In the Superhero anime Tiger and Bunny, there are only two lady heros out of the full ensemble of hero characters, and one black guy who is also gay.
But then the show IS japanese, which is much more of monoculture than the US or Australia so any other ethnicities are a win, AND the whole relationship between Tiger and Bunny gets really ambigious towards the end… so there may be more than one gay character ;)
That turned out to be a pretty clever Superhero show and pretty entertaining. It could have benifited from more female characters though and those that were there deserved more from it:
-The Dragon Girl character kept on being told she should be more girly and wear dresses even though she absoloutely didn't want to. It took being compelled to look after a baby to get her girly side to come out and she eventually conformed: that's fucking bad.
-The other character, Blue Rose, goes from being very independant and forceful to mooning over one of the male main characters. Again, bad, but not as bad as poor Dragon Girl.
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Irrevenant and Kim Luster are BOTH left hands with magic powers… WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? O_O
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
Sexism in comics and pop-culture?
ozoneocean wrote:Sexual roles in anime and manga is another kettle of sushi. Though some of the strongest funniest female characters I've seen were in harem animes.
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Irrevenant and Kim Luster are BOTH left hands with magic powers… WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? O_O
As far as foreigners in anime, Asians in Western shows are tokens so it's only fair they treat Westerners in their shows as tokens. Watch Fate Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works for an anime that is almost entirely Western characters from Gilgamesh to Arthur and some mage German families.
As for lefties… that is another topic and best left for another time. I'll just say that old word for left : sinister and what that implies in Modern English.
*Smacks you and your pop-culture!* :D Ooooo I just know I'm gonna get brought up on sexist harrasment charges :D
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Mine and I Irrevenent's Avatars were used to great affect by Fallopiancrusader's 'After Party' pic in the 2014 DD Awards - the hands-themes was brought up…!
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As for lefties, turning to biology (and chunking pop-culture into the can where it belongs :D), lefties tend to do well in sports and in cultures where hand-to-hand combat is important. The thinking is Righties' brains and bodies aren't programmed to dealing with someone who works 'the wrong way' and are thus at a disadvantage, whereas Lefties have had to deal with a world of Righties since birth and thus have gotten use to it… Bottom line is lefties can be see as exceedingly dangerous, and when someone is dangersous and also different, that's all it takes for prejudices and stereotypes to kick in :D
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I guess the reason lefties aren't even more successful (through biology and culture) is because they may also be saddled with other issues that come with being flip-flopped: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204083204577080562692452538
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(edit: I know pop-culture has it's place - I just being the funnies :D)
Pop-culture is what the thread is about though: TV, film, comics, books, fashion, plays… etc.
As for left handedness being an advantage in fighting, it's all because of training, not inbuilt.
- People are trained for right hand dominant styles because most are right handed (in sports too, the non fighting kinds as well).
- You can train to have a left hand dominant style instead, or even ambidextrous, going against your natural handedness, but I'm told it's not really too much of an advantage.
ozoneocean wrote:Different culture, hence different kettle. Asian culture has a lot of different views and assumptions about genset and sexual roles that often make little sense to the casual Western viewer.
It's the same kettle: it's all pop-culture. :)
I'm talking about all current pop-culture though. There's not that much difference.
If we're talking differences, the UK, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand and sometimes even Canada share certain things that the US simply doesn't… not to mention South Africa! (It's more different than you'd think in many small but significant ways)
The world's major English speaking countries can understand a comon pop-culture despite other cukture differences, adjusting for them is a akill we use to cope. We apply the same skills to any culture we come across.
Sorry to disappoint, but I'm right-handed. The reason the picture is of my left hand is that I took the photo using my right. :)
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"Talk is cheap, and people like to be thought well of. Teenage boys can say all they want about women being objectified, but they're the ones more than anyone else going out and buying those gamer magazines with the scantily clad vampire fighter on the cover. What people *really* want is going to be reflected in their behaviors, in their purchasing habits, in what sites they click on, and that's what ultimately drives companies to make the decisions they do."
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That's actually a really interesting example. Publishers put that on the magazine covers in order to appeal to male customers and male customers by them (Aside: the average gamer is much older than their teens nowadays. That may or may not be reflected in magazine demographics).
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But is correlation causation? Are people buying the magazine because of the cover? Despite it? Regardless of it? Are the publishers just smearing peanut butter on the floor to keep the tigers away? After all, they've always done it and there's no tigers, right?
It'd be a brave company to be the first to stop smearing and take the risk, no?
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"I should note, as a disclaimer, that I'm not much of a gamer personally, and never was even back in high school. But even from what little I can remember, and from what I do pick up about the current gaming universe, there already do seem to be plenty of female characters in games (Samus from ‘Metroid,’ Chun Li, Lara Croft, Aveline de Grandpre from ‘Assassin’s Creed'), so I don't even understand why this is something we're supposed to be upset about. Because there aren't “more” female characters? How much is “more?” When is “more,” enough? Likewise, there are plenty of butt-kicking female characters in comics and movies ('Kill Bill,' the entire ‘Alien’ franchise, ‘Colombiana,’ ‘Salt,’ ‘Lucy,’ the list goes on). I've probably seen more female police detectives on TV proportionally than exist in any metropolitan police department. And I've *definitely* seen more sword-wielding warrior vixens than ever stalked the Earth. So it's hard for me to get too worked up about it."
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I think a fairly reasonable rule of thumb is "is it representative?". If one in two people are women and one in twenty video game protagonists are women then that's not real representative. If one in twenty Americans are asian and one in a hundred Hollywood movies star an Asian that's not representative (and it gets worse if you start looking beyond the action movie genre). (That one also gets complicated because the biggest Hollywood stars of Asian origin are also the ones who can pass as non-Asian, like Keanu Reeves and Dwayne Johnson.)
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One in eight Americans have a disability. One in a hundred television characters do. And where they are represented it tends to be as stereotypes. (Random trivia fact: For Avatar, Sam Worthington studied how to accurately portray a paraplegic getting in and out of their wheelchair. Someone made the decision that it didn't look laboured enough.)
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"No one's going to argue that women are absolutely ignored as leading characters, and if you're upset that entertainment companies aren't meeting your own personal arbitrary benchmark, well, that's *your* benchmark, not theirs."
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Representativeness isn't actually an *arbitrary* benchmark - it's about accurately reflecting the society around us, and that's objectively measurable.
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But yes. That's why we should always be leery about leaving important social goals like representation in the hands of companies and blindly expecting them to action them without significant pressure being exerted. Weirdly enough, the people who aren't being underrepresented tend not to have a problem with it.
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Though in this case, the stupid thing is that better representation makes good business sense too. Audiences are always on the hunt for new and interesting stories and perspectives. The media company that realises that, for example, 'Empire' is fascinating to everyone, not just black people is the media company that gets to start printing money hand over fist…
ozoneocean wrote:And because of these assumptions of iniversality we get things like CNN branding anime and manga Child P0rn. (No link, just google it) Different cultural assumptions that lead to major misunderstandings of things that are casually accepted in some culutres and offensive to others. We DO NOT cope or adjust all that but just impose our assumptions on everybody else.
I'm talking about all current pop-culture though. There's not that much difference.
There is this veneer/facade and then there is underlying assumptions that are fundementally different and most people do NOT cope with them, but ignore them and go along their merry way as the oblivious tourist. Then there is the soldier's experience overseas. Talk about not getting another culture you're immersed in. Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam.
Show of hands, who as a writer feels they have dealt the most with cross-cultural assumptions about sexuality and gender roles in his/her comics?
Could just happen to be me. That's scary. The guy who is the most wrong-headed in this discussion is the one who actually writes about it the most.
I never said all aspects of culture were universal (although your own fouss on biological determinisim would argue that you think differently yourself…).
My intention was to state that we ourselves look at the smorgasboard of pop-culture as one dish that we sample from depending on our tastes.
It doesn't matter if you don't understand something in exactly the same way a native speaker of the original culture would, if it DID we'd all be limited to only evaluating stuff produced by our own countries, maybe even within our own cities, or own families! o_O
We have the mental tools and expereince to be able to look little wider and we're all bright enough to evaluate pop-cuture products on our own terms anyway.
- i.e. "How do I relate to this?" as opposed to "How would a repressed lesbian mongoliain yak farmer from the 16th century repond to that?"
I don't think it's "sexist" to have fewer female characters in a comic, movie, or game. The worst you can say is it's "less interesting" or "lacking in variety". Having Black Widow as the only woman in Avengers isn't a slight toward women, it's design choice. And while I think a superhero team consisting of people with a wide range of sizes, shapes, superpowers, and gender ratio is a more ineteresting superhero team, it's an artistic design choice that I don't think should be policed. Designing something more for boys is not a crime or sexist, and neither is designing something for girls. Comics aren't a governemnt service entitled to all people equally, they're a product made by people creating the stories they want to make. That's why I don't think Marvel and DC owe us female characters.
"Will my comic be more interesting if I add women to it?" "Will more autonomous and interesting women open up my comic to new audiences?" THESE are the questions people should be asking… not trying to find ways to apply shameful labels to people who are merely making artistic decisions and not really harming anyone. I think a lot of people would find the answer to those questions to be "Yes" in many cases, but it's up to them to decide that.
Hawk, I'm not talking about policing here, but these are way more that just "artistic" or "creative choices". With big film projects WAY more stuff than that is taken into account. These things are very carefully aimed at a mass audience, and excluding women from them IS pretty bad.
Even the "aimed at boys" theng. No movie is aimed at boys these days. Kids movies are unisex and films like Avengers are aimed at something like 14 to 35 year olds. Now saying that THOSE films are "primarily for men" (if you were to), would be SO wrong, so out dated… The world just doesn't work that way anymore.
Women like comics. They like action, they like violence. It's time we stopped artifically excluding them by imagining we're still living in the 1940s.
It's not automatically sexist to have fewer female characters. But the glaring question there is "Why did you make the design choice to have an unrepresentatively small number of women in this work?". Once you rule out premise-specific reasons like "Umm, it's set in a men's prison?" the answer to that is often sexist assumptions like "Because more people will see the movie if it has more guys in it".
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In the case of the Avengers, this is actually the extension of an *old* bit of sexism - it's based on a comic universe that has historically promoted the male characters at the expense of female ones. Note that this includes making the characters male in the first place - there's no reason that Captain America, Iron (Wo)man or the Hulk couldn't have been women other than that they're relics of a more sexist time where "soldier", "scientist" or "inventor/entrepreneur" was automatically assumed to mean "guy". (The existence of people like Joan of Arc and Marie Curie make that a sexist assumption even back then - and google "Women have always fought"
Hawk wrote:
I don't think it's "sexist" to have fewer female characters in a comic, movie, or game. The worst you can say is it's "less interesting" or "lacking in variety". Having Black Widow as the only woman in Avengers isn't a slight toward women, it's design choice.
I would tend to agree with you irrevenant, but for the fact that while those assumptions were certainly in force, the comic buying audience those properities were aimed at WERE male and that's what they wanted to see and so that's why they bought them.
I know that sounds similar to the position of El Cid and the rest, but we cannot be too retroactive with this stuff.
We CAN redress the balance now, and the culture has shifted so that women consume and enyoy these genres just as much s men do (idiotic to pretend they do not).
I don't agree with gender shifting established characters though, I don't think that adresses the situation properly at all.
I don't think you're advocating that, but it's a trend and I thought it'd be interesting to bring up.
I think a fantastic example of how to do things right are proprties like Xena and Mad Max Fury Road.
Xena was a totally new, made up character who was a female spin-off of the very popular, well established Hurcules. Her series went on long after his ended and massively eclipsed his in popularity. Now if they'd just made Herk a woman instead that would have absoloutely sucked.
In Mad Max Fury Road the totally new character Furiousa is introduced and she steals the show. She was brilliant. Now imagine if they'd have just gendershifter Max? It was have confused and annoyed the audience and reduced her power and impact has a character.
ozoneocean wrote:
I would tend to agree with you irrevenant, but for the fact that while those assumptions were certainly in force, the comic buying audience those properities were aimed at WERE male and that's what they wanted to see and so that's why they bought them.
Can you confirm that fans wouldn't have bought comics at least as voraciously if they'd had a more representative mix of gender? That seems fundamentally unprovable to me. (Note that this assumes comparably-written characters - the pool is tainted a bit when comic producers assume that idiocy like "Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane" is all the female audience wants).
I know that sounds similar to the position of El Cid and the rest, but we cannot be too retroactive with this stuff.
We CAN redress the balance now, and the culture has shifted so that women consume and enjoy these genres just as much as men do (idiotic to pretend they do not).
We can indeed redress the balance now. A good way to start would have been to select some female Avengers for the roster in the first movie. I'm more of a DC guy, but to me, The Wasp (who was an original Avenger in the comics), Ms/Captain Marvel (either Monica or Carol), Tigra, She-Hulk and Spider-Woman all seem like reasonable to include from the beginning. (Wasp you could give a secretive origin to lay seeds for the Ant-Man movie).
I don't agree with gender shifting established characters though, I don't think that adresses the situation properly at all.
I don't think you're advocating that, but it's a trend and I thought it'd be interesting to bring up.
I think a fantastic example of how to do things right are proprties like Xena and Mad Max Fury Road.
Xena was a totally new, made up character who was a female spin-off of the very popular, well established Hurcules. Her series went on long after his ended and massively eclipsed his in popularity. Now if they'd just made Herk a woman instead that would have absoloutely sucked.
In Mad Max Fury Road the totally new character Furiousa is introduced and she steals the show. She was brilliant. Now imagine if they'd have just gendershifter Max? It was have confused and annoyed the audience and reduced her power and impact as a character.
It's funny you should say that because I just gender-shifted my character, Chaos. xD He wasn't exactly what you'd call 'established' though.
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Generally I agree with your points. The best way to do that is generally through legacy characters (and Fury Road could easily have starred Max's daughter Max). One problem with DC's constant rebooting is that every time the DCU starts getting more diverse, they hit the reset button and we get rolled back to the same bunch of white dudes (plus Wonder Woman) who founded the Justice League in the 1960s. -_-
Pop culture evolves. So has the preception of women in our regular culture but has it evolved to the same magnitude in pop culture or are we still stuck in the virgin/whore/mother acchetype mindset of the 1950's?
Obvious examples of this virgin/whore mentality are pop singers. Taylor Swift as virgin and Miley Cyrus as whore to use two recent easily recognizable examples. Though Taylor Swift is doing her damnest to break it as did others like Alannis Morrisette before her. Maybe they're a subset of "whore" bitch. But then everywhere you do it can be said that's all you see women as. Virgin, whore, bitch, or mother. That is sexism. Women can't be independent thinking people like a male, if she expresses herself she's a bitch. If she expresses her sexuality, she's a whore. So if unattached she's left with virgin. And if in a relationship it's "when are you going to have kids?" Mother.
The same extends into comics and pop culture. That was the appeal of Xena. She didn't fit the archetypes. Some owuld argue she was bitch, but she transcended that to become an individual. Though it can be said she became a new archetype GRRL. You know the butch Amazon stereotype which be a suset of bitch or just a guy with boobs. But again Xena evolved past that. That's why I like Black Widow in the Avengers movies so far. She also doesn't easily fit the archetypes and seems independent oweing not a little to Emma Peel perhaps.
Now that was a gender stereotype busting role. But then it was the 1960's. And Dame Diana Rigg is still doing it with her role on Game of Thrones. That is one series that is has all the female characters fit the archetypes. Arya is bitch, Sansa is virgin, Cersei is mother(the bitch protective side) and the silver haired queen is whore. That character is trying to evolve past that but the archetype sticks all too well so far. And now she's getting married and be a queen to try to become mother.
That is sexism. Or at least one view of it. (can you say Upworthy?) Fits everything into categories and there is no busting out of them unless you turn pop culture on its head. It is pretty reductionist and the categories are socially programmed assumptions not reflections of reality? I don't really try to figure it out just use it as more grist for the mill in my writing and world-building.
Ozone, you're not really getting my point about who things are aimed at. I'm saying that NOBODY is entitled to have a commercial product aimed at them, and that unfortunately includeds women. If somebody wants to make a movie where EVERY character is a man, it's not "sexist", it's just risky and possibly narrow-minded. Artistic license and capitalism allow an artist to make those decisions. Luckily most people are smart enough to be more inclusive, because they understand that it gives their product a wider audience. They shouldn't be required to do so.
Now, please understand, I'm not saying "Comics and movies don't need women", I'm saying that I disagree with the idea of "This comic artist didn't put enough women in his comic for my liking, so now I'm going harass him on twitter and write snarky blog articles, because everything must be designed to my taste."
There are plenty of movies with no female characters. They tend to be about situations where you would not see a woman typically war movies. In fact some critics find the inclusion of women into such films intrusive and deters from the film. The intrusive and unnecessary romantic subplot in Pearl Harbor is one notable example. The excellent film Sahara (1943) is one without anyou females and is arguably better for it. A movie where the women are just objects is far worse than one with no women at all.
Are we rehashing stuff? I'm totally fine with that! :D
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I love female action heroes, and I hope to see more of them in future movies and other media, but I really do hate when they feel 'shoehorned' in, or when they're filling some sort of 'quota' thing! The female bunny (Lola) in Space-Jam felt like that to me - "Don't call me doll…" It felt like an active attempt to include diversity while also showcasing sexism… and it also felt fake to me…
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It's better to just let it happen naturally, organically… It worked with the Hunger Games movies. Someone wrote a set of novels that became bestsellers, and someone else decided they'd make great movies - there was no drive or agenda to make the protagonist female…. She just… was! Twilight is similiar (though I hate those…sorry)
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It seems the thing that is needed most is more female creators (who naturually tend to write more from the female side - we write what we know…) to actually go out there and start doing some 'creating'. Then, I believe more female characters would become popular via the normal creative process and market, and then we just watch where it goes. I think it's already happening that way to an extent, but more females have to get involved…
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I once heard someone complain about there not being enough female guitar players! Well, girls, get out there and learn to play guitar dammit!! Trust me - Guys would LOVE seeing a girl shred on stage!!
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As insinuated here, I think it might actually be damaging to make a super-heroine movie just because someone feels there's a shortage of super-heroine movies. I think that sort of motive/agenda shows through in the final product and the story suffers because of it - because we (maybe subconsciously) know what's being done!
t is an Internet law. Threads of a certain length start repeating themselves and should therefore be closed. It is just like the Nazianz simile regarding politics. The discussion is effectivelying over once a political is called Nazi or fascist unless they are demonstruly so.
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From my perspective, what you're saying is true, but it's also viewing the issue at a different level than I'm talking about.
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Essentially a lack of gender balance in a work is a significant symptom. It may or may not lead to a diagnosis of sexism depending on other factors. There are many possible causes for that particular symptom.
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Yes, you could employ a blunt instrument and say "X% of comic characters need to be women" to treat the symptom. But that just imposes a duty rather than genuiny increasing understanding and empathy. It doesn't treat the underlying disease of sexism, it just adds a modifier to its outcomes.
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The disease can only really be treated by getting to the underlying assumptions and unravelling them.
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In terms of "noone is entitled to have a product aimed at them", I agree. And I totally agree that harassment is a completely pointless way to try to change someone's mind. But expressing a personal opinion is entirely reasonable: "Your comic is great. Have you thought about having more women main characters? I enjoy your comic a lot and that would be icing on the cake.", for example. That opens a dialogue rather than a lecture.
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I partially disagree about snarky blog articles. Personally, I think snark is overrated and often unhelpful. But a blog is your personal space to express how you feel about things - using it to bitch about things you don't like is half the point of a blog. I think it's exactly the right place for people to put their snarky comments about X.
Hawk wrote:
Ozone, you're not really getting my point about who things are aimed at. I'm saying that NOBODY is entitled to have a commercial product aimed at them, and that unfortunately includeds women. If somebody wants to make a movie where EVERY character is a man, it's not "sexist", it's just risky and possibly narrow-minded. Artistic license and capitalism allow an artist to make those decisions. Luckily most people are smart enough to be more inclusive, because they understand that it gives their product a wider audience. They shouldn't be required to do so.
Now, please understand, I'm not saying "Comics and movies don't need women", I'm saying that I disagree with the idea of "This comic artist didn't put enough women in his comic for my liking, so now I'm going harass him on twitter and write snarky blog articles, because everything must be designed to my taste."
PS. The whole Miley Cyrus thing is weird. Like Britney before her, she got reclassified from "virgin" to "whore" practically overnight.
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It's like, as a society, we can't wrap our heads around the fact that kids grow up despite the fact that we all did it. Young adulthood is a time for experimentation and working out who we are. We all do stupid crap as young adults. It's not our whole identity.
PS. The whole Miley Cyrus thing is weird. Like Britney before her, she got reclassified from "virgin" to "whore" practically overnight.
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Looked at cynically it could have just been a marketing strategy to cash in on her becoming an adult. Look at the Japanese "idol" culture for a funny reflection. It's almost like they produce the idols on an assmbly line, push it then turn to the next one. There are marketing cynics who seize on trends in society to aim products at demographics. Most of pop culture is perception not reality. Making someone see something in a certain way can have them believing it is that way even if it's not. And then humans aren't generally good at critically analyzing their perception to get a deeper more accurate view of reality. They're also really bad at being able to determine long term trends or seeing the "Big picture"
This is especialy true in pop culture because it often seems to be an eternal "NOW" and it is very hard to remember anything from last week let alone that exactly the same thing happened 10 years ago or it's been trending that way since the 1920's or something. Let alone noticing the incredible similarities of the crumudgen/cynical point of views of Pop culture from Socrates to Mark Twain to today. They each say the same thing. Sports team fandom and soccar riots is the same phenomenon as the color riots in ancient Byzantium.
Human society has always followed similar patterns. Each even have those who insist that this is a unique time without percedent in history. It can lead to the perception that these patterns are somehow innate in the human animal. After this long discussion I'm almost beginning to think nature and nurture are the same thing in different settings and are so entwined that it's impossible at this stage in the game to tell them apart without really, really stepping back and looking at so many different cultures across the world. You got to get an idea at how culutral differences in interpretation spell out species similarites that can't be seen in the otherwise eternal NOW of pop culture. What are the similaries between an Inuit a modern American and an African Bushman? That's innate in the species. Looking at the varying interpretations of a pop phenomenon between Asian and Western culture is society. But seeing how the same idea developed thousands of miles apart without interaction… well human minds arrive at the same conclusions about certain things nearly every time. Problem solving is a trait innate in the species and often the same probelms can be solved the same way again and again indpedently of each other. That's innate in the species.
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