While I have a lot of thoughts on the subject of the depiction of women in comics (and their movie counterparts), my good friend Keith has compiled a wonderful collection of blog posts regarding the matter, which are entirely more eloquent than I am:
Dressed to Kill
Men in Skintight Leotards
What if male superheroes posed like Wonder Woman on the David Finch Justice League cover?
These in no way explore the depth of the problem, but they are a good introduction!
Dressed to Kill
Men in Skintight Leotards
What if male superheroes posed like Wonder Woman on the David Finch Justice League cover?
These in no way explore the depth of the problem, but they are a good introduction!
This is a great point, with which I entirely agree, but I don't think that drawing comic book men like comic book women really makes the point effectively. Most of the images supplied look like guys in drag, which is kind of already a thing. I mean to say that while the female viewer may titter at the gender inversion, the male viewer is distracted by the predominant cultural presence already associated with that image. Is the point that comic book artists draw women as eccentric gay men? It's an amusing thought, and I may be mistaken, but I'm not sure that's quite what these female artists are going for.
ReplyDeleteAt the root of the unfortunate misdirection is, I believe, the heart of the problem: women use and have used sex for power in ways that men have never had to. Because patriarchy has historically denied women avenues of authority and influence open to men, some women feel autonomized through their sexuality. Therefore (and unfortunately), hyper-sexualization makes sense for female superheroes but not for men. Patriarchy has forced the equivalence of power and sex for women. Women's consequent portrayal in comic books is a symptom more than a cause of this larger problem.
You make some very good points, Jon, although I think the point of these drawings isn't to make the men look like eccentric gays, but to show the weird ways female characters are forced to contort their bodies. And while I think that the relationship between power and sex may be part of the reason women are portrayed in this way, I think that it is unlikely that all female superheroes, with their various personalities and approaches to crime-fighting, would exhibit the same understanding. For example, I'm fairly certain that the Silk Spectre and Catwoman might equate sex with power, but would Oracle? Or Batgirl?
ReplyDeleteThat's not exactly what I mean. I'm not saying that female comic book characters use sex as one of their super-abilities, rather that our culture holds the sex=power dynamic as a cultural trope. Therefore, female sexuality becomes as much a symbol of power as a seat of actual power. So it doesn't matter how much of a floozy Oracle or Batgirl actually are. Hyper-sexualized costumes and poses symbolize whatever their abilities actually are --- simply because they're female.
DeleteThis is what always confused me about Storm while watching X-men as a kid; if she had this Gaia/Earth-mother/Protector/Moral Paragon thing going on, why did she dress like a drag queen? Those seemed out of sync to me.
Now, as you've correctly pointed out, this is all from a male perspective and should change, but I think there's more to it than just objectifying women in the ways men want to objectify them.
It's also the same reason why the male superheroes all have impossibly chiseled muscles, whether or not super-strength is one of their abilities. Muscles and bulk (at least in the male mind) symbolize power.
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