Oh man, I love reading this sort of shit. Builds up my blood pressure nicely.
StewShearer said:
One of the blatant paradoxes of many a human society is the fact that women make up 50 percent of the population, but are often treated as a minority.
Something about this sentence annoys me. Perhaps it's the attempt to equate sexism to racism. Yes, they're both "isms", pointless hatreds of people, but I don't think that sexism equates to treating women as "minorities" - sexism is a unique sort of problem. For example, some people consider pink toys to be sexist, even though they're supposedly produced FOR women.
It strikes me as an attempt to put square pegs in round holes because the number of sides isn't too far off so long as you squint. Speaking of numbers...
The report, which was recently published but the media site FiveThirtyEight, found that among DC and Marvel's current line-ups,
only around one out of every four characters is a woman. More precisely female characters only represent
around 30 percent of either company's overall cast, with <a href-http://www.escapistmagazine.com/tag/view/dc%20comics>DC Comics claiming a slight lead over Marvel owing, in part, to its early willingness to create female counterparts to its male leads.
This does not compute. 30 percent of comic book characters are women, but apparently you choose to say only a quarter of characters are women when the number is much closer to a third. Why the negativity bias, bro? 46% of comic readers are apparently women [http://comicsbeat.com/market-research-says-46-female-comic-fans/], so the number of characters representing them is actually only 16% off the actual proportion of readers. It could obviously use improvement, but it's not like the apocalypse was just announced - in fact, the number of women in comic books has apparently been rising steadily over the years.
What's more is that the analysis of these numbers has been skewed to suit a pre-arranged conclusion. The author of the article says that his sources are the Marvel and DC comics wikis, which he's been yanking data from to establish all sorts of stuff. The problem is that his 30% figure is based upon an analysis of the entire history of the two big comic book universes (at least if I'm reading his notes right).
If you wanted a more accurate picture of how many females are ACTUALLY in comic books CURRENTLY, you'd take a look at how many of said characters have been active/had starring roles in books the last few years. Otherwise you get shit like an enormous number of long-dead male Green Lantern Corps members that starred in one comic padding the numbers (and wouldn't that just be too bad?).
It gets worse the more you read. Take this snippet from the original article:
When we look at what kinds of characters women are, another unfortunate picture emerges: There?s evidence that women are more passive than men on the page.
Women and men were almost exactly equally likely to have a secret identity in the Marvel universe (49.4 percent of males and 49.5 percent of females), while in the DC universe 51 percent of males had a secret identity and 45 percent of females did. While it?s not a perfect stand-in, we can also infer that men may be slightly more likely to be superheroes or villains ? rather than just normal, unpowered side characters ? than women in the DC universe.
In both DC and Marvel, women were of neutral allegiance at a higher rate than men. Men were also more likely to be bad in each universe ? in fact, bad-aligned men alone outnumbered all women combined. In other words, there?s something of a paucity of female villains.
The author starts with a conclusion - that women are somehow more passive in comic books. As proof, he offers up... an analysis of how many women have secret identities? And the number is roughly equal (only 5% difference) to the number of men with secret identies?
First up, how does having a secret identity determine how "passive" a woman is in a comic book? For example, She-Hulk is VERY public about her identity, and she's not someone I'd describe as "passive." And when the number is only 5% different, aren't you saying that most men are also somehow "passive"? Gee, with how "passive" all these characters must be, it's a wonder comic books aren't used as sleeping aids!
Then he attempts to tie the number of women who don't have secret identities to the number of "unpowered side characters," as if all the characters in comic books without secret identities were mere window dressing. I can just FEEL the amount of
>implying going on. Woman without a secret identity in a comic book? Meh, probably just eye candy or unpowered girlfriends, right?
The funniest bit though is when he comments on how the number of male villains is greater than the number of female villains (a difference of about 20% on average). You'd think that the majority of women in comic books being good/neutral instead of evil would be a GOOD thing, but this guy's in full Negative Nancy mode, so instead he insists there's a "paucity" of female villains.
I never imagined that portraying the majority of women as good/neutral could be construed as a BAD THING(tm), but hey, here we are. Rather than talking about the
actual issues (I found the number of female characters being created/the number of female artists and writers to be a far more compelling statistic than the rest of this garbage) we have to work hard to be outraged about as much as possible.
Nurb said:
That number is even lower in yaoi comics.
Most problematic.
I admit, I chuckled.
