Darken12 said:
That's a long post. It's late. I'm not quoting all that.
You said a whole lot of shit that paints the issue with a ludicrously broad brush (social miasma? what?) and I think you potholed Shakesville, which explains a lot of why you're so fervently defending a fictional characters's right to not be called attractive.
You know, whatever, fuck it. I'll pick out a couple sentences I thought were weird, say why, and maybe you can explain what you meant. Then I'll come up with a broader response at the end.
It's not a win for women to be sexualised without their opinion or consent.
Whose consent? Catwoman's? She's not real. Do you get the consent of all women in the world? All women who are comic fans? All women the writer knows? What if some women think the sexualisation is acceptable and some don't?
If your issue here was that Catwoman is only ever written by dudes, that's not really true. Female writers and artists are, unfortunately, a minority in the comics industry, but Catwoman has been handled by the highly skilled hands of Gail Simone, amongst others.
And the apparent implications of your statement are disturbing - do you mean guys
can't write Catwoman? That they can write her, but they can't make her hot without being implicitly sexist? What about women who draw sexy dudes? [http://oglaf.com/mistertique/1/]? I mean, those are really shitty criteria to use for identifying sexism. You're right that it's difficult to identify objectification in action, but I don't think the proper response is "if women do it, it's OK."
A woman doesn't have to take "you're beautiful" as a compliment. A woman doesn't have to take anything as a compliment if she doesn't agree with it, and thoughtlessly dismissing their concerns or objections as "you should take it as a compliment!" reminds me an awful lot to the old "rape as a compliment" rationale.
I totally agree with all of that, and I'm wondering why that's what you thought I said. I said
most people are going to take being called attractive a compliment. Let's face it, they are. They're not
required to, God no, everyone's allowed their tastes, but being physically attractive is a desirable quality, like being called intelligent or witty.
I have
no idea how you got from that to "rape as a compliment," but you potholed Shakesville, and that gives me a clue.
You're missing my point. Sexism is almost never done on purpose. Most sexism happens because of laziness, conformity, peer pressure and/or the avoidance of critical thinking. When Rocksteady made Catwoman, they probably didn't set out to be purposefully sexist, they probably just lifted the design from the comics and didn't think twice. But if you uphold something sexist without thinking twice, you are still an accomplice in its sexism.
I totally disagree with that. I disagree with that on a fundamental, base, instinctive level. I disagree with that because the logical implication of subconscious sexism is that you can be sexist without knowing or intending to, and that's ridiculous.
That would make a stupid number of people sexist. That would make everyone at Rocksteady sexist because they've upheld something sexist. Everyone at DC would be sexist. Every guy who's bought a Catwoman comic would be sexist, because he's upholding something sexist. Every guy who's bought a comic made by DC would be sexist. That would make the guy who runs the store sexist. The parents who give their kids money to buy the comics would be sexist. The bus driver who drove the kid to the comic store would be sexist. Literally every person causally involved in the generation of revenue from the sale of a comic would be sexist, because we've taken intent out of the equation and then all that matters is whether they're "upholding" sexism.
I think you can offend someone unintentionally, and people are obviously going to disagree over whether something's offensive, and they have the right to. But you can't say that you're an unintentional sexist. I mean, the law draws a distinction between direct and indirect discrimination, but even indirect discrimination doesn't match what you're saying (it has to do with the application of standards that have a discriminatory result.)
Furthermore, no amount of good writing can cover up something sexist. If the Dead or Alive series had been written by George R. R. Martin, it would have still featured the objectification of women.
I disagree with this also. Objectification is, basically, the conceptual reduction of a person to an object. It's thinking of women in terms of walking breasts rather than as people with goals and motives.
Giving characters goals and motives that are believable and which evoke the actions of real people is exactly what good writing does. If the writing is good, the character is never objectified, because they become indistinguishable from a person. If the cast of Dead or Alive had all been three-dimensional characters as nuanced as Jaime Lannister, Dead or Alive wouldn't have been sexist at all, because at no point would it made the sexist implication that its cast were a walking pair of tits playing volleyball for our perverted amusement.
That's what makes Dead or Alive sexist. It's not the bikinis. It's the implication that the sexy women there are just walking tits, not people or even characters that mimic people. If you don't recognise that step, you're not making a distinction between sexualisation and objectification.
I want to make something else clear: I have nothing against fanservice or sexualisation. The problem is when sexualisation is used as a tool to perpetuate sexist notions.
How is this coherent with the above statement?
OK. Now more generally, I noticed a bunch of things about your position I find questionable.
You talk a lot about social conditions as a cause of sexism and a framework in which sexism occurs. I think you used the word "miasma" several times. I acknowledge the effect that social conditions has in the formation of a person's views as they mature, but I don't think that talking about sexism as a miasma rather than in terms of personal prejudice is useful because it removes the individual's decision to be or not be sexist and instead imputes moral blame onto all individuals within the "miasma."
If I live in a sexist miasma, how do I not be sexist? Is it by not acting sexist? How do I know what acting sexist
is if I could be subconsciously sexist? Who tells me what is or isn't sexist - are
they subconsciously sexist? Who is responsible for the sexist miasma in the first place? What do I do when two people of the discriminated sex profess different opinions over what is or isn't sexist? It all gets rather messy, and I vastly prefer a framework where the intention of the individual is the primary fault element.
I don't think you adequately recognise the distinction between sexualisation and objectification. Maybe you do, but you're not wording it very well. You talk a lot about a character being sexualised and then act as if that automatically amounts to objectification, as if merely
being attractive reduces a person to an object whose sole notable quality is being physically attractive.
I don't think that works as a framework. We have to be able to have beautiful people in our creative media without being sexist. I mean, Hollywood goes to ridiculous lengths to make sure its actors are all physically perfect specimens - male or female. The same factors drive comics artists to only draw incredibly buff dudes or incredibly sexy ladies. It's because
we like looking at beautiful people. If we're at the point where
being attracted to someone is considered objectification and sexist, we're flying head-first through the looking glass and all the way over to Shakesville.
Which leads to my next comment, which is that you seem to immediately discard the effect good or bad writing has on the objectification of a character. Why do this? Objectification is about the reduction of a person to an object, such as a set of abs or a pair of tits. Good writing is about turning characters into pitch-perfect simulations of real people. Good writing is incompatible with sexual objectification.
Case in point: Daniel Craig's shirtless beach scene in
Casino Royale is a clear-cut case of sexualisation. But it wasn't
objectification because he was the main character in the film, and he was more developed and defined as a character than anyone else there. We weren't seeing him as his rock-hard abs; we were watching James Bond. If he'd been written poorly, he wouldn't have been convincing as a person, and we would have seen him as a set of abs with two big ears running around shirtless and causing explosions.
Jesus fucking Christ, that was a long post. I'm sorry. I don't know why I did that. I think I hate coherent dialogue. I need breakfast.
