Point the first: Some of the statue's defenders are complaining that "most" of the complaints are coming from people who don't read superhero comics. I'm like, look: Here's the mass audience superhero comics lost years ago, and they're telling you exactly why they don't read superhero comics.
Point the second: A nerd culture girl friend of mine was telling me about her arguments with nerd culture guys, who were defending things like Clyde Caldwell paintings and Frank Cho pinups and the like. She concluded "Most guys don't want to hear that women are turned off by porn culture."
Now that threw me, because I draw my line at pre-feminist symbols, and tend to consider the near-porn stuff relatively harmless. And I just made the categorical statement that exploitative imagery cannot make a competent female action hero lead counter-feminist, which is basically an overt defense of a big chunk of (in those terms) porn culture.
So now I have to think some more. I think I can still carve out a line between counter-feminism and porn culture, but it's going to be based on defining feminism so that it doesn't address sexual behavior except in the same terms that it addresses other behavior, and then separately treating sexual behavior as an inherent property of the human.
But, yeah. Even if Zedwoman is a profoundly feminist book, with a lead who's a competent, independent woman with a career and a healthy and functional set of relationships with both men and women, maybe all that doesn't matter if the book is drawn in a purely good-girl style and the lead character makes porn face in every other panel.
Update: I left out a good line from my friend: "What makes the work feminist or anti/counter/etc. is the patterns." You look at the genre or the entire oeuvre of the artist as much or more than you do the individual work to find the patterns that tell you what the work is saying.
Posted by Greg at May 18, 2007 11:06 AM
I'm leery of saying either that it must or can't be - I think it is sometimes the case that a lot of good intentions and good work can be canceled out or severely weakened by the sexist pandering, and that it's worth considering cases.
I recently got a useful insight from some of the women I play World of Warcrat with. We were having one of those low-keyed late-night guild chats, and the subject of sexy/sexist/hypersexualized armor sets for female characters came up. The women spent some time kicking it around, and converged on this take: most of them said that there are times they like the fantasy females with the uneal proportions and skimy gear. PMS, bouts of stomach flu, and times of job stress all came up as occasions for this. What they all wanted is for it to be a choice, something with viable alternatives.
(This is sometimes the case in WoW and sometimes not. Essentially all female spell-casting characters in classes that use cloth armor will end up spending several levels in what amounts to a one-piece bathing suit and stockings, because the bonuses for it are just so much better than any alternative at those levels. On the other hand, female warriors and paladins usually have their choice of desirable armor sets from metal pasties and thongs to full body coverage.)
That makes sense to me. Any paticular instance of anything in a set is going to take on some implications from its context. I know that some disability-related hassles seem worse when there are no good outcomes available, and I can easily imagine that feeling much the same when it comes to sexist conventions. It's not, said my guildmaes, that they automatically and always object to having their character look like charter members of the Fighting Hookers of Azeroth, because sometimes that's fun/funny for them. It's when they must choose that kind of look.
I guess this amounts to agreeing with part of what Dirk Deppey had to say about the subject over at Journalista: someone's got to be making the alternatives and getting them to market.
What narks me about WoW is that a male character wearing the *exact* same clothes looks completely different. The pasties-and-thong combo won't be anything like as revealing on a male character.
IIRC, Mike Sterling of Progressive Ruin just said that quite a few of the readers of the more exploitative bad girl titles like Lady Death are female and he speculated that this might be that for allt heir fault, they still show competent powerful women having important adventures, though only dressed in lingerie.
Hypersexualized, fetishized, and objectified depictions of women would not be as big of a problem as they are--and I think they are--if they weren't so omnipresent and didn't reinforce prejudicial reactions. One of the worst things about stereotyping is that it reduced people to objects in a small number of allowed roles.
Most--almost all--women enjoy being sexual agents at some times, and being a sexual object can be part of that. But no woman wants to be limited to being a sexual object at all times.