Comments on Buzzfeed's real women in comic book poses

[JimB]

I would also think that would set the male standard of interest very, very low, meaning that this shouldn't be an issue in the first place. And given the outright tantrums that come from things like more realistic proportions (complaints that a woman with a three-inch waist is fat, etc), I would think the opposite.

I think the example of the "fat" woman is a symptom of the same disease: Her waist gets divorced from any context, whether the context of her specific body or the context of what's even humanly possible, so sexiness and the lack thereof are being determined by individual body parts.

I'll also say that it's my general experience the men who complain about real women not looking like comic book women are not men who have ever had sex with a real person. I think a lack of experience combines with a frustration against the women who aren't fucking them combines to play a big part of such a hypercritical and defensive attitude: Complaining that Wonder Woman's proportions and poses are physically impossible is an attack on the woman they've decided they deserve, and is therefore an attack on them.

(I just know that paragraph is going to piss off people who think I'm talking about them and I should probably delete it to save myself some trouble, but you know what? Fuck it. Members of the Escapist forums, I didn't name any of you on my list of frustrated, misogynistic virgins because I don't know you. If you think what I'm saying applies to you, then that's between you and your conscience, and I'll thank you to leave me out of it.)

It's more surprise that this would be a mass appeal sort of thing.

I'm the wrong guy to talk to about that. My sexual attraction doesn't lean toward effort-filled posing; I like casual sexy. Tee-shirts and jeans, and the way the woman wearing them crinkles her nose when she smiles. Like that. I get the reaction to Squirrel Girl, but as someone whose understanding of human beings involves putting himself in their shoes, these are shoes that don't fit me well enough to feel like I can walk in them, y'know?

It seems like a lot of this art is aimed at people who really hate women. Not saying it's actually true, just seems that way.

I'm willing to say it's true, just because I've seen how the people at my local nerd shops treat women. Don't even get me started on the girl who was cosplaying Frank Miller Robin for a promotion at the new comic shop in town who wouldn't stray from the six-foot-six Wookiee next to her for fear of what the fanboys would do to her without her permission.

 

[moggett88]

Putting aside the whole sexuality issue, why are they women involved surprised they can't match the poses? I don't read comics but I gather the superpower every hero and villain has by default is "trained to physical perfection" - part of what sets them apart in universe is that they are stronger and more flexible than ordinary people.

I've seen real life gymnastics on TV and know there's no way I could match the shapes those people get their body to make...

 

[JimB]

It's a non-issue for several reasons, but the obvious main point is sexism. Whoever is offended by this has the responsibility to avoid it and respect that others are not offended and that the designs are made the way the artist likes it.

No, we don't. I am a comic book fan; I'm in my comic shop every Wednesday as close to 11:00 as I can manage to pick up my books and to bullshit with the clerks about whether the snakes in Doctor Strange #2 should be voiced by Key and Peele (obvious answer: yes). I think the medium is brilliant, is America's version of Greek mythology and deserves to be treated with respect for the unique cultural expression it is; and I do not think its fans or its creators are showing much self-respect when they keep drawing impossible fantasies of juvenile sexual wish fulfillment weakly justified as "Free market! It's what the audience wants!"

Well, I don't want it. I want to be able to share All-Star Superman, which is otherwise an almost flawless triumph of symbolism and larger-than-life heroism compressed down into a package of goodness and hopefulness it still seems possible for real people to attain, with my female friends without blushing and feeling ashamed that Lois Lane gets stripped naked and put in a shower for no other reason than to show me her ass. I want to share Kingdom Come, possibly the most brilliant miniseries of our time, with my female friends without having to avert my eyes so I won't see the expression on their faces when they notice Wonder Woman is the only female character with more than two lines of dialogue and she's required to date Superman for no apparent reason. Fuck, when I pick up a book like InSeXts because I have a weirdly specific fetish for Victorian lesbians--that's right, I picked it up because I wanted to look at pictures of women with elaborate hairdos and wooden frame bell skirts having surreptitious sex with one another, and I don't apologize for that--I want the women to have a reason to be in love and have a relationship beyond just both liking the taste of vaj so let's kill my husband and get illegally married on that basis.

I am not going to walk around the comic shop with my arms extended in front of me and my hands at eye level so I can try to block from my view covers of fairy tale girls dressed like strippers just emerging from behind the curtains taking their walk to the pole, Smilomaniac. I am going to complain about them because I think they're trite garbage unworthy of cultural preservation, and I am not going to hold back because you expect me to respect your disrespect of my opinions or because you just don't want to hear it. I do not owe that to you, and I frankly owe it to myself and to the industry to do better than be silent and pretend I don't see anything worth criticizing.

 

[cthulhuspawn82]

I didn't need to click the link to know that "real women" meant women of a clinically unhealthy weight.

When defending comics, I dont see why people need to make excuses for why these poses aren't about sexual gratification, they absolutely are. The argument should be "Yes, its for sexual gratification, whats wrong with that?" When I walk past the romance books and see a half naked man on the cover, I dont get triggered.

 

[JimB]

You do see that you're excusing your want of removing things that others enjoy, so that you can feel comfortable, right?

I can't say I care for your attempt to imply that I am concealing some kind of guilt here, but moving past your "excusing" terminology, yes, I am one hundred percent advocating for the removal of juvenile bullshit that drives wedges between me and some of my friends based on the insistence that I need to see women in fuck-me poses whether it's relevant to a story or not. I didn't know that was something so subtle about my message that people would feel it needs to be decoded. I want my favorite artistic medium to stop trying to mine the hole in my right pocket for my money, and I want the medium to make people I care about feel more welcome in the environment surrounding that medium. I feel no more bad about that than I expect you to feel bad about trying to remove my voice so you can feel more comfortable.

 

[JimB]

By the way, don't kid yourself into thinking that I have any option of silencing you - I'd never do it even if I could.

Then your line about how people who are offended have a duty to stop looking and shut up is very weird.

In fact, you're the one advocating silencing others because "feels."

I do not understand what this means. Are you saying the only place in the world Frank Quietly (I'd love to know what his real name is) can draw females asses and/or action shots with the camera centered on a woman's ass is in the books I want to read? That if he hears I don't want him to explore his ass fetish in books I like and decides based on my preference not to draw asses in the center of the camera, then there is no other place for him to express his love of asses?

My standpoint is one of reasonable behaviour, that if you do have complaints you start by looking inwards and dealing with it.

That's not reasonable behavior. That's condescension. "You think you feel bad about the way your friends tell you your favorite works of art make them feel uncomfortable, but you probably really don't, and even if you do, tough shit."

 

[Sight Unseen]

It's not a sexist conspiracy to demean women, it's just something that the majority demographic for the medium likely finds appealing.

I never said it was.

I didn't mean to imply that you specifically were saying it was, but that it seems to be some kind of theme on the internet nowadays that people blame "the patriarchy" for these kinds of things. I apologize if you feel that I put words in your mouth unfairly, it was not my intent.

Saying "its the free market at work" doesn't necessarily justify it either. Ubisoft keeps releasing broken, unfinished games. It isn't the right thing do but people are still buying it. Gearbox actually made money off of Colonial Marines and they're still in a position where they could, and likely will be, sued due to the awful quality of the game and blatantly false advertising. How about cutting out content from a game and selling as day one DLC, such as the prothean DLC in Mass Effect 3? Its certainly profitable to do so. "Profit makes right" isn't a good justification for whether something is moral or not. I'm not saying whatever arguably immoral or unethical thing shouldn't be allowed to be practiced but using whether something is profitable or not as a litmus for whether its moral is not is crazy. Hell, one of the biggest games in the past decade, Bioshock, was all about proving that point.

See, what I see here is you listing a bunch of things that were objectively scummy and which made things objectively worse at the expense of the consumer, and comparing it to something that is arguably a selling point for some of the demographic, and is only as harmful as you decide to read into it. It's actively taking away from the consumers to release broken games and expecting the consumers to pay for it, or remove content solely to sell it back as DLC. It's not hurting consumers or women to have attractive women in a fantasy setting. It's not demeaning to real women to forgo realistic anatomy slightly for the sake of improved artistic quality and aesthetic appeal in a medium that is based largely on the quality of the artwork. Nobody is getting hurt by comic book art except for people who have a victimization complex to sell, and people who just may not find it tasteful, in which case they can just not purchase said product or create their own comic books that don't do it.

A simple google (https://www.google.ca/search?q=female+romance+novel+covers&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj92tWI-dfJAhVipoMKHci4AGoQ_AUIBygB&biw=1920&bih=955#) search will confirm that men get pretty heavily objectified and sexualized in media that has a majority female audience, whereas the women aren't quite as much (although they still are a little)

And? Were we talking about romance novels? No, we're talking about comic books because we're nerds who love comics.

My point was that nobody has a problem with men being sexualized in books targeted primarily to women, why is it such a controversy that women are sexualized in books aimed primarily at young men. Why is one wrong but not the other?

 

[JimB]

I'd be offended by your assumption of me wanting to silence you, if I didn't have the belief that you're prioritizing your feelings over thinking things through.

Okie-dokie.

I do not understand what this means. Are you saying the only place in the world Frank Quietly (I'd love to know what his real name is) can draw females asses and/or action shots with the camera centered on a woman's ass is in the books I want to read? That if he hears I don't want him to explore his ass fetish in books I like and decides based on my preference not to draw asses in the center of the camera, then there is no other place for him to express his love of asses?

We've seen plenty of examples of the power of "progressive" bullying, shaming companies and artists into changing their work to avoid bad publicity. It's a very sad state of affairs.

None of that answers the question I asked, so I will rephrase it more simply: How do you define "silencing" an artist? You seem to think that I, JimB, one person on the internet, espousing his views in a particular community where my views are not popular, is a silencing tactic because despite my only being able to affect sales of a comic book by about five dollars in either direction, even speaking my mind will make a multi-million dollar company suddenly think making money is less important than one internet grump's feelings; that disagreeing with an artist's loves of asses is a form of bullying. I would like to think that is not the case.

I'm absolutely sure that you feel a lot of things. It's knowing that you can and should move past the impulse to act on those feelings, that matters.

I disagree. You have not displayed to me any compelling reason for me to accept a set of priorities that are contrary to my own, apart from threatening to tell me that I'm bullying people.

Everyone has something that pisses them off - most just choose not to air those thoughts, for good reasons.

There is a difference between discretion and cowardice. If I claim to care about the feelings of my friends, then I am required to act on that interest.

 

[Jingle Fett]

Is there like a chart somewhere that defines "thin" as 60 pounds? That's news to me.


But you know what, you're right. I've now seen the light. 3 of the 6 women in the article totally aren't overweight or heavy. They're totally average and my standards were unrealistic. I've now learned what an average woman who isn't starving to death looks like!

Spoiler

AVERAGE AMERICAN WOMEN WHO AREN'T STARVING TO DEATH

It's outrageous that photoshop is required to make them look like comic book characters.

Given that an adult woman who weighs ninety pounds would be considered "overweight" by your standards I don't see how 60 is far-fetched. If you don't know what a real woman looks like or understand that women have internal organs thats fine, but don't make a false assertion if thats the case.

Please, by all means do quote me where I defined overweight as 90 pounds, or any other number for that matter, and I'll gladly change it. Like I said I've seen the errors of my sinful ways! You've shown me what "average" and "thin" really look like and I must make amends.

 

[Tsun Tzu]

None of them are gymnasts or, you know, superheroes with toned, athletic builds.

Clearly you've never met a female gymnast. I've worked with gymnasts and even my mother was a gymnast, an Olypmic contender in fact. To this day she weighs about 90 pounds She's a grown female gymnast that doesn't even weigh three digits and she has a hell of a lot more mass in her waist than most of what we see in the Buzzfeed article and she is considered severely underweight. You can see every rib she has when she takes off her shirt. Most female gymnasts who are that thin? They're starving. There is a very clear expectation for gymnasts (and wrestlers too, while we're on the subject) to starve themselves. That expectation isn't an anomoly, its the norm of the sport and is why I'm never allowing my children to participate in it (or wrestling either). A lot of the female gymnasts you see at an Olympic level won't have their first menstruation until their twenties - if they even ever menstruate in their lifetime that is. Why? Because thats what starvation does to somebody undergoing puberty. You'll also notice that none of them are adults, and most professional female gymnastics happens before adulthood. They're in no way an accurate model of a healthy woman's body. I don't think that devoted crimefighters like Wonder Woman are inexplicibly starving themselves of essential nutrients that they need to live so I think my point stands.

All righty. I can whip out some anecdotal evidence too.

I have athletic women in my family (track and field + soccer + baseball, etc.) and have friends who did the same stuff. They ate well, took care of themselves, and were by no means "starving." They were thin. Either at or under weight and intensely physically active. One friend actually lifts weights; she's thinner than these chicks, but her arms and upper body are proportionally more beefy.

My sister in particular is quite thin. She eats a lot better than I do, watches her diet, and works out.

I also have family and friends who are athletic and aren't under weight.

The difference here is-

They. Don't. And. Didn't. Look. Like. The. Women. In. This. Article.

3-6 are overweight. 1-3 seem about average. None of them appear to be athletes and none of them could be considered "thin."

Also, fun fact, NONE of them are super heroes with toned, athletic builds. Which is a point you seemed to completely ignore to go on about starving pre-pubescent gymnasts. I used gymnasts as a reference point in terms of flexibility. But fine, here, let's change it to "contortionist." Is that a bit clearer?

There are, of course, different body types and people out there who exemplify each and every one, but we're not exactly making an argument in good faith when we pull this "compare super heroes to the average dumpy person" nonsense. Just because they're not average doesn't mean that these women don't exist or aren't "possible."

Hell, a simple google search demolishes that idea.

Even most little people aren't that thin when they're nourished and healthy, no way other adult women in the world are living healthy lives at 60 pounds.

Ah. I see. You seem to have a pretty...unhealthy perception of what constitutes "thin."

It doesn't mean this:

That's just macabre as well as incredibly dangerous/unhealthy for said person and it's NOT what "thin/athletic/toned/healthy" translates to.

 

[Politrukk]

This gave me a good laugh.

Some of those artists clearly took the concept of "Dat booty" to the max. Seriously, once you compare it to realistic anatomy, some of the characters look like slug people.

I can't agree with this at all, positioning is a big thing obviously some things may be drawing mistakes.

These heroines are no different from their hero counterpart.


Oh my lord, the average john doe does not look like Captain America?

look at that pose spiderman makes that's such fat shaming.
look at Thor how can a man even aspire to look like that.
look at Dr. Doom he's such an unachievable standard for nerds.
Look at Mr. Fantastic pfff my spinal cord couldn't take it if I tried any of those poses.



That's what you people sound like,

 

[Battenberg]

I mean it's true that comic book (/graphic novel) characters, particularly female ones, get drawn in poses that are basically impossible for a human to replicate but I don't see what they were trying to prove by showing those photos? Like did anyone seriously think that's how bodies work? And if they did before why would their mind be changed by showing a 180lb woman attempting the same pose as someone who is meant to be beyond the peak physical fitness of basically all humans?

Female representation in certain artistic media is just not realistic and puts titillation ahead of a lot of other more important factors (including reality) and it'd be nice to see that change but articles like this Buzzfeed one just serve to undermine genuine arguments people make.

 

[Something Amyss]

It doesn't matter if you find her sexy or not (same with that sexy Flash image I linked): the core point is that she is intentionally designed to look sexy.

I get that. It was more surprise than, like...I don't know. Basically, it was surprise. I get that that's supposed to be sexy, but it's sort of like intellectually understanding a joke and not really laughing, I guess.

I think the example of the "fat" woman is a symptom of the same disease: Her waist gets divorced from any context, whether the context of her specific body or the context of what's even humanly possible, so sexiness and the lack thereof are being determined by individual body parts.

It's quite possibly the reverse, though, as people seem to be looking for a specific hourglass figure. In this case, almost literally, as only a few grains of sand can pass through. But I'm betting the one element here is useless without the others.

I'll also say that it's my general experience the men who complain about real women not looking like comic book women are not men who have ever had sex with a real person. I think a lack of experience combines with a frustration against the women who aren't fucking them combines to play a big part of such a hypercritical and defensive attitude: Complaining that Wonder Woman's proportions and poses are physically impossible is an attack on the woman they've decided they deserve, and is therefore an attack on them.

(I just know that paragraph is going to piss off people who think I'm talking about them and I should probably delete it to save myself some trouble, but you know what? Fuck it. Members of the Escapist forums, I didn't name any of you on my list of frustrated, misogynistic virgins because I don't know you. If you think what I'm saying applies to you, then that's between you and your conscience, and I'll thank you to leave me out of it.)

Yeah, I've seen this argument a lot and I get the impression there's a bunch of guys out there who have zero understanding of the female figure outside of doctored photos and fan service.

I'm the wrong guy to talk to about that. My sexual attraction doesn't lean toward effort-filled posing; I like casual sexy. Tee-shirts and jeans, and the way the woman wearing them crinkles her nose when she smiles. Like that. I get the reaction to Squirrel Girl, but as someone whose understanding of human beings involves putting himself in their shoes, these are shoes that don't fit me well enough to feel like I can walk in them, y'know?

Yeah, but as before, it's really more me just voicing my confusion. It's not like this is exactly new territory to me. I read comics from liek 3 (well, mostly looked at the pictures, I imagine) to 20 or so on a regular basis, and I still read them occasionally. I like science fiction, fantasy, video games and tabletop RPGs, so on some level I'm exposed to the style. The Squirrel Girl pic especially looked more like some Disney prelude to rule 34 than something designed to titillate a mass market.

Also, to recycle the above response, it's like grasping the basic concept of a joke and then not laughing when it is told.

I'm willing to say it's true, just because I've seen how the people at my local nerd shops treat women. Don't even get me started on the girl who was cosplaying Frank Miller Robin for a promotion at the new comic shop in town who wouldn't stray from the six-foot-six Wookiee next to her for fear of what the fanboys would do to her without her permission.

There's another strange disconnect. Complain about something even remotely approaching normal as fat or ugly, then chase anything with tits like a starving animal after raw meat.

 

[Furnicula]

This comparison with people that could easily cosplay as the Deathstar makes about as much sense as this one:

Or this one:

Spoiler