InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Are you coming and going"

muffinator (muffinator) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-05-30 12:53:00

Entry tags:

char: marvel girl/phoenix/jean grey, char: polaris/lorna dane, char: scarlet witch/wanda maximoff, creator: joe ahearne, creator: serge lapointe, creator: steve kurth, publisher: marvel comics, title: fantastic force

Stay classy Marvel
I looked back a bit and I haven't seen this posted but I just joined so I might be mistaken in which case forgive the repeat.

So when I looked through Uncanny X-men on a recent bout of masochism my righteous feminism sense were all ready pinging and on the last page of Fantastic Force they went wild. (There's some alternate timelines involved before people go 'where did this come from' on me.)

Photobucket

Edited because I don't want the focus to be on my comments on comics and on the panel itself.

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luxshine
2009-05-31 04:36 pm UTC (link)

Uhm, I wash by hand, my neighbours wash by hand, and I know a lot of people who do so. Even so, I never heard someone claiming she was washing the costume by hand... what I heard -and the image the statue gave me, individually- was that MJ was sorting the clothes before putting them in the washer, which is actually part of the whole process of washing the costume, even if we don't see her putting it into the machine.

In any case. Intent does matter, but so does the perception the public has upon the image. Taking your Batman example: Sure, in the comics he isn't a pedophile, and he has never even thought about Dick that way, but has that ever stopped subtext-reading?

The main problem with the cover was that it was too much like a tentacle-rape hentai cover. Even when that wasn't the intent (Because I'm going to give everyone involved the benefit of the doubt), that was the end result. Given that the artist is japanese herself, I highly doubt that she wasn't aware of the sexual connotations of a tentacle in her own culture!

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kitty_tc_69
2009-05-31 05:04 pm UTC (link)

If you're going to condemn things for being "too much like" entirely other things, that's an awfully wide brush you're going to be tarring with. Again, using "subtext-reading" or whatever other euphemism you want to use for READING THINGS INTO SOMETHING THAT AREN'T THERE as the basis for an accusation is a Straw Man argument, plain and simple. You're not allowed to make something up and then accuse someone of it. You're just not.

As to the MJ statue, I do hope you're not going to use "putting his costume into the washer" as an example of horrible, sexist domestic servitude. Because I find it hard to even take that seriously. Seriously, the steps of doing laundry with a washing machine consist of "1. Dump clothes into machine. 2. Add soap. 3. Press START button." If it takes you five full minutes, you're doing something wrong. It's a task that can be done during the commercial break of your favorite TV show. Is that really what you want to stake your argument on?

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	luxshine 2009-05-31 07:04 pm UTC (link)
	The anonymous was me. I didn't realize I had signed out. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

kitty_tc_69
2009-06-01 09:15 pm UTC (link)

Ok. You obviously are of the school that images exist without social context, and that no one ever has the right to see said context. You liked Heroes for Hire, didn't saw anything wrong with the covers, and are mad as hell that the book was canceled. But you know, as much as you have the right to be angry, we have the right to be angered by 'deathtrap' covers that depict heroines as damisels in distress.

Heroes end up in distress sometimes. I gave a nice list of male heroes in distress in one of my earlier posts.

And the "school" I'm of is the one that says that feminism needs to focus on real harm and real instances of misogyny, like this "Hysteries" garbage that's the topic of the post we're on, rather than stir up tempests in teapots about what something "looks" like. Like I said, as a likely result of this controversy, we lost a very rare female-majority book that displayed the kind of strong female character portrayals we have all too few of to begin with. It also had the very real potential of costing a female artist (again, a rare thing in western comics) the chance at gaining more work. It's damned sad when the male EIC of Marvel has to risk the ire of feminists to hire a female artist, but that's what it's come down to. Way to defend women, there!

The fact is, if the feminism in comics movement gets labeled as extremist and shrill, it's a surefire ticket to getting our voices ignored. Then, when there's real issues to combat, like female characters getting the fridge or actual instances of rape being used as cheap story fodder (Identity Crisis, anyone?), our power is dulled by the incessant cries of wolf.

There's a damned good reason I referenced the concept of a circular firing squad.

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