their femininity is just one part of the broader pattern of gender differentiation, or what you might call gendering.<\/p>\n

There are two common misconceptions about gendering children. One is that it has always been this way \u2013 with boys and girls so different naturally that all products and parenting practices have always differentiated them. This is easily disproved in the\u00a0history of clothing<\/a>, which shows that American parents mostly dressed their boys and girls the same a century ago. In fact, boys and girls were often indistinguishable, as evident in this 1905\u00a0Ladies\u2019 Home Journal<\/i>\u00a0contest in which readers were asked to guess the sex of the babies (no one got them all right):<\/p>\n

\"3\"<\/a>
Source: Jo Paoletti, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

The other common perception is that our culture is actually eliminating gender distinctions, as feminism tears down the natural differences that make gender work. In the anti-feminist dystopian mind, this amounts to\u00a0feminizing boys and men<\/a>. This perspective\u00a0gained momentum<\/a>\u00a0during the three decades after 1960, when women entered\u00a0previously male-dominated occupations<\/a>\u00a0in large numbers (a movement that has largely stalled).<\/p>\n

However, despite some barrier-crossing, we do more to gender-differentiate now than we did during the heyday of the 1970s unisex fashion craze (the subject of\u00a0Jo Paoletti\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0forthcoming book,\u00a0Sex and Unisex<\/a><\/i>). On\u00a0her Tumblr<\/a>, Paoletti has a great collection of unisex advertising, such as this\u00a01975 Garanimals clothing ad<\/a>, which would be unthinkable for a major clothier today:<\/p>\n

\"4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And these clothing catalog images from 1972 (left) and 1974 (right):<\/p>\n

\"5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Today, the genders are not so easily interchangeable. Quick check: Google image search for \u201cgirls clothes\u201d (left) vs. \u201cboys clothes\u201d (right):<\/p>\n

\"6\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Today, a blockbuster children\u2019s movie can invoke 50-year-old gender stereotypes with little fear of a powerful feminist backlash. In fact, even the words \u201csexism\u201d and \u201csexist,\u201d which rose to prominence in the 1970s and peaked in the 1990s, have once again become less common than, say, the word \u201cbacon\u201d:<\/p>\n

\"7\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And the gender differentiation of childhood is perhaps stronger than it has ever been. Not all differences are bad, of course. But what Katha Pollitt called \u201cthe Smurfette principle<\/a>” —\u00a0in which \u201cboys are the norm, girls the variation\u201d — is not a difference between equals.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at\u00a0The Atlantic<\/a>\u00a0and Family Inequality<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nPhilip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality<\/a>. You can follow him on Twitter<\/a> or Facebook<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

. The Smurfs, originating as they did in\u00a0mid-century Europe, exhibit the quaint sexism in which boys or men are generic people \u2013 with their unique qualities and abilities \u2013 while girls and women are primarily identified by their femininity. The sequel doesn\u2019t upend the\u00a0premise of Smurfette. In the original graphic novels, Smurfette (or La Schtroumpfette […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":56792,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[225,55,2102,2098,253,129,343,283],"class_list":["post-56668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-clothesfashion","tag-gender","tag-gender-history","tag-gender-prejudicediscrimination","tag-history","tag-media","tag-tvmovies","tag-prejudicediscrimination"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/08\/Screenshot_119.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56668"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56793,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56668\/revisions\/56793"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}