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The friendly folks at Marvel have brought us this cover for the new issue of Heroes for Hire. I can't imagine hiring any of these women for anything, unless I should suddenly be in need of backup singers, but what do I know. Anyway, for all of you who loved the Mary Jane statuette but really wished there had been more crying and alien spooge, Marvel has got you covered!
In the comments to the post I linked, though,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nindulgence asked some really interesting questions from the perspective of someone, like me, who knows slash-fandom mores well and the comics universe only tangentially. Here's part of the text of that thread:
"do find it interesting that many of the arguments against common depictions of female characters in comics (e.g., infantilization, excessive victimization, sexual objectification, domestication) have also been made against common depictions of male characters in fanfic--and that some of the same responses have been offered by fanficcers when those depictions have been protested by male readers (e.g., we're not writing for you; don't read the fanfic if you don't like it; isn't it funny that you men are threatened by our sexual desires, etc.).
There are of course, huge differences in the fact that fans are rating their kinkfic and kinkart as adult and posting it in semi-private public spaces, versus the comics companies which are marketing theirs commercially as good clean fun for preteens...but I do see similarities in the kinks themselves.
Which makes me wonder--hypothetically speaking--if objectification of male comics/collectibles characters were offered in equal quantities and rated in the same way as objectification of female characters (e.g., if pleasure-slave Obi-Wan statuettes were just as canonical as and rated no more strictly than and sold side-by-side with slave-girl Leia), would that be a satisfactory outcome for female comics fans?"
First, the correlationsnindulgence notes are very real, both in terms of what our kinks often are and how we defend them, so what she's asking is a 100% relevant and reasonable question; I'm glad she asked it. She's also wisely anticipated the most obvious objection, the truth-in-advertising issue: we call our kinks "kinkfic," "smut," and "porn," where Marvel appears utterly oblivious that that's essentially what they're churning out. Within the thread, liviapenn also eloquently deals with the second-most-obvious issue, which is that "equal treatment" isn't necessarily equal treatment when there's no such thing as gender equality on this green earth, and that the issue of sexual violence in the real world is not gender-neutral. All of that's true and good and worthy of being said.
But I still found myself thinking about the hypothetical: what's the ideal? Possible or impossible to achieve, what would I like to see being done differently in superhero comics, from the POV of a feminist who likes superheroes and would like to like comics again? I spent a fair amount of time last night pondering the question, and as I usually need a concrete example to hone in on when I tackle something like this, I kept coming back to PleasureSlave!Obi-Wan and PleasureSlave!Leia -- so if I talk about them, please understand that I'm not saying anything specifically about those characters or Star Wars or whatever; it's just a way of thinking-in-things about these ideas.
My conclusion -- and I don't know how much within the fannish mainstream I am on this, but here we go -- is that I wouldn't want to walk into my Local Comic Shop and see *either* of those statues. I would find it skeevy not *only* on gendered grounds, but because both statues violate what I feel is a serious and important boundary between source material and fannish treatment of source material.
I *adore* kinkfic. Some of my very most favorite fics involve such fandom greatest-hits as aliens-made-them-do-it, objectification, humiliation, bondage, slave-fic, and a gorgeous rainbow of semi- and noncon stories. I own my kinks, including the ones that are socially and politically awkward, and I think that being able to read and write kinkfic is good for me.
But what I'm reading is fanfiction -- it is one fan's creative use of a pre-existing and shared canonical vocabulary (setting, characters, narrative) to explore some particular thing that interests the writer, and then putting it out there for me to love, hate, or ignore. By the rules of fandom as I understand the fannish game, there's a sharp divide between what happens in fanfiction and what happens in canon that boils down to: what a fanartist does in her work affects the mini-universe of that work, but not the meta-universe of the show. And that matters to me, a lot.
Part of what I understand to be deeply offensive about the Heroes for Hire cover is that it actually alters the canonical characters: they didn't use to look like that, and they didn't use to be deployed in the service of plots like the one that cover art implies. What Marvel has done by putting out that cover is to write what is essentially kinkfic into the source, which for most people means that the way they view the source now has to shift to accomodate these new elements. The women we see here looking like artfully bloodied Bratz dolls in chains used to be these women. But they aren't anymore, and that's canon. That's a fucking loss to everyone with any stake in that fandom, in a way that no fan use of their images and characters could ever possibly be.
What I'm saying is that part of the pleasure, for me, of PleasureSlave!Obi-Wan is that there is a "real" Obi-Wan (yes, he's not a real person; don't e-mail me. *g* The game of fandom establishes a distinction between what characters are "really" like and what they are "really" not like, and we rely mainly or entirely on canon to do so) who isn't "really" owned and used by any other person in sexy, sexy ways.
To go with our PleasureSlave!Obi-Wan statuette, let's imagine a theoretical tv show: The Padawan Adventures, where an eighteen-year-old Obi-Wan travels the galaxy with his master, and every week he is menaced by villains, who tie him up and rip his clothing and his skin so that we see him (in the show and, of course, on all the commercials and print ads) half-naked and glistening and splayed open and frightened and kinda hot before his mostly-inevitable rescue/escape. For me, personally? No, I wouldn't be pleased. I would think it was gross and exploitative and disrespectful, and I wouldn't accept "But it's on the Oxygen Network, so it's for/about women's pleasures!" as a defense.
Give me the same story, the exact same story, as an ongoing fanfic serial, and I would dig the hell out of it. Maybe that's unfair; I can think of several reasons I might feel that way, but I don't know that any of them are bulletproof against accusations of rampant hypocrisy. But if the question is "What would make you happy?", then there it is. Not canonizing your sexual kinks would make me pretty happy.
I can even think of some actual non-hypothetical examples of female media transgressing those boundaries in ways that skeeve me -- not in comics and television, which are just not diverse enough to give women space to be sufficiently skeevy (the skeevy glass ceiling), but in genre novels. Most of Laurell K. Hamilton's work skeeves me out, because I think what she does is create characters who are essentially blow-up dolls and plot points in order to orchestrate increasingly byzantine and unrealistic sexual situations rife with consent issues and exploitation. They would make perfectly serviceable fanfiction, but that's not what they are, and I find them appalling. On the slash tip, there's Poppy Z. Brite, whose work I think fetishizes pretty young male bodies in situations that conflate pain and homoeroticism; Brite is a better writer than Hamilton is, and some of her stuff I think does more than just that, so in some cases I give it a pass in spite of my intermittent deep discomfort. But my discomfort is real.
What freaks me out about Marvel's actions lately is that I can't read their sexual fantasies about Misty and MJ as merely their own private sexual fantasies; I have to read them just as much as a franchise whose desire to indulge their private sexual fantasies is increasingly taking precedence over any desire to depict the female heroes as genuinely heroic or their female love-interests as genuinely loved. That poisons the well for me in a way that no fannish endeavor of any kind ever could.
In the comments to the post I linked, though,
nindulgence asked some really interesting questions from the perspective of someone, like me, who knows slash-fandom mores well and the comics universe only tangentially. Here's part of the text of that thread:"do find it interesting that many of the arguments against common depictions of female characters in comics (e.g., infantilization, excessive victimization, sexual objectification, domestication) have also been made against common depictions of male characters in fanfic--and that some of the same responses have been offered by fanficcers when those depictions have been protested by male readers (e.g., we're not writing for you; don't read the fanfic if you don't like it; isn't it funny that you men are threatened by our sexual desires, etc.).
There are of course, huge differences in the fact that fans are rating their kinkfic and kinkart as adult and posting it in semi-private public spaces, versus the comics companies which are marketing theirs commercially as good clean fun for preteens...but I do see similarities in the kinks themselves.
Which makes me wonder--hypothetically speaking--if objectification of male comics/collectibles characters were offered in equal quantities and rated in the same way as objectification of female characters (e.g., if pleasure-slave Obi-Wan statuettes were just as canonical as and rated no more strictly than and sold side-by-side with slave-girl Leia), would that be a satisfactory outcome for female comics fans?"
First, the correlations
nindulgence notes are very real, both in terms of what our kinks often are and how we defend them, so what she's asking is a 100% relevant and reasonable question; I'm glad she asked it. She's also wisely anticipated the most obvious objection, the truth-in-advertising issue: we call our kinks "kinkfic," "smut," and "porn," where Marvel appears utterly oblivious that that's essentially what they're churning out. Within the thread, liviapenn also eloquently deals with the second-most-obvious issue, which is that "equal treatment" isn't necessarily equal treatment when there's no such thing as gender equality on this green earth, and that the issue of sexual violence in the real world is not gender-neutral. All of that's true and good and worthy of being said.But I still found myself thinking about the hypothetical: what's the ideal? Possible or impossible to achieve, what would I like to see being done differently in superhero comics, from the POV of a feminist who likes superheroes and would like to like comics again? I spent a fair amount of time last night pondering the question, and as I usually need a concrete example to hone in on when I tackle something like this, I kept coming back to PleasureSlave!Obi-Wan and PleasureSlave!Leia -- so if I talk about them, please understand that I'm not saying anything specifically about those characters or Star Wars or whatever; it's just a way of thinking-in-things about these ideas.
My conclusion -- and I don't know how much within the fannish mainstream I am on this, but here we go -- is that I wouldn't want to walk into my Local Comic Shop and see *either* of those statues. I would find it skeevy not *only* on gendered grounds, but because both statues violate what I feel is a serious and important boundary between source material and fannish treatment of source material.
I *adore* kinkfic. Some of my very most favorite fics involve such fandom greatest-hits as aliens-made-them-do-it, objectification, humiliation, bondage, slave-fic, and a gorgeous rainbow of semi- and noncon stories. I own my kinks, including the ones that are socially and politically awkward, and I think that being able to read and write kinkfic is good for me.
But what I'm reading is fanfiction -- it is one fan's creative use of a pre-existing and shared canonical vocabulary (setting, characters, narrative) to explore some particular thing that interests the writer, and then putting it out there for me to love, hate, or ignore. By the rules of fandom as I understand the fannish game, there's a sharp divide between what happens in fanfiction and what happens in canon that boils down to: what a fanartist does in her work affects the mini-universe of that work, but not the meta-universe of the show. And that matters to me, a lot.
Part of what I understand to be deeply offensive about the Heroes for Hire cover is that it actually alters the canonical characters: they didn't use to look like that, and they didn't use to be deployed in the service of plots like the one that cover art implies. What Marvel has done by putting out that cover is to write what is essentially kinkfic into the source, which for most people means that the way they view the source now has to shift to accomodate these new elements. The women we see here looking like artfully bloodied Bratz dolls in chains used to be these women. But they aren't anymore, and that's canon. That's a fucking loss to everyone with any stake in that fandom, in a way that no fan use of their images and characters could ever possibly be.
What I'm saying is that part of the pleasure, for me, of PleasureSlave!Obi-Wan is that there is a "real" Obi-Wan (yes, he's not a real person; don't e-mail me. *g* The game of fandom establishes a distinction between what characters are "really" like and what they are "really" not like, and we rely mainly or entirely on canon to do so) who isn't "really" owned and used by any other person in sexy, sexy ways.
To go with our PleasureSlave!Obi-Wan statuette, let's imagine a theoretical tv show: The Padawan Adventures, where an eighteen-year-old Obi-Wan travels the galaxy with his master, and every week he is menaced by villains, who tie him up and rip his clothing and his skin so that we see him (in the show and, of course, on all the commercials and print ads) half-naked and glistening and splayed open and frightened and kinda hot before his mostly-inevitable rescue/escape. For me, personally? No, I wouldn't be pleased. I would think it was gross and exploitative and disrespectful, and I wouldn't accept "But it's on the Oxygen Network, so it's for/about women's pleasures!" as a defense.
Give me the same story, the exact same story, as an ongoing fanfic serial, and I would dig the hell out of it. Maybe that's unfair; I can think of several reasons I might feel that way, but I don't know that any of them are bulletproof against accusations of rampant hypocrisy. But if the question is "What would make you happy?", then there it is. Not canonizing your sexual kinks would make me pretty happy.
I can even think of some actual non-hypothetical examples of female media transgressing those boundaries in ways that skeeve me -- not in comics and television, which are just not diverse enough to give women space to be sufficiently skeevy (the skeevy glass ceiling), but in genre novels. Most of Laurell K. Hamilton's work skeeves me out, because I think what she does is create characters who are essentially blow-up dolls and plot points in order to orchestrate increasingly byzantine and unrealistic sexual situations rife with consent issues and exploitation. They would make perfectly serviceable fanfiction, but that's not what they are, and I find them appalling. On the slash tip, there's Poppy Z. Brite, whose work I think fetishizes pretty young male bodies in situations that conflate pain and homoeroticism; Brite is a better writer than Hamilton is, and some of her stuff I think does more than just that, so in some cases I give it a pass in spite of my intermittent deep discomfort. But my discomfort is real.
What freaks me out about Marvel's actions lately is that I can't read their sexual fantasies about Misty and MJ as merely their own private sexual fantasies; I have to read them just as much as a franchise whose desire to indulge their private sexual fantasies is increasingly taking precedence over any desire to depict the female heroes as genuinely heroic or their female love-interests as genuinely loved. That poisons the well for me in a way that no fannish endeavor of any kind ever could.
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Leia, Obi-Wan, and Male/Female Sexuality in Public Space
Date: 2007-05-25 07:07 pm (UTC)From:And in such a situation, I would totally agree with you. The reason I used slave-girl Leia as a comparison is that her gold bikini is so often affectionately referenced in pop culture (e.g., on "Friends") as having been a key moment in a lot of young boys' sexual awakenings. And I remember there being debate at the time of RotJ about whether it was appropriate to portray the famously turtle-necked Leia in this way--debate that seems almost quaint in retrospect given that by today's standards, Leia's slave-girl outfit offered ample coverage and was actually rather practical and athletic.
Leia-as-slave-girl snuck under the suitable-for-teens bar not just because we have a double standard about the degree to which male and female sexuality is normalized in film and advertising, but also because it was a single sequence in a longer series of movies that depicted her as powerful, smart, competent, funny, etc.; and because the sequence put her temporarily in jeopardy without depriving her of those canonical qualities: against the laws of physics, she succeeded in killing Jabba with her bare hands, and one of the most famous stills of bikini-Leia had her competently firing a huge gun. So, looking back on it now, I think it's kind of cool that such a kick-ass female character made such an impact on so many pubescent boys...and that's the kind of thing I meant when I was arguing for eroding that double standard by introducing a little more normalization of male characters in similar situations (I was thinking along the lines of a pre-prequel trilogy, with eight hours or so of content of fabulous Jedi competence, say half-an-hour of which involves having to infiltrate the central headquarters of Planet Harem-Pants-and-Eyeliner *g*). Because I know that at present Harem-Pant-Obi-Wan would be perceived as more controversial than gold-bikini Leia (in the same way that Brokeback Mountain was perceived as more controversial than much more explicit het love stories, or that male underwear ads are protested against as indecent by people who barely blink an eye at female ones) and I'm irked by that double standard.
I think that there have certainly been inroads, and pondering this the last couple of days, I've realized that a lot of fandom's classic source texts are ones that do provide a PG or PG-ish version of that in extremis roller-coaster experience to potential fans. I mean, classic Trek did it all the time. ;-)
And the recent LotR movies offer a fascinating example of the kinds of anxieties that are raised when we see male characters in classic woman-in-jeopardy situations: the fact that Frodo was small and beautiful and under threat from all directions and in need of protection and that his strength was manifested in endurance rather than fighting was, I think, disconcerting for many male fans because that's not the way male heroes are supposed to behave.
In another example, given the recent controversy over the MJ statuette, I think it's interesting that the most iconic image from the movie versions so far is that of MJ peeling back Spidey's mask to kiss him: she's not only the sexual initiator there, but also a potential threat (to the secrecy of his identity)...resulting in a very subtle roller-coaster moment.
So I do see some slow steady chipping away at that double standard...but even if we got to the point where it was completely eliminated, I suspect there would still be an imbalance in the subjects depicted by the comics and collectibles industries, because of significant differences (in general) in the things that men and women collect and in the ways that they purchase them.
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Canonical Harem Pants on Young Indy
Date: 2007-05-25 09:51 pm (UTC)From:Apparently George Lucas gets more points for gender parity than I thought. ;-)
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Re: Leia, Obi-Wan, and Male/Female Sexuality in Public Space
Date: 2007-05-26 03:55 am (UTC)From:I have previously put Carrie Fisher in Han Solo's costume (http://naefox.livejournal.com/10730.html), gender switchery is sometimes the best way to explain to those who have never thought about the situation, exactly what the issues are.
Re: Leia, Obi-Wan, and Male/Female Sexuality in Public Space
Date: 2007-05-29 08:42 pm (UTC)From:Carrie looks fab in her Corellian gear! It reminds me a bit of the early Ralph McQuarrie sketches in which Luke was a girl.
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Re: Leia, Obi-Wan, and Male/Female Sexuality in Public Space
Date: 2007-05-29 10:36 pm (UTC)From:Luke was a girl? I feel like that should explain something, I'm not sure what that is though. =)
Genderswap Art; Luke as a Girl
Date: 2007-05-29 11:07 pm (UTC)From:And the art in response to Frank Miller's "I have a date with Bruce Wayne!" version of Vicki Vale as well--I recall some rather fetching hypothetical superhero covers coming out of that brouhaha. :-)
Luke was a girl?
Yes, apparently George Lucas hewed a little closer to The Hidden Fortress in his early conception of Luke. If I recall correctly, there's a lovely costume drawing of a female Luke in The Art of Star Wars--she had short hair and a very cool bodysuit that looked a bit like a less-regal version of Princess Amidala's white catsuits from the later prequels.
You can get a bit of the idea here (http://www.ralphmcquarrie.com/galleries/SW/sw.html).
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Re: Genderswap Art; Luke as a Girl
Date: 2007-05-29 11:39 pm (UTC)From:They are up on Girl-Wonder here. (http://counterpunch.girl-wonder.org/)
Thanks for the link, looks very cool. I wonder how it would have changed the story, it certainly messes with how the character sits in your head. In a good way though. =)
Re: Genderswap Art; Luke as a Girl
Date: 2007-05-31 05:12 pm (UTC)From:I hadn't seen that full "How to Draw" piece before, though I had seen some of the guerrilla art inspired by it, and man--the assumptions inherent in something as basic as how you make your character stand (because of course superheroines keep their hips cocked all the time rather than standing up straight and strong)!
And I see that the first article on that page makes a much more succinct version of this point: Solution: Parity in sexual emphasis. Either tone down the women, or tart up the men.
Heck, yes. Preferably both.
~