I know, I was mostly kidding. I’m female myself, so I’m all for sexing up the male characters’ costumes to match the ladies’.
That said, just once I’d like to see Black Canary complain about the permanent waffle-shaped scars on her knees from falling down in those fishnets, and the pain involved in pulling the nets out of the fresh wounds. I’ve been there myself, and it’s really unpleasant. I guess her knees would be a mass of scars by now, like an old boxer’s face.
However, it must be noted that male comics characters are well-dressed, and females…dental floss, if that.
Uh, what are you doing in fishnets that leads to your knees getting injured? When I’m in fishnets I’m usually just prancing around and getting photographed.
That’s more or less the point of the linked column.
Fighting crime, obviously.
It happened to me a number of times back in my Rocky Horror-performing days.
I’ve seen it happen in dance clubs too. One time, an old friend of mine tripped on some concrete steps in fishnets. Her leg scraped along the edge of one of the steps and managed to bury her fishnets in about three inches of the flesh of her shin. She pulled the fishnets out of her skin and nearly passed out, then she had friends help her get out of the club and go home. Once she got there, they had to help her pull off the tights. Of course by that time, the wound was beginning to scab over, so removing the fishnets opened up the wound again. Not pretty, and it left nasty scars.
Sorry to have been so long. I still can’t get Google up for whatever reason, so I went to Dogpile, though my Dogpile-fu isn’t nearly what my Google-fu is (not saying I’m a Google master or anything, just that I don’t use Dogpile all that often and I use Google a lot, and not just for bondage porn (though it is good for that).
So here’s a few links. Most are female feminist bloggers, but there are a few SNAG types represented as well. I’ve read a lot of posts from guys who don’t like too much sexiness in comics, some on these pages, so I’m not hallucinating this stuff. It’s out there, in quantity.
from here:
http://www.barbelith.com/topic/3358
from here:
This whole freakin’ blog (shudder):
all of this blog:
quote]The definition of what a ‘real’ comic book is includes the following elements:
–Image style 4 color art
–Big breasts on the women, big muscles on the men
–Plot, violence, Plot
–A homo-social world view. That is, one where men hang out with men and the few female characters out there hang out with women. There are next to no male-female friendships in comics that stay friendships.
–A woman is defined as either good girl/bad girl art, a victim, or a significant other.
–And lots of other stuff that I can’t think of at the moment
[/quote]
from here:
from here
http://www.viciousgrin.com/writings/womencomic.html
Yeah, still not seeing your point.
Some fans and critics have taken issue with some treatment of sex in comics, for various reasons.
Some of them want to see women treated as more than objects.
Some of them are concerned about age appropriateness.
And some of them just like their eroticism a different flavor than the in-your-face balloon smugglers comics give them.
None of these are fear of sex. I mean, hell, I prefer Zatanna’s classier classic costume to the fetish wear she had in the series that guy was talking about. I also own and enjoy Moore and Gebbie’s “Lost Girls”, a non-stop fuckathon defiling the classics of children’s literature through breaking every sexual taboo imaginable in exquisite detail. Just because I like my sex a certain way, or sometimes want to read things not about sex, doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy sex in my art.
In light of your cites, the OP still makes no sense.
You argued that comics are essentially sexless.
Your cites are all complaints about comics being too sexy, or sexy in misogynist ways.
Bring it all together for us, won’t you?
The people in your cites aren’t complaining about comic characters being sexy. They’re complaining about going totally overboard with it. Look at your cites; the first is explicitly complaining about a lack of realistic body types. The second is complaining about a costume being “a little too sexy”, not just “it’s sexy, that’s bad”.
There’s a difference between “All sexy things are bad” and “Hey, that’s cool, but superheroes fighting in less than a porn star and with more extreme proportions”. It’s as if someone said they didn’t like it when Superman killed that entire planet of people last week - and you suggest they’re againest violence. Well, no, not necessarily, they’re just against extreme, unecessary, pointless violence. You can be for sexiness and against fanservice.
Yeah, they’ve got this rationale and that rationale, but when you boil it all down, what they don’t like is sexy women in skimpy costumes, i.e., female characters who are drawn in such a way as to be sexually appealing to the overwhelmingly male readership of comics. I’m just not buying it. Men like generously proportioned women. They like them in skimpy costumes. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I see the skimpy costumed superheroines in dental floss as the natural expression of male sexuality in the absence of censorship.
The people who complain about the skimpy costumes have a reason for doing so, and I was trying to figure out what it was, and this explanation made sense. Even if the costumes were skimpy, the females superheroes weren’t all that different than male superheroes in terms of BEHAVIOR, however suspiciously rounded their curves were. They were still fighting bad guys and so forth in a world of relative moral clarity.
Yes, underground comics, a whole different kettle of fish. Heavy Metal, for example, started out as a BDSM comic. And retained a lot of that even after it grew more mainstream.
You must have missed this line in the OP:
I never said they were sexless. I said that some people who read them as preadolscents and never really picked up on the sexy cause they were kids remember them as a haven from the adult world, and now decry all the sexiness in current comics, which they now pick up on.
That work better?
Your standards of “Overboard” are probably different than mine. I don’t think “Cavewoman” is overboard. I don’t think Frank Thorne’s “Lann” is overboard. They’ve both got good stories and artwork to them. But very sexy, very naked heroines.
Me thinks them boys have spent too much time in prison.
What you’re failing to grasp is that people can have similar reactions against comic book sexiness for different reasons.
Ok. So four guys walk into a comic book store and see this. They all agree that it’s ugly, distasteful, and they’d rather not see that kind of thing in comics.
-One says that it treats women as sex objects.
-One says that he wants comics he doesn’t have to hide from his kids.
-One says that he finds such blatant, gratuitous sexiness unerotic, especially in the context of a superhero comic. He says that sometimes more clothing is sexier, or at least less damaging to suspension of disbelief.
-One says that it’s just ugly.
They’re all right. (Especially that last guy, yeesh) I mean, you can tell feminist guy and G-rated guy to chill out, but they’re being upfront about why this image bothers them. And it’s not because they want comics as a refuge from adult sexuality.
Believe it or not, there’s a whole galaxy of reasons why guys might object to sexy imagery.
So is this about sex or is it about retreating from a threatening adult world? I really don’t think most people who read comic books are doing so to escape from the real world. At least no more so then most people who watch sports, sit-coms, read mystery novels, or play World of Warcraft. When I worked in a comic book store I don’t think I ever heard one of the customers complain about the level of sexuality in mainstream comics. My female coworker used to think the folks who bought Lady Death/Demon, Chastity, Dawn (especially one of the Dawn artbooks featuring a nipple that looked more like a tumor), and other similar cheesecake titles were kind of pathetic but she didn’t complain about the outfits worn by the more mainstream heroines. Once in a blue moon I had someone come in and ask for recommendations for titles that would be appropriate for children but that’s not really the same as a complaint.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to complain about how women are depicted in some comic book titles. It’s true that most superheroes, male or female, tend to wear tight outfits but somehow the artist always seem to focus on the breasts and asses of the female characters. This might be acceptable in a GOR novel, where women are pretty much objects, but in something like Spider-Man or Batman? Nah, not cool.
I feel the same way about some of the art in fantasy role playing games. If a woman is suppose to be a fighter with a sword, shield, and armor, then it just looks silly if her plate armor has a plunging neckline to show off her monstrous cleavage. If she’s suppose to be a thief then wearing little more then a thong, thigh high boots, and a bikini top on a daily basis is just stupid.
Marc
I’m afraid I don’t know either of those (assuming Cavewoman is a title and not just a genre) But I would imagine you could be right, though “overboard” very much depends on context. Take Tarot, for example; art like that would be incredibly over-the-top if used in Superman. But there there’s no pretence at realism, and it’s upfront about it (pun intended). Out of interest what would you consider overboard? Let’s say it’s your average superhero comic. At what point is female character art “too much”? Same for males?
Merely because your sense of going overboard is higher than mine doesn’t mean I hate sexiness in comics, though.
It is a title. Here’s a sample cover:
Personally, I’m bothered by the subliminal messages it sends about what women should look like, and I don’t just limit that crap to comics. I’m not particularly fond of Barbies or Bratz either, because they don’t let young girls play with women who have natural, healthy physiques. Even if the boy reading the book isn’t thinking about sex yet, he will someday, and you’re setting up unrealistic expectations for looks.
