Why is it that people who answer feminist critique with "This is nothing new" don't seem to realize that that's pretty much the whole problem? That it goes on, that's its been going on, that a whole bunch of people are getting fed up with it and we're reaching the point where creators are going to find themselves dodging thrown maxi pads at conventions if they don't learn to fucking shape up right fucking away?
Then, on the other hand, part of me wants to say "No, it wasn't this bad. I started reading in the fucking 90s, and it wasn't this bad. There were T&A characters, and I ignored them, but the characters I liked got treated with respect and at some point that started to erode and now I'm just trying to get through this anti-woman nightmare period by complaining about the problems so I won't have to give up on the male characters I love as the only way I can avoid watching all the female characters I love are being dragged through pigshit of varying viscosity in order to conform to the wish-fulfillment fantasies of some jackass creator and his flock of jackass fans because the 21st Century is apparently the ideal time to put uppity women back in their place after that nasty feminist movement."
I think there's an ebb and flow, and we'll have a few years of decent female character treatment followed by a few years of backlash. I figure that's why it seems like things are getting worse when in the past they have been this bad before, because right before this we had a period of relative calm and complacency. So we get this illusion of this sort of thing having been "always there" at the same time we get the creeping feeling things are getting so much worse.
It does seem to be getting worse doesn't it? And the reactions to any complaints are getting shriller and shriller. But I don't remember this sort of crap going on with Silver Age books, or even in the 70's and 80's.
ReplyDeleteWe did have to deal with Stan Lee girls, who fainted, and moaned a lot, but at least he didn't rape and kill them off every other week.
I don't know if it is all a part and parcel of the latest "Let's kill another popular character!" theme that seems to be going on at the moment, but regardless, it is getting tiresome, dull and a bit on the sickening side.
Or maybe, I'm just really cranky today.
I'm leaning towards "backlash" too, but that's more because I'm reading The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi right now, and stories of heroism seems especially vulnerable to that type of reaction, than because I know as much as either of you about comics.
ReplyDeleteI've been reading comics since the late 1960's, and I think things have changed. The sexism stays the same, sure, but the type of sexism or how it's expressed is very different. In the seventies I rolled my eyes a lot (in the sixties I was young enough to just go "that's dumb"), but it's the more current stuff that actually offends me.
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