SEXISM IN COMICS IS WITHOUT GENDER BIAS: PART ONE

Among the traditional criticisms of superhero comic books is that they are sexist because of the way women were depicted — typically in scanty or skin-tight attire that emphasizes healthy protrusions for breasts and lustily rounded mounds for buttocks. As you can readily imagine, this criticism is more that I can sit still for. And so, squirming in my chair, let me propose a short safari of exploration and, if we’re lucky, discovery.

We start out at a familiar domestic crisis—one that has been going on for as long as there’ve been toilets — when, at the very onset of every marriage, the wife insists that her husband remember to put the lid down. Every wife launches into wedded bliss with this demand. Oddly, no husband that I ever heard of has ever complained to his helpmate that she never leaves the lid up.

No, and thus the fundamental inequity that distinguishes the relations between the sexes is re-established with every nuptial bond, and the same injustice is perpetuated throughout society at large in all its cultural venues. And so it is that men are forever reconstituted as the compliant gender. And because we are the compliant gender, we never complain that the charges of sexism in comics always conveniently neglect to mention the emasculation represented in the visual ravages committed on male anatomy.

I refer to the way superheroes are depicted. In many of these images—particularly those full-frontal poses with legs akimbo—it is obvious that something is missing. Spider-Man, Superman, Iron Man and all the rest do not appear to be equipped with the usual male package. They have no genitalia. They have all been completely, and thoroughly—and literally—emasculated. The artists who draw Spider-Man and all other superheroes dutifully obey the laws that govern comic book illustration and deliberately eschew making pictures that hint at male genitalia. But not without unintended consequences.

As Freud established long ago, a repressed impulse always seeks a way to express itself—as water will always seek a downhill path. Prohibited from depicting that part of the male anatomy that Anthony Weiner has lately brought into prominence, artists unconsciously seek respite from repression by drawing boobs and buttocks on female characters. They exaggerate these obvious attributes of the sex, focusing on them. The explanation for this preoccupation is simple: hooters subconsciously substitute for weiners. And so what so many observers see as sexism of a supposedly anti-feminist persuasion is actually a perverse manifestation of the male’s unconscious aspiration to equality between the sexes.