Apples and oranges. When your job description includes chasing villains through all kinds of terrain, picking up buildings (or at least pieces of them), and getting into fistfights with similarly powerful individuals, big bulging muscles make sense. Male superheroes have big bulging muscles because they’re strong; any resulting sexiness is incidental. By contrast, there’s really no “professional” reason why big bulging breasts would be an advantage for female superheroes. If a female superhero has big bulging breasts, it’s for no other reason than to make her sexy (or at least, to attempt to).
Still, I wouldn’t say that that’s the most sexist thing about superhero comics. What I find more troubling is the lack of standalone female characters. Most female superheroes are just female versions of already-established male superheroes. Batgirl is just a female Batman, Supergirl is just a female Superman. What’s worse, while the male heroes are usually “Man”, the females are often “Girl”, even as grown women. Yes, Wonder Woman is an exception here (no male equivalent, and she’s “Woman”), but she’s really the only one, among major characters, and she has a set of gender issues all her own.
Superhero comics are fantasies for frustrated powerless young men. Teens in particular have very little power in the world. Their lives are dictated by parents and schools. They have little choice in the subjects they study, or even what they eat for dinner. So they compensate with an elaborate fantasy world where they have the powers of ancient gods and heroes, and fight battles against world-threatening villainy. (Video games seem to be replacing comics here.) Part of that world involves warrior women who both look hot and kick ass. I don’t see the problem with it. Even if it is sexist–I’m not sure if it is, but I’m not going to argue the point–so what? What’s the harm?
That woman with that bingo blog comes off as an annoying sanctimonious ninny.
To be fair about the woman/girl argument, a lot of Adjective Girl type characters genuinely are young. Off the top of my head, the current Supergirl, Batgirl, and Wonder Girl are all teenagers. Marvel Girl chose her name to purposely honour her mother. Of course, the list of Adjective Boys is pretty small, except for the various Justice Legionnaires/Rejected Legionnaires, who are pretty much all …Boy or …Girl. There’s Superboy, of course, though currently he’s dead.
Oh, Jesus, no they aren’t! Batman’s costume is as sexy as Black Canary’s? He’s showing six square inches of skin, tops! Take it from a guy who enjoys his beefcake as much as his cheesecake: men in comics are not drawn remotely “sexy,” not in comparison to the women. Somewhere around here, I’ve got a gay porn superhero comic spoof. The heroes in that (when they’re in costume, at least: it’s porn, so that’s obviously a rare occurance) are wearing stripper thongs, short shorts, and absolutely no shirts under any circumstances. That’s equivalently sexy.
I’m not sure where you’re getting “obligation” from. Where has anyone suggested that comic companies be forced to de-sexify their superheroines? Comic companies are free to do whatever they want, and the rest of us are free to buy or not buy as we see fit. I don’t see anyone complaining about this basic setup.
But as to why we - both readers and publishers - should care, is the damage that this is doing to the comics themselves. These stripper heroines attract a certain demographic, but what about the demographic they’re driving away? How many women are going to pick up a comic book for the first time, if this is what she sees on the cover? Worse, how many women writers and artists are going to pass on working in comics if that’s the image they have of the medium? (And yes, I’m aware that that cover was painted by a woman. Doesn’t change my point.) How many parents are going to see stuff like that, and decide to keep their kids away from comic books?
Comic books are still a ghetto. For the most part, they all appeal to the same insular, aging demographic. We need more people, of different ages, from different backgrounds, reading and making comics. Not for the health of society, but for the health - both economic and artistic - of the medium itself.
Bitch magazine ran a piece a few months ago pointing out that most of these female heroines meet their ends with a nice ol’ torture and kill, often after they’ve gotten themselves into a dangerous situation (rather than dying noble deaths, mostly off-panel).
I should add that the link in my above post is to an image embedded into this blog entry by Eric Burns, who examines in more detail the way Marvel is shooting itself in the foot with this sort of pandering.
The funniest thing I’ve seen lately on the oversexualization of women in comics was the flap over the Spiderman “Mary Jane” toy and response from a female cartoonist. I think the “toy” accurately reflects how women are portrayed in the comics (T and A, plus . . . well, just T and A) and the response was hilarious. The blogger’s exasperation about disagreement is a little tedious, but the comparison between pictures is hilarious.
I don’t disagree with this, but to some extent I think it’s somewhat of an historical artifact. The prevailing opinion seems to be that boys don’t want to read about girls (and men don’t want to read about women). I don’t know how true it is, but it certainly seems to be perceived as true among publishers. So, since comic book readership has been historically heavily male (and almost certainly still is for super hero comics, though I don’t have any hard numbers), the vast number of protagonists have been male. (There have been a lot of female super heroes, but they tended to be more supporting and minor characters.)
I think that’s changed a bit over the last 20 years, perhaps indicating that boys are now more willing to read about girls, as social attitudes change. DC, for instance, is currently publishing Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Supergirl and the Legion of Super Heroes, Catwoman, and Birds of Prey (an exclusively female super team) among its main titles. It also has Manhunter, which is a book about a female super hero that’s on hiatus, but is supposed to return, as well as some minis that are usually going on (Black Canary has a 4 issue series coming out right now, Wonder Girl has a limited series coming in the fall, and so on). There’s also been increased participation of women in super hero teams. The original Teen Titans way back when had one female character (Donna Troy) to four male characters (Robin, Aqualad, Kid Flash, and Speedy), while the most recently announced line-up has four female characters (Supergirl, Wonder Girl, Miss Martian, and Ravager) to two male characters (Robin and Kid Devil). You can say that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the books centered around male heroes, but it’s better than it was 10 or 20 years ago.
So, it might be that boys (and young men) have gone from not wanting to read about women at all, to wanting to read about them as long as they’re shallow and sexualized. I don’t know, maybe that’s progress.
The biggest problem with introducing more top tier female protagonists is that super hero comics can be a very nostalgic genre/medium. Older fans read about the same characters they read about 30 years ago, and newer fans tend to gravitate towards the names they’re most familiar with. So people read Superman and Batman because they were read 30 (and 40, and 50) years ago. A lot of creators seem to get into the genre because they want to write stories about the characters they read as a kid. In that sort of atmosphere, it’s difficult for any new characters, male or female, to reach major character status, particularly ones that don’t have any legacy connection to older characters. Which isn’t to say that if a new superhero universe was created today that male and female characters would be found in equal proportions; they probably wouldn’t be, but I think it would be somewhat more representative without the historical baggage.
On the other hand, how many male protagonists are there in romance novels?
Why is it not OK? The real reason it’s happening is that comics are no longer sold OTC in grocery stores and drug stores and whatnot, which means that the only small kids reading them are those whose parents go to comics stores and buy them – not a big enough demographic, I suspect, to bother with.
So the mass of comics readers are young guys full of testosterone, sex hormones and whatnot who naturally like to look at images of hot women, so publishers provide such images. I’m having trouble finding the wrongness here. Spell it out for me, if you will.
That’s not really a fair comparison, though, because romance novels are such a small section of the total novel market. Well, not exactly “small,” but they don’t dominate it in the way superheroes dominate the American comic market.
Um, probably some do, but frankly, if you’re looking for sexually suggestive images of women, there’s a lot of very DIRECT images available on the Web, of actual women. I don’t think comcis can match actual porn in that regard. I also don’t think most comics readers have a superheroine fetish, they just like hot women, so superheroines tend to look like hot women.
Beautifully put. When I see covers like the Heroes for Hire than** Miller** linked to, the message I get is “NOT FOR YOU.” In many ways, I’m well poised to become a comic book fan. I read and watch a lot of science fiction; I’m a fan of Neil Gaiman’s and Alan Moore’s graphic novels; I thoroughly enjoy most superhero movies. But when Marvel and DC publish images like that, they’re telling me that they don’t want me as a reader or a customer. That’s their right, but I find it disappointing.
I agree, this seems an interesting project. There’s a lot of argument there, much of it interesting. As there are so many arguments, I’ll go one square at a time. May take awhile, but could be worth it. I’ve got some RL stuff to do right now, but I’ll get back atcha.
You haven’t seemed to pick up on this yet, but people aren’t complaining that there aren’t enough ugly women in comics. “Hot” is fine. But women can be hot without dressing like strippers, or being posed like they’re doing an FHM photo shoot.
I’m afraid my reaction is worse than that; not just “Gosh I wouldn’t read that!” but “Who would read such crap?” It’s a cover that IMO insults the intelligence not only of women (most of whom won’t read it) but also of the men who apparently would. Heaving women, breasts on display, hands tied over their heads, while slithering tentacles creep up their bodies? C’mon. It’s not even subtextual, it’s obvious. Next cover: Train repeatedly penetrating tunnel – but only with a half-clothed female engineer riding it, of course.
I don’t mind sexuality in art, but I do prefer not to be whacked on the head with it.
