This is going to involve a lot of me losing my temper about misogyny and art.

The more early-to-mid-20th century art you experience, the more criticism and biographies you read about it and its creators, the more you find yourself thinking “Wow, there really was a lot of lead poisoning in those days.”

Also, that level of alcohol abuse isn’t good for anyone.

Women are treated as the disposable artifacts of creating Great Art. We are casualties of necessity to enable the genius of men. Our own genius is of necessity smaller, frailer, not really all there if you know what I mean. (Joanna Russ said this all better than I can: read her book.)

The work of women, seeking their own creative outlets and mastery, is lesser because we say it’s lesser. It’s erased. We stand behind those great men: we aren’t recognized as their equals even when it’s acknowledged that their creativity relies on our drudgery.

This other work of women—supporting their spouses and families, shouldering most of the burden of—doesn’t really matter, after all. Narratives of our exploitation and sacrifice cast us as ‘helpmeets.’ The sordid fates of so many of us when we are used up and discarded—sure, they add a certain poignant frisson of tragedy to the tale, but no more than that.

It’s not as if Zelda Fitzgerald was a person, after all. It’s not as if Adele Morales Mailer existed as a real not-fictional woman with hopes and dreams. It’s not like any of the wives of that epic philanderer and serial abandoner-of-women (you can’t really call him a serial monogamist, can you, because that implies monogamy was at any point on offer.) Ernest Hemingway (can you name any of them? can you even remember how many there were?) mattered.

They were not human beings. They were just vessels, inevitably shattered by the burden of containing a great man’s intellect and (oh above all) his artistic temperament. Oh, his artistic temperament.

As the proud owner of an Artistic Temperament of my own (clinically diagnosed and well-medicated, thank you very much) I have to tell you that such a thing is a heavy-duty maintenance responsibility and not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Mental illness is real and difficult… and not an excuse for harming others if you can possibly help it.

One must one’s own shit own.

And in the actual Art Itself. there might be one female protagonist to accompany the band of men. The cool girl, the one who can almost keep up. Or maybe she’s just a love interest. A prize to be won.

The Smurfette, as it were.

The Only Girl In The Game, to steal a nice turn of phrase from John D. MacDonald.

A toxic side effect of Smurfette Syndrome spills over into real life, too. Since there can Be Only One, you have to get rid of the other woman if you want her social spot. Women must compete for everything—men, jobs, a place at the table. Half the evil genius of patriarchy is setting us against each other. If the only way to get a position of authority or acceptance is to climb over all the other women, then it sure does a great job of defanging any female solidarity that might otherwise gum up the works of oppression.

This is why narratives of female friendship, to my mind, are so radical and so extraordinary. Revolutionary, even.

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Toxic Smurfette Syndrome and how to avoid it…