I was just doing that thing we blog-reading geeks do sometimes where we are reading a post on a blog and we follow a link to anther related blog and then we read that post and maybe a couple other posts on the linked site and we follow links on that site to some other posts on other sites and suddenly we’ve spent an hour discovering new stuff we didn’t know was out there. You know what I mean, right? There’s probably a “new media” name for this whole thing I’ve just described, but I don’t know of it. But I bet most blog-readers do it just the same.
Anyway, today I did that and I started following through some various threads dealing with topics related to feminist perspectives on pop culture, comics, etc.
And I feel totally, helplessly, hopelessly like crap.
I’m a privileged white guy who believes he is very liberal, very progressive, totally cool with alternative lifestyles and is as pro-women as it is possible for a privileged white guy in Western culture to be.
And that’s the problem. Apparently, it seems no matter how much I WANT to be the good guy, I’m still kinda filthy. Because I’m white, and a guy, and I read mainstream comics and I play roleplaying games and even though I think I’m against misogynist crap I still often subconsciously buy into stuff that objectifies and degrades women without even consciously noticing it most of the time. I let sexist stuff fly by all the time without calling anybody on it. And the stuff I DO notice, I sometimes rationalize away or excuse with a “they don’t know any better”.
Aw, I’m not making any sense. I guess I’m just saying that on days like this, when I allow myself to discover perspectives that kinda give me a reality-check, I find I’m not as far along the progressive track as I want to be.
But I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to stop reading comics. I agree that lots of women heroes are drawn with boobs that are ridiculous and curves that are unreal and costumes that are non-functional. I agree that in many cases women are treated as objects or plot points that do not actually have their own lives but actually just “affect” the true heroes, the men. But for all that, I love superheroes and comics. I don’t want to quit.
I’m a Batman fan, but I didn’t read the Batman maxi-series War Games. But, I did hear through the pop-culture grapevine after the arc was over about what happened with Stephanie Brown – a teenage girl who happened to be a hero known as the Spoiler. She was Tim Drake/Robin’s sometime girlfriend and eventually was taken in and trained by Batman, and she even became Robin for a short time before her gruesome assault and murder at the hands of a power drill wielded by a crap-ass Joker-ripoff villain named Black Mask. It seemed like an unfortunate and dumbass misuse of a character death just to amp up the drama, but other than thinking that, I originally let it pass me by. I didn’t read it myself, didn’t see the images the story used during Stephanie’s murder.
Well, later on I DID see some of the images, and they made me sick. Because it was right there. In several frames, as she was being tortured and killed, the artist drew her in sexually suggestive poses. Then I saw how this particular death scene was juxtaposed with the time in 1988 when the Joker killed Robin II, Jason Todd. When THAT happened, you saw nothing of the actual beating but the Joker grinning and Jason’s arm raised in self-defense.
Anyway, now the icing. Jason Todd’s death affected Batman massively, he has a memorial in the Batcave, and Batman has always considered it Batman’s fault that Jason died.
Stephanie has no memorial, DC comics editors are insistent that she’s not going to get one, and both characters in the story and DC Comics writers and editors have said that what happened to Stephanie was Stephanie’s own fault.
What the Frak? Whether this was conscious intentional misogyny or not, what are they thinking? What are people supposed to take away from this? What is the ethos or the creative agenda that DC is putting forward, conscious or not?
I’m at my wits’ end.
Read through these threads if you get some time and feel so inclined. I’ll try to do a better job of processing through my current emotions and maybe re-visit this later. But I’m kinda pissed off at DC right now.
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