Escher Girls

This is a comment somebody left in my reblog of the Ironman/Black Widow redraw:

What’s sad is that, before reading “Iron man”, I was thinking it was a Iron woman because of the ridiculous pose. Comics are screwing me up.

And that’s the thing. We see that pose and we think “woman” because only women are sexualized like that (and ridiculously posed) in comics (and many other industries, honestly). The pose itself is enough to say “WOMAN!” and that’s part of the problem with how women keep being posed and portrayed in comics, and part of how comics “marks” itself as being “for” hetero men.

As I said in a previous post, part of the effect (intentional or not) of all the sexualized female characters in video games, comics, etc is that it marks these spaces as “male spaces” (and a specific subset of men). Anybody else is just visiting. It sends the message “sure, you might like this despite the art, sure you might like killing zombies, or reading about giant robots being punched by flying people, but this isn’t for you, you’re just a guest here.”

In a similar way, this constant posing and drawing of women as sex objects, as being helpless, or with their butts thrusting out and spines bent in doggy style, or etc, also sends the message that female superheroes aren’t SUPER, or aren’t SUPER first and foremost. They’re WOMEN first and foremost. Just like how that reader read “woman” because that pose is MEANT for women, these poses mark the superheroine as female first and foremost, as existing for men, as being at best, partners and at worst, sex objects for the power fantasy of being a hero (i.e. a straight, often white, male hero). It says “this is not for you” to female readers, and it also says “this isn’t your power fantasy” and “you’ll never be a hero first to us, you’ll be a woman first, you’ll be OUR fantasy”.

http://eschergirls.tumblr.com/post/17842938869/robinade-gingerhaze-okay-i-cant-tell-whats <— The pose I’m referring to.