viz. - sexism

Starfire Revealed At Last: A Prelude to the Politics of Sexy Poses

clsloan — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 13:35:04 +0000

Image Credit: dc.wikia.com

In future posts I would like to delve into the ongoing conversation in the comic book world about the hypersexualization of the superhero women who fly, strut and kapow their way across the industry's glossy pages. Before reaching out to this debate in abstract terms, I would like to present one of the key images that catalyzed the explosion of feminist rage, feminist approval, and, quite frankly, some sexist reactionary defenses. In 2011, DC announced the New 52: a complete relaunch of their comic book line including, surprise, 52 titles all starting, or starting over, at issue #1. DC followers set the internet aflame with reactions, thoughts and feelings about the ensuing comics, and a particularly impressive inferno sprang up around Red Hood and the Outlaws #1. Why? Here's a hint. It's the reason this post is tagged Not Safe For Work.

Starfire, a lesser-known DC character outside of the comic book subculture, features in this issue, gracefully splaying her body in suggestive poses and sporting one of those magical, physics-defying bikinis of the lift-and-separate class. A quick comparison with a Tales of the New Teen Titans cover from the 1980s provides a thorough story, told through visuals, about this character's meta-bildungsroman. Both Starfires are alien princess and on-again-off-again members of various superhero teams on earth, but the visual shifts that have accompanied Starfire's growth distinguish these two particular avatars. The 80s Starfire, though still scantily-clad, demonstrates some of the abilities that help define her as a superhero. She soars vertically through the air, her long, impressively buoyant hair leaving a flashing trail beneath her, marking her ascent. A beam of energy shoots towards the viewer from her outstretched hand. Sure, she sports a smile, an immaculate coiffure and a bikini, but we are encouraged to see her as active, exercising the abilities that make her super. The text beside her “REVEALED AT LAST! THE SHOCKING SECRET LIFE OF PRINCESS KORIAND'R!” becomes wryly amusing when juxtaposed with the 2011 Starfire. Revealed at last, indeed.

Image Credit: read/Rant

This Starfire's bikini has gotten even smaller, unlike the other prominent attribute of this frame. Admittedly, this outfit is not meant to serve the purpose of a uniform, but that's part of the point. This Starfire is showcased, not as a superhero, but as a hypersexualized pin-up girl. The vapor trail that signaled breakneck speed on the old cover has become a languid, sparkly trail of ripples in the water, marking the sensual path of her Venus-like emergence from the sea. Where the 80s Starfire crosses an arm over her chest to fire a ray at some unseen mark, the new princess's arms are pulled back and away from her torso, drawing attention to her breasts. The creators emphasize her desirability by including the ironic thought “I'm not wanted here” beside her bikini top in hot pink text.

The debate about unrealistically-portrayed superhero women includes the following questions: Are depictions of sexualized women, like that of the New 52 Starfire, inherently sexist in their objectification of the female form? Contrariwise, are they inherently feminist in their celebration of women's sexual liberation? Is there blame to go around for the convention of the supersexy heroine? Are comic book creators morally or ethically bound to make women's bodies more realistic? Or is the audience at fault? The industry itself? Are these images harmful to those consuming them or harmless fantasies of a cultural beauty standard?

Of Ponies and Patriarchy

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 19:44:59 +0000

Image Credit: Center for Inquiry's Women in Secularism 2 Conference Website

Controversies over sexism have recently embroiled the online and in-real-life spaces of the gaming, fandom, and atheist communities. The sexist behavior that has sparked controversy and the backlash facing those speaking out against harassment are too hateful and ugly to discuss at any length here. I'll link to two examples with trigger warnings for threats of sexual violence: Rebecca Watson and Anita Sarkeesian. The controversy in the organized atheist community, however, has also seen an act of resistance and some levity in the face of abject misogyny by repurposing a visual trope well known to the community.

Since the early 2000s, the "new atheism" has attained prominence in the wake of outspoken and sometimes polemical writings. The most prominent of these writers are known as the Four Horsemen of New Atheism: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.

Image Credit: Paul O'Flaherty

The Four Horsemen name alludes to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation, and it attempts to play off religious beliefs that the atheists criticize and evoke the emotional fervor that all sides invest in religious debate. Images like the one above cast the four authors in an arrangement that speaks to a serious, knowing demeanor, but it also evokes a somewhat forbidding feeling as well with their faces partially obscured in shadow. The fact that all four atheists are horsemen hints at the trouble with sexism in the organized atheist community. (The presence of all-white horsemen also speaks to atheism's trouble with racial diversity, but that's an issue for another time.)

Despite the role of women in the history of freethought, as documented by Annie Laurie Gaylor, and the presence of women writers and activists working today, women remain marginalized at various levels of organized atheism. Attendance at conferences often has a gender imbalance, and the leadership of some advocacy groups resist engaging with criticisms about sexism in the community.

The visual markers of patriarchy in the atheist community are not clear to those unaware of the operation of male privilege, though a critical appraisal raises red flags. For example, artist Saejin Oh published the drawing below of famous atheists who had influenced his thinking.

Image Credit: Saejin Oh

The atheists stand on a rocky rise against a threatening sky in confident poses befitting superheroes in a panel of a comic book. They are exclusively men. Those commenting on his work remarked on the absence of women, to which he replied, "I couldn't think of one that influenced me as a person of reason, unfortunately." At the time, Jen McCreight, a prominent blogger and advocate for feminism in the atheist community, remarked that she found his explanation "sad," suggesting that this was yet another example of gender imbalance in atheism.

Image Credit: Unknown Author

Other images ostensibly serving an epidiectic function of building atheist community demonstrate similar sex biases. Both the images above and below circulated in the popular atheism subreddit. Each carries the text message "Fear not hell, for if it exists, you will find yourself in good company" embedded over or around the faces of famous people who are also atheists. While these collages do contain some women, the imbalance is still noticeable, and these images are only a small part of much larger problems in the community.

Image Credit: joebbowers

The backlash facing those standing up against sexism has been brutal. Jen McCreight recently suspended her blog due to stress from online harassment. Pteryxx, commenting on a blog entry about sexism in atheism, jokingly suggested that "Perhaps we now have our Four Horsewomen of the Feminist Apocalypse," referring to four prominent women bloggers. The commenter immediately after asked, "Is it terrible if I envision them riding out on My Little Ponies?" Soon, another commenter names embertine sketched out that vision.

Image Credit: embertine

More than four bloggers were eventually immortalized on ponies at Jason Thibeault's blog. In all the images, the bloggers bear weapons befitting an apocalyptic rider: whip, sword, daggers, mace and more. Oddly enough, in the first four images, the expressions of the riders contrast markedly with the expressions of the ponies. The riders' faces seem happy, while the ponies show grim determination and displeasure. These pictures hardly make up for the indignities the bloggers and other women in the community have faced, but they begin to push back on the sex imbalance in atheist visual rhetoric.

Excuse me, but there's some prejudice on your face

ladysquires — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:16:29 +0000

Photo credit: Pargon, Flickr Creative Commons

There are plenty of negative things to be said about the Tea Party, particularly in the wake of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally: that the movement's appropriation of the words and images of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln represents the deployment of unreconstructed white privilege at its worst, that it is controlled by corporate and media elites with a vested interest in obstructing a Democratic agenda (note the Tea Party's inexplicable support of the Citizen's United decision, which seems completely out of step with their populist ethos though perhaps somewhat consistent with the libertarian ideal of unfettered markets).

Yet I'm noting, with increasing annoyance, a problematic elementary school nastiness in criticism of the Tea Partiers and their ideologues. Note the photograph above, which was posted on Flickr as part of a series called "Teabonics." The argument of this particular photo and a few others like it seems to be that Tea Partiers are fat and stupid and therefore don't deserve to be taken seriously. Such a reading seems to be confirmed by the first comment, which says, "Resisance is Conservative for Fat Ass." And while, yes, I agree that there is a dismaying irony in signs like the following, given the draconian new anti-immigration laws in the Southwest, I find myself asking, "Really? Is this the level to which we must descend?" (Forgive the hackneyed syntax. I did not want to be accused of ending my sentence with a preposition).

Photo credit: Pargon, Flickr Creative Commons

Such tactics might not merit concern if they weren't being legitimized in corners of the blogosphere that I had previously found quite lucid and respectable. I came across the first photo on the widely popular humor site Political Irony, which accompanies the image with a link to the site LOLGOP, a blog (which is designed to look like the Drudge Report, performing a sort of rhetoric before you even get to the content) that makes the claim that "there may have been only 87,000 people there, but they ate for 1,000,000." LOL indeed. As far as I can tell, that claim is as unsubstantiated as Michelle Bachmann's assertion that 1,000,000 attended the rally and appears to be simply a jab at the rotundness of certain attendees.

Let's take stock of everything that's wrong with that, shall we? First of all, this line of critique makes several aggressively sizest assumptions about the relationship between larger body size, intelligence, and human worth. Furthermore, it eclipses the presence of the many progressives who happen to be fat (or poor spellers). Then we have the Flickr album labelled "Teabonics," obviously a pun on the term "ebonics," which was used for a time to describe African American vernacular speech. In other words, this pun posits a relationship between the quality of one's grammar or spelling, intelligence, and worth as a human being, a logic that has historically been used to exclude African Americans and other minorities from the public sphere. Given the relationshisp between illiteracy and poverty, this is also a logic that erases anyone from a lower socio-economic background.

In other words, this critique--"LOL, Tea Partiers are fat and uneducated"--enacts the same forms of prejudice found within the Tea Party itself by making overt arguments about what types of people and voices count in the political arena, i.e. no fatties, no poor and/or uneducated people, and by extension no one who fails to embody hegemonic ideals of middle class respectability. And don't worry, there's sexism in there to. Among the taglines on LOLGOP is the following: "Sarah Palin is the porn industry's idea of what a businesswoman looks like." Ok, sure, this could be a critique of the way in which Palin has been sexualized by the media, but I doubt it. Devoid of context (and there is no link on that entry), this appears to be a dig at Palin's appearance. How droll. As Melissa McEwan of Shakeville so aptly states, the sexist attacks (most recently in the Vanity Fair piece) on Palin's appearance and performance of motherhood are infuriating precisely because they "compel feminist/womanist women to come to her defense, or, at minimum, point out the absurdity of the coverage. (Bauerlein also tweeted: "'Sarah, these aides say, seemed comforted by having the children around, and she seemed lonely when they were gone.' Truly a monster.") To have feminist writers mock the paucity of legitimate criticisms in a hit piece on Palin can't have been the point."

As the wise man said, before removing the splinter from your friend's eye, first attend to the log in your own.

Knockout Ads: Sexism and the Super Bowl

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:04:21 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

Since almost everybody else on the Internet is commenting on this year’s Super Bowl ads, I couldn’t resist offering my take. The obvious issue with the Super Bowl ads this year is their fairly blatant sexism.

Whether declaring how men need Dodge Chargers because women emasculate them, or entreating men to “wear the pants,” the Super Bowl commercials addressed themselves to a male audience, as noted by the New York Times:

There seems to be a theme in many of the Super Bowl spots: the need to reassure men that they are as manly as they hope they are. That theme recurs in Super Bowl ads because so many of the viewers are men and so many of the products advertised are aimed at them.

Or, as James Poniewozik from Time put it:

Wow, Super Bowl ad men really hate Super Bowl ad women this year, don’t they?

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

The visuals of the Charger ad in particular, entitled “Man’s Last Stand,” are particularly creepy; the ad features a montage of men staring into the camera, ending on a closeup of one man’s intense eyes before shooting to footage of the car zooming over the landscape as the words “Man’s Last Stand” appear on the screen. The deadpan of most of the men’s expressions doesn’t directly express hostility, but the voice and the script, which dully intones that “I will carry your lip balm. I will watch your vampire TV shows with you,” implies a building hostility that can only be recovered through the car’s fast speeds.

What I find interesting about this, though, is how seemingly tone-deaf these ads are to a potential female audience. According to the Nielsen Company, this year’s Super Bowl reached more than 106 million viewers—it seems obvious that many of these viewers would be women, right? Why would they risk alienating a potential audience, many of whom are the people who go the store to buy the beer that their families will drink while watching Drew Brees and Peyton Manning? (At the Super Bowl party I was at, there were ten women and six men—and while the women weren’t all major football fans, we all watched the ads attentively.)

However, in looking at the most successful of the ads, the Snickers ad “Game” that featured Betty White, the message isn’t dramatically different. Betty White is actually Mike, who is “playing [football] like Betty White out there.” Once Mike eats a Snickers provided to him by an attractive girl, he becomes a young man again, as the tag line assures viewers that “Snickers satisfies.” While Betty White getting tackled in a football game is amusingly incongruous, the basic message of the commercial is still the same: being a man in sporting events is good, and whatever product makes you a “satisfied” man is to the good as well. Maybe the issue with the Super Bowl ads this year wasn’t their sexist content, but rather that the amount of sexism has to be tempered by equal amounts of humor. Women can take a joke, but just not too much of one, so advertisers need to not express their angst about the economy and their lost jobs to avoid knocking out a valuable audience.