Back in the 1970s a band called Roxy Music put out a series of album covers that had feminist critics steaming with anger. And those feminist critics were absolutely right to be angry. In the entire history of rock and roll, a music form that is not exactly pro-woman, these covers were probably the worst.
Here is their first cover:
Notice that the woman is posed as if thrown on the ground. Her face looks pained and her make and clothing have been messed up. This photo makes this woman an about-to-be rape victim and puts us in the rapist's point of view.
The really odd thing is that this cover was actually the work of one of the very few pro-feminist rock bands at the time. Roxy Music were the art-rock band. So how did it happen? Well, mostly because it was all meant to be a put on. That photo isn't meant to be erotic, it's meant to make fun of other people's idea of eroticism by exaggerating it.
And that all seems fine until you ask yourself if you can be entirely sure everyone is actually going to get the joke. What does a man who really hates women think when he sees that? (Or, for that matter, what does a woman who really hates women think?)
But we use that excuse a lot, here h/t Pastabagel, is a shot of Wonder Woman,
The important difference being that this isn't supposed to be a joke. It's make believe, to be sure, but the people who read this stuff are actually much more serious about it than Dostoevsky readers are.
At a site site is named "Bleeding Cool" (good name), Rich Johnston thought it would be fun to draw a bunch of male superheroes in that pose. Here is what he got:
It's quite telling to look at what things that are supposed to be only make believe reveal.
Roxy Music made four or five album covers on the line of the one above but it eventually got to them too. So they made a cover that responded to their critics. Here it is:
And you can see the difference right away. These women are actually doing something. And they are not trapped by our gaze because their interest is somewhere else, they are looking where they are about to throw those javelins. No, they don't look like they are very good at throwing javelins, they are just models after all, but it's light years different from the poses above. We are looking at these women because they are beautiful but the pose they are striking says, "I exist for myself first".
It didn't catch on though. In fact, the exact opposite happened.The really disturbing thing, as Pastabagel notes elsewhere, is that a lot of women who read comics rather like it that Wonder Woman poses as she does. They find it empowering. And Google Angelina Jolie or Beyonce and you will find both these stars specialize in presenting themselves as static, frozen sex objects in awkward poses as if ready for consumption by men.
He blames the art form. And there might be something to that. Taking the sexism out of comics and pop music might be like taking the violence out of football; it would still be a game but it wouldn't be football any more. But the deeper problem is this: women really like this stuff. An awful lot of young women look at the photo below and they don't see a victim of male sexism sacrificing herself up to our gaze. No, they think, I want to be just like her:
Not all the time but sometimes. In another indictment of the way comic heroines are presented, Laura Hudson writes:
Here is their first cover:
Notice that the woman is posed as if thrown on the ground. Her face looks pained and her make and clothing have been messed up. This photo makes this woman an about-to-be rape victim and puts us in the rapist's point of view.
The really odd thing is that this cover was actually the work of one of the very few pro-feminist rock bands at the time. Roxy Music were the art-rock band. So how did it happen? Well, mostly because it was all meant to be a put on. That photo isn't meant to be erotic, it's meant to make fun of other people's idea of eroticism by exaggerating it.
And that all seems fine until you ask yourself if you can be entirely sure everyone is actually going to get the joke. What does a man who really hates women think when he sees that? (Or, for that matter, what does a woman who really hates women think?)
But we use that excuse a lot, here h/t Pastabagel, is a shot of Wonder Woman,
The important difference being that this isn't supposed to be a joke. It's make believe, to be sure, but the people who read this stuff are actually much more serious about it than Dostoevsky readers are.
At a site site is named "Bleeding Cool" (good name), Rich Johnston thought it would be fun to draw a bunch of male superheroes in that pose. Here is what he got:
It's quite telling to look at what things that are supposed to be only make believe reveal.
Roxy Music made four or five album covers on the line of the one above but it eventually got to them too. So they made a cover that responded to their critics. Here it is:
And you can see the difference right away. These women are actually doing something. And they are not trapped by our gaze because their interest is somewhere else, they are looking where they are about to throw those javelins. No, they don't look like they are very good at throwing javelins, they are just models after all, but it's light years different from the poses above. We are looking at these women because they are beautiful but the pose they are striking says, "I exist for myself first".
It didn't catch on though. In fact, the exact opposite happened.The really disturbing thing, as Pastabagel notes elsewhere, is that a lot of women who read comics rather like it that Wonder Woman poses as she does. They find it empowering. And Google Angelina Jolie or Beyonce and you will find both these stars specialize in presenting themselves as static, frozen sex objects in awkward poses as if ready for consumption by men.
He blames the art form. And there might be something to that. Taking the sexism out of comics and pop music might be like taking the violence out of football; it would still be a game but it wouldn't be football any more. But the deeper problem is this: women really like this stuff. An awful lot of young women look at the photo below and they don't see a victim of male sexism sacrificing herself up to our gaze. No, they think, I want to be just like her:
Not all the time but sometimes. In another indictment of the way comic heroines are presented, Laura Hudson writes:
Why is she contorting her body in that weird way? Who is she posing for, because it doesn't even seem to be Roy Harper? The answer, dear reader, is that she is posing for you.And that reader, dear Laura Hudson, is you. You keep reading these things and while more men than women read comics, Beyonce specializes in posing that way for her audience who are mostly women. You might say Beyonce is a comic superheroine for people whose attention span is so short they can't even follow comics. Why does she contort her body the way she does in the video below? Because she wants to strike a pose that says, "I don't exist for myself, I exist for you". And millions of girls willingly embrace her as a role model. Stop blaming men because this is what lots of girls and young women really want:
The lyrics tell the viewer that Beyonce doesn't care what we think but everything else about this video tells us that she cares very much. She wants to exist for the man she is singing to and she wants to exist for us.
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