Feminism

So Frank Santoro and Sean T. Collin discuss comics criticism, mentioning in passing the lack of women in this, prompting Heidi MacDonald to write a piece arguing that actually, they and the Comics Journal were part of the problem, in turn inspiring Annie Murphy to talk about what bothers her about the Journal’s culture:

So I’m saying, all this relates to the environment of comics at large, the confidence of women artists, and the inclusion of people besides just straight white men. Groth’s comment about what is ‘good’ or not is the rule, not the exception. I cannot tell you how many women, queers, people of color have told me that they used to draw but stopped completely after someone told them their drawing was not ‘good’, because it did not look like what the straight white men were drawing. I’ve heard this from dozens and dozens and dozens.

What Annie Murphy talks about here struck me as not too dissimilar from what we’ve seen in science fiction fandom, gaming or the skeptics community in the past couple of years, which is not too surprising as these all share the same DNA, the same makeup. These are or were all male dominated spaces, where women (and everybody not white and male) have always been treated with a certain hostility, tolerated if they fit in and pretended to be one of the boys. Some of this is done consciously, by the more meatheaded parts of comics fandom, but much of it is systemic and built into how the industry and the critical community are established and operate.

There’s a lot of unexamined privilege, a lot of systemic racism and sexism at work in the comics industry and not just at the big, commercial publishers; people who point that out are not always welcomed with open arms. In science fiction fandom similar problems are slowly being addressed, but I feel that comics fandom and the comics industry are years behind at this point

To get back to the Journal specifically, it’s culture has always been aggressive, from the Blood & Thunder lettercolumn to the famous Groth editorials. It’s an environment that punishes mistakes harshly and where people take pride in their toughness, again not dissimilar to e.g. programming culture, where it’s long know that this contributes to the lack of diversity within programming.

So it turned out there were quite a few incidents of (sexual) harassment at the New York Comic-Con, one part of which was the ad campaign ran by the con’s sponsor, Arizona Ice Tea, with their ” I love Big Cans” hur hur innuendo. Though that sort of pseudo tittilation couldn’t have helped the atmosphere at the con, but Ulises Farinas calls out the much deeper link between comics culture itself and harassment:

There’s arguments about cosplay not being consent, which is such a broken debate because it takes place in a space where half the images being costumed are of characters that’s only existence depends on being a sexual object. SLAVE Leias and Wonder Women who’s only armor is a fucking bracelet. How can i expect any dude to understand some complex shit like white male privilege, when they prefer to spend their whole lives in echo chambers of caveboy spandex. Where every “strong female character” is just another fanboy fantasy with guns strapped on. All the elaborate justifications in the world can’t change the fact that Black Widow was introduced to us tied up, that despite years of slash fiction online and in zines, we’ll see plenty of lesbian witches but never one gay Captain America. That Uhura is an even less important character in Star Trek today, than yesterday. That because we loved pacific rim so much, we had to ignore the fact that it fails the bechdel test like every other movie, and…well..uhhh…lets just call it the Miyako test instead now. Fuck that shit.

I think she’s got a point, in that the immature sexual pandering and sexism in much of mainstream comics feeds into the mindset that thinks cosplayers are there to be groped. But this doesn’t mean it’s pointless for comics conventions to take measures against it. And while “white male privilege” may be “complex shit”, keeping your fucking hands to yourself and showing some minimum of respect to everybody at a con, fan or professional, isn’t above the reach of even the average fanboy.

I also think that the rise of cosplay, as an important, separate thread in comics fandom is a good thing. Cosplay isn’t new of course, but its popularity is and the amount of creativity and sheer craft put in it is amazing. It’s easy to dismiss it all as “slave Leias”, but the fact that this is a part of fandom in which women are in the lead, removes some of that “boy club” feeling lingering in comics fandom.