The Wonder Woman TV show got canned, and comics fans of various stripes are rushing to explain why it should or shouldn’t have. The Beat has a roundup. They link to dcwomenkickingass, who has a heartfelt rant saying in part:
Why is Thor so easy to get to screen, but Wonder Woman is reduced to a television drama by David E. Kelley where she’s a superhero but also a female who worries about her body and pines for her boyfriend? Why when that treatment fails do the stories focus not on the execution but on the character?
Why is it when it comes to a male character like the Hulk, we don’t see that reaction. “Oh gee, it couldn’t possibly be the character of the Hulk that is the problem. We’ll just make three movies until we get the execution right.” Three takes. Not one.
And we have seen treatments that have worked. For all its gender issues the animated movie showed that Wonder Woman can be badass and compelling.
DCU Online has Wonder Woman as a core character and anyone who has seen the cinematic trailer can see how bad ass she would look on screen.
And the original TV show, despite being 30 years ago, worked.
The problem with adapting Wonder Woman to the screen, either big or small, has nothing to do with the character other than her gender. The recent television show felt they needed to turn her into something she’s not. She’s not Ally McBeal. She’s Wonder Woman….
How fucking sad is it that we as a gender are forced to prove ourselves worthy as a film audience once again? Every time there is a hit or success outside the narrow little lens that Hollywood views us it is an aberration or a fluke.
Hollywood is certainly sexist. But…is it really the case that Hollywood and television are uninterested in promoting shows about kick-ass women? La Femme Nikita just got renewed. The terrible movie Priest features Maggie Q as a superninja kicking ass. Bones’ main character is a female physical anthropologist/best-selling novelist martial arts expert. There’s multiple killer female assassin movies just released or coming out. There’s Salt from last year. Is there really a reluctance on the part of entertainment media to show women in tight clothes kicking ass?
I think much more of a problem is that large numbers of viewers just don’t necessarily share dcwomenkickingass’ enthusiasm for Wonder Woman, whether she’s kicking ass or not. The cancellation of wonder woman isn’t a blow to women everywhere. It’s a blow to women who like Wonder Woman maybe…but that’s not all that many women.
I thought I’d reprint my comment from the Beat thread here.
I don’t think it’s a problem of growing expectations exactly. It’s a problem that the character is really, really weird. The costume is bizarre even by super-hero standards (yes, even by superhero standards); she’s all about bondage; she’s got nutjob accessories like the invisible plane; she’s supposed to be a pacifist who runs around hitting people. She’s goofy. Which I love, love, love about her — those early Marston/Peter comics are basically the best super-hero comics ever, damn it. But the fact that she’s so idiosyncratically weird it makes her much harder to sell than, say, a secret agent with a tragic backstory who shoots people like Salt.
WW was very popular 70 years ago in comics and for a few years on television back in the 70s. Outside of that, people have really had trouble figuring out what to do with her, even as female action heroes have become really really popular (Buffy, Xena, Angelina Jolie in everything, Kill Bill, La Femme Nikita (recently re-jiggered), there’s like three more female assassin movies just come out or coming out whose titles I can’t remember…there’s just no shortage of examples.)
I don’t exactly understand the logic of wanting new WW product anyway. The TV show looked like it was going to be dreadful. If you like WW, why not just go reread the old stuff? What’s so validating about having some corporation make some stupid show that uses the character you love in insulting and moronic ways? Why is Thor validated by some stupid movie? Why is Batman validated by being put in a ridiculous styrofoam suit and having a bunch of mediocre to bad films made about him? Why do you need your art to be a pop cultural phenomena for it to matter? Like I said, I don’t get it.
I make similar points in this essay here.
Just to expand a little…I agree with dcwomenkickingass that female superhero pop culture efforts can work. Twilight is a female superhero film in a lot of ways; Bella certainly gets superpowers at the end. Buffy was a female superhero project. Sailor Moon is a female superhero story which was crazy popular. And, again, women with ninja powers kicking butt are all over the pop culture landscape. Temperance Brennan from Bones (the anthropologist/novelist/martial artist mentioned above) even dresses up as Wonder Woman on occasion. As a joke.
So the issue isn’t whether female’s kicking ass or even female superheroes can be popular. The issue is whether female superheroes toeing the very narrow genre constraints of mainstream comics can be especially popular. The issue is whether most women really want their superheoines with secret identities and dressed in swimsuits and coming out of an industry that has been male-dominated for decades — an industry that has shown over and over again that it has only the vaguest idea how to appeal to a female audience. The answer in general to that question has been that no, they don’t, they’d rather get their kick-ass women fix elsewhere.
I can see where that’s really frustrating for fans like dcwomenkickingass, who are in the minority that really like the superhero women on offer by the big two. And I can see arguing that media is sexist. But I think it’s worth pointing out that less sexism in Hollywood really, really would not have to go along with more Wonder Woman in Hollywood. Because, like I said, WW just isn’t that popular and is very weird and has that costume that doesn’t exactly scream “independent woman” and doesn’t have a clear romantic interest with angst and tension, which is what you generally look for in female genre product, and…well the list goes on. But the upshot is that if you wanted to create a woman kicking ass, even if you were really committed to feminism, you might think twice before going with Wonder Woman.
I’ll end with another comment I left on the Beat, where DF said that WW had become boring except for maybe Darwyn Cooke’s version of her. I replied:
I like Darwyn Cooke’s version, including his satirical take. I’d agree that his version is probably as good as it gets after Marston…unless you go to once-removed versions like Alan Moore’s Glory or Promethea or Adam Warren’s Empowered.
I think the boredom is part of not knowing how to deal with the original concept. And the original concept is not going to be redone; you’re not going to see WW in a gimp mask or Amazons hunting each other in deer costumes or entire races of seal men subjugating themselves to women or even giant space-faring kangaroos. It’s just not going to happen. Which is a shame, and I strongly believe that all girls and boys and adults should read the original Marston/Peter run, which is one of the most ridiculously sublime pieces of work the comics medium has to offer. But I don’t need new stories with WW anymore than I especially need some random Hollywood development team to do the brand new adventures of Elizabeth Bennett.
Update: Aha! I was wondering why we were getting commenters all of a sudden. dcwomenkickinass has a response to this post here.
…Why is it so great that women lead characters get to be “badass,” “kicking butt,” “kicking ass”? Is it supposed to be a triumph for feminism when female heroes prove themselves by the most primitive methods employed by male heroes?
I’d much prefer a heroine who fights evil by using her brain, á la Miss Marple, or Erle Stanley Gardner’s splendid Bertha Cool ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_and_Lam )…
———————
The issue is whether most women really want their superheroines with secret identities and dressed in swimsuits and coming out of an industry that has been male-dominated for decades — an industry that has shown over and over again that it has only the vaguest idea how to appeal to a female audience. The answer in general to that question has been that no, they don’t, they’d rather get their kick-ass women fix elsewhere.
———————
Actually, “most women” are not even remotely in getting a “kick-ass women fix.”
(Not that the alternative is much better; from the overwhelming evidence on display on women’s magazine covers, what obsesses them is romance, marriage, babies, diets, celebrity love troubles, how to satisfy HIM…)
I think plenty of women like to see female action heroes, just like plenty of men do. Buffy, Sailor Moon, La Femme Nikita, Dora the Explorer…there’s just no shortage of female action heroes marketed to women and girls.
Um, Mike?
What’s on the covers of so-called “women’s magazines” isn’t evidence of what’s obsessing women, it’s evidence of what’s being marketed to and pushed upon women – or would you prefer that men be judged by the contents of Maxim, Esquire, Playboy and Sports Illustrated?
I’m just sayin’. :D
Well, Anja Flower– is that push marketing– or pull?
I think judging men on what’s in Maxim and Esquire and Sports Illustrated is pretty fair. (Nobody reads playboy anymore.)
I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to suggest that many, many women are interested in what is in women’s magazines. Marketers market what people are interested in buying…within certain limits, sure, but nevertheless. If women didn’t want to buy those magazines, they would fold.
Women’s magazines aren’t all bad, anyway (especially when compared to Maxim.) Many of them run fairly substantial stories about women’s issues (gender discrimination, child care, and the like.) And they’re interested in fashion, obviously, which is a perfectly valid aesthetic medium (not that it doesn’t have it’s own problems, but what doesn’t?)
Wonder Woman is uniquely peculiar, but a lot of superheroes have not aged well, especially the ones created in the 40s. It seems like Batman was the only one to successfully transition into the modern era. Others were cancelled, re-imagined, etc. Superman mostly survives as a brand and trademark rather than a character.
Much of the weirdness is in the costumes. You mentioned WW’s costume, which is particularly weird, but so are capes and underwear outside of tights (and other references to circus strongmen). 40s pop culture is just very alien. Also worth noting that the action heroines you mentioned (Nikita, Buffy, Salt, Bella) don’t wear gaudy costumes.
That’s a really interesting point. What heroes have survived from the 40s? There’s just Superman, Batman, and WW right? Flash and Green Lantern have been rejiggered, Captain Marvel and Plastic Man show up occasionally…and there’s Captain America…who else is there?
Wonder Woman is certainly the only woman from that era who has survived, isn’t she?
Well, Black Canary was a 40’s character, but like the Flash she’s been re-jiggered so I don’t know if that really counts. And DC keeps trying to bring back other 40s characters without any success.
I was playing a game called L.A. Noire recently, which is set in 1947, and it got me thinking about mid-century pop culture. Everything from the cars to the clothes to the way people talked, just seems so … I don’t know the right word but it was almost exotic. Like a different country. Men should start wearing fedoras again, is what I’m saying.
And Wonder Woman just seems so mixed into that world, not just Marston’s idiosyncrasies, but the pop culture of the 40s. If she had a Wonder-mobile, it would be big and gaudy with lots of chrome and star-spangled streamers.
Richard Cook sez: Superman mostly survives as a brand and trademark rather than a character.
That’s a good description of Mickey Mouse, but I don’t think so with Superman. It may be that way in comics (and I’m not so sure about that), but they’ve done more with adapting him to other media than probably any other comics property. I’m 41, and in my lifetime, there have been five feature films, with a sixth going into production. Only one flopped commercially (IV), and only two did poorly with critics (III & IV). Several comics fans like to bitch about Superman Returns, but it was well reviewed by MSM critics. It earned nearly $400 million worldwide, so it was only a commercial disappointment relative to cost. There have also been at least three live-action TV-series in the last 40 years, and it seems to me that Smallville (the most recent one) was pretty successful. There have also been God only knows how many animation efforts. I think Superman is a pretty vital pop-culture property. He’s certainly more than a piece of entertainment-conglomerate decoration.
Other Golden Age superheroes that are still around in one form or another: Sub-Mariner, Hawkman (rejiggered), the Human Torch (rejiggered).
Sometimes the rejiggering bespeaks its own decade– all those Legion of Super-heroes bell-bottoms…
Isn’t Smallville a re-jiggering though? It’s been awhile since I watched the show but it seems very different from traditional Superman stories.
I suppose I was one of those people who hated on Superman Returns. Though it had nothing to do with comics fandom – I just though it was a awful, boring movie that made me less interested in ever watching another Superman flick.
I agree with you about Smallville to a point. Conceptually, I think it diverges from the original to the extent that the source material can seem all but irrelevant. But it’s still a Superman adaptation, and not an unpopular one.
I’m sorry if I suggested that you were speaking for fandom in aggregate with Superman Returns. I’ve just noticed that active dislike of the film is a lot more prevalent among people in the comics community than those outside it. I liked it, but I like Bryan Singer’s filmmaking style in general. (I haven’t seen Valkyrie yet.) Although if he’s going to make a story in which Clark and Lois would have to be in their 30s, he shouldn’t cast actors who look like they’re too young to buy beer.
That’s a good criterion for appreciating any comicbook– indeed, any genre– movie. Is it any good– in the sense that an “outsider” would consider it good?
I saw the first two Spider-Man movies with definite non-fans, people who might have been voaguely aware of SM as a brand on Slurpee cups. They loved the flicks.
About Wonder Woman and that costume– it’s never been about the tit jiggle. The true erogenous zones of Peter’s WW were her (well-muscled) neck, shoulders, and back.
The ’70s WW tv show worked to the extent it did because they found an exceptionally fitted actress for the part, Lynda Carter: a tall, strong, beautiful woman who was sexy on her own terms.
(Aside: I still love those transformation scenes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_15noK_uUE&feature=related
…and every time WW does the ‘bullets and bracelets’ schtick!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFtDOvU6c28
Corny, but I luvvit!)
I argue that Peter was all about the back and shoulders in that comixology link above in the post.
I think Lynda Carter still kind of looked ridiculous in that outfit…and the show itself was pretty mediocre overall (not horrible, but eh.) But they really were onto something with that transformation bit, which I agree was great. (And of course was nowhere in the original.)
I find it interesting that you don’t ask why male fans need to have their own fandoms validated. And, as has already been noted on Tumblr, your dismissal of the Gail Simone run as “Mary Sue fanfiction” is one of several instances of you not checking your own male privilege at the door.
But, if you want one answer as to why Wonder Woman should get a shot at a good TV or movie adaptation, it’s the one DC Comics had been providing in its’ own canon for most of the past couple of decades: because she’s just as important to the DCU as Superman or Batman. Hell, the company spent a whole year emphasizing that in the Trinity maxi-series. She’s been front-and-center for every (crucial) incarnation of the Justice League, including the much-acclaimed Justice League Unlimited animated series. In fact, for all the complaints about her being “hard to understand,” somehow DC’s animated division has managed to consistently show us a fully-realized Diana, both in the Justice League Unlimited series and in Wonder Woman’s own animated feature. It wasn’t until the recent “rejiggering” – really, the resurrection of pre-Civil Rights era incarnations – of Green Lantern and Flash that Diana was presented in canon and in marketing as one of the DCU’s big guns. So why should she get her own movie? Because DC’s creators have promoted her character as being up to it as much as Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne. It seems the people up the corporate ladder are the ones who can’t “get her.”
If you’d read the essay about Gail Simone, you’d see that I praised her for her Mary Sueishness. It was when she tried to do things other than Mary Sue (like when she tried to talk about pacifism) that I felt that she ran into trouble.
I also sneer at male fandoms more or less constantly. I think Grant Morrison’s idolatrous Batman and Superman reboots are utter and complete crap. I thought Iron Man’s occasional charm failed to balance it’s smug racism. I didn’t sneer that much at male fans in this post because you can’t do everything all at once. But if you think my point is “all these other superheroes really deserve movies and WW doesn’t,” you’re not reading very carefully.
The WW animated film was quite bad and deeply uncomfortable with its own main character. If that’s your idea of a fully realized WW, lord help us.
WW is always sold as being important in DCU, much as the JL is always promoted as being great saviors of justice and Superman is sold as being an icon of all that is good in humanity. That’s fine in continuity. In real life, though, Superman is a corporate tool and the most boneheaded kind of male power fantasy, the Justice League is an only intermittently popular and consistently qualitatively lousy comic, and WW is promoted because she’s the best known female character historically, not because she actually has much of an audience or because anyone has the slightest idea how to write stories involving her.
My issue isn’t that I don’t think WW “deserves” a show, whatever on earth that means. My issue is that I don’t see why I should be particularly upset that she didn’t get a show. I’m all for more media that addresses women, and even all for more female action heroes. I just don’t see why those female action heroes have to be WW, or why it’s a particularly sad thing if they’re not.
To the extent that I think WW would not translate to other media as well as other properties, incidentally, it’s because I *like* her. Marston’s original vision of her is gloriously weird, and had actual content (feminism, bondage) that straightforward pulp characters like Batman and Superman really didn’t. Translating her is difficult because she’s actually a work of art as opposed to just a piece of pulp detritus.
Which means, among other things, that the best way to honor her is not to recycle her as pulp detritus, but to *make more art.*
In case you’re interested, here’s me spitting bile at Batman. Here’s me sneering at the Justice League. Lots more where those came from.
and doesn’t have a clear romantic interest with angst and tension, which is what you generally look for in female genre product
God, I’m so bored of this chestnut. Sex, romance, friendship and relationships are things that many people of both genders like, and many people of both genders dislike; I would say that on balance more people including most men like at least a little bit. Spider-man fans have opinions on Gwen Stacy vs Mary-Jane – in fact the male Spider-man fans seem to have a lot more opinions about it than the women. Does Lois Lane put the boys off? Meanwhile, the series of boring-to-offensive throwaway romantic relationships Bruce Wayne, like Diana, has had (and to an extent Dick Grayson, although at least he usually dates superheroes; Tim Drake also has a pattern of this) haven’t put women off reading Batfamily comics. In fact it’s usually men I see complaining about serial romances and wishing for a little monogamy (although no-one ever agrees on who the monogamy should be with, but hey, comics fans). It’s true that a certain type of comic book fan protests the inclusion of certain types of romance, generally because they seem “girly” (what a solid reason to disagree with a narrative take in a failing industry: “Ew, that tactic might attract more readers!”) but it’s nonsense to buy into it. Stop.
Calling Twilight a superhero franchise makes me want to cry. Although Bella has in common with superheroes that she’s designed as a bit of a sketch in order that the audience can identify with her, superhero franchises are, at least a bit, aspirational and empowering. They might not be empowering you to be a very good person, if you’re reading Watchmen or the Secret Six or, um, Batman, but there’s gotta be something there that makes you go: I wanna be that, I want to do that. Bella is the opposite; she’s designed to make you think “oh that’s me, I’m pathetic like her too, I’m clumsy, I need a man to make me awesome, that’s where awesome comes from.”
Noah: “If you’d read the essay about Gail Simone, you’d see that I praised her for her Mary Sueishness.”
I think you might have gotten the wrong idea about what a Mary Sue is. A Mary Sue is not an improbably powerful or beautiful character. It’s a case in which an author is inserting an obvious surrogate for herself and using the story not for drama but to deliver recognition and gratification she’s apparently not getting elsewhere. You don’t see a lot of them make it to publication, indeed the term came from fan fiction, because it’s truly masturbatory, not even fan-service but author-service.
“haven’t put women off reading Batfamily comics”
What are you talking about? Statistically, there are hardly any women who read batman comics to begin with. The vast, vast majority of people who read those comics are men.
There’s plenty of romance in male genre fiction too. It tends not to be as central (or not as acknowlegedly central) as it is for women. That’s not to say all women like romance or that all men don’t (*I* like romance.) It’s just genre is a demographic phenomena, so aggregates matter.
Re: Twilight. Bella’s a lot more aspirational than you’re claiming. She saves everybody, all her family and friends, at the end, and is shown throughout the series as being courageous and smart and resourceful. It’s true that she is not the ideal feminist hero in every way…but on the other hand, she doesn’t gratuitously wear a swimsuit for no particular reason. The Marston/Peter WW are way better than Twilight…but Twilight’s better — weirder, more thoughtful, better written — than just about any of the other iterations, whether the WW TV series or George Perez or whatever.
That is, the Twilight books are better. The last movie was godawful.
Liberty: I know what Mary Sue is supposed to be. We had a long roundtable about it. I think the sneering at Mary Sue characters is unfortunate and confused, basically. It’s a trope which has good aspects and bad aspects, like any trope. The definition that I was happiest with was an author who loves her character perhaps overly (thought overly isn’t always a bad thing.)
And a *ton* of them make it to publication. Tintin, Lord Peter Whimsey, Superman, Tarzan…the list goes on and on. It’s just that when they get published, people don’t call them Mary Sues anymore.
Robert: “Several comics fans like to bitch about Superman Returns, but it was well reviewed by MSM critics.”
The danger of making your tentpole superhero franchise film a heavyhanded Christian allegory is that if you don’t think it over you might wind up in the position of treating your hero like God. In that respect I thought it had a lot in common with hardcore comic shop culture and the editorial focus of DC Comics after Alex Ross: stories about why the heroes deserve our adulation as pop culture institutions rather than earning our affection each time as we watch them overcome obstacles. The movie’s portrayal of Superman as a deadbeat dad who thought the world revolved around him added another level of obnoxiousness. I don’t think I was intended to walk away thinking the movie should have been about Lois Lane’s boyfriend, the guy who helped out in dangerous situations using a small plane instead of superpowers. I remember critics I like and would consider mainstream, like Roger Ebert and the New Yorker, panning it for similar reasons, and I think the fact that they’re not continuing the series but attempting another of those reboots says something.
Noah: I’ve never seen the Mary Sue term used in a way that describes any Tintin, Tarzan, or Superman story I’m familiar with… or Gail Simone’s Wonder Woman run. The last time I heard it was for Julie Taymor’s Arachne character who everyone agreed was a major reason the story for her musical fell apart. Where is your roundtable?
Statistically, there are hardly any women who read batman comics to begin with. The vast, vast majority of people who read those comics are men.
People say this, but since every comics reader I know (and I actively avoid knowing dudes who are comics readers) reads at least one batbook and generally two or three, I don’t believe it. (And by read here I mean “buy”; I don’t buy Detective Comics, for example, but I usually know what’s going on in it and have an opinion.) I don’t know what the proportions are of women batfans relative to female fans of comics, male fans, and male batfans, but I don’t think you do either and I also don’t think DC does. I’d like to at least see the numbers put before me so I can criticise their source.
(And we can talk about the specific books the women I know buy: Batgirl, Red Robin, Batman & Robin, and Birds of Prey (if you count that as a batbook). All series not notable for a consistent romantic tension between any particular characters, unless you count Oracle and Black Canary. I would imagine Batwoman will be pretty heavily read by women too, if it ever actually happens, and I don’t expect to see a lot of romance there, either. Yet I think few comics fans would hesitate in identifying Batgirl and Birds of Prey as “girl” comics. Right?)
What is it about Wonder Woman’s outfit that reflects on her fitness as a character again? Specifically? (We’re clearly not going to agree about Bella; she apparently does some cool shit at the end of her enormous series, but I continue to feel that she represents an aiming for less but with powers, rather than an aiming for more but with powers. I won’t even bother with a feminist criticism, since coming from a comics fan it might look a bit, um.)
However, nice to see someone acknowledging the prevalence of male Mary Sues out there, and also a shout out to peter death bredon.
I understand the frustration a fan feels that their favorite character is having trouble making it to the screen. Or in some cases, deemed not worthy to be on the screen (yes, still pining for that Rocket Raccoon and Groot film by Pixar and “Scud the Disposable Assassin animated series). I mean, as a black kid growing up in the late 60s and 70s, I had to put up with Nicholas Hammond Spider-Man. I had to sit through that unbearable Doctor Strange pilot. I got dreck like Steel and Mantis and Meteor Man. I had to wait decades, decades, just to see Pete and Cyborg on Smallville. I love most superheroes and loved the Lynda Carter series and would like nothing more than to see a great WW movie or tv show or new animated series. And I also understand those angry feelings of being marginalized being a black man who loves comics.
What I don’t understand is the blinding rage that these fan girls have on the subject of WW and the refusal to understand the problems that studios face. Over at the Beat, Heidi is at least even tempered about it. But dcwomenkickingass….wow. I mean the hatred and anger in her echo chamber is actually kind of disturbing. There is no discussion to be had on this subject. At all. And the notion that “ww is too complicated” should be met with such vitriol is kind of dumbfounding.
And making comparisons to Thor is just incoherent. Thor is practically a blank slate with a Hammer. There is no 70 years of baggage connected to him. There is no history of fetish connected to him. There isn’t a angry commentary by Gloria Steinem about Thor losing his powers connected to him. His norse mythology is irrelevant to the character unlike WW’s hopelessly tangled Greek roots. Thor is one of the most baggage free heroes in the history of heroes. Squirrel Girl is more complicated than Thor. The fact that die hard WW fans can’t see that, can’t (or won’t) understand it and greet such opinion with such condescending scorn is rather astounding and shows that these WW fan girls don’t want a conversation about the subject. They just want to promulgate their own opinion on the character.
I also don’t understand the “marketing element” of WW as some proof that she’s a viable property for the big screen or television. DCWomen seems to think that the Estee Lauder line of cosmetics is empirical evidence of some sort. Of what I don’t know. They make cosmetics, not comics. I doubt the majority of women that purchased a WW compact would be remotely interested in reading the comic or seeing the cartoon or make them pine for a big screen movie. My wife bought some of that and she still has disdain for all things comic and fantasy related. Saying that DC/Warners failed to take advantage of this marketing campaign to get more female readers to WW is just insane. It’s like Estee Lauder doing a major marketing campaign to 8 year old boys by putting Spider-Man on their lipstick and then being surprised that no 8 year old boys bought the lipstick. How is the marketplace for two completely different products somehow magically transferable? The logic of these very passionate WW fans is really rather astounding.
I spent some time reading dcwomenkickingass comments after seeing this article and couldn’t believe the anger, the misery, the frustration, the close mindedness and out and out hate. The comments section was, well, lets just say telling. That every opinion that differs from the blogger is met by the other comments as “misogynist” is pretty outrageous. After reading some of this terribly depressing blog I was not compelled to leave any thoughts on the subject or inclined to visit it again given it’s oppressive and relentless tone of utter despair and anger. And that’s kind of sad given that the blogger has some interesting things to say on other topics. But life is too short to be that miserable over a comic book character.
Thank you, sir for your mansplaination. Now that I know the proper way of things I shall cease and desist in being a fan of the silly, weird, ridiculous and complicated character that is Wonder Woman.
Instead I shall devote my fan efforts into; the Norse godling born of the Allfather who visits our realm to fight ice monsters via a rainbow bridge and flies about with his hammer of doom that only he can wield and also the Super man who as a tiny baby alien, was sent away from his exploding planet, the last of his kind, and crash landed in a corn field to be found and adopted by a passing farmer couple. Who then grew up to have epic solar powered super powers, wear a big red S on his chest and his underpants on the outside. As those are OBVIOUSLY far less silly, weird, ridiculous and complicated characters.
Basically, this is my saying that your OPINIONS on the character of Wonder Woman are so fundamentally flawed that the only way I could even begin to comment to this was with the above sarcastic jab.
Hey Noah,
You should brush up on your lexicon a bit. Words like “weird” and “bizarre” are a bit pedestrian even for you. Your take on WW is all wrong. You need to read WW comics before making a silly editorial. The movie Salt was nothing short of abysmal. Plot holes galore. Read the comics first than write about them.
libertymedia–
Among the film reviewers Rotten Tomatoes tracks, Superman Returns enjoys a 76% favorable rating overall, and a 72% favorable rating among “top” (i.e. establishment-media) critics. I didn’t say it was universally well reviewed; I just said it was well reviewed, and I hoped the inference of “generally” would be understood. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
The film earned a $391 million worldwide gross. That sounds pretty good to me, and it’s better than the $371 million worldwide gross Batman Begins had a year earlier.
WB executives think a different direction would be more lucrative for the franchise. They have their reasons, but it’s not that Superman Returns was a critical or commercial failure. The opposite is true. It just didn’t make as much money as they anticipated.
You seem to assume that because they’re making a decision you agree with, that means they’re making it for the same reasons you would. Believe me, they don’t care about any of what you bring up. They’re notorious for not even watching the films they put into production.
the dcwomenkickingass acolytes are out in force. is the echo chamber over there getting a bit crowded?
Tui, in the first place, basically nobody reads comics. It’s a tiny portion of the entertainment industry in the U.S. Beyond that, the average comic reader is a man in his 30s who’s been reading comics for decades. Every time anybody talks about comics demographics, that’s what they say they are.
Are there some people who read comics? Sure. Are there some women who read comics. Undoubtedly. Are there enough women who read comics that you can know what seems like a lot of them online. Absolutely. But there are exponentially more women who are interested in Twilight, or Harry Potter, or Nora Roberts than there are who care about the Batman books.
I don’t think there are any superhero comics that are girl comics, incidentally. I’m sure Birds of Prey and Batgirl had/will have majority male readership, because majority male readership is what you’ve got if you’re creating a comic at the big two. If you want comics that have majority female readership, you need to move over to manga.
And one of the reasons for that is precisely what you say; superhero comics have a lot of trouble figuring out how to do romance. Romance is the most popular genre for women. Again, that’s not to say all women want romance…it’s just the way the demographics play out in general.
Wiccy, I really don’t like Superman. I don’t give a rat’s ass about Thor, and firmly intend never to see that movie. On the other hand, I really like WW. I like her because she is weird. If she were less weird, she would be much more boring. None of which changes the fact that, yes, her outfit is more uncomfortable even than Superman’s. In part because *it comes across as being deliberately kind of sexist.* To many of the many women out there who don’t read superhero comics. Or care about female superheroes.
I’d also point out that I didn’t mansplain anything. You want to be into WW, go ahead. My question was why *I* should care, and, in fact, why anyone who is not a Wonder Woman fan should care, or should get into a feminist uproar, over the fact that this series was canned, and over the fact that in general WW is not a very successful cross-media property. Insulting me doesn’t really answer that question. Insisting that you are a fan doesn’t answer the question either. What does WW offer in new corporate iterations that I should really be excited about? Nobody has even come close to even trying to respond to that question, as far as I can tell.
David, I’ve read many WW comics, thank you very much. And Salt was not very good. We agree on that. So what?
Penis + disagreeing with me + explaining your views.
There’s a word for that, and it’s an ugly word: mansplaining.
Wonder Woman has charged into battle in a Playboy bunny outfit that has been steadily shrinking for the past 700 years. Any questioning of that is sexism. Noah Berlatsky used the words “weird” and “bizarre” in some relation to my favorite children’s character, and that made me so mad I stopped reading and started typing. If I do say so myself I may be on the front line of the great feminist cause of our age. However I am struggling to express myself in an environment with no “like” function or ability to paste sparkly unicorn GIFs. That’s why I can’t do it alone. I have already posted my cry for vengeance on the Nightwing/Starfire4Evr bulletin board, but justice will only be restored when we have several hundred more commenters in here free-associating their feelings about random words. This is what the internet is all about!
Oh sure, just pour gasoline on the fire, why don’t you….
Are there some people who read comics? Sure. Are there some women who read comics. Undoubtedly. Are there enough women who read comics that you can know what seems like a lot of them online. Absolutely. But there are exponentially more women who are interested in Twilight, or Harry Potter, or Nora Roberts than there are who care about the Batman books.
Not only are there more women who care about Harry Potter than women who care about Batman, there are more women who care about Harry Potter than men, women, children, trans* and genderqueer and, basically, humans who care about Batman. Sure. Yes. That’s a fact. There are probably more women out there who care about patisserie, S M Stirling, or Robert Frost than people who read comics. I concur that this is related to the big two’s general ineptness at targeting a variety of people. But I am pretty bored of people saying “comics readers are 30 year old men who like what they like and what they like, they like” without any willingness to actually back up their anecdata (someone must have done some numbers sometime; where are they?) At any rate, my point there was that there are women – bunches of women – who don’t conform to these tired old notions of what women like, and men who do. (Lots of women really liked Firefly, for example, which is not a solid romantic product. It has some romance, but romance is not a cornerstone.) I was implying, and I think, that Wonder Woman doesn’t need to have a Lois Lane in order to appeal to women or to be a viable commercial property. Comics *can* do romance well; they can do it at least as well as TV shows. They don’t have to to be good or to be commercial though; plenty of women saw The Dark Knight Returns. And Thor. (PLENTY of women; I really don’t want to hear again that women don’t watch superhero movies.)
What does WW offer in new corporate iterations that I should really be excited about?
The thing is that this is exactly the question that Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, the Hulk, Spider-Man never have to answer. I could say “the loyalty of eight year old girls, the audience who watched Buffy and Nikita and Bones”, and you’ll respond by saying, “but that’s already met by Buffy and Nikita and Bones.” What does Batman bring me that Superman and Sherlock Holmes didn’t bring me? What does Iron Man bring that Batman didn’t? Only the nuance of the characters. If you like Wonder Woman so much I don’t get why you’re so convinced she can’t bring exactly the same thing.
I’m not actually sure they have run numbers on this. I know that most of the commenters I trust (Dirk Deppey especially) believe it’s the case…and it certainly fits with what the output of the big two is. You just don’t draw women that way if the audience is significantly female.
“What does Batman bring me that Superman and Sherlock Holmes didn’t bring me? What does Iron Man bring that Batman didn’t? ”
The thing is, I don’t think Batman or Superman or Sherlock Holmes or Iron Man really bring anything in particular. I’ve liked some things with each of them (the Batman Adam West movie is awesome; the first Christopher Reeve superman movie is pretty good; the Sherlock Holmes movie was pretty good.) But if there were no Batman products, I wouldn’t care. At all. Not even a little bit. I certainly wouldn’t be ringing my hands saying, “why aren’t there more Batman movies! He deserves a chance!” Because it’s a corporate owned property that’s basically idiotic and has always been. Who cares?
That’s all I’m saying about WW (who hasn’t been idiotic forever, but has been for quite some time). It’s possible that someone could make a decent series with her; odds are against it given the history, but it’s possible. But dcwomenkickingass and others are actively upset that the show got dropped, and are suggesting that there are feminist grounds for being upset and for feeling that this particular character is not getting as much attention as she deserves. And like I said, I just don’t see it. If you’re a fan, you’re a fan, and fans like what they like — but to argue that it’s really a cultural problem that there isn’t more WW…I need a better argument to convince me of that.
Part of it, again, is that to me, loving the Marston/Peter series doesn’t mean I want tons and tons more WW product, anymore than loving Elizabeth Bennett means I want tons of sequels of Pride and Prejudice written by somebody who isn’t Jane Austen. Sometimes loving a piece of art means you *don’t* want it to be turned into hackwork…..
Okay, this is some info from Valerie D’Orazio from a couple years back on mainstream reader demographics:
I can’t get to it directly, for some reason, but found a cache.
I have to say, 90% male is higher than I was even thinking. That’s pretty crazy.
Here’s Johanna Draper Carlson with similar stats. From the mid-90s, but still…I don’t think the gender breakdown can have changed all that much.
This is a published source saying 94% male in 1983. Same source says around 12% female circa 2000, but says women buy fewer comics and more other things from comic shopts, so 12% may be too high.
So that’s three sources covering the last 30 years or so, all of which suggest that men make up around 90% of the market for mainstream comics. These things are obviously hard to pin down, but that seems fairly convincing to me. If you can find statistics that contradict that, I’d be interested to see them.
“Part of it, again, is that to me, loving the Marston/Peter series doesn’t mean I want tons and tons more WW product, anymore than loving Elizabeth Bennett means I want tons of sequels of Pride and Prejudice written by somebody who isn’t Jane Austen.”
Prider and Prejudicer: The Revenge of Elizabeth Bennett
Come on, Noah, tell me you wouldn’t plotz to see a live-action Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls. Woo-woo! (Candy would be CGI, natch; god forbid you cast a real-life short, fat woman). That said, I can actually envisage an Adult Swim WW cartoon that just dramatised, dead-pan, the Marston/Peter stories.
It’s funny you keep protesting your love for the original comics–I love them too!. (And I’ve enjoyed the venus-girdle series). But I’m fairly sure that anyone who likes those comics has zero interest in the character otherwise, especially on TV/film; and, contrariwise, anyone who wants a film/TV-series would run a million miles away from the original comics as being far, far too fucking weird and, worse, too silly…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…To the extent that I think WW would not translate to other media as well as other properties, incidentally, it’s because I *like* her. Marston’s original vision of her is gloriously weird, and had actual content (feminism, bondage) that straightforward pulp characters like Batman and Superman really didn’t. Translating her is difficult because she’s actually a work of art as opposed to just a piece of pulp detritus.
Which means, among other things, that the best way to honor her is not to recycle her as pulp detritus, but to *make more art.*
…Sometimes loving a piece of art means you *don’t* want it to be turned into hackwork…..
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Agree 100%; the original WW is as uniquely idiosyncratic a work as, say, Chester Gould’s “Dick Tracy.” (Look what happened to that strip when others took it over, decided to delete the weirder touches, “humanize” the lead character…)
And even from small portion I’ve seen, the original WW series was also clearly the best; those samples of Harry Peter’s art at http://www.comixology.com/articles/454/Wonder-Playmate (particularly the cover and “jumping backwards over the sabertooth” panel) displaying a sinuous grace and power.
For all the understandable fuss about the bondage in the ur-“Wonder Woman,” the point doesn’t get made much (I’ve not noticed it at all, actually) that, unlike erotic bondage scenarios, where the woman simply whimpers and struggles ineffectually, Wonder Woman struggles heroically and breaks free!
Nothing wimpy or submissive about her struggles depicted at https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/05/can-wonder-woman-be-a-superdick-part-2/ ; she “bites through the tough leather of the brank,” bursts open the Tibetan collar by “tightening her powerful neck muscles”…!
Noah, I yield to your superior WW scholarship, but in what way do scenes like this show that Marston is glorifying submission, “show[ing] WW’s power by tying her up”? Anybody can get tied up; but Wonder Woman’s power is shown by her breaking free, again and again.
(Doesn’t this also remind of Harry Houdini, or “Mr. Miracle” [ http://olsenbloom.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/mr-miracle-03-00-the-paranoid-pill.jpg?w=201&h=300 , http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/wysiwyg/image/MisterMiracleVol1_6%281%29.jpg ]? Or the thrilling moment in the first “Matrix” movie when Morpheus strains, and breaks the shackles on his wrists?)
The Peter b&w illustration at http://www.comixology.com/articles/454/Wonder-Playmate simply making obvious what Wonder Woman was continually having to struggle against.
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Jones, one of the Jones boys says:
…That said, I can actually envisage an Adult Swim WW cartoon that just dramatised, dead-pan, the Marston/Peter stories…
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That would be outstanding! (“Dead-pan” is a must; no knowing winking or smirking, please…)
“who are in the minority that really like the superhero women on offer by the big two” Seriously? What about characters like Kate Kane as Batwoman? She is immensely popular and with good reason too. As well as the characters in Birds of Prey?
I actually am interested in what would have to say about Batwoman.
Here’s Johanna Draper Carlson with similar stats. From the mid-90s, but still…I don’t think the gender breakdown can have changed all that much.
This is a published source saying 94% male in 1983. Same source says around 12% female circa 2000, but says women buy fewer comics and more other things from comic shopts, so 12% may be too high.
It can’t have changed all that much in 10-15 years? Really? Your willingness to take data and then be completely subjective in extrapolating it to fit your ideas of who is reading comics is frustrating. As a woman who buys comics and has worked in a comic book store, I can be subjective too and say there are a lot more women in comic shops making purchases than there were 10 years ago.
Yes, manga is more popular for women, as are less traditional superhero comics (DC Vertigo, indie comics, etc). However, I think the graphic novel format in general is more popular and accessible to comic readers, especially women who seem to me to be less likely to be collectors and more likely to simply want to read the stories. The big increase in graphic novel availability in the last 10 years has significantly changed readership, as people who wouldn’t have had anything to do with issues are buying them with gusto and discovering a love for them. Manga was ahead of the curve on this, but everyone else has been running to catch up.
RHWGeek: Well, part of the reason I don’t think it’s changed that much is I’ve got a source looking at statistics from 2008 saying it hasn’t changed that much. Yeesh. Read the whole comment, huh?
And as far as subjective goes; I actually found some statistics, as requested. If you’re got statistics, put ’em out there. Otherwise, your claim that “everyone else has been running to catch up” is just speculation. I’ve seen little evidence that the big two has figured out how to effectively imitate manga in any significant respect.
Mike: Gene was asking this on the other thread… There are a couple of ways that I think loving submission is fairly important. First…Marston talks about it a lot. It’s one of his thematic touchstones. Second, he does show WW on several occasions submitting to Aphrodite by doing as she tells her. Three, WW becoming Diana to serve Steve is an example of loving submission. Fourth, there are numerous examples of large groups of men bowing down to women. And finally, scenes of bondage and escape are (to me at least) clearly as much about the bondage as the escape. The excitement is in the breaking out, but also in the tying up. This is especially true inasmuch as B&D play generally involves struggle — and also inasmuch as I think it’s fairly clear that WW’s travails mirror Marston’s kinks, and probably his own actual B&D play.
Marston was very interested in women breaking bonds, but he was also interested in women demonstrating loving submission. I think the comics reflect and integrate both those concerns.
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Kesi, I haven’t read Batwoman. I’m not much of a fan of Rucka though. Also, if you’ll look up thread, you’ll see that multiple sources claim that male readership is about 90% of the comics audience, and has been for decades.
I read the whole source, actually, and find the most recent stats you referenced unconvincing. She even says:
Yes, the male/female percentages on the readership shocked the hell out of me. I expected a male majority but not to that extent. And yes, unless I saw the methodologies and explanations of sample sizes used, I can’t stake my life on this data. But, a lot of what we see in mainstream comics bears this demographic out, does it not?
So, the data is somewhat iffy, as she only heard/saw the results from someone, and didn’t actually *see* any study at all.
Did they look only at readers of issues? Regular subscribers? Readers only accessing comics via comic book stores vs buying graphic novels at bookstores? The data is meaningless without context and information on the sample taken.
It could also be the case that “a lot of what we see in mainstream comics” bearing this out is because of preconceived notions, not because the readers are actually driving it.
Yup – my “running to catch up” comment was opinion. I never said that any of the main publishers had “succeeded” in anyway, especially not in mirroring mangas particular success. The big guys have, however, significantly improved their graphic novel collections and distribution.
Their content has also become ever more insular, though.
I’ve got data from mid-80s, mid-90s, early 2000s, and late 2000s all saying that the breakdown is 90% male. Of course all data like this is iffy. But three sources from four time periods with the same breakdown seems fairly convincing to me. Like I said, if someone can turn up another source with contrary information, I’d certainly be interested to see it. For the moment, I think I’m justified in saying that, on the best evidence I’ve got, women make up a small fraction of the readership of superhero comics. Which suggests to me that the best way to increase female readership is to offer more of the kinds of content that large numbers of women actually seem to care about, rather than to put more effort into promoting characters that, by and large, they have shown that they are indifferent to.
Robert: “The film earned a $391 million worldwide gross. That sounds pretty good to me, and it’s better than the $371 million worldwide gross Batman Begins had a year earlier.”
I think after the massive advertising push that film got, the recognition of the Superman character, its positioning as an almost-sequel to the Reeve films, and its status as an all-ages film as opposed to the dark, violent direction the Batman film took, that was underperforming.
“Believe me, [WB execs] don’t care about any of what you bring up.”
I don’t think they would find my critical stylings very interesting at all. But they do care about whether it connected with audiences, and I don’t think it did. I just don’t buy the insular comics world vs. mainstream culture division. You’re still hearing comics fans talk about it because these are people who spend time talking about Superman.
It made money. Not enough for the greedheads.
libertymedia–
We’re not going to convince each other. We’ve made our respective cases, so let’s agree to disagree and move on.
Noah–
You might be interested to know this. It’s estimated that up to 80% of all fiction and memoir sales in bookstores are made to women.
Good lord! That’s crazy. I had no idea bookstore sales were that weighted.
There’s no way of knowing for sure, but that’s the figure that’s been accepted in New York publishing circles for years. I heard it repeatedly when I worked on-staff at a New York house years ago, and I still hear it from my contacts in the business now.
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liberty media says:
Robert: “[Superman Returns] earned a $391 million worldwide gross. That sounds pretty good to me, and it’s better than the $371 million worldwide gross Batman Begins had a year earlier.”
I think after the massive advertising push that film got, the recognition of the Superman character, its positioning as an almost-sequel to the Reeve films, and its status as an all-ages film as opposed to the dark, violent direction the Batman film took, that was underperforming.
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The giant problem is, that it’s a Hollywood rule that a movie must take in three times its cost at the box-office in order to break even. There are shares that go to the theaters and distributors, cost of making prints of the film, advertising expenses, which were HUGE here: “[The film was] preceded by an extensive marketing campaign at the cost of $44.5 million…” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_Returns .
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Director Bryan Singer quashes the rumor that `Superman Returns’ cost $250 million to make. Singer says, “The movie was budgeted at $184.5 million and will probably climb with visual effects and variables that occur in a movie of this magnitude, with 1,400 visual effects, etc., to somewhere still south of $200 million.”
Of course, once Warner Brothers has paid all the marketing bills for the film, the tab will undoubtedly be close to $250 million. That’s a big bet.
According to The Numbers, the 1978 “Superman” cost $55 million to make; “Superman II” cost $25 million. Of all the Christopher Reeve era films, the first “Superman” grossed the most worldwide ($300 million)….
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http://cinematech.blogspot.com/2006/02/superman-returns-director-says-his.html
…So in order to merely break even, SR would’ve needed to take in almost $750 million, not a paltry (!!) $391 mill…
Ooops! Giving statistics, quoting information; am I guilty of “mansplaining” too? Lemme Google info on this term (which I’d not run across before)
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…This is also known as the Men Who Know Things phenomenon, whereby some men mistakenly believe that they automatically know more about any given topic than does a woman and will, consequently, proceed to explain to her- correctly or not- things that she already knows.
The mansplainer’s problem isn’t so much that he’s trying to teach a woman something, but rather that he takes it as a given that she doesn’t already know whatever it is he is going to tell her.
…Despite my general competence at life, dudes mansplain things to me all the time. When I’ve been in gyms working out, men have offered me unsolicited tips on new exercises to try, despite the fact that I’ve been successfully working out and lifting weights for almost two decades.
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http://fanniesroom.blogspot.com/2010/02/art-of-mansplaining.html
I guess these guys who — the horror! — dared to give her exercise tips, ignored that she had “I’ve been successfully working out and lifting weights for almost two decades” tattooed on her forehead. Of course, since it was those vile male creatures doing it, naturally it couldn’t be anything like friendly helpfulness, or an indication of romantic interest. Just contemptuous condescension…
I never went to college (despite the fact my outstanding grades would’ve easily qualified me for a scholarship) ’cause nobody ever “mansplained” to our single mother that there existed these things called “scholarships,” and I wasn’t willing to dump her with the expense, despite her willingness to sacrifice herself so. (And nobody in school or family ever bothered to pass that tip on to us, either.) Oh, and — as in many fundamentalist, “traditional” societies — since women were to be “protected” from getting involved in the nasty world of business, nobody ever “mansplained” to her anything about advancing in her career, investing money instead of scrimping and saving, negotiating when purchasing a home or car, etc. How fortunate we were!
Guys, if a woman’s car won’t start, don’t you dare lift a finger to help; feminists everywhere would freak! On the bright side, I’ve read stories of elderly and ready-to-pop pregnant women having to stand in trains and buses; ’cause healthy young men rightly did not engage in the insultingly condescending slap-in-the-face action of offering them their seats.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…There are a couple of ways that I think loving submission is fairly important. First…Marston talks about it a lot. It’s one of his thematic touchstones. Second, he does show WW on several occasions submitting to Aphrodite by doing as she tells her. Three, WW becoming Diana to serve Steve is an example of loving submission. Fourth, there are numerous examples of large groups of men bowing down to women. And finally, scenes of bondage and escape are (to me at least) clearly as much about the bondage as the escape. The excitement is in the breaking out, but also in the tying up. This is especially true inasmuch as B&D play generally involves struggle — and also inasmuch as I think it’s fairly clear that WW’s travails mirror Marston’s kinks, and probably his own actual B&D play.
Marston was very interested in women breaking bonds, but he was also interested in women demonstrating loving submission. I think the comics reflect and integrate both those concerns.
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Fair enough; yet, is there anything kinkily submissive about the two examples you gave, “submitting to Aphrodite by doing as she tells her,” or “becoming Diana to serve Steve”? Or aren’t those actually perfectly normal examples of human behavior, namely giving in to the will of God, as one sees it, and putting aside one’s interests in order to care for a loved one?
“Originally, Wonder Woman owed her abilities to the goddess Aphrodite creating Amazons superior to men, with Diana being the best of their kind,” says http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Woman . So Aphrodite is not only a major goddess, but WW’s creator. Back when I was single and had the time for serious attention to my devotions to Kali, I not only did what she wanted when it was communicated me, but found prostrating myself in loving worship before her image to be a perfectly natural, normal thing to do. (Anyone who wouldn’t bow down to the god/goddess they worship has a serious arrogance problem, and needs a heavy shot of humility.)
And if a brain surgeon or corporate CEO becomes a parent, and for a while sets aside their outer-world responsibilities to care for their child, including stuff as important yet unedifying as changing diapers and wiping runny noses, is that “submission” too? In Wonder Woman’s case, being a nurse for the sick or injured Steve Trevor simply means for a while setting aside her warrior duties and persona in order to let another aspect of her self, the caring nurturer, emerge.
As for real-life B&D activity, from all I’ve read, the bound “victim” never escapes; such an action is as totally out-of-kilter as a rape fantasy culminating with the victim beating up the rapist. So, though Marston’s own kinks might have inspired similar scenes in “Wonder Woman,” the character is hardly an example of proper submissiveness…
Bit of a head-trip to think that Marston and Alan Moore had both shared a polyamorous relationship with a pair of bi women! What notes and experiences they could have shared… (Alan Moore voice: “It’s important that everyone have their own bathroom…”)
I don’t know; men do in many cases treat women in a condescending fashion, or tell them what they should be thinking. It’s not wrong to point that out. I don’t think that’s what I was doing…and I think there can also be a tendency to use the charge of sexism to shut down differences of opinion. But I’d rather negotiate those issues on a case by case basis rather than making sweeping declarations about how men in general are treated unfairly, which I don’t think they are.
Mike–
Isn’t that an old rule? I seem to remember first hearing that “three times its cost” rule back in the 1980s. I would think the income from home video, etc. is much more important now. Also, Hollywood accounting muddies things quite a bit; I believe one of the executive producers sued WB over profits from the first Tim Burton Batman film because the studio claimed the film hadn’t made any–which is nonsense.
The estimated budget for Batman Begins was $150 million. It fell short of the “three-times” standard, and I’m certain it wasn’t considered a financial disappointment.
Also, does anyone know if the costs of the development process was figured into these budgets? Superman Returns had an expensive, troubled development history. There were at least two earlier versions that were shut down shortly before going into production. One was to be directed by Burton, with a script by Kevin Smith that would star Nicolas Cage. The other was to be directed by McG from a script by J.J. Abrams. I seem to remember reading that Cage had a pay-or-play deal that ended up earning him $20 million for doing a few costume tests.
I’m used to the term “mansplaining” – and its analogues, like “cissplaining” – having a fairly specific meaning: some feminists are having a conversation. A man comes in, sometimes claiming to be an ally, sometimes not; he proceeds to treat everyone else like they don’t know what they’re talking about and completely derails the conversation by making big, obvious excuses for the man/men being discussed, or worse, for all men. This usually involves condescending explanation, as though everyone else in the conversation (especially the women) couldn’t possibly know these fairly basic things and have never heard these fairly simple arguments before. It may include headdesk-inducing arguments, like appeals to biological determinism, reverse oppression or natural roles, that no feminist would ever buy. It may in effect be trolling, although it’s never explicit, and may not be intended as such. The overall effect is that of a man coming into a conversation between feminists and wrecking it by waving his privilege everywhere, demanding everyone’s time and attention by constantly derailing the conversation, knocking over the china and getting everyone really angry.
I’ve seen the term used outside of that context, and I suppose it has some usability in other situations in which a man is seen to be priv-waving and engaging in condescending, sexist, forehead-smacking argument. It really loses some of its specificity when it’s taken too far out of context, though.
I think it’s getting used here because some people believe I’m telling them that all women don’t like Wonder Woman. Which I really don’t think I said. I think some folks are also willing to use it because I believe that most women really aren’t especially interested in WW, and that there are kind of obvious and quite decent reasons why that would be so. So the argument is that I”m speaking to what women think and that makes me a mansplainer.
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Robert Stanley Martin says:
Mike–
Isn’t that an old rule? I seem to remember first hearing that “three times its cost” rule back in the 1980s. I would think the income from home video, etc. is much more important now. Also, Hollywood accounting muddies things quite a bit; I believe one of the executive producers sued WB over profits from the first Tim Burton Batman film because the studio claimed the film hadn’t made any–which is nonsense.
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Guess I’m more long in the tooth than thou; I’m old enough to distinctly remember when it used to be “two and a half times its cost”…
And indeed, “Hollywood accounting” is notoriously crooked, which is why stars/directors with sufficient clout specify they get a percentage of the box-office take, where the figures are reported openly and fairly accurately, rather than profits, which can mysteriously evaporate through accounting legerdemain. (I used to be a devoted reader of “Variety,” many decades ago…)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I don’t know; men do in many cases treat women in a condescending fashion, or tell them what they should be thinking. It’s not wrong to point that out.
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Sure; yet when the net is cast so wide that you — hardly a domineering macho pig — are accused of “mansplaining,” the term itself in employed to have a chilling effect on all male-female interactions.
(Which is the hidden intent, of course; in the same fashion that the Right’s accusations of “liberal bias” and being “too liberal” are used to drive public discourse ever further to the Right. Or human rights activists in the West are accused of being “culturally insensitive” if they say some Third-World tyrant is guilty of human rights violations; who by not being white or Christian is therefore exempt from criticism by “our kind.”)
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But I’d rather negotiate those issues on a case by case basis rather than making sweeping declarations about how men in general are treated unfairly, which I don’t think they are.
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Who’s saying that “men in general are treated unfairly”? Feminists are — for better and worse — a minority group, with asinine attitudes such as this that display fearfulness and insecurity keeping the movement on the fringe. (“Oooh! A man held a door open for me! He’s sneeringly showing contempt for my ability to open the door for myself!!”)
And plenty of examples at http://fanniesroom.blogspot.com/2010/02/art-of-mansplaining.html of “sweeping declarations” among the more specific instances (“…my girlfriend and I were eating dinner with a white male human.”) He’s not only male, but he’s white, too! Hisss! And…he’s eating “Man Food”!! More from that site:
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Whereas whitesplaining is the result of the white experience being “normed,” mansplaining, is the logical result of males possessing the privilege whereby they are largely assumed to be both default human beings and automatically competent at life.
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Yes, all males — especially those white ones — are endowed with privilege and bucketloads of automatic, undeserved self-confidence.
Imagine all this bilge with “blacks” taking the place of “males,” and it becomes more blatantly evident what’s going on here.
Of course sexism is unfortunately alive and thriving. For instance, my wife reports that in her state job, men still get significantly more pay than women for the same work, and American women soldiers are in more danger from their male fellow soldiers than the official “enemy.” ( More about the plight of the latter at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103844570 )
Yet going on and on about the vileness of “men” and “white males” (’cause black males are SO much more enlightened about sexism) simply drives away potential allies; replaces sympathy with resentment.
(Look what happened to the Civil Rights movement after Martin Luther King’s assassination as it became “fringed” when whites were no longer welcome; when Louis Farrakhan pushed anti-Semitism among blacks, thus driving away Jews, who’d once been a powerful ally of oppressed blacks…)
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Anja Flower says:
…some feminists are having a conversation. A man comes in, sometimes claiming to be an ally, sometimes not; he proceeds to treat everyone else like they don’t know what they’re talking about and completely derails the conversation…The overall effect is that of a man coming into a conversation between feminists and wrecking it by waving his privilege everywhere, demanding everyone’s time and attention by constantly derailing the conversation, knocking over the china and getting everyone really angry.
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Well, Gawd forbid the feminists should calmly argue back at him, debate his dubious points. Hevvins, their delicate lil’ discourse on the Evils of the Patriarchy has been “wrecked” and “derailed”! Instead of cool rationality or a dismissive “thank you for sharing; now, run along…” we get an incoherent emotional reaction. (Which, unfortunately, is what Dave Sim would’ve predicted.)
What they need to do is put a “No Boys Allowed” sign on their clubhouse, since these fragile feminists get thrown into a tizzy if some schmo walks in and waves his “privilege” at ’em…
Alas, that the valiant Suffragettes, who were massively scorned and thrown in jail — “Suffragettes in the UK used militant tactics such as chaining themselves to railings, setting fire to mailbox contents, smashing windows and occasionally detonating bombs,” sez http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette — should have so devolved…
It’s perfectly reasonable for women to want to have spaces in which they can have conversations without being trolled by idiots. Marginalized groups need to be able to build solidarity. And men who show up at such conversations with the intention to disrupt and pontificate aren’t necessarily there in good faith.
I think in this case you’re also kind of confused about the source of the animosity and the cause of the tension. The issue here is more about fan culture than feminism, I think. The reaction is quite similar to what I get whenever I poke somebody’s fandom, whether it be men or women or art comics folks or manga or whatever. People get upset when you question their pop culture investments. That’s not feminism’s fault.
Mike, the examples Anja gives are ones I’ve come across often, both on- and offline. I agree with you about the gym tips scenario, though.
“Sure; yet when the net is cast so wide that you — hardly a domineering macho pig — are accused of “mansplaining,”
Sensitive new age guys can be sexist too, is the thing. So can men who declare themselves feminist.
To get back to WW — has anybody seen the pilot? It could be simply that it was mediocre, or just didn’t fit the network line-up. I believe only half of pilots actually filmed get to the air, and maybe one in five of the latter go on to a series.
There’s no need to suppose some vast sexist anti-WW prejudice. Certainly Warner would love to exploit this property.
Caleb saw it.
Gee, Mike, thanks for informing me about the Suffragettes! Between reading women’s art history, groaning at Judith Butler’s prose and debating on feminist forums, I simply hadn’t taken the time to find out that the Suffragettes existed. Why, I thought that the framed picture of Alice Paul on my desk was a photograph of a famous actress! Um.
Feminists should be able to have discussion and debate between feminists, within our own feminist spaces, without getting barged in on by misogynistic douchebags making excuses for All Men and demanding that we defend the basic tenets of feminism. I don’t know how you ended up inserting incoherence and emotionality into that – or are all feminists supposed to be stiff-upper-lip and stoic at all times, lest we reveal ourselves to be the wilting and trembling bundles of emotion that Dave Sim believes us to be? ‘Cause, you know, being frustrated at a frustrating occurrence seems pretty reasonable to me.
It’s true that sensitive new-age guys and self-declared feminist men can be sexist. Women can by misogynistic, too – internalized oppression happens.
Also, why would you want to bring up Dave Sim in defense of ANY of your views, even ones that have nothing at all to do with gender? Srsly.
Odd, Anja.
You’ve attacked feminists in this blog, and vigorously.
What’s that all about?
At any rate, this concept of “our own space” seems pervasive among non-males.A place where exterior criticism is forbidden.
Pretty timorous, in my view.
This is ironic in that the latter have been unremitting and relentless in their attacks on males’ having their “own space”, such as private clubs…
I’ve attacked feminists? When? I might’ve attacked radfems, but one does not have to be a lesbian seperatist or cultural feminist to be radical and a feminist (or a feminist, period).
Why is it so weird to want space for feminists to debate amongst themselves without exterior intrusion? We should have places where we can have non-101 and non-apologist discussions without those discussions being derailed. It’s not a matter of women-only spaces, either – I’m against women-only spaces, and against the people (radfems) who usually support them.
Those “private clubs” you refer to are generally spaces for wealthy and powerful white patriarchs to gather. There’s a difference between the Bohemian Club or the Pacific Union Club and a group of feminists – some of whom do not identify as women – who want to ward off trolls. Anyway, I’ve never heard of or seen a women-only feminist blog or forum, and if I did, I’d oppose it.
Anyhow, private clubs aren’t spaces for men as a group, they’re spaces for a very small elite of rich, powerful white men. The case against them is based on class issues as much as it is on gender issues.
Anja’s talked about problems ze has with particular feminists at times. However, since ze actually cares about feminism, and isn’t just trying to score points against feminism, ze is able to figure out that disagreeing with one feminist doesn’t mean disagreeing with all feminists. Which is pretty basic, but seems to be a stumbling block for many.
Again, marginalized groups are discriminated against in systematic ways. You need to build community in order to resist that. There’s nothing wrong with that; nor is there anything wrong with policing forums in order to weed out abusive or trollish commenters.
Well, you’ve singled out some feminists for transphobia.
Well, yeah. I don’t pardon transphobes on the basis of their being feminists; if anything, the transphobia within certain strains of feminism and advocated by a number of prominent feminists hurts much more than the entirely predictable transphobia of right-wing and centrist groups and people. It’s painful to have to be on guard in feminist spaces against transphobia, which is something that every self-respecting feminist should be vehemently opposed to and educated about.
Noah’s right – I do care about feminism and I identify as a feminist and gender liberationist. Social inequities do indeed work in a systematic manner. I’m no egoist; I don’t seriously think that oppressive systemic structures can be successfully fought against by completely uncoordinated individual action. That means solidarity, planning, debate and discussion, which, yes, means policing our cultural spaces and removing trolls, antifeminists and entitlement-wavers who take up our valuable energy and time.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Sensitive new age guys can be sexist too, is the thing. So can men who declare themselves feminist.
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Anja Flower says:
It’s true that sensitive new-age guys and self-declared feminist men can be sexist. Women can by misogynistic, too – internalized oppression happens.
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Can women who declare themselves feminist be sexist too? Against men, that is; the opposite doesn’t seem to count; note how the only sexism mentioned is the kind directed at women. Does the knife only cut one way, then, with the poor, oppressed group being excused of falling into the same trap? (Liberals wouldn’t dream of calling blacks going on about how the White Man and the Jew are the Devil “racists”…)
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Anja Flower says:
Gee, Mike, thanks for informing me about the Suffragettes! Between reading women’s art history, groaning at Judith Butler’s prose and debating on feminist forums, I simply hadn’t taken the time to find out that the Suffragettes existed. Why, I thought that the framed picture of Alice Paul on my desk was a photograph of a famous actress! Um.
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Oh, so if I mention the Suffragettes to compare them with oh-so-sensitive modern feminists, who didn’t put up with a fraction of the abuse, have a million more rights and power that those women ever dreamed of, yet are perpetually moaning about suffering horrendous atrocities like men giving them gym and legal tips, therefore I am treating all feminists reading my remarks as if they didn’t know that the Suffragettes existed? You couldn’t prove my earlier points better if you tried.
And I guess if you mentioned to a black civil-rights activist that Al Sharpton represented a sorry-ass decline from the greatness that was Martin Luther King, he’d likewise get all huffy about my supposedly assuming he didn’t know that MLK existed.
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Also, why would you want to bring up Dave Sim in defense of ANY of your views, even ones that have nothing at all to do with gender?
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Can no one read these days? “In defense of”? What I actually said was that those feminists flipping out over some awful male daring to barge into their conversation, thus throwing them into a fury, acted in a stereotypically emotional manner that “unfortunately, is what Dave Sim would’ve predicted.”
(Back in the TCJ message board, I’d expended huge amounts of verbiage in attacking the arguments of the few Dave Sim arguments defenders who showed up…)
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Feminists should be able to have discussion and debate between feminists, within our own feminist spaces, without getting barged in on by misogynistic douchebags making excuses for All Men and demanding that we defend the basic tenets of feminism.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
It’s perfectly reasonable for women to want to have spaces in which they can have conversations without being trolled by idiots. Marginalized groups need to be able to build solidarity. And men who show up at such conversations with the intention to disrupt and pontificate aren’t necessarily there in good faith…
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Sure; but, what are these “feminist spaces”? Never mind the Web, where it’s pretty obvious the virtual doors are gaping open, and anybody can barge in. From the site where I first saw the term explained ( http://fanniesroom.blogspot.com/2010/02/art-of-mansplaining.html ), we get examples of “mansplaining” at the gym, the office, a restaurant, a sports arena, a family home… *GAD!* Is no “feminist space” (which apparently means most of the world) free from the horror that is “mansplaining”?
And blacks would be sorely tempted to heave a brick at the collective head of a bunch of white women, most college-educated and vastly better off financially, which still see themselves as a piteously “marginalized group”…
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…the sistas are hopping mad because they sick and tired of being dissed by their White sisters…They’re tired of having their concerns pushed to the back burner if addressed at all, sick of not being recognized as Sistas-in-Arms by their fellow White feministas, and they’re tired of the latter’s constant whining over stuff that doesn’t mean anything at the end of the day, while it’s Black women that REALLY have problems.
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http://www.the-spearhead.com/2010/11/30/the-season-of-the-sistahoods-dissedcontent/
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Anja Flower says:
Those “private clubs” you refer to are generally spaces for wealthy and powerful white patriarchs to gather.
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Like the “International Order of Friendly Sons of the Raccoons”: http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/fiction/fraternities/raccoons.jpg ?
(Note how “white” keeps getting tossed in to ramp up the heinousness. D’you think if blacks were equally wealthy and powerful, the race “in charge,” that they’d act in any more enlightened a fashion? Take a look at Africa, or how respectfully women are treated in the ghetto…)
…And circling back to Wonder Woman; did she hide out in Paradise Island and endlessly gripe to the other Amazons about how awful and sexist men “out there” were? No, she went out into the world to fight evil and show by her example what a truly powerful woman is like…
Men aren’t oppressed under patriarchy…at least, not by women. So no, sexism against men functionally doesn’t exist. The effort by men to use sexism as a charge against women is a backlash against feminism and a form of sexism in itself.
The thing about sexism is it means that gender roles are not balanced. Women experience systematic injustice. That’s what feminism is about. Men don’t experience that. Having this same, very basic argument with men over and over again is something that women don’t necessarily want to do every time they have a discussion about feminism. Which seems reasonable to me.
Gender and race have various complicated intersections. White women were not slaves. On the other hand, black men got the vote first. Different groups have different problems. But using one group to deny the legitimate problems of the other seems like it’s more about gaining tactical advantage than about actually being concerned about anybody.
Especially since you then try to dismiss racism by claiming that black people would act the same way if they had the chance. This counterfactual means nothing. History happened. You have to deal with it, not whine about how the other guy would be just as bad if he could. You’re responsible for your moral position, not somebody else’s.
The whole point about Wonder Woman was that she grew up in a culture without sexism, where she was supported by innumerable sisters. Marston believes she is *stronger* because she comes from an all female culture. Marston thought women should rule, Mike. He thought matriarchy and sisterhood — *not* equality and brotherhood — were the best ways to run a society.
And Marston speaks explicitly against sexism too. He doesn’t see it as whining. He sees it as a necessary prelude to subjugating men so that everyone, women and men, will be happier. Because men are egotistical assholes who really can’t be trusted.
Yes, men are oppressed under patriarchy/kyriarchy – by other men.
No, there’s nothing inherent about women or Black people – or other people of color, Native people, queers, trans people, people with disabilities, non-neurotypical people, Deaf people, intersex people, old people, fat people, or anyone else – that would necessarily prevent them from being oppressive if they were in power.
Oppressive structures of power and privilege are bad.
I love how you implied that Noah and I must be liberals, which is hilarious because I’m a big scary socialist radical (like that Kenyan Muslim Obama! Runnnn!) and Noah’s a Marx-reading lefty. Liberals are just capitalists with a collective hard-on for regulation and the welfare state.
There. I replied to your wanky post. Ya happy?
I think I’m probably actually a liberal. I voted for Obama. I kind of hate myself for being a liberal, but that just makes me more of a liberal.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Men aren’t oppressed under patriarchy…at least, not by women. So no, sexism against men functionally doesn’t exist…
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So, “sexism” only exists when a group is “oppressed” by it? Therefore, women who go on and on about what scum men are, how they all want to oppress women and are addicted to violence and the pursuit of power, how they Only Have One Thing On Their Minds…
(NSFW) http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/KreiderKnowDiff.jpg
(uh, OK, that one is fair enough…)
…are not sexist? And, following that same reasoning, if Jews in America are for all effects free from oppression, therefore there’s no anti-Semitism in the U.S.A.?
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Women experience systematic injustice. That’s what feminism is about. Men don’t experience that.
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No, men get ALL the societal perks! No drawbacks to being male at all, unless…
– When there is a draft, it’s men who are forced to enter the murderous meatgrinder of combat; women are exempt.
– 85% of child-custody cases are awarded to the mother.
– “Women and children first!” for the lifeboats in a sinking ship.
– Men get harsher punishments for the same crime than a woman does.
More:
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1. Men are treated as inherently aggressive and violent. Men are not allowed to be flexible; they are forced into a narrow definition of MALE. When they do not fit in to the definition they are labeled “wimp”, “sissy” or “girl”.
2. Violence against men is more condoned than against women. Despite the growing societal awareness of violence against women (which is very good) it is still acceptable to harm or kill men if the reason is “justifiable”.
3. Men are treated as if they do not feel pain or experience the full range of emotions like women. If killing or risking of life and limb is involved men are chosen for the job. When they get hurt at work or play they are expected to shrug it off and continue as if nothing happened; the work or the game is considered more important than their feelings. Men are looked upon as expendable.
4. Boys and men are not expected to need closeness, reassurance and attention, which is thought to be harmful to their sense of place and importance in the world. If a boy or man asks for help they are seen as weak and needy and then put down for being like a woman.
5. Men are treated as inherently compulsive in their sexuality….
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http://userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/male_oppression.html
I might also recommend Herb Goldberg’s excellent “The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege”: http://tinyurl.com/43qz23m . No, Goldberg doesn’t actually argue — nor do I — that “male privilege” doesn’t exist</i., but, first, that it's hardly equitably spread about, and next, that it carries a whole batch of damaging burdens and expectations. (For instance, the men who lose their job and commit suicide because they felt the pressure to be the "breadwinner" for their family; that without their job, thought they were worthless.)
In his "Are Men Oppressed?" article, Hugh Ristik writes:
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In Part 1 of this series, I observed the tendency of feminists to throw around the term “oppression” without defining it, or explaining why only women are “oppressed,” but never men. Yet I have encountered a few feminists who do believe that men can suffer gender oppression. In this post, I will discuss a differing feminist view.
One of the best discussions of the concept of oppression I have seen is by feminist sociologist of gender Caroline New, who argues that “both women and men are oppressed, but not symmetrically.” New agrees with me that the view that men can be oppressed is rare: “sociologists of gender hardly ever discuss the possibility that men are oppressed on the same dimension as women, i.e. in respect of gender relations.”
What makes New’s essay so different from other feminist discussion of oppression, even ones that admit the existence of male suffering is that:
(a) New constructs a clear and concise definition of “oppression” and applies it evenly, instead of employing the kinds of double standards I discussed in Part 1.
(b) New acknowledges psychological suffering of men, but doesn’t reduce male suffering to just subjective experience; she recognizes material disadvantages men face, and the cultural attitude of male disposability.
(c) New recognizes the systematic and institutional character of the mistreatment of men, and recognizes that this mistreatment should be called “oppression.”
…Another important point the she makes is that the oppressions of men and women are “complementary” and mutually reinforcing. …
Caroline New’s essay is called Oppressed and Oppressors? The Systematic Mistreatment of Men [downloadable PDF at the site], from 2001 in Sociology Vol.35, No.3…I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
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http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2007/01/08/are-men-oppressed-part-2-systematic-mistreatment/
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…you then try to dismiss racism by claiming that black people would act the same way if they had the chance. ..
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I’m not dismissing racism; simply pointing out it’s a mistake to act as if a victimized group were somehow inherently nobler than the one doing the victimizing, and beyond criticism when they act like creeps, because being victimized excuses anything. (In the geopolitical realm, Israel’s used the horrors that Jews suffered under the Holocaust to justify all manner of atrocious actions and policies.)
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Marston thought women should rule, Mike. He thought matriarchy and sisterhood — *not* equality and brotherhood — were the best ways to run a society.
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Oh, I’d be fine — while recognizing it was technically “unfair” — with women running the world, men being banned from holding office. Look at the sorry, bloody mess men have made of things throughout history! As a group, indeed they “are egotistical assholes who really can’t be trusted.” There are women who are power-mad jerks, sure, but they’re far less likely as a group (for the “reading-challenged,” note that caveat: AS A GROUP) to heedlessly dump poisons in a city’s drinking water in order to marginally increase their profits, see other human beings as things to be ground up for money, slaughter millions on the altar of some madly unrealistic ideology.
For further proof of this, consider the hardly-surprising fact that women are more likely to be liberal than men: http://www.gallup.com/poll/120839/Women-Likely-Democrats-Regardless-Age.aspx
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I think I’m probably actually a liberal. I voted for Obama. I kind of hate myself for being a liberal, but that just makes me more of a liberal.
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Oh, I’m very much a liberal too, as well as a feminist. Just not a party-line-thinking type, and am particularly irritated, considering how vile and ruthless the other side (right-wingers and the truly sexist) is, to see liberals and feminists adopting wimpy, self-defeating and marginalizing attitudes.
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Anja Flower says:
…I love how you implied that Noah and I must be liberals, which is hilarious because I’m a big scary socialist radical (like that Kenyan Muslim Obama! Runnnn!)…
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Oooh, yeah; because I find fault with the idiocies which pepper basically righteous causes like liberalism and feminism, therefore I must be a Fox News/Rush Limbaugh acolyte. Subtle thinking, there…!
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Liberals are just capitalists with a collective hard-on for regulation and the welfare state.
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Sounds good to me!
Mike, we’ve reached the point I sometimes reach with you, where I can’t read all of that.
But to answer one of your questions up top, as a Jew, I don’t think it’s very useful to talk about anti-Semitism in an American context. Jews are not discriminated against in the U.S. at the moment; we have white skin privilege. Charges of anti-Semitism in the U.S. context are mostly used to shut down debate on behalf of people with power.
Jews *do* have a history of being oppressed in the U.S., and there certainly is some residual anti-Semitism — and obviously anti-Semitism remains a very potent force in some parts of the world. So you have to look at it on a case by case basis. But in general I think the U.S. is way more concerned with anti-Semitism than it should be, in large part precisely because Jews *are* part of the (white) privileged group here, and therefore are able to get their grievances taken seriously in a way that other less assimilated minorities can’t.
And nobody’s saying victimized groups are more noble, I don’t think. But historical and current power imbalances matter a lot. Equality and justice are achieved by taking those imbalances into account, not by selective amnesia.
I’m probably going to get into trouble for saying this, but Obama’s no liberal. By any measure, he’s further to the right than either Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford. In terms of stated views and actions, he’s pretty much identical to Bob Dole.
I don’t think that’s true, actually. Depends on the issue; Dole almost certainly wouldn’t have pushed through the health care reform bill, for example, and absolutely certainly wouldn’t have pushed through a bill allowing gays in the military.
But I’d say Nixon was a liberal basically too. Most of our presidents have been liberal in a broad post-enlightenment sense.
I know you like Obama less than I do, but I don’t have any problem with people criticizing him. His civil liberties record is atrocious and his war mongering makes me ill. I guess the civil liberties stuff is worse in some sense since I knew going in he was going to slog on stupidly in Afghanistan, but he did promise during the campaign to, for example, not torture political prisoners. Which seems like a low bar, really, but that’s our presidency….
The health-care law was all but identical to Dole’s planned counterproposal to the Clinton plan back in ’93-’94.
Obama was dragged kicking and screaming into supporting the end of DADT (which hasn’t and may not happen) and DOMA (ditto). Politically, he’s realized he can’t afford to alienate the Democrats’ gay constituency. I closely watched him during the ’08 primary and GE campaigns. On a personal level, he’s clearly homophobic, and much moreso than Edwards, who was the next most prejudiced against gays among the Democratic candidates.
It’s hard to imagine Dole actually pushing for health care reform, though, is my point. Republicans will occasionally make proposals, but I’ve never seen any evidence that any of those folks actually care about it.
That’s not my read on his DADT reform, but I’m happy to agree to disagree.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…historical and current power imbalances matter a lot. Equality and justice are achieved by taking those imbalances into account, not by selective amnesia…
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Certainly!
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Robert Stanley Martin says:
I’m probably going to get into trouble for saying this, but Obama’s no liberal. By any measure, he’s further to the right than either Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford…
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Absolutely; even with occasional good points, he’s pretty atrocious in many ways, only “liberal” compared to the troglodytic psychos in the GOP. Some Obama-trashing from Tom Tomorrow:
http://www.credoaction.com/comics/2011/03/the-flustercluck-doctrine/
http://www.credoaction.com/comics/2011/02/the-strongman-steps-down/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/04/963244/-Budget-Battle-Royale!
http://www.credoaction.com/comics/2010/12/middle-man/
http://www.credoaction.com/comics/2010/06/sensible-liberalism-featuring-chuckles/
http://www.credoaction.com/comics/2010/06/obama-the-far-left-radical/
Mike, I think what I’m getting here is that you want to feel like you support anti-oppression causes without having to challenge your own privilege and question your own entitlement on a number of fronts, so you throw up a whole bunch of right-wing chestnut objections to anti-oppression analysis. Men suffer too! “Political correctness” is bad! Black people would oppress white people if they could! That’s unfortunate, but common.
Privilege is nothing to be ashamed of, though. We’ve all got it – even as someone who is in many ways pretty severely oppressed by first world white standards, I’ve got bucketloads of privilege. Hell – even an impoverished orphan with disabilities in Darfur may have sighted privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, cisgender privilege. Much as I love that famous old IWW poster (this one: http://www.niu.edu/~rfeurer/labor/iww-pyramid.gif ), people really aren’t arranged on a simple linear scale from most oppressed to least oppressed. It’s more complicated than that, ya know?
It’s just better to confront the advantages you’ve got over other people and try to find ways to mitigate them, unpack them and be conscious of their effects. That’s all.
I didn’t actually mean to say that I thought you were a Rush Limbaugh acolyte. I was just making a silly joke about the fact that I’m a socialist radical.
Yeah, as an American Jew who actually faces serious discrimination and bigotry on other fronts, I have precious little patience for people who squawk “antisemitism!” the moment someone makes a bitter comment about the occupation of Palestine. The conservajews at ADL, AIPAC etc. stretch the word “antisemitism” in a manner analogous to how radical feminists stretch the term “rape.” “Cultural rape,” “symbolic rape of women’s bodies and lives…” It’s almost like they’ve got a vested interest in distorting the terminology to the point where it doesn’t mean anything.
I’ve gotten the shit kicked out of me and lost teeth for being trans and queer. The overt antisemitism I’ve faced has been, what… My grandma got angry once at hearing a shopkeeper say “don’t jew me out of that,” I think? That’s not to say that I couldn’t face anti-semitism in the US – I pass as a gentile most of the time, probably, and I might run into something now and then if I wore a chai or mogen david necklace. I’d face some real, actual shit if I was Orthodox and dressed the part, I’m sure.
I’ve never been scared to walk the streets at night because I’m Jewish, though. I’ve never been beaten for being Jewish, I’ve never had to defend my identity as a Jew, I’ve never had “kike!” shouted at me on the street, I’ve never had anyone suddenly lose interest in dating me when they found out I was Jewish, I’ve never had to seriously weigh the costs and benefits of assimilating vs. being known as a Jew. I didn’t consider making my name sound less Jewish when I changed my name.
I’m sure many of those things might be different if I lived elsewhere – say, in Russia or Eastern Europe – or lived in the U.S. in an earlier era. If I did live in the U.S. in an earlier era, though, I’d be more concerned about being thrown in an asylum, blackmailed, lynched, god (or G-d) knows what else, for being trans and queer.
There’s a saying “Deaf first” – that many Deaf people tend to see themselves as Deaf before they see themselves as other things (Black, woman, old, etc.). I guess you could say I’ve got a “trans first” perspective.
Yeah, Tom Tomorrow is pretty great.
Well, with DADT, we’re still waiting for Obama, the Defense Secretary, and the Joint Chiefs to actually decide whether to repeal it or not. After that happens (if it happens), there’s a 60-day waiting period, which would allow Congress to pass a reinstatement, which Obama might “have no choice but to” sign in order to get a budget agreement.
Yves Smith put it best: “Recall the Team Obama modus operandi: getting something done, no matter how lame, compromised, or even counterproductive it is, is considered progress because it presumably can be swaddled in enough propaganda to be made attractive to a presumed to be chump public. “
” getting something done, no matter how lame, compromised, or even counterproductive it is, is considered progress”
That’s politicians.
“lame”
That’s ableist.
But yeah, Obama is a Black conservative with a community organizer past who knows how to say “si se puede” in English.
“lame”
I think I’ve said this before, but…I think the “lame” ship has pretty much sailed. It’s used much more to refer to people who suck than to anyone who has something wrong with their legs. (I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used in a contemporary context to refer to somebody who had something wrong with their legs.)
There is a point at which patrolling language maybe becomes counter-productive? I just don’t see the benefit in interdicting words that have become almost completely disconnected from any history of oppression the might have been linked to.
People who use “lame” in a metaphoric sense are all sinister ableist creeps; worse than that, they are moral cripples, blind to their faults, and deaf to reproach.
Complete morons.
Really, Noah? If I had a physical disability involving my legs, I’m not sure I would appreciate the constant reminder that I’m considered less human due to my disability. Using language that equates being a member of an oppressed population to being a bad or inferior person is bad.
I’m also pretty sure I’ve never witnessed a disability activist defend “lame,” pretty much ever, and I tend to defer to communities’ own internal anti-oppression analysis on these matters.
What bugs me is that things that could be harmful to the communities with the least visibility and the least voice always seem to be most easily disregarded. Insults against people with disabilities, Native people, trans people, fat people, old people, Deaf people, non-neurotypical people, people with mental illness, etc. often get dismissed out of hand.
Reese, you’re just being a troll.
Anja…well, a commenter here with physical and mental disabilities argues along the lines I did. There are certainly other folks in that community arguing the opposite…but if I can find someone in the community saying it’s not a problem after 30 seconds of googling, it seems like it’s at least still up for debate.
Oh, and Reese, I’d agree that you’re trolling here. Please don’t.
Okay, I deleted that, Reese. I will delete other trolling comments as well. Please stop wasting our time.
Noah – I can find trans people who don’t want to be associated with The Gays and don’t think that non-binary gender (like mine) even exists. In fact, it’s not that hard. I’ve also had a trans person argue to me, in all seriousness, that so-called “shemale” porn isn’t defamatory or damaging to trans people. Such people always exist; the question is where their arguments are coming from and whether they make any sense within the larger framework of anti-oppression.
‘Cause, you know, some arguments against language use actually don’t make sense. Obviously, I think a lot of them do, and I do get quite angry at people’s language because I DO think that language shapes cultural and individual attitudes, sometimes in very negative ways. It’s not just about offense or politeness, as I think Kinsey Hope neatly explains here:
http://genderbitch.wordpress.com/2011/04/02/words-offense/
People tend to react most strongly against others’ desire to hear certain language not used when they feel their own privilege questioned or under attack – so the “anti-PC,” heterosexist, binarist trans people tend to be highly socially privileged rich white people who can afford surgery with all the trimmings and are terrified of losing their social standing by being associated with The Queers and other non-“respectable” groups. Lesbian and gay folks and organizations routinely shit on trans people; binary trans people routinely exclude and otherwise shit on non-binary trans people. Thus, we get trans Republicans (I know one! No shit!) and gay Tea Partiers. It happens.
That’s why I always try to remain open to challenge about my behavior or language from people over whom I have privilege. I may be oppressed in some ways, but I’m privileged in others, and I don’t want to slip into that same old behavior of “I’ve got mine, so fuck you.”
Sure, I know that finding a counter-example doesn’t end the argument. It was just very easy to find…and I think it matters somewhat.
I can agree to disagree, though. I see where you’re coming from.
Anyway, there’s plenty of literature online about this. I know you probably know where to find it if you want, so I won’t have a huuuge nitpicky derail argument with ya. Meanwhile, I’ll continue on my merry way, excising “lame,” “crazy,” “retarded” and various other words from my vocabulary and having the entire rest of the English language left to use. :D
See, that’s the thing. I know you see where I’m coming from, and I know that you disagree anyway, which in a way is more frustrating than someone like Mike disagreeing (which would be entirely predictable). Anyhow.
I’d actually really like to see some good writing about superhero tropes from a disability perspective. It probably exists – I saw a really interesting panel about Daredevil and the phenomenon of passing (as something you are, or as something you’re not) at WonderCon. There’s a lot of interesting and fucked-up shit going on in superheroics and the whole construct of “super-ability.”
Ah well…can’t agree on everything!
I think something on Daredevil from a disability perspective would be pretty interesting.
Also…Anthony, my apologies; I don’t know why you’re comments got caught in the filter. Sorry it took so long to fish them out.
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Anja Flower says:
…Mike, I think what I’m getting here is that you want to feel like you support anti-oppression causes…
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Well, for about ten years — until my income has been drastically slashed — I was a donor and dues-paying member to the ACLU, the International Campaign for Tibet, Amnesty International; so I’d say I was doing more than “wanting to feel like I supported anti-oppression causes.”
But I guess it doesn’t count until you talk the party line, do all the required breast-beating…
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…without having to challenge your own privilege and question your own entitlement on a number of fronts…
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Yeah! My head is still attached to my shoulders, I have all my limbs, am a white male in the richest country in the world; therefore I am automatically awash in privilege and entitlement, everything’s been handed to me my whole life. “King of the world, ma!”
The reality is actually far from that, but a feminist sees a white male, and they see an arrogant, swaggering macho pig, with the entire force of the Patriarchy making his life as cushy as possible, smugly certain of his God-given role as the Crown of Creation, merrily trampling on women, gays, blacks as he goes…
Someone would consider that “prejudice,” but of course only white Christian males could be guilty of such a thing.
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…so you throw up a whole bunch of right-wing chestnut objections to anti-oppression analysis. Men suffer too! “Political correctness” is bad! Black people would oppress white people if they could! That’s unfortunate, but common.
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So if right-wingers use actual facts to boost their loathsome cause, that therefore means that things like reverse discrimination don’t exist?
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It’s just better to confront the advantages you’ve got over other people and try to find ways to mitigate them, unpack them and be conscious of their effects. That’s all.
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“Mitigate” my advantages?
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mit·i·gate
1. to lessen in force or intensity, as wrath, grief, harshness, or pain; moderate.
2. to make less severe: to mitigate a punishment.
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http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mitigate
So I should wear glasses with the wrong prescription (or better yet, go blindfolded) to lessen my “sighted privilege,” tie an anchor to one of my legs so I won’t be so “ableist,” drug myself into a stupor to cut down on my “intelligence privilege”…
Why, that reminds of Kurt Vonnegut’s great “Harrison Bergeron” story: http://www.nexuslearning.net/books/holt_elementsoflit-3/Collection%204/Collection%202/Harrison%20Bergeron%20p1.htm
Oh, come on, Mike. You’re just engaging in really desperate misreadings of everything I say at this point. I can fill my arguments with caveats, exceptions, and reminders that I have privilege too, and you’ll come back at me with stuff about how all feminists hate all men all the time, and isn’t that terrible, yaddity ya. Which, again, is privilege-defense.
Lots of liberals and pseudo-liberals donate symbolic money to symbolic organizations. Sometimes it helps; sometimes it doesn’t. It’s good that people make the effort, at least, but it’s behavior structured to make the donor feel better, not really to produce a thorough, systemic solution to the problem.
Of course, liberalism is all about band-aid solutions and symbolic measures. Which, you know, sometimes that’s all you can do, but sometimes it’s not, and sometimes you have to take the cookies from the the cookie jars of a few well-meaning rich liberals to (heaven forfend!) “spread the wealth” a bit.
I’m not really going to bother with you any further at this point. Thanks for demonstrating my point so neatly, though.
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Anja Flower says:
…you’ll come back at me with stuff about how all feminists hate all men all the time…
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Yeah, like I really said that. And, I’m “engaging in really desperate misreadings of everything you say”?
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Lots of liberals and pseudo-liberals donate symbolic money to symbolic organizations…it’s behavior structured to make the donor feel better, not really to produce a thorough, systemic solution to the problem.
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“Symbolic money”? You mean I could’ve saved hundreds by paying with play money, instead?
‘Cause “symbolic organizations” like the ACLU and Amnesty International can’t compare in accomplishment to a group of feminists griping about the Patriarchy on their website; until, that is, a male comes barging in with peskily disruptive commentary, “knocking over the china and getting everyone really angry.” (Probably eating all the cookies, too!)
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Of course, liberalism is all about band-aid solutions and symbolic measures.
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As opposed to people who really accomplish things, like Mao and Stalin. No wishy-washy, incremental things like Social Security and Medicare for those visionaries!
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I’m not really going to bother with you any further at this point. Thanks for demonstrating my point so neatly, though.
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It’s simply an exercise in futility to try debating a True Believer; no complexity or nuance gets past the ideological filters.
Any male who doesn’t supinely go along with anything a feminist asserts is a privileged, oppressive tool of the Patriarchy; anyone who doesn’t go along with everything a religious fundamentalist says is the Will of God is an agent of Satan; whoever finds fault with the most egregious policies of a Republican administration — torture, lying us into a war, wiretapping average Americans, stealing elections — is therefore showing they are a “far-Leftist” who “hates America”; to suggest cutting down on pollution means you’re a Luddite who wants to destroy jobs and send us back to the Stone Age…
Yup, ’cause Mao and Stalin were anarchists, just like me.
Have fun throwing your poor-me persecuted man why-do-the-feminists-hate-me routine at someone else.
Hah! I knew you couldn’t stay away; we’ve got a Captains Jack Sparrow and Barbossa dynamic going here…
And if Mao and Stalin had been anarchists, the destruction they’d have wrought would’ve been bumped up several times.
But, wait! Now you’re an anarchist? Weren’t you a “socialist radical” before? Ah, but that was two days ago…
And, nothing like anarchy to make sure that gay/”differently-abled”/transgendered, etc. folks are assured of being protected, not only from persecution, but from insensitive language. Everybody just agrees to be nice! What could be simpler?
Have you read “The Dispossessed” Mike? Ursula K. Le Guin — it’s a very enjoyable, not-completely-implausible anarchist utopia…. Anyway, you might be interested in checking it out if you haven’t seen it already.
Mike, the fact that you think “anarchist” and “socialist radical” are necessarily different or even mutually exclusive categories shows how little you know about anarchism.
If Mao and Stalin had been anarchists, they wouldn’t have been dictators; they may not have been leaders at all. The whole idea of “leaders” itself is constantly interrogated and questioned within anarchism. Only the more libertarian-communist and platformist types tend to elevate leaders of any kind (although other traditions do have activist and philosopher icons).
I hate the term “differently-abled,” and every person with disabilities I know seems to hate it, too.
It’s true – you’re like a train wreck. I want to look away, but I can’t…
I haven’t read The Dispossessed! I really should.
When I was at Oberlin, there was a student-taught course on anarchism, where I think basically they read the Dispossessed. The best part about the course was that they taught it in the hall rather than the classroom, because, of course *they were anarchists.*
That always cracked me up.
Well, if that meant they were able to sit in a circle instead of elevating certain people to a physical place of power and significance on a podium or something, that makes plenty of anarch@-sense.
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Anja Flower says:
…If Mao and Stalin had been anarchists, they wouldn’t have been dictators; they may not have been leaders at all. The whole idea of “leaders” itself is constantly interrogated and questioned within anarchism…
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So if they had been anarchists, the governments (or whatever) they set up would’ve been exactly like the most perfect, ideal version of “anarchism.”
Just like the governments they did create were utterly like the idealized “communism” first dreamt of; just like the government in the USA is exactly like what a “democracy” (or republic) is supposed to be like; no messy real-life hypocrisies, inconsistencies, injustices, violations of their principles allowed.
And, which version of “anarchy” are we dealing with here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy mentions several, with Somalia (where female genital mutilation thrives) as one example, with some “pros” but many horrendous “cons” mentioned (as well as capitalist and anti-capitalist branches of anarchism) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy_in_Somalia
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…When I was at Oberlin, there was a student-taught course on anarchism, where I think basically they read the Dispossessed…
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A student-taught course? This Bruegel comes to mind: http://freechristimages.org/images_Christ_life/BlindLeadingTheBlind_Bruegel.jpg
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Anja Flower says:
Well, if that meant they were able to sit in a circle instead of elevating certain people to a physical place of power and significance on a podium or something, that makes plenty of anarch@-sense.
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Tch! Doesn’t the very idea that someone can have something to teach, for others to learn, itself automatically elevate the former to a position of power and significance?
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…I hate the term “differently-abled,” and every person with disabilities I know seems to hate it, too.
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If Noah’s using “lame” to describe a dubious argument is, as you said, a “constant reminder that [those who have a physical disability involving their legs are] considered less human due to [their] disability,” isn’t the very use of “dis-ability” similarly demeaning?
And you go on to mention “people with mental illness”; wouldn’t some of those folks (including Chester “there is no schizophrenia” Brown) be incensed that their thinking their entire family has been replaced by duplicates, or that voices are talking to them out of their kitchen faucets, telling them to kill their children, constitutes a sickness, like cancer or leprosy? How sanity-privileged of you…
Again, whatever you might think, I’m vehemently against creeps mocking and discriminating against those who are less well-off. But, to squarely face that some are handicapped, and not to prettify their difficult conditions with mealy-mouthed terminology, is no attack against them, but to acknowledge often-harsh reality.
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George Carlin on Fat People
George Carlin died, in honor of him, I’ve decided post a video of his from youtube…
I’m a fat person. I know that I’m fat because I consume more than I expend. It’s as simple as that. I’m not necessarily proud of that fact, but I’m comfortable with it. I know that I’m fat and I know the reason why I’m fat. I’m not offended by anything that George Carlin says in this video, but if you’re easily offended you should not watch this video….Rest in peace George.
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http://fattrailrunner.com/344/george-carlin-on-fat-people/
The video’s no longer on YouTube; but here’s Carlin on that subject:
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I use the word “fat.” I use that word because that’s what people are: they’re fat. They’re not bulky; they’re not large, chunky, hefty or plump. And they’re not big-boned. Dinosaurs were big-boned. These people are not overweight: this term somehow implies there is some correct weight… There is no correct weight. Heavy is also a misleading term. An aircraft carrier is heavy; it’s not fat. Only people are fat, and that’s what fat people are! They’re fat!
– George Carlin
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