Men in Comics

This weekend’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival includes among its many talks and events a panel on “Men in Comics.” Here’s the description:

Men have a long history in comics, both as readers and as characters. This panel is a chance to talk about the decisions that creators make when writing and drawing male-identified people, as well as how these creators’ experience with men in comics have shaped their work. Featuring Caitlin Major, Iasmin Omar Ata, Shieka Lugutu, and Sanya Anwar. Moderated by Eleri Harris.

This all-women panel about men is the latest in a series of such events, intended as playful reversals of all-male panels about women’s participation in various domains. (See, for instance, this all-male panel on women’s empowerment.)

Last year, PodCon featured an all LGBTQ panel on “How to Write Straight Characters,” and Dragoncon featured a last minute replacement of a “Women in Comics” panel by one similar to this weekend’s TCAF panel.

Here’s a fun Twitter discussion of these and other such panels kicked off by Canadian nerd and Dinosaur Comics creator Ryan North.

 

Ghostbusters

You might have heard that the Ghostbusters re-boot will feature four female leads. If you’re like me, you might have thought the casting choices were excellent. If you did, then you might have been disappointed (though perhaps unsurprised) by many of the reactions to the news on twitter, reddit, and other online fora. Jezebel provides some comic relief (language warning for the full piece in the link, in case swearing offends you):

Four female Ghostbusters simply aren’t realistic. Only men are uniquely equipped to wield proton packs and analyze ectoplasm, a substance emitted by ghosts, WHICH ARE REAL. Women’s hands are much TOO SMALL to hold a proton pack. GHOSTBUSTERS is supposed to be a COMEDY and WOMEN AREN’T FUNNY. And good luck getting audiences to believe that FOUR WOMEN could possibly do SCIENCE, much less in the same room without GETTING THEIR PERIODS ALL AT ONCE or snatching each other’s weaves in a fight over a man. I watch television AND READ THE INTERNET. I know how women are.

. . .

Also: SEXISM!!! THE SEXISM!!! Imagine how angry feminists would be if Hollywood decided to make an all-male Sex and the City, or an all-male Joy Luck Club, or an all-male… OTHER MOVIE ABOUT WOMEN. Ladies, you ALREADY direct 17% of all major studio movies, and even sometimes are allowed to talk onscreen. WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT?!!?

Philosophical rejection lines

Ever had a philosopher hit on you at a conference and you wish you had some pithy line ready with which to say “not happening”? Go out for drinks after seminar, your colleague is makes an unwelcome move, and you don’t just want to say no, you want to say hell no, but without actually having to use those words? Buzzfeed can now help you with that:  a list of philosophical rejection lines here.  Below is the Leibniz.

Your chance to Kickstart some feminist theatre

What a neat idea! Travesti is a new play that takes verbatim women’s “stories about unruly body hair, being groped on public transport, and experiences of sexual violence” and puts them in the mouths of an all-male cast. Here’s what its creators have to say about it:

By putting these stories in men’s mouths, we wanted to highlight the absurdities of typically ‘female’ behaviours – why are women expected to wear make up and men aren’t? Why are we expected to shave our body hair and men aren’t? Why are we expected to consider our safety at night in ways that men don’t have to? Happily, as a result, it also opens up interesting discussion about the social roles enforced on men, for example how male rape is something that is not discussed in the same way as female rape. Our intention was to make a feminist theatre piece that looks like the women we know: intelligent, playful, funny and sexy. 

Want to help Travesti get to the Edinburgh Festival? Here’s their Kickstarter page.

Guess who

opposes
gay marriage
gay adoption
abortion
contraception
Women priests (no doubt)

Sometimes people become radicalized when they enter the upper positions in an extremely conservative institution. The US Supreme Court demonstrates some instances of this transition. So let’s hope that Pope Francis can do the same.

A new pope is thought to choose his name to signal the tradition he will align himself with. Francis I is not situating himself in such a line. So let us hope.

Misogyny (et al.) at the Oscars

NSFW: expletives

A row of Oscar awards

“This wasn’t an awards ceremony so much as a black-tie celebration of the straight white male gaze.”

An article by Margaret Lyons at   Vulture.com has been making the rounds on the internet: “Why Seth MacFarlane’s Misogyny Matter.”
(MacFarlane is the creator of Family Guy, and hosted the Oscars this year.)

Lyons does a nice job of summing up experiences that are all too common for many of us but haven’t sunk in to our cultures at large:

“Yes, I can take a joke. I can take a bunch! A thousand, 10,000, maybe even more! But after 30 or so years, this stuff doesn’t feel like joking. It’s dehumanizing and humiliating, and as if every single one of those jokes is an ostensibly gentler way of saying, “I don’t think you belong here.” All those little instances add up, grain of sand by grain of sand until I’m stranded in a desert of every “tits or GTFO” joke I’ve ever tried to ignore.”

Lindy West at Jezebel.com also posted an article about MacFarlane, coining the term “sexism fatigue.”  (I wouldn’t be surprised if another term for this already exists in the academic literature.  And if it doesn’t, it should.)

Sexism Fatigue: When Seth MacFarlane Is a Complete Ass and You Don’t Even Notice

“Seth MacFarlane will go on the television and make a joke about George Clooney having sex with a 9-year-old girl who is sitting right there, and your first reaction will be, “Well. At least he didn’t literally say she should get raped. Pass the cheese.”

That’s bad. A famous man making sexist jokes on a primetime awards show watched by millions of people is so banal and status-quo in our culture, that to me—a woman professionally committed to detecting and calling bullshit on sexism—it just feels like a drop in the bucket.”

West also coins another phrase in her article:

“Fuck the bucket.  If I’m not fatigued, I’m not caring enough. So fuck that stupid bucket.”

I hope there’s an equivalent term for this in the academic literature, too.

I Was a Misogynist Comedian

There’s a great opinion piece by Michael J. Dolan over at The Skinny. Motivated by a mixed review of his recently released stand-up record and by some candid words from a friend, he re-examines his material only to discover in it — and in stand-up more generally — misogyny of which he was previously unaware. Dolan’s piece is smart, engaging and bracingly honest. Here’s a taste:

The defence so often used is that they’re only jokes. They’re not to be taken at face value, we obviously don’t mean it. But you’ll rarely hear a contemporary act try to justify racism that way. We know that in a culture of racism every racist joke contributes to that culture and that none of them are acceptable. This is no different. In our culture of misogyny, of violence against women, every misogynistic joke contributes.

(Thanks for sharing, SP.)

What Is the Current State of Feminism’s PR?

I hope everyone had a very nice Let’s-Glorify-Imperialism Day.

I came across this screen shot on failbook (which surprising takes quite a few shots at oppressive cultural patterns) and at first I had myself a mighty wince over seeing all the hackneyed stereotypes of feminism get thrown around.  But then I found the article that the screen shot comes from, and that adds a whole new context: the #sorryfeminists hashtag was created by feminists.  To mock these stereotypes. (here’s the article on Slate):

One of the most frustrating parts of being a feminist is how negative stereotypes created to discredit feminism are now pretty much conventional wisdom. Like the population at large, actual feminists can be funny and sexy, despite our bad rap as sexless and dour. It’s like living in Oz but repeatedly being told you’re in Kansas. That frustration boiled over this morning when Deborah Needleman, the editor of T Magazine (and the stylish wife of Slate‘s own Jacob Weisberg), put up this joking tweet suggesting that feminists dislike women being sexy:

At this point, stereotypes of feminists are mocked so thoroughly that it’s impossible to determine if someone who invokes one is trying to reinforce it, making fun of it, or playing up the ambiguity so that you get a little from both camps. Anna Holmes, the founder of Jezebel, and Irin Carmon of Salon (full disclosure: real-life friends of mine who are, may I say, ridiculously sexy ladies) decided to respond in a way that the Internet does best: embracing the confusion by creating the hashtag #sorryfeminists on Twitter.

It worked. The #sorryfeminists meme is, as I type, expertly tearing apart the idea that feminists hate fun, hate sex, and hate beauty. (It’s also, like any other Twitter meme, devolving into layers of irony and meta-jokes that pretty much stop making sense altogether.

So it seems like there are both people using the #sorryfeminists hashtag to make fun of stereotypes and makes fun of feminists.

Okay and now there’s yet another level.  If you actually look on twitter (#sorryfeminists) there’s a lot of people using this hastag to critique the white-washing and middle-class-centrism of feminism and its public face.   For instance:

#sorryfeminists is fun/funny to people who can afford to be that stereotype, or who have the knowledge to refute that stereotype.

Cutesy side of 2nd wave. What #sorryfeminists is NOT addressing? Those OTHER labels: at worst oppressive/racist, at best willfully blind.

You gotta stop this echo chamber of white feminists who are given book deals to recycle the same tired ideas. #sorryfeminists I’m not sorry.

If I was introduced to white feminism 1st I would’ve NEVER been a feminist. Thank goodness for Black/brown feminist scholars

Feminism has a double PR problem. It still hasn’t shaken some of these ridiculous stereotypes but it also all too often puts forward white middle class women and issues that are particularly (or only) pertinent to white middle class women–so they become interpreted as “the” issues of feminism.
(I sometimes catch myself doing this still: abortion is not the only issue for women’s reproductive rights and health; balancing work and family is not a “new” issue for lots of families;  fighting to gain respect for not changing your last name has little resonance for people whose marriage isn’t recognized as legitimate no matter what they do with their name, etc.)

So in the name of helping improve feminism’s PR, I’m giving a shout out to some of my favorite blogs that join in the dismantling of anti-woman oppression and that address issues that aren’t often given the spotlight:

Because We’re Still Oppressed

Angry Black Bitch

Womanist Musings

Geek Feminism

fbomb

Racialiscious

The Jaded Hippy

Street Harassment Catharsis

For your viewing pleasure, a satirical video on how to be a street harasser:

(The whole ‘you should look gross’ thing was unnecessary, but otherwise, this is pretty golden.)

WOOW!

Watch Out for Old Women: