Is Sexism the Problem or a Symptom?

Mike A couldn’t make the meeting last week, but wanted to weigh in on our topic of sexism in comic books. Here’s his thoughts:

Weirdly enough, I was kinda primed for this discussion earlier in the week.

As a big comics’ guy, I was reading about Grant Morrison’s upcoming work on Wonder Woman, and I can across this article. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/21/grant-morrison-wonder-woman

It reveals a bunch of facts that I didn’t know about Wonder Woman.

  • Created by a psychologist named William Marston (who also invented the Lie Detector) and his wife Elizabeth.
  • Wonder Woman was modeled after the couple’s 18 year old girlfriend. I guess they were big ‘free love’ proponents and lived in a polygamous relationship that would still be controversial today.
  • Marston believed in ‘loving submission’ and thought that men should submit to woman and let them control the world. They were big bondage fans.
  • They created Wonder Woman because they felt that Superman was far too masculine.

Unfortunately, in the years that passed, a lot of those inspirations were lost and Wonder Woman became more of a ‘home maker’ superhero through the Golden Age. Since then she’s been written as a strong empowered woman who can hold her own against any of the world’s supermen.

Despite the best efforts of the creators, the character was molded to meet what the ‘audience’ wanted. It was all to sell comic books. And for an industry who’s original audience was teenage boys, that meant bigger boobs, skimpy outfits, and yeah, fantasy characters.

But the key word here is Fantasy. Comics are often written as an escape from real world, where you belive a man will fly. And with fantasy comes ‘extremes’. Superman is an unrealistic depiction of a man and so is Batman too actually, it’s not just Wonder Woman there. Super villains have often been written as ‘psychos’ and the comic companies get a lot of flack for it’s depiction of ‘mental illness’ and the characters ‘treatment’. You’ll never eliminate Sexism any more than you’ll stop doomsday machines from blowing up Metropolis every month.

I know that there are lots of other female heroes in comics, and they get a lot of flack for being ‘over-sexed’ and drawn as fantasy sex objects. But in the last 10-15 years that I’ve been reading comics, I’ve seen a lot of these characters become much more than that stereotype.

Of course it’s slow going. Trying to undo decades worth of story telling and perception while still selling those books is a tough go, but I feel like it’s going. It doesn’t hurt that there are great female creators in the industry right now, and that number is only growing too.

So yeah, I really don’t think Sexism is the issue in pop culture. I think it’s a symptom of a larger problem. I think it all comes down to our society itself. Everything we do is built upon the old, and that propagates a lot of old mentalities and thoughts, we all harbour some of our parent’s mentality in us, and they have some of theirs.

I don’t think you’ll ever eliminate the -isms of the world, but just having these discussions and people taking it upon themselves to challenge the status quo will go a long way to burying them from pop-culture. Of course, who knows what the next generation of pop culture will be offended by.

And part of that will be my fault. I will not let my son marry a droid.

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