Sure they were.
Women are there to exist as motivation and/or beautiful things to be admired for the men, you solve your problems by beating the crap out of them, and if you have bad feelings, you don’t talk about them, you crush those feelings way down deep and keep on doing what needs to be done.
Or, at least, that’s how I remember the comic books of my youth. Maybe they’ve changed somewhat in the interim.
I think the implication is that a man who is “white-knighting” is grandstanding in order to impress the woman he is defending.
My thoughts on this ad:
Even so, better than being a POS.
See, that’s the thing. When did we as a culture decide that men trying to impress women by doing the right thing was somehow BAD?
Besides, as they say: fake it 'til you make it. At first, it might just be to get a date. Over time, it becomes who you are.
(General YOU, not you-you, you know?!)
I don’t get this.
As I’ve been saying for almost my entire life, all you have to do is say “not cool” when someone starts punching down. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it does break up the momentum that doing nothing would simply add to.
Yes, I’ve lost friends by saying it’s “not cool” to punch down, and no, I don’t regret it at all. But hopefully it made them think about their actions and whether or not everybody agrees with them. If I alone say “not cool” they might think I’m being overly sensitive, but the more people do it, the more they realize they’re not just saying what everybody’s thinking.
It’s not white knighting or grandstanding either. It’s who I am. I don’t like people being assholes to people who have no power, and it turns me off to the extent that I don’t want to associate with anyone who is like that.
I would argue no. A white knight is a Good Person™ and a Nice Guy™* when looking out for his public image (e.g., trying to impress a girl) but turns back into a raging asshole when he’s with his buddies and nobody else is around. I would rather have someone be an asshole and own it rather than pretend to be minimally decent just to work an angle.
See: neckbeard, or someone whose neck boycotted Gillette before it was cool
Because you don’t get a cookie for being minimally decent. You don’t even get the crumbs for just pretending either.
Pretending to be decent is like the so called moderate Republicans. In the 90s, every Republican I met was a moderate Republican, even though statistically this simply could not be. It turned out that they were just claiming to be moderates to take the heat off them and put it into Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms or whomever, when really they agreed with those people. Now that trump is in power, their public selves match their private selves. They didn’t change at all, they just hid who they were around certain people.
As the hot dog vendor told the Dalai Lama when the Dalai Lama asked for “one with everything” and handed him a $20 etc etc: “change must come from within”
Absolutely. It’s an important thing to say. And its hard. My professional society is doing bystander intervention training at a conference this summer. It’s really necessary to practice that skill!
What comic-book universe did you grow up in? And what age? I mean…a lot of social stuff was included in the late 1960s…both Marvel and DC. Even “Wonder Woman” of the Golden Age was more than the things you listed.
I grew up reading Silver Age, and later, some Golden Age comics. I don’t think Susan Storm Richards was motivation (she snuck onto the damned rocket!) or just to be admired. For Spider-Man, his motivation was guilt brought on by the murder (which he may or mayn’t have prevented) of this Uncle Ben.
But the 1990s…dude, I gave up, for women with bodies like that…I mean, did Howard Hughes design those costumes, because how they don’t get black eyes every day of the week is beyohd me!
I grew up in the 90s, and was only peripherally exposed to comic books (I’ve always preferred full-text stories).
And, yes, I know that I’m oversimplifying the genre, that there’s a lot in it beyond what I’ve described. But what I have read almost always turns out to be:
I know that in no era was this the entirety of the comic books being published; I have read, and very much enjoyed, Watchmen and Sandman, which have very little of the above.
But even as recently as 2016, I used to go by a comic shop on a weekly basis, and what I remember seeing were covers, posters, and statues with women in costumes that can best be described as “various states of undress,” and, everywhere, images of costumed individuals smacking each other around.
I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that comics were entirely socially regressive in content, and I apologize if that’s the message that I conveyed; I simply was trying to point out that the culture of toxic masculinity is just as pervasive there as in other media, if not more so.
Sounds about right. I read conics in the 70s, was forcibly stopped from reading them when I was about 10 by my parents (they thought it would impact my reading level, even though I was also reading novels), and having been dipping in and out of them since the 90s.
I think @Lucy_Gothro is right – they used to be more feminist. Compare 70s Scarlet Witch to 90s Vampirella and it’s pretty clear.
I was thinking more in terms of how the toxmen are treating the intervention in bullying and harassment as “weak”.
Captain America, Superman, Spiderman, et. al. were shown standing up against bullying all the damn time.
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Oh yah, it’s ever’whar; read some Joseph Campbell and his take on the Hero myths. Or read the myths yourself, the ancient Greco-Roman ones, and make your own take, lol!
But the original early 1960s Scarlet Witch…eeeeeeeeeew, she revolted me when I was growing up! Like GIRL YOU HAVE ALL THIS POWER! Same with Marvel Girl. But then…Roy Thomas came into Marvel and things began to change…coinciding with the evolution of 20th century feminism (it’s always been around, but submerged; had Mary Wollenstonecraft lived, things would be waaay different, I’m convinced). And Roy helped, but getting more female staff besides Flo Steinberg probably helped.
However, at DC, Wonder Woman lost her powers (pretty much) in the early 1970s; Black Canary was on the ascendancy, and the ladies of the Legion of Super-Heroes were given some power, particularly Saturn Girl (now I really liked her); Supergirl also seemed to be on the rise, as well.
Yeah, I read a LOT of comics from age five to about age twenty-four, lol.
Could it be like Nancy Drew? The original stories were very feminist, and then they were re-written to adhere to a more 1950s/60s sexist mindset. Maybe early comics were more wide ranging, but then they became more sexist for at least a few decades, which we’re only now getting past? (I don’t know: I can’t read comics, they confuse my brain.)
I hear that; I have trouble picking up exactly what is supposed to be happening in the images, and how they relate to the story, especially when the artist puts a lot of detail into the panel. I just can’t figure out the conventions which should tell me exactly what I’m supposed to be looking at, and what details I should be taking in.
I think so. I know people love to hate on the comics code, but one of the things it enforced that I liked was that women (and men) had to be at least kinda sorta realistic. You can usually spot the bra cup line on women’s superhero costumes up to the 70s, and the men, while muscly, aren’t more beefy than a top-tier bodybuilder.
Then the code was abolished.
The 90s – apologies to those who have fond memories of that era’s comics – to me both the women and men look like they’re constructed as balloon sculptures.
LOL, it really kinda started in the 1980s; look up George Perez, for one example that worked for both DC and Marvel. What I found funny was that in interview with - I think Perez, not sure, - in the Comics Journal, he said that one artist, Carmine Infantino (a Sliver-Ager, look him up - he did some good stuff with “The Flash” and if you watch it on TV, you should try to at least read the Silver-Age stuff, it’s not as “busy”), drew womens’ breasts as eyes on a face; and eyes on a face are supposed to be one eye-length (or is it width?) apart.
It all comes down to: WHAT sells?
That, and what informs the artists.
I’ve had more than one comics fan tell me that earlier artists took life drawing classes, or at least copied artists who had. Now that’s changed to artists who learned to draw from copying porn.
It’s not all about T & A. There was the uproar a few years ago when Spider-Woman was drawn climbing onto a roof in a way that made no sense to rock climbers, anatomists, or clothing designers (one of the issues was that her costume was drawn as paint, not cloth, when canon has it established as cloth).
It’s not all about “sexy”, or what the artists are allowed to get away with. It’s also about aesthetic choices which pull the reader out of the story. There’s a part in one of the Sandman comics where something inscribed with runes is shown, and if you can read the alphabet (I can read one version of it) it says something which really pulls you out of the story. In the old days that would have been a fun plot Easter Egg.
New book: