Mental Floss

I have been told that the Women In Refrigerators website, which I created with some friends back in 1999, long before I had thought of becoming a pro writer, has been named the #3 Most Powerful Website Of All Time by Mental Floss magazine.

I am still trying to figure all this out…I am very glad it’s had an impact, and I think it’s mostly been positive. There’s been tremendous change in the comics medium, and I think we were definitely part of that. I think change was coming anyway, but I think we helped make people question what they were doing in comics.

When people would ask me if it made a difference, for a long time, I said I didn’t think so. But over the years, creators would tell me right out that it had, sometimes without even knowing I was behind the website in the first place. I also remember it was one of the first quite blatantly huge call-outs to the male domination of the industry, which at that point (at least as far as mainstream comics was concerned) was simply overwhelming, on the internet.

I took years of abuse for the site, and still get some from time to time, almost always from people who apparently hadn’t bothered to read it. The site is not a condemnation of all comics, all males, or all males in comics. The words ‘sexism’ and ‘misogyny’ are either very rarely or not at all (it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at it).

It simply asked the questions…Is this a trend? If so, what does it mean?

And because I was not an expert, I asked a lot of people in the industry for their opinions. Some were dismissive, some were very sympathetic to the question, but almost all of them knew exactly what I was asking about.

Why was it that the industry seemed so puzzled that there were so few female readers, when the few long-standing female characters of note were all getting killed, maimed, or depowered?

I still think it’s a fair question. And I think the fact that we tried to say, “Hey, these female characters DO have value,” made a lot of creators, and later, publishers, pause a little bit before continuing the trend thoughtlessly. That’s also something I’ve tried to do in my career, successfully or not, that’s not for me to say.

The other thing is, it spawned several similar discussions about other marginalized people and how they are represented in comics. And I know for a fact it gave some other female commentators a bit of encouragement to speak up on these topics themselves. I know because they’ve told me so many times.

I don’t know what other sites are on the list, I haven’t looked at it yet. I think there’s a bit of a danger in assigning too much importance to it. There were many factors that led to female characters being given more value in comics (the continuing rise of indie and mature comics, the Vertigo line and its mixed gender audience, the increase in British creators who handled gender differently, and above all, the increase in power of the internet as a forum). Some of these had a much bigger effect, I think.

I never felt the idea of Women in Refrigerators was to take anything away from the existing readership. I always felt it was just about opening the doors a little more so more readers felt welcome.

It’s a flawed site, there’re things about it that I would have done differently.  And focusing on just one marginalized group pretty much means ignoring other marginalized groups.

But I think it did make a statement, and the fact that it appeared in national news magazines, on the radio, and in Harper’s Bazaar, of all things, I think it did make people take a look at what was in their reading material, and that did force publishers to consider that women might actually be READING these things.

It has not been a smooth trajectory, there is still a lot of nonsense and bullshit about gender roles in comics. But when I look at the vibrant and active (and growing) community of readers that are all along the gender spectrum, I am pretty happy and I know we were a small part of clearing the way for that to happen.

Thanks, Mental Floss. I haven’t read the article yet, looking forward to it.