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As you say, the feedback loop between reader and text is highly complex, BUT, again, I'm not so sure the distinction between "art" and "life" is as unfuzzied as you suggest. Are you saying that our fictions never intrude upon the real?
I'm not sure to what extent. You have a good point here, one worth taking up. I don't know how to approach it at the moment, though. As I said, despite what it may seem, I'm actually on the fence here. Show me the money, is all I'm saying.
She-Hulk is as complicit in perpetuating all this bollox as any other scantily clad, bullshit, teenypube vision of femininity.
The She-Hulk thing is problematic. Her "day job" is nothing to sneeze at. She hasn't worn rags since the early 1980s (while her male counterpart still does). She's intelligent and witty and doesn't need rescuing. Why is she a "bullshit, teenypube vision of femininity?" These are the assumptions I'm questioning.
Oh, and Marti and Jane do a shit load of writing for the show and enjoy producer credits also - there's a BIG female influence on Buffy.
Yes, but they're still outnumbered by men and working under Buffy's male creator and overseer.
And I can pretty much guarantee the empowering elements of Buffy inform Elektra exactly 0 percent: the fighting really has fuck all to do with it. But we really musn't explore this'n anymore - completely off topic.
It's on the "Are comics, on the balance, more degrading in their treatment of women than TV" part of the topic. What I'm asking here is why are the same elements seen as empowering in Buffy but misogynist in Elektra? My response is that we have deep-rooted feelings about comics that are no longer based on accurate information (in other words, we are judging today's comics by yesterday's comics without actually stopping to see what's changed).
Comics do give women a bad deal. Janet Van Dyne was a fashion designer?? Look at the facts, comics were primarily directed at boys and for fun. This usually involved men saving women
This is why I specifically narrowed the discussion to modern comics. I think we're all in agreement on the Lee/Kirby stuff and earlier. As I said before, I think a paradigm shift began around 1974 and probably settled down a few years ago. A shit track record in terms of time, but there you go. To my mind we have to focus on modern comics, in the same way that a discussion of television should focus on modern television - these are the series people see now. So trotting out the old "men saving women" thing doesn't help, because there's a balance today that was missing before. The self-reliant women of the X-Men are now the norm, not the exception, and violence against female characters (and their subsequent rescue) must be analyzed within the context of what appears to be an equal amount of violence against male characters (and their subsequent rescue). Someone made the interesting suggestion upthread that comics don't treat anyone right - if that's the case, then the misogyny argument falls by the wayside and we're into a whole new discussion.
I recall numerous bad things happening to women in Sandman, has anyone else noticed?
Of course women were also the protagonists in much of Sandman. I think men fare a lot worse than women in that series in general in terms of representation (bad things may happen to women, but in most instances the bad characters are men). I don't know how the rape of Black Canary was handled, but disempowering characters happens to males and females alike, and often becomes empowering in itself (for example the mohawked Storm).
Are comics misogynist? To which qualifiers have been added, id est not the entire medium of comics, let's just talk about the superhero genre of comics and further, and I believe it was LLB who introduced this, not today's superhero comics.
I think we're all guilty of the spandex trap, equating it with the medium. I'd point out that my suggestions for troubling comics (Sin City and 100 Bullets) are not superhero books. As far as limiting the discussion to modern/current books, well, I feel that's implicity in the abstract. The question isn't were comics misogynist, but rather are they (ie: now).
And that still leaves "Is the only way for a female character in comics to be compelling to be victimized in someway?" from the Abstract.
I was hoping we'd lay some common groundwork before we got to this point, because we need to figure out what it is to victimized, and if it's different for men and women to be victimized (as someone else pointed out, the male body count and victimization in comics as a whole is likely far higher than the female equivalent).
I sympathize with your view on the state of the thread, and suggest that we might come to some agreed-upon definitions even if we as individuals do not agree with those definitions. Some sort of context to base the discussion in.
And often enough, women are placed in precarious situations, with an evil villain trying inventively to do her in. Examples are in Batman, Superman, even Spiderman.
Specific examples in the past five to ten years, offset by explaining why identical examples featuring male victims don't negate the argument? Your first sentence here probably accurately describes the first several decades of comics, but we've been beyond Snidely Whiplash for a while now.
I apologize to everyone if my tone has descended into 'snotty' mode from time to time. This is a fascinating subject and I am genuinely interested in it. I think this is why it bothers me so much when people resort to lazy shorthand, refuse to offer concrete examples etc. The topic is better than that. |
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