female athletic poses

[hradzka]

I've thought for a while that scanty female clothing in comics isn't nearly as much of a problem as the porntastic posing. There are male superheroes who wear scanty clothing, but the way they're posed is athletic or dynamic or casual, whereas the women are invariably lightboxed out of Maxim or some such. (Also, as I've mentioned in a post I can't find now, it's interesting to note that the male characters who go about scantily dressed are monstrous (Hulk, Thing), or they look weirdly alien (Hawkman, Martian Manhunter), or they're from Somewhere Else Where They Dress Funny (Namor, Hawkman sometimes, Thor). I figure that this ties into the cultural issue that women can show more skin in everyday life without getting laughed at than can men, so the "here and now" male characters show little skin compared to the freaky dudes or the dudes from Somewhere Else. Meanwhile, male artists who like hot women amp that up to eleven. It's amazing how much better women were drawn before the sexual revolution.)

I've mentioned on Twitter that if I were a superhero comic artist in search of reference, I would *screencap the shit* out of female athletes at the Olympics. Not just for the different body types and emphasis on athletic over hot, but for the action poses. Case in point: I just ran across this 1988 Steve Landis picture of Florence Griffith Joyner, and I've seen a lot of "women crouched over" drawings in comics, but they invariably tend toward the sexy and FloJo is in a pure action pose. It's a seriously great picture; somebody should photoshop it so she's wearing a Wonder Woman costume.

(This is me passively-aggressively linking it so somebody can do that.)

Comments

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I've thought for a while that scanty female clothing in comics isn't nearly as much of a problem as the porntastic posing.

Right with you on this. While Synechdochic makes good points above about the extensiveness and complexity of the larger issue of objectification, I still can't help but think that if all the women in sex-poses in comics were magically replaced by women in actual action poses (with bonus points for them having bodies that could believably belong to athletes) it would make a staggering difference to the overall objectification-quotient, no matter what they were(n't) wearing.

This is always something that frustrates me extremely in discussions of body-image in comics: people only object to huge-boobed skinniness because it's really unusual to find in real life without extreme combinations of genetics and surgery. And that's certainly a valid objection in the case of visual portrayals of women in the media-at-large, but a much more immediate one in the case of superhero comics is, "But how is Black Canary/Catwoman/Batgirl/etc. supposed to be doing all this rigorous physical hero-ing with a body that doesn't look like it could do a push-up, let alone climb a wall, knock out three bad guys, run 4 miles, hop a train, and rescue 6 children from drowning all in the course of a single night?"

Maybe having been a serious athlete for my entire life has skewed my perceptions and given me unfair insight into something most of the population of the western world is completely ignorant of, namely that TONS OF WOMEN HAVE BODIES THAT CAN DO THINGS BESIDES FUCK AND HAVE BABIES.

I just . . . I would probably pay 10 times whatever standard comics cover price is now for a book about lady!vigilantes who look like fighters. Or gymnasts or runners or weightlifters or whatever else; I've abused google images enough for one comment box, but my point is: Olympians and professional athletes! The closest thing the real world has to Superheroes! A great number of them are women! AND THEY LOOK AWESOME!

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(d'oh, Synecdochic, sorry, random extra letter is random.)