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Whether it’s “Big Bang Theory”, “Avengers” or “Star Wars”, these series and films all have one thing in common: they all echo the Smurfette syndrome. Between sexism and under-representation, we explain to you what is hidden behind this concept still too present on our screens.
Surely you know “The Smurfs”. These little blue characters from the comic strip created by Peyo in 1958. If it is easy to name the different male characters between the beefy Smurf, the handyman Smurf, the Smurf with glasses, or even the grumpy and lazy Smurf without forgetting the Papa Smurf, there is only one female character: the famous Smurfette. Unlike the male characters, this character only has their sex to be differentiated, with no other added value. Smurfette only exists in her relationship to the male characters. She represents the unique female figure: beautiful and kind that all men are in love with. It is this principle that Katha Pollitt, an American essayist and feminist, theorized through the Smurfette syndrome, in the journal The New York Times in 1991.
“Boys are central when girls are on the periphery”
This principle denounces the fact that castings only include one female role among a multitude of male roles, whether in cinema or on television. These works of fiction also reduce the female character to sexist and shallow stereotypes. Proof of this is with the character of Penny in the series “The Big Bang Theory”. Embodied on screen by Kaley Cuoco, Penny is none other than the next door neighbor of the two other main male characters. Unlike the latter, Leonard Hofstadter and Sheldon Cooper, his last name has never been revealed. Audiences first meet her after Leonard’s character falls in love with her. Regularly depicted as taking advantage of the money, hospitality and food of her male neighbors, the character of Penny breeds gender stereotypes. Compared to her scientific neighbors with superior intelligence, Penny is seen as far more ignorant and far more frivolous.
We also find this difference in treatment in the films of the “Avengers” saga with the character of Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson. “The message is clear. Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central when girls are at the periphery; boys are individuals while girls are stereotypes. The boys define the group, its history and its values. Girls only exist in their relationship to boys“, explains Katha Pollitt.
Good in your body, good in your head!
The Bechdel test
The cartoonist Alison Bechdel also highlighted this sexism and this under-representation in works of fiction in her comic strip “Lesbiennes to follow” published in 1985. In one of the speech bubbles, one of the female characters indicates that she does not watch films if they do not meet three criteria. This Bechdel test is based on three questions to ask to determine if a content corresponds to the Smurfette syndrome: Are two women or two female characters named in the said work? Do they talk together at some point? Does their conversation evoke a subject other than one of the male characters? If these three questions are positive, then the work in question is not considered sexist.
The website bechdeltest.com makes it possible to identify films according to these three criteria. To date, 9,802 films have been submitted to this test: 11% failed the three questions while 57% passed.
If film studios are now paying more and more attention to the representation of women on screen, as in the latest “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” or “The 355”, films like “Blonde”, the biopic on Marilyn Monroe played by Ana de Armas released on Netflix in 2022, or “Elvis”, winner of the Golden Globes 2023 for best actor in a dramatic film for Austin Butler, both failed the test.