SEXISM IN COMICS IS WITHOUT GENDER BIAS: PART THREE

Maybe the perennial attacks on comics as conveyances of sexist attitudes warrant a little healthy ridicule. The charge of sexism in comics has been around for at least a generation. And I’m pretty sure that in all that time it has had little effect on the way superheroines and other female characters are drawn.

The sexist charge turns on the issue of sex objectification: to portray women as sex objects turns them into sexual playthings, leaving individual personality out altogether. But the sex object gambit is simply rhetoric: in the early years of the feminist crusade, the function of the rhetoric was to draw attention to the gender inequality fostered by our culture. I had a woman friend whose last name was Goodman, and she seriously contemplated changing her last name to “Goodperson.” She didn’t, but if she had, she would have been deploying a rhetorical device to emphasize the extent to which maleness dominated Western culture. And the dominance of maleness effectively undermined any consideration of women as individual personalities.

Useful as such rhetoric may have been at the beginning, it long ago became a threadbare ploy. Everyone realizes—and even admits—that humanity falls into two sexes and that each is attractive to its opposite as a means of guaranteeing propagation of the species. Fashions in wardrobe emphasize those aspects of one gender’s physical appeal to the other. I naturally observe women’s fashions more than men’s, and everything about women’s fashions—not haute couture, but the design of everyday wardrobe—is intended to enhance the female’s appeal to the male. In short, sex appeal.

I observed some years ago that cleavage had returned; and breasts that bounce when their owner walks is likewise a fashion statement about sex appeal. And that is the way it should be. What shouldn’t be as a result is gender inequality in social or political or occupational realms. But surely we’ve progressed beyond sex object allegations as the means by which the inequality can be noticed and, perforce, remedied.

To the extent that there are other worthwhile things in life than sex, so should women (and men) be seen as something more than sex objects. And that requires a cultural maturity that goes beyond mere rhetoric. Those who criticize comics as sexist are charging into battle against sexism with out-dated weapons.

In short, some things deserve to be laughed at as a way of moving beyond them. So maybe my joke wasn’t in such bad taste as all that.

In the meantime, as we muster forces with newer weapons, we can still pause to celebrate the eternal feminine, which I do here. We don’t want the summer to fade away forever without a swimsuit issue; herewith—: