this statue<\/a> of Mary Jane from the Spider-Man comics is anything but sexist and demeaning to women.<\/p>\nDon’t try to rationalize it. Sorry, doesn’t work. I don’t care what the target audience is; I don’t care that women “don’t have to buy it” or “don’t HAVE to look at it.” I don’t care that there are women who actually do laundry for their husbands, or women who look like that, or even women who look like that and pose like that when they do laundry.<\/p>\n
It’s patently offensive to me that a major American entertainment corporation chooses to depict women in this way. It’s an archaic view of a woman’s place in the culture, it’s demeaning to the entire gender, and it’s just the latest example.<\/p>\n
This example is particularly egregious, because it is so outlandish as to almost be a parody of sexism. Hell, maybe it is. I dunno.<\/p>\n
I know that every time I see a Michael Turner cover with breasts bigger than basketballs, it pisses me off. Every time I open an issue of Superman and see Carlos Pacheco’s cheesecake obsession getting in the way of a darn good superhero yarn, it pisses me off. Every time I read an Ex Machina trade and a random main female character is depicted as sitting at home alone in a transparent negligee, like a character in a Friday After Dark movie on Skinemax, it pisses me off.<\/p>\n
When I saw this statue, it REALLY PISSED ME OFF, and something snapped.<\/p>\n
I just can’t resign myself to it anymore. The debasement of women in modern superhero comics, much like the graphic violence in the same, is something I have come to tolerate if I like a story well enough. There is no way I can justify it, and it consistently bothers me that I somehow support and silently issue my approval by spending money on it. Yet it doesn’t ruin things for me often.<\/p>\n
This statue? It ruins things. It makes me want to torch my entire collection and disassociate myself completely with a fanbase and a hobby that I love. It makes me embarassed to even read comics. It’s pathetic.<\/p>\n
I wish more people could try to understand how this is a problem, instead of working so hard to weakly rationalize it.<\/p>\n
As I said in the Sisyphean comment thread on Newsarama (yeah, I’m gonna quote myself, fuck you):<\/p>\n
If you think this statue is okay, I ask you to do me one simple favor.<\/p>\n
Imagine any woman you care about in that same pose. Your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, your wife, your daughter, your friend.<\/p>\n
Just give it a second.<\/p>\n
Then tell me how it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s okay for this industry to put these images consistently out into the public space, EVEN in limited editions, and EVEN for a targeted, tiny, sad market. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oh, sigh. I’m trying to speak sense to the senseless, and frankly, it’s exhausting. There is no context, nor situation or scenario, in which this statue of Mary Jane from the Spider-Man comics is anything but sexist and demeaning to women. Don’t try to rationalize it. Sorry, doesn’t work. I don’t care what the target […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics","category-fandom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}