Feminism in Comics Redux

Tom Foss continues to show he's a thoughtful, intelligent comics blogger. His post
Walkin' on, walkin' on broken gla-a-ass is must reading. And here's my comment, so I can preserve it here.

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Well, I've always felt that feminism means making the world a better place for everybody. It's not to make things better for one sex or the other. I can see that the pressures on males is often unfair, too. While there are gender differences, there are also individuals within their gender who don't fit the so-called norms and therefore are under great pressures to conform. Sexuality isn't one thing or another; it's likely a bell curve for each with the 2 bell curves overlapping. Some women will be stronger than some males and some males will be stronger than all women, and so on.

And if a man beats his wife, but also his son, is he a woman hater or simply hateful? And does a wife beater hate women or is he simply a self-hater lashing out at the most convenient target? Misogyny is a tough label to apply, IMO, so we end up with people's impressions of what's presented in the media and since we each have our own definitions, we vary greatly in their application. A bit of Wittgenstein here. Disclaimer: I was a psych major with a minor in Philosophy.

And while we all would probably agree we want well-rounded characters, that does include seemingly two-dimensional ones, ones who are cliches, because cliches exist because people like that do exist. It's hard at times, especially with supporting characters, to flesh them out when they get so few panels per story. Some writers excel at it, others not so much.

And when so many different people get to write/interpret these characters, it muddies the water, so to speak, because they write and develop characters differently, have different foci in their writing (ie story-driven vs character-driven) and sometimes, we get outright contradiction, not just confusion.

I still firmly believe that if more women were writing and drawing mainstream characters for the major publishers, things will improve. But I don't want scantily clad females to disappear, anymore than I want bulging muscled males to disappear from comics. That's part of the superhero genre and I'm not ready to say goodbye to it.

I suppose if so many people weren't so uptight about sexuality, this would be viewed differently. What I want is to see more variety. But it's hard to differentiate a woman who flaunts her sexuality because she's proud of it vs one who does so out of insecurity vs a woman who doesn't flaunt her sexuality because she's insecure vs one who doesn't because she is secure and sees no need. The surface appearance is flaunted sexuality vs not flaunted, yet the reasons are much more varied.