I seem to be posting a lot about comics lately...

[telophase]

...so here's a link to a post by Noah Berlatsky over on comiXology about bad superheroine cheesecake, titled "Adding Incompetence to Insult."

But more often, you get images like those above, where Star Sapphire's costume makes her look vulnerable, not tough…or the Marvel Divas cover, where everybody but Hellcat is making with the bedroom eyes, and the only threat is that Black Cat's costume may pinch so tightly that she actually pops apart at the waist, causing everything from the torso up to go swooshing about like a deflating balloon.

Comments

[tprjones.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I have to add:

I, as a comic reader, never identified with female characters; any female character. They look like movie stars / porn stars, they do not have realistic problems, they look like all their organs are in their breasts, and frankly, I'd bet a lot of other women feel like that, too.

It might not be sexism at it's worst, but it's sexism at it's most destructive; the impact of it is subversive, harder to fight against, because the only thing we're shown is one kind of woman.

See, I can't identify with male superhero characters for the same reasons. Those are not what real men look like, they aren't made of bulging muscles with clean cut lines everywhere and they don't all have rugged features and square jaws of steel. They don't act realistic either; they're either mentally deficient boy scouts or mentally deficient douches - usually the latter.

To make it worse there are some more realistically depicted male forms in comics, men who are reasonably proportioned or even overweight. But they're all villains, the evil ones. Would it make it better for you if realistic women were pictured in these comics more often, but they were always evil figures to be subdued and punished?

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I really do see everything that's been said about the problems with female superheroes being equivalently pictured in the men. To me it seems as plain as day that everyone is being misrepresented badly. That this is a matter of an industry full of bad art all around, not rampant sexism.

I will admit one non-equivalency: skimpier outfits. But I'm not sure how much that applies when you consider that what is there for both of them is so form-fitting that it's really just a different color then flesh-tone, not what you would call actual clothing. In most cases - for both genders - the genitals is the only part of the costume that isn't shaped exactly like the character underneath.