I'll be returning to my series on role-playing games soon, but this blog is intended to hold a variety of articles. This time, I'm going to look at an issue I've been hearing a lot about in the past few days – the portrayal of women within comic books.
I'm not an expert on comic history, but I'm pretty sure that the original super-heroes of western comics were basically all men. They were also aimed at a young male audience – teaching them important values such as contempt for the civil rights of criminals, a robust sense of patriotism and a willingness to beat up funny-looking trouble-makers. What made the stories such a hit was the concept of seemingly normal people wielding superhuman powers. It was a fantasy everyone could relate to and project themselves onto – while the limited number of abilities possessed by each differing character allowed for spirited debate about which favourite hero was 'best'.
At some point the question seems to have been asked “if these people can do things because of powers no-one really has, why can't women do the same things with the same powers?” Female super-heroes therefore emerged to battle super-powered foes at a time when women were not even used as front-line fighters in the publishing country's military. Eventually, the comic publishers figured out that they had female readers as well and the number and roles of these characters began to improve.
Today, there are a very large number of famous female super-heroes (the exact gender ratio is academic when only a handful of people in the world can name every last canonical character). They are also capable of handling themselves and driving the plot – many males have been crushed by females and one female character recently re-sculpted the entire Marvel world to suit her wishes. Yet female comic fans still complain that their gender is subjected to institutional and offensive levels of sexism – an opinion that some male commentators readily share. Why is this?
The first and most obvious issue that gets pointed out is the costume design. While men typically wear fully covering if not exactly 'concealing' outfits, women are almost invariably portrayed with a large amount of skin on show. Some people even demonstrate this by mocking up equivalent male costumes.
More important than the costume, though, is the anatomy beneath it. Both male and female characters are portrayed in a highly idealised fashion – which is often used as a counter-argument. However, for men this takes the form of a highly muscular athlete/ body-builder physique whilst for women the emphasis lies on supermodel builds with remarkably large chests.
The thing about the male build is that it can be approached with training. Super-heroics are dangerous physical things and it makes sense that the best of them would be in terrific shape. Obviously if you plan on making Captain America (whose only super-power is that a serum gave him the perfect human physique) a major character, handing out perfect bodies like confetti is bad story-telling. Even so, it is forgivable.
The women frequently boast very large thighs, but seldom carry any corded muscles around on their own forms. More importantly you cannot 'train' your boobs bigger, so they must all naturally lie at the extreme end of the curve (although I'd love to see a story revealing the dark secret that they'd ALL had implants). Having been blessed with such a body, they naturally prepare for battle by selecting something that both lifts and separates – clearly the sports bra is a totally misguided design.
As a result female characters look like they've been idealised by the MALE mind. Although the male characters are probably good-looking, they also represent a male ideal. Remember how I said that super-heroes were popular because people project onto them? The male characters are designed for men to do just that. Female characters are designed differently because they fulfil an inherently different role – allowing male readers to project INTO them.
This is reinforced when combat actually starts. Although both sexes are effectively posing for the camera, female characters tend to contort themselves with all the naturalism and dignity of a porn star in mid-shoot. This isn't universally true (and DC appear to be bigger offenders than Marvel) but there are many, many examples of heroines who look as if they've been snapped in half in order to get their breasts and butts pointed at the fourth wall simultaneously.
Defenders of the status quo tend to argue that these woman are liberated and in control of their sexuality, seeing no need to hide their femininity away and even using it as weapon. This may be true for some of the provocative costumes, but it seems like convenient characterisation to say that every super-heroine wants to make opponents (and co-incidentally readers) stare at her breasts. Where anatomy and positioning are concerned, however, these women are not sexualized because they choose to be. They are sexualized because the universe they inhabit is forcing them to be that way.
Is it any wonder that female readers have little desire to project into these 'empowered role models'? The women are clearly being presented for the male reader, leaving female readers feeling as though they don't belong here. Yet when they complain they are argued against and ignored.
Some might claim that women should not be presented in this manner at all. I don't entirely have a problem with it as an expression of male fantasy – what you like and what someone else deems politically correct aren't always the same. It could be argued that selling such a skewed view of the world to young people is irresponsible – but if you take all of your ideas from comics you won't grow up well-adjusted anyway. What publishers shouldn't do is sell the result as being a balanced view of the world for both genders – and what they definitely shouldn't do is to tell any woman who feels alienated by their work that there is something wrong with them.
It might seem unsurprising that publishers are wary of changing their winning format by reducing the amount of guy-pleasing eye-candy. After all, males probably make up the majority of the readership (especially with the content regularly offending the women). This raises an interesting question – if female characters are sexualized and the audience is male, why haven't female characters taken over the comic universe?
There is no doubt that a superhero's true power comes from his sales figures. The only reason Batman constantly gets called in to help Superman or Green Lantern is that his title rivals theirs and Spiderman takes out more foes than most of the X-men for the same reason. Now, Catwoman and Harley Quinn are both iconic sexual fantasies throughout the entirety of geek culture and both have had their own titles. Given how much less interested nine out of ten male readers would be in staring at a picture of Batman, why haven't they taken off enough to reduce him to a background figure in his own setting?
The answer is simple. Remember how I said the success of super-heroes was down to the ability to project yourself onto the hero? Well, apparently readers don't do that across the gender divide. (I actually spent my childhood successfully projecting onto giant shape-shifting alien robots, but I might have an unusually fertile imagination). Presenting a character in a sexual fashion also drastically reduces the viewer's ability to do this, as female comic readers and men forced to watch Twilight will readily attest. As much as most men can enjoy the fantasy of being savagely conquered by Catwoman or going for ride on the Harley* they are actually more entertained by the fantasy of BEING THE FREAKING BAT. Sex sells, but when comic readers buy their dreams other things sell better.
As a result, I believe that comic publishers would have far more readers to win by making genuinely aspirational female characters than they would lose in the process. Anyone who is just looking for soft porn isn't going to stick around anyway – mainstream comics have yet to match the flesh displays of several daily newspapers and cost far more.
I'm actually quite interested in what a genuinely aspirational female superhero would look like. Back when speculation was rife about who the new Bond would be, there was a repeated suggestion of the possibility that the new Bond would be a woman. I didn't think this could work and I still don't. The reason is not that it would be any more absurd for a woman to do all those things than for James himself to pull them off, but because 007 is such a very male ideal. Bond does what almost every bloke would on some level like to do and we all want to be him for it. I think he's a jerk and his life is obviously horrible on many levels, yet his man card will always be more impressive than mine.
It seems unlikely that Bond is as irresistible to women in the real world as he is on screen, but I bet a great many have fantasised about him at some point. But do most women fantasise about BEING a vodka-swigging bedpost-notcher who crushes all that oppose them with sweet guns, fast cars and high-end electrical goods? I'd venture not. Accordingly, Jane Bond would never be embraced as an icon of her sex the way James has been.
Comics emerged from male fantasy and it's obvious that in many ways they haven't emerged very far. Although raising female superheroes to the point where they are just the same as the men would be an improvement, will transplanting female protagonists into male life-paths produce the same resonance with the female audience? Or do the very primal assumptions behind the super-hero mythos have to be re-examined with a feminine eye? I don't claim to have the answer to that one – but it would be nice to know that somewhere within the big publishing companies someone was asking that question.
*Arkham City reference. Stop throwing things at me.
