Let’s take a look at this group photo from Pensioners’ Association from Maribor. There are 41 people in it, 35 women and only 5 of them are having grey hair.

Pensioners’ Association, Maribor

Hiding grey hair by colouring or dyeing them is part of a beauty work for women or work of femininity that is work women do on their appearance, manner and personal identity to maintain femininity – i.e. the ideal of young, white, middle class, able-bodied, cis hetero femininity – throughout their lives. Dyeing hair is part of feminine technologies, associated with women by virtue of their biology (e.g. tampons, birth control, bras, and hair colour) and/or their social role (e.g. kitchen utensils, sewing needles, household cleaning products), alongside with skills, tools and knowledge about those technologies and how to use them that women acquire during their lifespan.

In Western, postmodern societies, where bodies are categorized through “normative or normalizing gaze” (this means measuring, comparing and consequently including/excluding people) this gaze – directed at women’s hair – includes hair standard that doesn’t welcome natural grey hair colour. Being a grey-haired woman translates into being perceived old – hence ugly – and by that, triggering feelings of repulsion or abjection.

Hair carries many culture-specific meanings about a person; their gender, race, ethnicity, social status, sexual orientation, political convictions, occupation, health and age. Grey hair in our consumer culture connotes aging, future body decay (illness, sickness, death), and all these future events evokes fear or phobic-fear (i.e. fear without the known object of fear), avoidance of the subject, aversion, uneasiness, something that is there, but is in the undefined future. Death, as Julia Kristeva has stated, is one of the categories of abjection, together with sexual difference and food loathing. All three of them serve for the preservation of life and constitute the proper social body to conform to the cultural expectations of the physical body. And the cultural expectation for women’s physical bodies is to remove all signs of ageing, including grey hair.

However, having grey hair is a gendered issue – men sport grey hair without being pressured or self-disciplined to hide it by colouring as women do. Women are still regarded as Body, enmeshed in bodily existence in a still current Cartesian body-mind dualism where body – the bearer of flesh, emotionality, sexuality and procreation – connotes life, instability, changeability, disorder, mortality and death. Women’s grey hair are therefore the most visible signifier of aging that causes fear of death or ageism, but according to Iris Marion Young, ageism exhibits border anxiety of the abject – we are confronting our own death and we fear our future selves, only time divides our current selves from our future, older ones. The abject is a border between self and other, and because of its closeness to the subject, cannot be defined as Other or object.

Women’s grey hair has this abject status – they are close to a person’s head, alive at the roots from where they constantly grow, technically dead at the ends and their colour signifies aging. This signifier of an old age can be avoided by colouring them which also serves as a reducer of death anxiety for them and people around them. Grey roots are the border between the artificial colour and grey hair, always threating to outgrow the artificial hair colour. This fear of showing grey roots creates an ongoing anxiety so they must be consciously kept under control.

Dye your hair until you die.

Of course, this association between grey hair and death is socially constructed; originating from the modern conception about death – prior the 19^th century, death was common among children and young adults, older folks were rarity and with longer life expectancies, and emerging new discourses – medicine as a main knowledge producer – link between and old age and disease/death was created.

Head, covered with strings of grey hair or grey hair full-on, is subjected to ageist microaggressions or body policing, much of it happening almost mundanely or what Anthony Giddens has described as a practical consciousness: informal (unnoticed, unreflective) speech (“you look old with grey hair”), aesthetic judgements, jokes (“is it snowing outside?”), bodily reactions (side-eyeing at people), tone of voice, etc. Practical consciousness involves complex reflecting monitoring of the subject’s body, other subjects and their surroundings while interacting with others, but on the fringe of consciousness.

Women in the first photo we saw were everyday women, their retired status and older age means that they are out of the work force (do not belong anymore to the work circles), perhaps without strong family ties (widows, with adult children), so colouring their hair could be interpreted as an insignia to belong to their pensioners social circle, to be part of the group where the in-group monitoring do occur.

How about women who occupy the highest positions in international politics and business, do they sport grey hair? They do have “status shield”, a term coined by Arlie Hochschild, where higher social status protects individuals from “displaced feelings of others” – anger, shame, mockery, verbal abuse, microaggressions, peer body policing etc.

Among 100 powerful women in 2016, according to and ranked by Forbes magazine, there are only 10 women who don grey hair:

From left to right: Janet Yellen (Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in U.S.), Christine Lagarde (Managing Director of IMF), Queen Elizabeth II, Ho Ching (CEO of Temasek Holdings – investment firm from Singapore) and Sheikh Hasina Wazed (Bangladesh prime minister)

From left to right: Drew Gilpin Faust (President of Harvard University), Irina Bokova (Director-general of UNESCO), Mary Meeker (venture capitalist, head of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ for surging Internet companies), Beth Brooke-Marciniak (Global Vice Chair of Public Policy for Ernst & Young, multinational professional services) and Theresa May (British PM)

Having grey hair is obviously still not “respectable” enough for women in professional settings, because – according to Young – respectability is linked to the idea of order, where the standard remains white, bourgeois male who is rational, restrained, chaste, straight and dispassionate and by conforming to these norms sexuality, bodily functions, and emotional expressions are repressed. Cleanliness as a part of respectability agenda means avoiding anything that can be linked to bodily functions or changes, so sporting grey hair in professional environments is viewed as frumpy, sloppy or non-professional. Women are in danger to be losing respect not just due to their gender but also on behalf of their appearance because the ideal of respectability is still rooted in professional settings (government, multi corporations, high-level politics). However, despite the fact that those ten women out of the hundred do have grey hair, their hair colour can be dubbed as an “expensive grey”, i.e. colour and hairstyles one can acquire in top hair salons without looking washed out or half-styled. They are protected by their class privilege to look professional by donning (expensive) grey hair. But their lives are still pervaded with a specific type of self-disciplinary body regime, common for professional spaces.

It is called “power dressing”, a sartorial phenomenon for professional women that emerged in the late 1970s in capitalist societies when women started to occupy middle and top managerial positions in companies on behalf of second wave feminism in Central/West Europe and North America. This type of clothing practice represents the masculinisation of women’s dress – two-piece suit with skirt or pants in dark colours (black, grey, dark blue) with shorten hair or hair bun. This “uniform” was used to visually divide professional women from secretaries, a job that was most common for women in office spaces.

As we saw, most of them do perform power dressing – they de-feminize themselves, but others who do not belong to the Western culture, present themselves in more traditionally influenced outfits that could be marked as feminine rather than masculine. What is considered professional look is also culture-specific. Perhaps deliberate decolonising practices are here at stake.

Ho Ching and Sheikh Hasina Wazed

Let’s take a quick look at mass media (film in this case). Young has defined mass media as a site for unbridled fantasies, so how is it with the representation of grey-haired women. Are they even present in film? Not particularly, but when they are, they are portrayed in fantasy tales as witches (i.e. women with otherworldly power), for example, Into the Woods with Meryl Streep and Grimm’s fairy tale Hansel and Gretel – this is the image every child is exposed to and has internalized it.

Into the Woods (2014) and Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel

When portrayed in a contemporary or futuristic cinema, they are power-hungry bitches (The Devil Wears Prada with Streep again and Julianne Moore in The Hunger Games). The representation of grey-haired women as powerful “creatures” affirms the aforementioned statement about films as spaces where the abject can come alive. Apparently, women’s power is so threatening that can only be lived on screen – as a fiction.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and 2 (2014)

The other type of grey-haired on-screen characters are minor ones, usually mad, poor women, living on the fringes of society like Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons and Judy Davis in The Dressmaker.

The Simpsons (1989-) and The Dressmaker (2015)

Here, another dimension of discrimination against old women can be spotted: sanism (discrimination against people with mental illnesses) and class discrimination or classism. In this case, grey hair translates into the absolute loss of power – socio-economical (i.e. poverty) and personal or psychological (i.e. insanity).

Film representations of grey-haired women are stuck on the opposite sides of power; they are either powerful or powerless with the absence of anything in-between. This apparent on-screen invisibility – except for the aforementioned extremities in power – render the cultural desire for older women to be absent in society in general.

To conclude: this avoidance of grey-hair can be explained as a gendered abjection, a fear of death and women as the bearers of flesh, life and mortality and proof lies in almost every aspect of our social Western reality: everyday life, professional environments and media representations.

Thank you.

This new phenomenon has arisen on the behalf of (1) a large use and popularity of social media where anyone can carefully curate and portray better (or worse) versions of them or broadcast an opinion/gut reaction to the world, (2) the urban impersonal living, (3) the possibility of an online anonymity, (4) the users’ need to overshare and (5) a human practice to Other anyone who acts/looks/thinks unconventionally and is not a part of our in-group.

Strangers are the ultimate Other – we do not know them, so we do not care about them. French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss has stated ways of handling persons who are stigmatized as Other and one of them is public ridicule or humiliation. Public humiliation it is a form of social control that occurs when a person violates the norms of the community and other people respond by publicly criticizing, avoiding, or ostracizing her/him/them. Before the 19th century, when legal systems were rudimentary and the system of modern prisons has not yet been institutionalized, the use of this tool was to keep public order intact. But more important was the fact that it kept delineation between Us (i.e. the good, normal, the in group) and Them (i.e. Others, outsiders, social or moral deviants).

Stranger shaming is therefore nothing new, as it has its roots in public humiliation. In the past, there were shaming parades, scold’s bridle, the pillory and the cucking stool for those in-group people who violated the norms, but for Othered or out-groups, there were Victorian freak shows (or shows with human biological oddities), human zoos (also called ethnological expositions), auctions of black slaves and lynching of black folks in American history.

Frank Embree was handcuffed, stripped naked and whipped, later lynched and castrated. Before and after images of him were sold as postcards. Source: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

Witches, religious groups (Jews and now Muslims), war collaborators (mostly women who were stripped naked with shaved heads), prisoners of war/citizens of defeated countries in war, refugees, and foreigners in general were submitted to public humiliation with one intention only – to assert power over her/him/them by degrading them, taking away of their pride, dignity, status and humanity. Public shaming is a moral warning (“it can happened to you if you don’t follow societal rules”) and at the same time, it is a spectacle or entertainment for the public.

To shame a stranger publicly online because he/she/they do not conform to our worldview, is a digitalized form of public humiliation. The photographer/uploader has a power over other people and is convicted that she/he/they has the moral right to punish someone for behaving or being different by publicly posting that photograph. As Dr Aaron Balick put it, ‘the photo shared is a psychological reflection of the person who took the picture, not the photographed. Individuals may shame strangers to evacuate their own bad feelings through the process of projection, thereby giving them a better sense of security at the expense of another person.’ But speaking sociologically, stranger shaming contains sexism, ageism, racism, sanism, classism/snobbism as it is mostly directed toward women and other minorities (e.g. LGBT+ folks, black and brown people, economically disadvantaged, folk with in/visible disabilities, those who do not conform to mainstream beauty/fashion rules …). Here are some examples of current stranger shaming.

• People who dress “extravagantly“,“tastelessly”, or “age inappropriate” defy the rules of the most disciplinary regimes of modern times – fashion, who can be classist, ageist, sexist and trans/homophobic,
• people who are overweight/underweight/disabled are being fat-shamed/body-shamed because they do not conform to the norm of a “beautiful body”,
• people who sleep on public transport are prone to classism or sanism,
• women who eat in public are subjected to sexism (“women should stay thin”) and sexualisation (a never tired man-created association between eating a banana and giving fellatio); who eat in public transport break the rule of not dining in the domestic sphere/home where they should prepare food for others; who drink/are drunk in public defy the societal rule of enjoying themselves, being hedonistic and abandoning the women’s responsibility to be serious and take care of others instead of themselves, which – within the rape culture context – translates into unwanted sexual invitations from men who don’t respect the rule on ongoing, enthusiastic consent and who don’t remove their body hair ignore the rule of the beauty regime (“smooth and hairless body is the only right body”),
• people who behave “differently” are subjected to classism and ableism/sanism,
• the last one is hacking of nude photos of female celebrities, where women are usually victim blamed of having them instead of people who illegally obtain them being prosecuted. But illegal ogling at nudes of some beautiful female celebrity serve as a means of degrading them to sex objects and making them falsely “accessible” to average Joe’s. This crème a la crème female objectification is reserved for wealthy and famous women.

Modern stranger shaming is a reflection of people’s obsession with other people’s bodies – what they look like, how they behave, how they are adorned. At the same time, it is an affirmation that we live in the society where discipline and self-discipline of the body remains our main focus.

People who stranger shame are self-proclaimed socio-moral crusaders who want to reimpose disciplinary rules on those who escaped them. Fruitless mission, I must say.

Why is or would be a crazy cat lady (CCL hereinafter) considered dangerous? Let us examine the highlighted words more thoroughly: “elderly”, “widow”, “alone”, “dozens or more cats”, “small house”, “woman”, “middle-aged or older”, “no husband”, “empty lonely void”, “stinky homes”, “white trash”, “loves her cats more than people” and “old lady”.  These words create a person of a certain gender, marital status, age, economic income, mental health and philosophical ethics. By these descriptors, CCL is always (1) a woman, (2) single/unmarried, (3) middle-aged or older, (4) economically disadvantaged, (5) with mental disabilities (e.g. hoarding, social anxiety), (6) lacking in personal hygiene, and (7) bonding with other species (cats) than only humans.

CCL is a slur, a negative and hostile label, directed at women who do not conform (willingly or not) to the dominant societal ways of living which still consist of obligatory coupling with another adult person – most likely of the opposite gender – resulting in formation of a marriage and creation of the nuclear family where animals (i.e. cats) do not occupy a central role in the household. Any deviation from these lifestyle guidelines creates a threat or disturbance to the existing patristic social order where anything or anyone dangerous is sometimes handled as the Other. When Otherness is manifested as a cultural misstep from the expected role – as is the case with CCL – it can be ridiculed and used as a warning to stay within (societal) lines.

The CCL label carries a subtle set of discrimination and stigma, directed at non-conforming women: sexism (only women), heteronormativity (unmarried and childfree), ableism or sanism (“crazy”, hoarder, asocial), ageism (middle-aged or older), classism (poor and dirty) and speciesism (love for cats).

The dimension of sexism in the CCL label is evident in the imposed gendered belief that any cat loving person must be a woman. And while there are no labels describing a cat person who happens to be male as a “crazy cat man” or – when different species are involved as pets – a “crazy dog woman” or a “crazy parrot man”, the relationship between a cat and a woman stays largely devalued.  If a dog is man’s best friend, then a cat can never be appreciated as woman’s significant companion. There are many cultural sources that associate women with cats; for example, “catfight” is pejoratively used term when describing a conflict between women, “catwalk” is a type of fashion walk for female models, “pussy”, a word for a cat, also means vagina, and Catwoman, a female superhero/supervillain, who shares a special bond with cats, can be viewed as human-nonhuman hybrid. But only one cultural image is the most persistent when it comes to single women living with cats – a witch, an archetype of a dangerous woman. Portrayals of witches in the popular culture predominantly included cats as their companions, but this popular depiction is also rooted in the historical data where medieval women were prosecuted as witches and their cats were seen as witches’ helpers. However, today’s CCL is constructed more as a desexualised witch because ageism, or discrimination on the basis of age, does not allow women to be sexual or sexually appealing on their own terms after the age of 50.

Heteronormativity and compulsory coupling, societal notions about heterosexuality and marriage are part of the dominant cultural belief about proper adult identity. A single woman, whose sexuality is also ambiguous due to her singlehood because heteronormative and coupling ideologies does not allow women to be without men, is being pathologized for defying these expectations. These ideologies vilify any manifestation of affection or love that is not directed towards men or offspring. CCL symbolically fills this gap between societal expectations and single women’s living experiences by explaining their solo lifestyles as “odd” or “crazy” because women’s singlehood, non-heterosexualities or non-monogamies are still at odds with patriarchal conceptions about women who view them as useful to them – hetero wives and mothers.

The word “crazy”, still nonchalantly used by most people, is an ableist or sanist slur where its usage is being deployed with humorous intentions. Ableism or discrimination against people with disabilities that also include less visible ones (such as mental illnesses) in this particular syntagm only amplifies the traditional ideas about gender where women are defined as irrational (hence “crazy”). However, by ignorantly linking a certain lifestyle that does not include husband or kids as a mental problem, not only deepens the misconceptions about mental illnesses, but also reinforces the outdated gender ideas about inherently “emotional” women.

Ageism or discrimination, based on someone’s age is also present in the CCL label. A middle-aged woman is seen as useless in the youth-driven and sexist society where any societal benefit of a woman is narrowly viewed through their physical attributes: beauty, youth and reproductive abilities. Once those attributes start to fade away, woman’s value starts to decrease in an androcentric society. CCL can be therefore understood as a non-threatening symbolic depot for middle-aged women with nothing to offer to (patriarchal) society.

Words such as “poor”, “white trash” or “stinky” connote classist attitudes towards older women who are due to the lifelong wage gap more prone to poverty. The symbolic and material aspects of poverty and old age are mostly associated with dirt or bad smell, an abject matter which needs to be eliminated from the visible sight of society and just left alone. “Lonely” is another word that describes CCL, but maybe this loneliness is more of an economic that personal issue.

The last dimension of CCL label is that of speciesism or carnism. A person appreciating and living with cats should be called a cat person, a genderless and de-gendered word, which would merely imply a certain bond with other species than humans. To ridicule any human-nonhuman bonding only reiterate one of the major systems of oppression – carnism; the belief than some animals are allowed to be eaten, others can be held as pets, but none of them should be acknowledged as sentient beings. The more traditional view on women’s caretaking of cats enforces patriarchal ideas about maternal transference from non-existing humans to cats in need. But this notion conflates CCL’s caretaking with mothering and it reproduces traditional gender roles that associate women with caretaking or mothering as their nurtural calling.

The CCL label therefore represents a dangerous downfall for women, something that must be avoided at any price, a pitiful lifestyle that was driven by bad choices or a lack of (self-) control over woman’s life. CCL is a patriarchal warning sign to single women who are still young/ish and love animals (cats in particular) to abandon those solo lifestyles because they lead to the worst case scenarios for women – to be alone, mentally disabled, poor, societally overlooked and invisible. It is a tool of shaming or a disciplinary strategy for women whose personal choice, identity or social circumstances do not co-align with the current demands of marriage, motherhood, heteronormativity, age-appropriateness, middle-class mind-set, mental health disposition and/or philosophical ethics.

But what is an internalized sexism or misogyny? It is not hard to imagine that if the society is sexist, women won’t pick up or internalise those attitudes and definitions about their own gender on the basis of those beliefs. Internalized sexism happens when a woman is using the same sexist attitudes and beliefs about her gender towards herself and other women. Any woman can be subjected to sexist attitudes from two different sources: the opposite (e.g. men) and the same gender (e.g. women), so being a woman is like being caught between Scylla and Charybdis.

Reasons, which contribute to internalized sexism, are:

• A rule of hegemonic masculinity that is invisibly present and perpetuated on every level of Western society. Anything other than male/masculine is Othered – silenced, devalued and ignored. Women, as de Beauvoir has stated many moons ago, are Other by default, but gender intersects with other social factors, such are race, class, ability, sexuality; under the umbrella of Other can therefore fall low-wage people, trans persons, black, LGB+, people with disabilities etc. However, being a woman in a world of hegemonic masculinity is not a powerful social position.
• The lack of (women’s) power results in devaluation of femininity from any gender. Anything that is culturally conditioned and linked with femininity – for example colour pink, make-up, duckface, selfies, narcissism, frivolity, nipples, menstruation, sexual agency (or to put it more simple – women wanting sex and being slut-shamed for that), servile professions (low income, status and prestige, so-called feminized professions – waitressing), sex work (pornography, prostitution), entertainment (pop singers, dancers), self-care – is being perceived as not “serious” or “essential”. However, any woman who is transgressive from what is considered “proper femininity” (e.g. academic professions – women are still being perceived as second-class academics, having leadership skills, feminist values, being a cat lover, gender bending or sexually fluid), is also being subjected to same-sexist monitoring.
• Capitalism encourages competition and women are more than welcome to compete with each other in the “feminine areas” – fashion, beauty, fight for heterosexual men. The hybrid of allowed competitiveness and beauty is showcased in beauty pageants, where merely physical attributes of a woman are judged.

How is internalized sexism cultivated and perpetuated? Through external sources, such are early socialisation (learning of gender roles – boys like blue/are trustworthy, girls like pink/are flaky), media and advertising (women are either passive or evil/active characters); perceptions of women are being stereotyped and hence seen as less powerful. If women are perceived as “powerless”, then no wo/man wants to identify with powerlessness. Even though the latter is a result of an uneven power struggle, what is perceived as “powerful” is still associated with masculinity – rationality, emotional distance, physical strength, wealth etc.

How is internalized sexism manifested? Women, who have internalized sexism, suffer from self-hate, alienation from themselves and others, hate other women  sometimes just for being different (Othered for that matter – childfree women, educated women) and hence unrelatable, they do not believe/trust women, discredit them professionally, attack them personally, use victim-blaming strategies to shame women and unnecessary critique, they minimize the value of women, do not employ women, create hostile working environments, engage in passive aggression, but most importantly, believe in gender bias in favour of men. Sexist women rarely question or criticize the authority of men, their actions or behaviours or gender order of hegemonic masculinity in general. This deliberate gender blindness is just another aspect of their internalized sexism.

What to do? Firstly, this pattern has to be recognized and then deliberately unlearned. Internalized sexism is harmful to all women, because it positions them as primarily guilty until (or if) proven innocent. No woman should ever be put into a position to endlessly and constantly defend herself for being a woman.

Age is a tool for primitive categorization (i.e. categorization that is made almost automatically, under one second – race, gender and age, Nelson 2005), so it is not surprising that ageist language, behaviour and age prejudices in general are so common that even such “harmless” creative outlets, as are jokes and humour, carry covert societal messages about age: getting old is not OK, children are clueless and youngsters are naïve.

Ageism is Othering that is based on the person’s age and it draws lines between “us” (currently right-aged group) and “them” (or Other). Children, youngsters and old people constitute the category of Other-aged.

Children are primarily subjected to the juvenile ageism that is manifested in an adult’s comprehension of children as helpless, mindless, dependable upon adults and unreliable. Youth has been vilified ever since the idea of a teenager emerged in the post-war era. American 1950s introduced us with juvenile delinquents, 1960s had hippies, 1980s punks, 1990s Generation X and 2000s Millennials.

Ageism against old people is the most damaging one. The general stereotype of old people in the contemporary Western societies portrays them as dependent, lonely, disagreeable persons, who have various physical and mental limita­tions. They tend to be marginalized, stripped of responsibility, power and their dignity. Older adults are still regarded as non-contributing burdens on society, treated as second-class citizens with nothing to offer. The most harmful aspect of ageism is how it affects older people in the workplace (i.e. economic sphere). They are perceived as less motivated and com­petent at work, as harder to train or retrain and as more expensive for employers, because they have higher salaries and, due to declining health, use more health care benefits.

Ageism against older people can even evolve into gerontophobia, an irrational fear or hostility against older people. Elderly people represent our future selves and are a reminder of our own aging and death, as youngsters represent our past selves. So, the ageist language that is directed to both of those Othered age groups is just fear. We are not young anymore; we have made our life choices and must live with them. Time is known for its irreversibility – when it passes, it passes.

Currently right-aged group is now being “concerned” about Millennials; they are described as self-involved, shallow, selfie-obsessed, vain, spoilt etc., the predictions about future are pessimistic because nothing good will happen by the time Millennials grow up. When the right-aged group is “morally condemning” youngsters for being young (i.e. different from them), they are (un)consciously using ageist language. Ageist language (e.g. old people are incompetent, children are helpless, and youngsters are shallow) is generally very patronising language; it positions Other as a voiceless and powerless subject. And this is exactly what is being done to youngsters – they are defined by those who possess the power to construct “truths” about Other-aged groups. Nobody knows how responsible, reliable or sociable youngsters will be as adults in the future.

This ageist narrative about contemporary youngsters has become so populistic and accepted that it is hard not to remember that every right-aged group had the same fearful prejudice about their youths; 1950s parents were terrified of juvenile delinquents and their power to disrupt the illusion of the perfect nuclear family, to parents of Gen X everybody was lost and confused, 1980s punks were prone to destroy the society with their anarchistic political views … But none of that has happened. Not on a larger scale.

Ageism segregates different-aged people into “us” and “them”, so any cross-generational connection (except the familial one) is absent and by that, any enrichment from one age group to the other is unavailable.

Except in films, or at least, in one film – an anti-ageist love story Harold and Maude (1971, d.: Hal Ashby). Here’s to love and death (of ageism).

The term “Smurfette principle” was coined by an American journalist Katha Pollitt in 1991, when she was analysing children’s programmes on television which led to the conclusion of children’s shows being highly gendered (“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”, she stated). The Smurfette principle, named after The Smurfs and their living arrangement (one woman – plenty of men), describes a situation where “a group of male buddies are accompanied by a lone female, (usually) stereotypically defined.” However, a “Smurfette” can also be an exceptional (and only) woman in a man’s world, for example, the only woman in a company’s boardroom or the only credible female character among men in a film. When just one person of an underrepresented group is included in the otherwise gender-homogeneous environment, that one person is a token. Tokenism as a practice of how minorities should be included only imitates equality, because it usually accepts only one outstanding individual and not a group of average ones.

The Smurfette principle, used in the cinematic surrounding, is not a monolithic trope; it is an adaptable one, depended on its context. In the television or film storyline, the “chosen” woman can be either (1) a part of the all-male team; (2) a lonely antagonist against the male team or (3) a decorative and unessential-to-the-story sidekick, created to dilute the possible homoerotic subtext of the narrative.

The “one of the guys” version appears in films, such are Gone in Sixty Seconds (Angelina Jolie/Sway), Inception (Ellen Page/Ariadne), Ocean’s 11 (Julia Roberts/Tess Ocean), The Imitation Game (Keira Knightley/Joan Clarke), Flatliners (Julia Roberts/Rachel Manus) and Michael Clayton (Tilda Swinton/Karen Crowder). Sway, Ariadne, Tess Ocean, Joan Clarke, Rachel Manus and Karen Crowder are the only women, allowed to be in the all-male ensemble and they function as antisexist tokens. The TV sitcom Seinfeld had this syndrome, too – Elaine Baines (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) was the only woman in the cast.

Seinfeld cast (Credits: NBC)

The reversed type of the Smurfette principle is a lonely female antagonist, set against the male team, which treats her as a threat. This trope can be found in film characters; such are Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3), Selina Kyle/Catwoman (Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises), Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club), Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone in Casino), Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams in Sherlock Holmes) and The Lady (Sharon Stone in The Quick and the Dead). Jodie Foster was quite often cast as a proponent of this cinematic trope; she was dr. Eleanor Arroway in Contact, Annabelle Bransford in Maverick and Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. All those characters were outsiders for not fitting into the masculine concept of good (or domesticated) femininity; they were lone warriors for justice or truth (Ripley, The Lady, Eleanor and Clarice) or self-reliant grifters (Selina, Marla, Irene, Ginger and Annabelle).

Jodie Foster in Contact (Credits: Warner Bros.)

The last version of the Smurfette trope is an unessential sidekick, who is introduced into the homosocial storyline only to remove any potential homoerotic subtexts. These are some of the examples: Skylar (Minnie Driver in Good Will Hunting), Miss Piggy in The Muppet Show and Penny (Kaley Cuoco in The Big Bang Theory).

However, the image of the only woman among men was predominantly present in the 90s alternative and rock music (pop music is considered to be too “feminine”), where she would usually be a front(wo)man (i.e. singer), but less often a band founder or a leader. The “one-woman-in-all-men-band” trope is also a variable principle of femininity that must be aligned with the band’s masculine vision of how to represent themselves as unique artists, but also how to be appealing to the public (media, consumers and record labels). The visual appearance of the only woman in a man band still upholds the common signifiers of femininity (e.g. beautiful face, thin body, young/ish, embellished clothing, creative fashion choices), but it is done with an alternative twist to fit into the masculine conception of rock performance. Here are some illustrations of alternative femininities within one-woman-in-all-male-band contexts.

Garbage’s Shirley Manson sported an edgy alternative beauty, No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani was a blonde, stylish femme-tomboy and Skunk Anansie’s Skin was presented as a black androgynous handsomeness, while The Cardigan’s Nina Persson embodied a blonde fragile femininity. Sonic Youth’s bassist/singer Kim Gordon shared the same blond coolness with Smashing Pumpkin’s bassist D’arcy Wretzky, while The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan and Texas’ Sharleen Spiteri were symbols of casual androgyny. Katrina and the Waves’ Katrina Leskanich exhibited the queer femininity, Joan Jett and the Black Hearts’ Joan Jett toyed herself with the femme-masculine brashness, while Sade’s Sade Adu exuded the modelesque beauty. Blondie’s Debbie Harry was synonymous for what a sensual and daring blonde should behave and look like, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O radiates an artistic aloofness and Scissor Sisters’ Ana Matronic campy seductiveness is hidden in her stage persona, while The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde was just all about her ambivalent coolness.

The Pretenders (Credits: Rolling Stone)

Regardless of its location (entertainment, politics or every-day life), the main problem with the Smurfette principle  is that it reinforces the idea that there is only enough room for one (exceptional) woman to be engaging and profiting from male (or female) professions which leads to the misguided belief of who the enemy is. Well, it is not anOther woman.

Sizeism is a discrimination against a person on the basis of her/his/their body size (fat, thin, small or tall), but it also includes a less common prejudice against a person’s length and width of feet. This prejudice is far more problematic for women, whose feet size is larger than number 41. They fall out of the category to be ‘beautiful’ because western society’s notions of women’s beauty are intertwined with their feminine physicality. Beautiful = feminine.

Women’s feet are – as any other body part – defined and validated via disciplinary regimes of beauty. Besides the usual young, pretty and thin imperative, women’s hands and feet are supposed to be small and delicate. The littleness of feet is yet another body ideal, placed upon women with its subtle message that their bodies should not occupy a lot of physical space; women should make themselves as small (hence the tyranny of slenderness) and invisible as possible. When it comes to feet, there is a ‘big feet’ shame that – in everyday life – translates into taunting and is primarily damaging for girls and young women, who do not have small feet and if they are also tall (i.e. over 1,80m), another aspect of sizeism (i.e. women’s height) is being added. These societal body prejudices can harm a young person’s body image.

When a woman does not belong to a ‘normal’ shoe size, she is being ‘punished’ for her size discursively (being constantly taunted for her feet) and materially (not being able to find the right size or kind of shoes). Her right to choose shoes has been eliminated. The only options left for her are sports footwear or men’s shoes. But not every woman has a desire to wear those limited types of footwear, if those choices were forced upon her and she also wishes to engage in more diverse (e.g. feminine or extravagant) footgear. Reasons can even have an economic aspect – not everyone can afford custom-made shoes or to order shoes of specific shoe brands from abroad.

If I apply the traditional psychoanalytic approach about a shoe as a symbol of female genitalia, then too big or too wide women’s shoes translate into the sexist understanding of a vagina as being ‘loose’ and needs to be corrected or medically tightened. In times where vaginoplasty is becoming more normalized, the repulsion of anything big (e.g. body fat, ‘loose’ vagina, big labia or big feet) on a woman’s body just reinforces the idea that being a woman is nothing but shameful.

Therefore, a big feet shame should just became a big feet Pride.