Huh. Don't know why I always thought it was a rooftop. Never noticed the glass before. And if you feel it's an important enough issue that I didn't keep reading Catwoman after finding it awful, that you have to rail on about it in ten different ways for half of your response, you might as well tell me how they handled this particular sex in the overall arc, such that you think it's a stirling example against everything I've railed against. I mean at this point, you kind of have to.
Sorry I can't afford to buy books that I don't like though. My bad.
Out of curiosity, I took the picture of the weightlifter and elongated her body, stretching her from what looks around 5'-something to She-Hulk's height, here's what I ended up with:
If anything She-Hulk is bulkier, especially around the calves. Now true, She Hulk has a bigger bust, and wider hips, but she does have the bulging and cut arms and legs that the weightlifter does, if not more, even n the fairly "soft" renditions of the character, and far stronger than women in the "mid-tier" body shape.
Oh so when you say "stretch" you mean literally stretch--as in make her taller and thinner. I thought you meant if you just literally made her taller, that that would change her body type. I would only say to this that "stretching" the girl out in the manner in which you do here, has nothing whatsoever to do with what I was talking about, and is a completely inconsequential point, because it's the equivilent of saying "well that square would be a triangle if I removed a side and connected it in the shape of a...triangle". It's not the same body type if you change it, silly.
Exploitation of the female form has gone on for ages and not just in comics.
Absolutely, yeah. But the superhero comic is one that has always been targeted at an almost exclusively young male audience, and I think that is why there is more unashamed sexual objectification there than you will find in other media. And I think Sarah is quite right when she says that that is part of why comics have so little in the way of a female audience - a lot of people still equate comics with superheroes, and if a girl looks at a typical superhero, she'll know at first glance that this isn't for her.
[quote name='Ogul' timestamp='1330843339' post='2411862'] Except that this would be silly. I see no reason why it's unreasonable to assume that he has sex like a normal person. [/quote]
You said yourself he can't have sex like a normal person because he has a bat cave, and a utility belt, and all kinds of knick knacks and paddiwacks that prohibit him from even removing his gloves, let alone having normal sex.
[quote] Like I said, I've seen this exact situation on TV before, just in scrubs instead of superhero suits. [/quote]
I think either you are exagerrating, or minimizing what I'm talking about in order to make it contort to the point you think you're making, because I can assure you that you haven't.
[quote] Lol. Please try to be serious. [/quote]
You're the one giving me canon on why Batman can't have normal sex.
[quote] Even the one on the right is more ripped than most comic heroines. Seriously, you're completely blind to that or will you just refuse to admit it because it undercuts the point you're clinging to. [/quote]
Probably I'm not as desensitized to the lack of diversity as you are, so I can't see the same minuataue that makes up a difference for you, when to a normal person looking from outside, they can see that the women all for the most part look the same.
[quote] The sex in Catwoman did mean something and did impact the characters, something you'd know if you hadn't stopped reading in the first ten minutes. [/quote]
It didn't mean much in the first issue. The book could have ended before that scene and would have not missed it one iota. Maybe if you spent more time explaining how it meant something or how it impacted her in a way that is interesting, and less time complaining at me for not reading awful comics, we could advance the dialouge.
[quote] And that's fine, but it also means that you don't have the right to talk about the subject as if you know what you're talking about. You're getting upset about an imaginary problem, like seeing a clip about Pearl Harbor and railing for hours about how America completely lost WWII. [/quote]
I'm perfectly within my rights to discuss it in the manner which I'm discussing it, which is in a much broader way than you are applying it. The point I was making about sex in superhero comics has nothing really to do with whatever happened in issue two. Most readers didn't even make it past issue one. I wasn't alone on that one. It is possible to evaluate the monthly superhero comic as an entity unto itself. Go to any review site. They do it all of the time.
[quote] You're the one that keeps bringing up "the bottom." I do not., I'm making no judgement of the sexual position being used. I'm talking about the characters here. I'm talking about Batman, the paragon of justice, the alloof dark knight. That he is not immediately slapping the cuffs on Catwoman (not like that) and taking her down (not like that) is a subversion of his very identity. Clearly in that scenario, he is the one being weakened and submitting to her advances, not the other way around. Now on Catwoman's end (not like that), there's nothing wrong with her wanting, pursuing, or achieving sex, but she is a criminal, a thief and a murderer, so that would be her crime, not anything sexual. [/quote]
Nothing you said about Batman or Catwoman matters. And I will resist the obvious bate to get into a debate with you over your clearly flawed revisionist history of batman's libido. And I don't get what's wrong with bringing up "the bottom".
[quote] And did you only read a few pages of Valentina and judge the entire work by that small sampling? [/quote]
I've never read it in english, but I have read over 400 pages of it. If you'd like to know more about Valentina/Crepax, Matt Seneca wrote a great piece on comics alliance about it this week, which was why it was on my mind, besides that I'm always on a Crepax kick.
[quote] Yes, but that's the thing, you actually would have to break an actress's spine to get somethign like that in real life, while in art, unless you puzzle it out, unless you really consider the situation, you don't even realize that this is anatomically impossible, you don't realize that a normal person can't just do that.You keep going for the sensationalistic stance that posing a comic character like that is equivalent to human mutilation, but I guarantee you that few, if any artists who have rendered the "broke back" pose have ever even considered that it would involve spinal damage or anything of the sort to achieve. I also guarantee you that 99% of comic readers, male and female, never considered it either, until it was mentioned to them. [/quote]
I guarantee you that 99 percent of the above paragraph didn't realize that it was random conjecture that was tangential at best to the argument at hand. The first thing you said was my point as I said it. And then everything else was just useless.
[quote] Sure, but I can't really think of an example of a comic that had a sex scene that was truly gratuitous. Some might seem that way if you ONLY read the sex scene, but then any sex scene is gratuitous if it's viewed out fo the context of the entire work. [/quote]
Well of course you can't. That's convenient.
[quote] Really there aren't that many examples of on-screen sex scenes in mainstream comics (outside of Emp, of course). I think that if you actually read the full story arc for Catwoman you would understand why that scene worked within the context of the complete story. I don't know that I would put it on the list of the most monumentally vital sex scenes in history or anything, but it totally made sense. [/quote]
It totally made sense that they had sex, I'm sure. It wasn't neccessary though and was stupidly done. Which diminishes Catwoman as a character.
[quote] I'd be curious to see how making Wonder Woman a bondage fetish object would empower her as a character. I imagine it would be white-suited kung-fu Diana all over again. [/quote]
Well it worked for Empowered.
[quote] You complain about broken backs, but not about shattered rib cages and collar bones? [/quote]
I do. One is done to amplify the heroic nature of the character, and the other is done to amplify the sexualization while diminishing her heroic nature--which within the superhero genre is critically important.
[quote] And while I think that there are certainly egregious case studies, they are far from the norm, and that while those in the industry should work from the inside to reduce those incidences, it's uunfair to slander the entire industry with the same brush, akin to holding the entirety of television for what Spike TV gets up to. I think that regular public "outcries" over some issue or another only serves to stigmatize the industry to outsiders. If you don't read comics, but you hear that they are mysoginistic and exploitative to women, would that really make you likely to pick up an issue and see for yourself, or just to avoid them entirely? [/quote]
I find it funny how up in arms you are over the portrayal of women in television, while not caring about it in comics. Or do you only care about it in television as it serves your point to diminish the problem in comics? And shifting the blame onto people who don't want to read mysogniistic material, from the people who make mysognistic material will get no one anywhere.
[quote] But you're talking about superhero comics as a whole, when really you only have a problem with a tiny fraction of superhero comics that display the problems you've raised, while the bulk of superhero comics are outside that sphere. I get that you don't lump Vertigo or whatever in with the "superhero boys club," but the problem is that you're lumping the other superhero books into the "superhero boys club." You certainly don't seem to hold manga to the same standard, hapily enjoying stories like One Piece (which I'm fairly sure has included a broken back or two, btw), without holding them accountable for other series like To Love Ru that are far worse than anything in any Marvel or DC book, and is published in the same line. [/quote]
Manga is also not a genre. My critique on the treatment of women is pointed toward superhero comics because the criticism inherently deals with the tenants of the genre. There's no real way to cross apply what I'm saying about superhero comics to say doctor television shows, porn, or one piece.
For instance I love Suehiro Mauro books, which obviously do far worse things to women than would even be allowed in the big two(or probably any american publisher). But he's not participating in a large scale genre trope that is intrinsically about empowerment. He's doing horror, which is inherently offensive, messed up, and weird. It would be hard to hold those books to the same standard and have it make sense. My problem with superhero comics sexualizing women is that these books have universal messages, and are ostensibly about the desire of the disenfranchised to be special and wonderful and amazing. It's a beautiful idea, that is muddied when you alienate particular groups while executing the genre, from partipating in that dream. It's hard for me to partipate in Black Canary's empowerment as a hero when I have to read her being put in humiliating poses for male readers enjoyment. At those points she doesn't remind me of the possibilities I have as a woman, but reminds me of the limitations that men see in me. And that's a really sad thing to have in a genre that could and should aspire to be much better. These characters and their stories appeal to everyone, but the way that comics tell these stories, they alienate people that they don't need to alienate, just through stupidity and laziness.
And talking about that is important to me. Enough so that I'd engage you in a debate knowing full well it will never end.
[quote] Huh. Don't know why I always thought it was a rooftop. Never noticed the glass before. And if you feel it's an important enough issue that I didn't keep reading Catwoman after finding it awful, that you have to rail on about it in ten different ways for half of your response, you might as well tell me how they handled this particular sex in the overall arc, such that you think it's a stirling example against everything I've railed against. I mean at this point, you kind of have to.[/quote]
I think it would be better if you read it yourself, but I can sum it up for you.
Spoiler
One thing to remember is that these characters have been rebooted. As has been made clear by now, Selina does not know who Batman is under the mask, and they've probably only hooked up a few times before that, maybe only once. As she's taking off, she points out how he could catch her, wants to catch her, but his feelings are conflicted enough by his attraction for her that he does not. The rest of issue 2 is her making a daring heist from the mob, returning home to find that a villain has killed her fence and his thugs catch ehr off guard and knock her around a bit. Issue three has her taped to a chair, but she busters herself free, kneecaps some thugs, and threatens to shoot one in the junk. She then captures the thugs' boss, takes him to a rooftop, and beats him senseless with a bat before almost kicking him over the ledge, but Batman tells her to stop. Batman tries to talk her down from killing him, telling her that he won't be able to forgive her if she does, so she goes up and kisses him. . . as she knocks the back guy off the roof. Batman manages to save him, but she uses the distraction to get away.
Then the cops come after her because they believe she was the one that killed her fence. In what she believes to be stealing form some drug dealers, she instead finds that she stole a bunch fo money from dirty Gotham cops. They send a telekinetic hitgirl after her. Catwoman does Ok, but then gets launched hundreds of feet up. She manages to catch her fall with the whip, but dislocated a shoulder and has to re-set it. She manages to beat up the Teke, and get away with the cash, which she starts to throw around town, but eventually gets cornered by the cops and taken in. The sneak the TK in to the interrogation room to beat the location of the money out of her, but Catwoman manages to bite her ear off. flip her cuffs in front of her, and then beat her up a bit before a good cop sneaks in and knocks the TK out, letting her escape.
After retrieving the money, Batman shows up again, and she indicates that he was responsible for removing her prints and info from the police databases, not only allowing her to escape him, but also covering her tracks. He asks her to give up crime, she refuses, they fight in a scene that mirrors the earlier sex scene. He seems genuinely worried for her and asks if she wants to die, and she responds that maybe she does, which shocks him and he releases her, and she runs.
Basically, I think the sex was important to the book. I think that it established the relationship between Catwoman and Batman, that it was strong and primal, as the later scenes added some depth to it. I don't think that it in any way reflected badly on Catwoman, and if anything it reflected badly on Batman because it caused him to give in on some of his core principles. Overall I think it had one of the better six-issue runs of any of the new 52, with a solidly defined and entertaining character, and some gorgeous art. It's one of the books that I intend to start buying with issue 7, now that my 6-issue boycott is over.
[quote] Oh so when you say "stretch" you mean literally stretch--as in make her taller and thinner. I thought you meant if you just literally made her taller, that that would change her body type. I would only say to this that "stretching" the girl out in the manner in which you do here, has nothing whatsoever to do with what I was talking about, and is a completely inconsequential point, because it's the equivilent of saying "well that square would be a triangle if I removed a side and connected it in the shape of a...triangle". It's not the same body type if you change it, silly.[/quote]
But a triangle is a triangle even if you stretch one of it's aspects. If you take She-Hulk and shrink her to Black Widow size, she would still have about 30-50lb. of pure muscle over Natasha, they have very different sillhouettes. Is the difference as exagerated as between Hulk and Hawkeye? No, but She-Hulk is a very different character than Hulk is, even though they start from the same basic concept. Could they have made She-Hulk look like this?
Sure, but I doubt she would have been anywhere near as popular a character with men or women. She would be about as popular as Stompa.
[quote] You said yourself he can't have sex like a normal person because he has a bat cave, and a utility belt, and all kinds of knick knacks and paddiwacks that prohibit him from even removing his gloves, let alone having normal sex.[/quote]
You can have normal sex with gloves on. Most people just don't wear gloves. It's no more weird than having sex with your socks still on.
[quote] I think either you are exagerrating, or minimizing what I'm talking about in order to make it contort to the point you think you're making, because I can assure you that you haven't.[/quote]
Nope. I have most definitely seen sex scenes on Grey's Anatomy in which two characters entered a break room or something, fully dressed, moved "the business end" of their pants down, without removing them completely, clearly through the context had sex like that, and then pulled up their pants and left.
[quote]Probably I'm not as desensitized to the lack of diversity as you are, so I can't see the same minuataue that makes up a difference for you, when to a normal person looking from outside, they can see that the women all for the most part look the same.[/quote]
Only if they choose to cling to that viewpoint. Now I will grant you that the "She-Hulk" body type is fairly rare, maybe only a few dozen characters of any notoriety have it, but the same it true of the "hulk" type, Hulk's just a more popular example.
[quote]It didn't mean much in the first issue. The book could have ended before that scene and would have not missed it one iota.[/quote]
Yes, but if they'd ended without it the issue would have been several pages short, and the next issue would have run several pages long.
[quote]Maybe if you spent more time explaining how it meant something or how it impacted her in a way that is interesting, and less time complaining at me for not reading awful comics, we could advance the dialouge.[/quote]
You can read what you want to read, you can't can't then also claim to know what you're talking about. "I don't read it, but I know that it's bad," doesn't hold up. I read the first issue of the Glory Reboot, so I know that that issue was bad. I can't claim that the rest of it will be bad based on that though.
[quote]Nothing you said about Batman or Catwoman matters. And I will resist the obvious bate to get into a debate with you over your clearly flawed revisionist history of batman's libido. And I don't get what's wrong with bringing up "the bottom".[/quote]
You can bring it up, but don't bring it up like it has anything to do with me. You several times claimed that I had some problem with Batman being on the bottom, when I never implied any such thing. You seem to do that a lot, just assuming something random about me and then going off at me about it, without first confirming that I believe anything like what you imagine I believe.
[quote] It totally made sense that they had sex, I'm sure. It wasn't neccessary though and was stupidly done. Which diminishes Catwoman as a character.[/quote]
Why? Why does it diminish Catwoman as a character that she had sex? Now you've got me curious. Are you taking the Rush Limbaugh approach?
[quote] Well it worked for Empowered.[/quote]
Yes, but Emp is a VERY VERY different character. Making Diana into Emp would make NO sense. Emp works because she's super-insecure, she's a nobody, a bit more like Peter Parker than Diana, even moreso. She's considered a joke by most of the world, but we, the reader, know she's not because she's strong enough to push through that and keep trying, and sometimes she manages to save the day. I'm not saying that DC couldn't tell that story with a character, even though it would be tricky to not make it derrivitive of Empowered, but it would never work with Diana. For one thing, she's not from the modern world, so she isn't likely to be as insecure and self-conscious as Empowered is about what people think. For another, there's no way Empowered could stand in the trinity, as a JLA headliner. It would completely undermine Wonder Woman as a character. There is just nothing connecting the modern Wonder Woman (as in the one that existed in any of our lifetimes) to Empowered.
[quote] I do. One is done to amplify the heroic nature of the character, and the other is done to amplify the sexualization while diminishing her heroic nature--which within the superhero genre is critically important.[/quote]
Just so we're on the same page here, you're refering to Captain America in the second case, right?
[quote]Manga is also not a genre. [/quote]
No, but I was talking about two Shonen Jump manga, they are as close to being in the same genre as they can get.
[quote]My critique on the treatment of women is pointed toward superhero comics because the criticism inherently deals with the tenants of the genre. There's no real way to cross apply what I'm saying about superhero comics to say doctor television shows, porn, or one piece.[/quote]
So basically, sexual exploitation is only bad when it takes place in superhero comics, and if the same scene takes place wearing scrubs instead of spandex then it's perfectly OK, and even comics that don't have any sexual exploitation at all should be held accountable for those very few that do?
[quote]It's hard for me to partipate in Black Canary's empowerment as a hero when I have to read her being put in humiliating poses for male readers enjoyment.[/quote]
And yet you're advocating that they do it for Wonder Woman? What do you have against Wonder Woman?
Just download them, it's not really stealing if you can't afford them.
[ /deja vu ]
Why would you do this? Due to a trapped nerve I have a lot of free time now. Time which I wasted reading all these replies and feel none the wiser. My only hope is the drugs kick in before you get a response.
Yes, on the surface Born to Die is disturbingly, deliberately shallow because that’s what we ask women to be. Born to Die is an unflinching exploration of the implications and personal cost of this culture.
[...] instead of burying with a tokenistic ‘girl power’ pop song, she’s brought the message home far more powerfully than any other pop star before her. She’s also breaking the silence that women are taught from an early age: “don’t cry about it”. Well, Del Rey is; the mournful tone of the album undeniably speaks to that.
This demand for attention is powerful: she confronts us with the extraordinarily strong desire of an archetype assumed to be passive. She not only makes us look at her – her hair, nail polish, shoes, lipstick, dresses, swimsuits – she shows us that this character is not devoid of internality [...] Lana Del Rey unapologetically objectifies herself to the point of destruction.
You can have normal sex with gloves on. Most people just don't wear gloves. It's no more weird than having sex with your socks still on.
why don't you try having sex with a woman whilst wearing gloves? i'm sure it would go down well. one might argue that wearing gloves while having sex implies that the person you're having sex with is dirty, or somehow unworthy of the intimacy that literal physical touch brings. wearing socks simply suggests laziness or perhaps it's a practicality.
why don't you try having sex with a woman whilst wearing gloves? i'm sure it would go down well. one might argue that wearing gloves while having sex implies that the person you're having sex with is dirty, or somehow unworthy of the intimacy that literal physical touch brings. wearing socks simply suggests laziness or perhaps it's a practicality.
on no - that's having sex with a condom. you only use condoms for girls who you think are dirty. gloves and condoms if they're really dirty. gloves, condoms, and dental dams for the filthy ones.
Uh, well, no matter that, but gloves and socks are worlds apart when it comes to sex.
I mean, you don't all that often use your feet in sex. Most of us don't, at least. Which is why sometimes people leave their socks on. Your hands, on the other hand... you do use them a lot. It's a whole thing. And not everything you do with those hands would work all that well with Batman's gloves (which I assume are kinda rough to the touch). Except if you're into that, specifically, of course. And there's your own sense of touch, of course, I mean you do want to feel your fingers touching skin, which you don't if you're wearing gloves.
I don't even care about the Batman/Catwoman thing, I'm just saying. Gloves are not socks.
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