Baby it’s cold in there
May. 27th, 2008 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkThere are phrases that stick in the mind in spite or maybe because of not knowing quite what they refer to when you first stumble across them. “Women in Refrigerators” is one that crops up relatively quickly when browsing around comics fandom in a spirit of idle curiosity. Thanks to the wonders of google it then only takes a few clicks to hit the mother lode, a 1999 web page started by Gail Simone as a list of “superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator.” The refrigerator was literal and belonged to one “Green Lantern.” The woman was his girlfriend.
The thing is that even having never heard of Green Lantern, far less read the book the story has an unwelcome familiarity. Familiar in the way a third generation atheist who never went to Sunday School, never read the Book of Revelations still knows in her gut what happens when “The Man Comes Around.” It’s in the culture or feels as if it is, which is presumably why the list was taken seriously enough to generate the responses from comics professionals listed on the site.
A common response is to point out the inadequacy of the list as a statistical argument. Surely it needs to be compared with an equivalent list of chill cabinetted males with the numbers adjusted to express each as a proportion of total superheroes of either sex. Maybe an analysis of variance for good measure? I suspect, however, that such a natural history of superheroes approach would obscure as much as it revealed. The striking thing about the original list is as much what it doesn’t contain as what it does. I’m quite happy to believe that an equally appalling list of male atrocity sufferers could be drawn up, but even I as a non-comics reader am able to come up with a counter list of five or six male superhero survivors. Female superheroes who lived, well there’s Wonder Woman maybe and that’s it. One and one is never enough, one is a token. One is ‘blink and you’ll miss her’ Olivia weighed against every other black character who appeared just to die or be evil and die in the first six seasons of BtVS.
For those who accept that there is a difference or a disproportion in the treatment of male and female superheroes what does it mean? Simple misogyny is one possibility, that readers or writers actually enjoy stories about women being dismembered and depowered. Some of the imagery does support that, there’s a visual tradition that goes well beyond comics of eroticizing violence against women and one of the WiR respondents, Joan Hilty (an editor at DC) points out how easily the artwork can push a story from tragedy into torture porn
I can even name one off the top of my head that I didn't see on the list - the brutal, rape-like death of Artemis in WONDER WOMAN. It wasn't so much the story (by Bill Messner-Loebs I think, who I actually consider a wonderfully feminist comics writer) as the vile art by Mike Deodato.
Man-torture is rarely lingered on so lovingly in visual media and when it is has a history of religious iconography to draw on making the subject appear more Christ-like than degraded.
A more acceptable explanation for the WiR phenomenon is not hate but indifference, the sexism inevitable as long as women are excluded from the target demographic and the writing staff. This is the option Simone seems to endorse and is implicit in the way describing a character as a “Woman in a Refrigerator” usually means she’s been put there to provoke a reaction in a male partner not because her own storyline (if she has one) demands it. It covers a lot including the why of how I as a comics newbie can name so many unchillable males. To quote another respondant to the site, Tom Bierbaum:
I think one of the differences to keep in mind between male characters and female characters is that there are a few male characters that have a large, established following that must be catered to by any profit-seeking company. So there must be a viable Batman that's roughly compatible with the Batman of the movies and TV animation, same for Superman, Spider-Man and perhaps a small handful of others.
What it doesn’t explain is what happens in series such as Buffy, where the target demographic and the writing staff definitely does include women, or the less violent but still marked disproportionate suffering of female soap characters. Here there must be something else going on or probably several things. It may be, as Tom Bierbaum suggested, that “having female characters in peril, suffering or dying packs more of an emotional wallop” with both men and women. It could be that they are perceived as weaker (like children) or conversely stronger (Joss Whedon’s mother dying being the worse thing that ever happened to him). It could be culturally conditioned expectation of female heroes. Men save the world, women sacrifice themselves for it. A surviving female superhero would be like the proverbial dog walking on its hind legs, a mere novelty lacking the power to sustain a narrative through sheer force of cliche.
On the other hand (or leg) it could be none of these but that rare thing a story where the women are the main actors, they die, they survive they do everything. This is my impression of both the current season of BSG (I know not everyone agrees) and of BtVS where the women die but they always come back to haunt the story whether literally or metaphorically. Which is not to say that everything which happens or may have happened in the current comics gets an automatic pass but that a great deal depends on the follow up.
The thing is that even having never heard of Green Lantern, far less read the book the story has an unwelcome familiarity. Familiar in the way a third generation atheist who never went to Sunday School, never read the Book of Revelations still knows in her gut what happens when “The Man Comes Around.” It’s in the culture or feels as if it is, which is presumably why the list was taken seriously enough to generate the responses from comics professionals listed on the site.
A common response is to point out the inadequacy of the list as a statistical argument. Surely it needs to be compared with an equivalent list of chill cabinetted males with the numbers adjusted to express each as a proportion of total superheroes of either sex. Maybe an analysis of variance for good measure? I suspect, however, that such a natural history of superheroes approach would obscure as much as it revealed. The striking thing about the original list is as much what it doesn’t contain as what it does. I’m quite happy to believe that an equally appalling list of male atrocity sufferers could be drawn up, but even I as a non-comics reader am able to come up with a counter list of five or six male superhero survivors. Female superheroes who lived, well there’s Wonder Woman maybe and that’s it. One and one is never enough, one is a token. One is ‘blink and you’ll miss her’ Olivia weighed against every other black character who appeared just to die or be evil and die in the first six seasons of BtVS.
For those who accept that there is a difference or a disproportion in the treatment of male and female superheroes what does it mean? Simple misogyny is one possibility, that readers or writers actually enjoy stories about women being dismembered and depowered. Some of the imagery does support that, there’s a visual tradition that goes well beyond comics of eroticizing violence against women and one of the WiR respondents, Joan Hilty (an editor at DC) points out how easily the artwork can push a story from tragedy into torture porn
I can even name one off the top of my head that I didn't see on the list - the brutal, rape-like death of Artemis in WONDER WOMAN. It wasn't so much the story (by Bill Messner-Loebs I think, who I actually consider a wonderfully feminist comics writer) as the vile art by Mike Deodato.
Man-torture is rarely lingered on so lovingly in visual media and when it is has a history of religious iconography to draw on making the subject appear more Christ-like than degraded.
A more acceptable explanation for the WiR phenomenon is not hate but indifference, the sexism inevitable as long as women are excluded from the target demographic and the writing staff. This is the option Simone seems to endorse and is implicit in the way describing a character as a “Woman in a Refrigerator” usually means she’s been put there to provoke a reaction in a male partner not because her own storyline (if she has one) demands it. It covers a lot including the why of how I as a comics newbie can name so many unchillable males. To quote another respondant to the site, Tom Bierbaum:
I think one of the differences to keep in mind between male characters and female characters is that there are a few male characters that have a large, established following that must be catered to by any profit-seeking company. So there must be a viable Batman that's roughly compatible with the Batman of the movies and TV animation, same for Superman, Spider-Man and perhaps a small handful of others.
What it doesn’t explain is what happens in series such as Buffy, where the target demographic and the writing staff definitely does include women, or the less violent but still marked disproportionate suffering of female soap characters. Here there must be something else going on or probably several things. It may be, as Tom Bierbaum suggested, that “having female characters in peril, suffering or dying packs more of an emotional wallop” with both men and women. It could be that they are perceived as weaker (like children) or conversely stronger (Joss Whedon’s mother dying being the worse thing that ever happened to him). It could be culturally conditioned expectation of female heroes. Men save the world, women sacrifice themselves for it. A surviving female superhero would be like the proverbial dog walking on its hind legs, a mere novelty lacking the power to sustain a narrative through sheer force of cliche.
On the other hand (or leg) it could be none of these but that rare thing a story where the women are the main actors, they die, they survive they do everything. This is my impression of both the current season of BSG (I know not everyone agrees) and of BtVS where the women die but they always come back to haunt the story whether literally or metaphorically. Which is not to say that everything which happens or may have happened in the current comics gets an automatic pass but that a great deal depends on the follow up.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 10:06 pm (UTC)And, as you pointed out earlier, the execution. I think the differences between Buffy and Angel are particularly stark. There were fewer women on Angel to start with and most all died or left the storyline (such as Gwen and Kate). Even Illyria is actually a god king. So even if the same number met a similar fate on both shows the end result is different.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-28 03:50 pm (UTC)