Boys are the norm, girls the variation
Barry Duke at the Freethinker tells us that Haredi Jews in Bnei Brak in Israel have been spared the horror of seeing a female cartoon character on billboards.
Here’s the safe, innocent, not-smutty billboard:
Here’s the filthy lascivious lewd one:
Aaaaaaaaaaaaah! Yellow hair, eyelashes, googly eyes, a small nose! A female! FILTH!!!
According to this report, the original poster for Smurfs: The Lost Village, shows four of the tiny blue humanoids – but one one, a blonde Smurfette, was cropped from the ads in the district by the PR company Mirka’im – Hutzot Zahav.
The company distributing the movie, Forum Film, said that the PR company decided not to hang the original posters in Bnei Brak in order not to harm residents’ sensibilities, adding that it is not accepted practice for images of women to appear on the city’s billboards.
Well…if you say so, but…*cough*…that’s not an image of a woman.
Take a look at the kids’ section of your local video store. You’ll find that features starring boys, and usually aimed at them, account for 9 out of 10 offerings. Clicking the television dial one recent week — admittedly not an encyclopedic study — I came across not a single network cartoon or puppet show starring a female. (Nickelodeon, the children’s cable channel, has one of each.) Except for the crudity of the animation and the general air of witlessness and hype, I might as well have been back in my own 1950’s childhood, nibbling Frosted Flakes in front of Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and the rest of the all-male Warner Brothers lineup.
Contemporary shows are either essentially all-male, like “Garfield,” or are organized on what I call the Smurfette principle: a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined. In the worst cartoons — the ones that blend seamlessly into the animated cereal commercials — the female is usually a little-sister type, a bunny in a pink dress and hair ribbons who tags along with the adventurous bears and badgers. But the Smurfette principle rules the more carefully made shows, too. Thus, Kanga, the only female in “Winnie-the-Pooh,” is a mother. Piggy, of “Muppet Babies,” is a pint-size version of Miss Piggy, the camp glamour queen of the Muppet movies. April, of the wildly popular “Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles,” functions as a girl Friday to a quartet of male superheroes. The message is clear. Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types. Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. Girls exist only in relation to boys.
1991. Very little has changed.
That’s one TV custom that Buffy the Vampire Slayer broke, and broke big: the super-hero, and the most important sidekick, were both girls (later young women), and they both kicked ass. Giles and Angel are the only male characters that come close. (I gather similar has been said about Xena, but I never watched it).
I don’t know if there are any cartoons comparable, even today.
Not sure I can agree – as the father of a daughter I notice very, very many franchises marketed towards girls.
Of course, the question then arises what role models they present to the viewer. Anybody else have to witness the animated series Winx Club? All female protagonists, but their clothes are what TV Tropes calls stripperiffic, and I guess their character designs would approach anorexic from below if they gained 20 kg each. Mind you, it is still drawn better, written better, and more socially aware than what was on TV in the 1990s.
With the smurfs, boys are the norm. Every smurf has a special characteristic that deviates from the norm: being smart, being the boss, being greedy, being sleepy, being a girl (there is only one smurfette, after all).
Speaking of animated cereal commercials, I don’t know what it’s like in the states but there are virtually no female cereal spokes-things over here. Weetabix had one in the 80s but she was the token female weetabix in a whole family of otherwise male ones and the family was – inexplicably – a family of skinheads.