FEMINIST WRITINGS: WOMEN IN MEDIA VS. THE MALE GAZE

I couldn’t come up with a good title for this article at first. I kept coming up with ‘Fucking Hell: This Again?’, or ‘Seriously Guys, Grow The Fuck Up’, or even yelling into a voice recognition program and letting whatever it translated to be the title. Then I calmed down a little, because I realized that behaving without restraint and maturity wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

Even if a lot of guys are complete doodyheads.

Okay! Moving on, the point of this article was in response to a recent internet event that sparked my interest. Specifically, an artist offered a rendering of Batwoman to various noteworthies in the comix biz at San Diego Comic-Con. Their rejection of her rendering would not have been that noteworthy or anger inducing, however, were it not for the way one person in specific phrased it:

“Her breasts are much too small and do not have the lift that superhero women should have. Her jawline is fat and her neck much too long. The style of her hair is clunky and does not flow in a sense that a super human would. Her hips, waist and thighs are too big and she honestly looks fat. No one is going to want to read a comic with a fat female protagonist. I honestly recommend looking at issues of Sports Illustrated to get the right anatomy. Those women are the peak of human perfection, and that is what we want in this industry.”

The rest of the response to this ‘critique’ can be found here.needless to say, I found the idea entertaining and wanted to share this contest with my friends on the interwebs, specifically Facebook.

Unfortunately, one among my circle of friends that responded negatively to this and posted a rebuttal. I will not recount the full argument here as it is too long, but suffice it to say it included pointing out the exceptions to the rule as proof that comics don’t hate ‘fat women’, and that ‘beauty is heroic’ (except, of course, when beauty is evil) and you tend to have more confidence in heroes that look to be in their prime, physically. Etc, etc.

I don’t like getting in fights, particularly not with my friends. But as a feminist, one that’s worked hard to see things that are self-evident to actual women and have been for decades, I feel more and more the need to speak out. So in this case I did. Maybe I could have presented my case better, but that’s something I’m still working on. In the end however, I have to draw the line on at least one point. During the argument, my friend made the following statement:

“Even regular television is filled with attractive people, so why, again, shouldn’t comics? We read comics to escape the mundane and believe in a world where people are fantastic and amazing and attractive. Why would I live an average life, looking at average people, to read a comic about an average super hero who looks like an ordinary schmuck?”

This argument made me think of a recent foray into the subject byMoviebob – in this case addressing the recent internet assault onAnita Sarkeesian regarding her starting her own webshow about how women are portrayed in videogames. While Moviebob is not the best proponent of feminist issues in geek culture, he’s at least pointed in the right direction, and has plenty of good things to say. But what is comes down to is this: when comics readers say ‘we want to see superheroines as being physically perfect, because we want to escape mundanity, yadda yadda’ what they are actually are saying is this: men want to see hot chicks kicking ass. And even the kicking ass can fall by the wayside if they just stand around showing great ass and cleavage shots, going around and looking sexy while all the men just look badass. Case in point:

There are no women out there that are loudly decrying Sarkeesianor Girl-Wonder.org or When Fangirls Attack or saying that women aren’t hyper sexualized , objectified, and disrespected in comic fandom. The bile, the dismissal, the argument that ‘this isn’t really a problem’ is all coming from men that feel like something’s being taken away from them.

(sigh)

You know what, guys, I understand. I do. I was right there with you. I was a guy that looked at Mary Jane in the peak of the 80s and 90s, all of her hot and sexy posing as a model as drawn by Erik Larsonand Todd McFarlane, and I was enthralled. But I also grew up. More importantly, I understand now that comics, that any media, should be about more than empowerment fantasy. Especially when there isn’t an equal playing field. When there are badass heroes, and sexy heroines, both of those things are being marketed at men. We aren’t seeing any beefcake aimed at female readers, and even if we were, that’s not the point. The point is that all characters in all media – whether comics, videogames, TV, movies, or books – should be recognized as individual people with desires, motivations and emotions that are equally important, equally real. That women don’t exist merely to be driving forces for the men, either sexual, emotional, or to take bloody vengeance for, a la Green Lantern and his girlfriend Alex DeWitt, the original Woman in a Refrigerator.

Women are not ‘here for us’, any more than we are here for them. We are all people, and we cannot fall into the trap that just because they are part of a fiction, does not make them less deserving of respect. Especially when so many people seem to still have a problem with treating actual women with respect. In fact, maybe if we treated women in media better, maybe it would help teach people to treat women better in the real world. It couldn’t hurt, at least.

In the end though, my friend asked me: ‘Are you willing to stop buying/reading any mainstream comics until things improve?’ To which I replied ‘What makes you think I haven’t already?’ Any comic purchase I’ve made in the last few years have all been indie – not all of them perfect – but I have pretty much given up on DC and Marvel for the moment. Maybe, maybe on a case by case basis if a fellow feminist tells me that it’s well done. Because I want to support steps in the right direction.

To any other arguments made in favor of the status quo – again, all made by men – my only further response is to play Anti-Comics-Feminist Bingo. I don’t know what else to say, except this: It’s not acceptable. It will never be acceptable, and even if it is merely asymptom of a larger problem in our culture,  I will nevertheless do my best to fight for that in the future.

Please do the same.