If you were a child in roughly the same chronological period that I was, then you probably spent many a Saturday morning eating brain-rotting, chemically laced cereals, and watching cartoons. So you probably remember seeing stories that involed a strange tribe of little blue people. You know, the Smurfs. La, la, la-la-la, and all that jazz.

The Smurfs have joined subjects like airline food, highway/parkway entomolgy, and the differences between men and women in the playbook of hack comedians everywhere (ahem). Especially one of them. Especially her.

Oh my god! The Smurfs only have one woman! She must be tired (yawn).

Yes, there's only one Smurfette. And, as we get older and learn about s-e-x, the thought of hundreds of little blue men sharing a single female makes us either uncomfortable, or makes us giggle uncontrollably, depending on your upbringing I guess. But, if you think about it in an critical way, there are some very good reasons for the sexual demographics of a certain little mushroom village, somewhere in a ridiculously clean middle-age-era European wilderness.

One of the major themes of The Smurfs was that it takes diversity and the co-operation of people with their own individual talents to get things done. Being different wasn't a bad thing in Smurf-land--it was the one thing that kept you from being eaten by some freaky dude in a black dress. Of course, this translated to a limited set of crude stereotypes who were named with adjectives. Favorites like Jokey, Hefty, Brainy, etc. were not so much richly drawn charecters as they were physical embodiments of abstract personality traits.

If one were going to open the door to multiple female characters, one would have to assign them these sorts of descriptive names and the demonstrative behaviors that go along with them; and that means making some sort of judgement about whether or not a particular trait should be embodied by a male or female character. An activity that's fraught with peril.

Is being jokey a male or female trait? Would a girl-Hefty be seen as an enlightened choice or crass pandering? Even if you choose to just assign random names and genders, you still have to deal with the repercussions of your percieved biases.

You could, of course, create a male and female character for each personification, but that could cause some major narritive headaches. How many Smurfs can you name? Ten, if you really try? (And include some of the Seven Dwarves.) But weren't there around 300 of the little blue bastards living down there? It must have been a serious pain to write stories big enough to include the regular cast under normal circumstances. Now double that. You'd have to have each pair walking around hand-in-hand and stepping on each other's sentences if you were going to cram them all in. Personally, I'd rather answer the occasional sniggering question from some loser who's not even in my target demographic then go through that hell.

Given how difficult the above options are, why even have a Smurfette in the first place? Well, don't females deserve some representation? Of course they do. So Smurfette becomes the only example of her kind. You could make the argument that this reduces her gender into a mere personality trait--and you'd be right. Yet, consider the fact that she became a much more three-dimentional character due to the fact that she wasn't particularlly strong in any specific area, but was still interesting enough to be included in almost every important event in Smurf history. The only other Smurf with that designation is Papa Smurf himself (who had to be rescued almost as often as she was).

Was Smurfette the best way to deal with the myriad issues of gender that the series faced? Probably not. At best, she was a comprimise or even a cop-out. She should have been handled with a lot more care than she got. But we do know this: children are more likely to be affected by depictions of gender than they are to give a good goddamn about the hypothetical sexual behavior of cartoon characters.

-B. C. Silvia