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| From: emovieposter.com |
"Female characters are only insatiable, barely-dressed aliens and strippers because someone decided to make them that way. It isn't a fact. It isn't an inviolable reality, especially in a comic book universe that has just been rebooted. In the end, what matters is what you choose to show people and how you show them, not the reasons you make up to justify it. Because this is comics, everybody. You can make up anything.
Most of all, what I keep coming back to is that superhero comics are nothing if not aspirational. They are full of heroes that inspire us to be better, to think more things are possible, to imagine a world where we can become something amazing. But this is what comics like this tell me about myself, as a lady: They tell me that I can be beautiful and powerful, but only if I wear as few clothes as possible. They tell me that I can have exciting adventures, as long as I have enormous breasts that I constantly contort to display to the people around me. They tell me I can be sexually adventurous and pursue my physical desires, as long as I do it in ways that feel inauthentic and contrived to appeal to men and kind of creep me out. When I look at these images, that is what I hear, and I don't think I even realized how much until this week.
In many ways, the constant barrage of this type of imagery (and characterization) is not unlike the sh*tty neighborhood I used to live in where every time I walked down the street, random people I didn't know shouted obscene comments about my body and told me they wanted to have sex with me. And you know, maybe a lot of those guys thought they were complimenting me. Maybe they thought I had tried to look pretty that day and they were telling me I had succeeded in that goal. Maybe they thought we were having a frank and sexually liberated exchange of ideas. I'm willing to be really, really generous and believe that's where they were coming from. But in the end, it doesn't matter that they didn't know it was creepy; it doesn't matter that they 'didn't get it,' because every single day I lived there they made me feel like less of a person.
That is how I feel when I read these comics.
And I'm tired. I'm so, so tired of hearing those messages from comics because they aren't the dreams or the escapist fantasies or the aspirations that I want to have. They don't make me feel joyful or powerful or excited. They make me feel so goddamn sad that I want to cry, because I have devoted my entire life to comics, and when I read superhero books like these I realize that most of the time, they don't give a sh*t about me.
I have been doing this for a long time, now. I have lived in the neighborhood of superhero comics for a long time. And frankly, if this is how they think it's ok to treat me when I walk down the street in a place that I thought belonged to me just as much as anyone else who lives here, then I'm not sure I want to live here anymore."
— Laura Hudson, Comic Alliance
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"Lately, a lot of anti-gay folks and conservatives have come out saying that Archie Comics is trying to introduce sexuality by introducing Kevin Keller, an openly gay teenager. Their basis for this opinion is that they believe that Archie Comics boasts pure, I suppose 'conservative' values, especially since the characters were used for Christian-based Spire Comics stories. Well, I hate to break it to the conservatives, but Archie Comics has been sexualized for years, unless they don’t think of Betty and Veronica pin-up drawings as 'sexual' (it most certainly is!)
From the very beginning, Archie Comics has focused on the sexual nature of the girls in Riverdale, specifically Veronica and especially the later addition Cheryl Blossom. In fact, when Cheryl was created in the ’90s, she was considered as a character that pushed the envelope too far and too sexual for children. She was later taken out of the comics and re-introduced in a less sexual manner in order for her to be on the same level as Veronica and Betty." — moniqueblog
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