A Slightly Frustrating Thing...

j33zits:

gailsimone:

…about the wonderful http://eschergirls.tumblr.com/ and http://thehawkeyeinitiative.com/ .

I think these sites do something hilarious, something I’ve tried to do my whole online history, which I think of as ‘mocktivism,’ that is, activism by mockery. You showcase how absurd something is, you take away the excuses and the labeling and you nakedly show how ridiculous some things are that desperately need changing. It’s a way of getting at the entrenched nonsense by making fun of it.

Making the egregious laughable.

All well and good, I’m thrilled these sites exist.

But what’s bugging me is that there are still goofballs out there who are taking away the wrong message. The narrative is growing that, contrary to all indications, the people behind these sites are just humorless feminists who hate anything sexy.

GUYS. WAKE THE FUCK UP.

That is NOT what’s happening. These people are exposing something that is intrinsically disturbing, but they are doing it with more humor and wit than the original drawings EVER displayed.

But beyond that…it’s irritating and incorrect to imply that pointing out something stupid makes you anti-sex, anti-sexuality, or anti-sexy art.

Most feminists I know LIKE beautiful women in their comics, they LIKE sexy characters and sexy content.  Every con I’m at, women line up for sketches of women by artists like Adam Hughes, Amanda Conner, and other artists with a gift for drawing gorgeous, sexy pin-ups.

I for one love when a gifted artist draws a beautiful, sexy woman in a comic (guys too, obviously, but this topic is about female portrayal).

It’s just that the definition of sexy isn’t broken-back swivel-torsoed caricatures of balloon-esque underage demi-teens with perpetually frozen sex doll expressions and Penthouse poses. Usually while they are making coffee or turning on the television.

It’s not the SEXY that is at issue. It’s the competence. It’s the lack of understanding of how women work, the lack of concern about alienating huge chunks of the readership. It’s mistaking ‘ugly’ for ‘sexy.’  It’s taking empowered characters and displaying them like a standing rib roast at the butcher shop. It’s making women adornments instead of characters with souls and will and agency.

It’s bad comics. It’s bad illustration.

And most of it even fails on this basic goal…it is bad cheesecake.

No one wants to take away the sexy out of comics. Most would be fine with a lot MORE sexy in comics.

They just want to be included and not actively discouraged, they want to see women treated with the same kind of care and fun that the males are, they want to see good art done well instead of distorted for a market that never grew up.

Making fun of bad art doesn’t take away the sexy. If anything, it encourages artists to do sexy BETTER.

Like it or not, women are going to have a voice in comics. And in this case, that means making fun of stuff that absolutely deserves it.

GOOD.

I think she is still missing the point. Eschergirls is partially about bad art, but it is also about pointing out needless sex display; how the boobs and butt pose is not only bad anatomy, but indicative of an underlying misogyny. More importantly, thehawkeyeinitiative is making fun of how female characters are portrayed by showing a male character in poses typically used for female characters to demonstrate the unnecessary sexual display they entail.

My tumblr should make it obvious that I don’t have a problem with sexuality (and my “art” is probably creepier than most). I like porn comics. However, I also like reading comics without porn. When I read comics without porn, it is annoying when the same art techniques designed to help guys jerk off are used in non-porn comics. It looks stupid, and makes people who enjoy comics look bad.

What if Sex and the City had been filmed with with the camera looking between the main characters legs, or if a number of shots in The Wild Bunch had been the camera slowly panning up Ernest Borgnine’s body, making sure to get a nice view of his ass? Yet we tolerate this kind of thing in comics without a blink.

I think I commented on that pretty specifically, in fact.