A short while ago, in what is now actually last year, Ragnell the Foul posted on her blog about a new 'Nice Guy' letter that was going around, found on Craigslist. (I have no idea why people put up letters like that on a place like Craigslist. I may just not be cool enough or in the scene enough to understand)
I just came across, via a link on my Twitterlist of what I'm now thinking of as the female version of the Nice Guy Letter. I'm calling it the 'Bitch Blues'.
Gird your loins and go read the link. I'm not asking you to comment, I'm not suggesting you dogpile - and really there's no reason, it's an opinion. But I would like to talk about it, about the warped view of feminism, about how the writer claims to have moved past blaming other people for her problems - and yet she's now blaming women and feminism.
The reason I'm writing about it here is that the essay makes me wonder about women in comics; how they're defined, how they're perceived and why it is when female consumers start to talk our voices come across as so much Charlie Brown 'wah wah wah wah'.
Modern comics to me are modern mythology. The Ancient Greeks had Heracles, Athena, Hebe and Odysseus. I had / have Batman, Black Canary, Dazzler and Storm.
But that essay, the concepts in that essay as if it's somehow an insider's look at the inner life of a real empowered woman (it's not), just makes me think about the storylines given to female heroines and the excuses given about it.
In the tv show Heroes, the character Claire who has Wolverine's powers, is stalked by a seeming 'Nice Guy' who wants everything to be about him, but it's not portrayed as stalking and abusive. You're supposed to cheer for Mr. Nice Teenage Stalker Guy. You're supposed to think it romantic. You're supposed to think he'll make everything better for Claire.
You know that pause when you read a story and you wonder what crack the writer was smoking and why on earth he (usually but not always) thought that the word's he'd written and the plot he'd created was the reality of the modern woman ?
That essay makes me think that that type of stuff is what they're reading. It's no longer two dimensional concepts for women - The Madonna or The Whore, there's now The Bitch, someone competent until it all starts to fall apart, someone who seems to want to strive to be the Madonna on the outside, while being the Whore now and again on the inside and all around is bitterly unhappy because there's no white picket fence, fluffy dress, adoring and taking care of her husband.
What. The. Hell ?
If you read all the way through to her deciding to let her sons 'be men' and stop nagging them about feelings and sensitivity - maybe you'll see what I'm talking about when I say I read this essay and think about the ideas being formed about women and how that's reflected in our modern myths of comics and...
Well, it's worrying.
I've seen far too many blogs talking about the call for equality somehow being the cry of entitlement. I had no idea where those opinions were coming from and how they could be formed. Now I have a better idea and it's sad.
Quote from comments on the page: The truth is feminists are nothing more than wh0res and goldiggers who use intellectualism and large-scale manipulation, as opposed to the much more honest(relatively speaking) approach of the typical, street wh0re. And feminists are not at all averse to secretly using the trade of sex for status/power/money either, as evidenced in this woman's story here. At least the street wh0re is honest and upfront about who/what she is to herself - which is much more than we can say for our typical feminist/modern woman
Look Ma', it's Frank Miller's Spawn. He's not alone.
Scary.
PS: As a gay woman, don't even get me started at how the lesbian in her story is represented.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Madonna, Whore, Bitch?
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I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about that post, but my mind keeps drawing a complete blank. Just a big question mark. I just...I can't even wrap my mind around it.
ReplyDeleteThe whole thing reads to me as something written by an MRA. It doesn't read the way anti-feminist comments from women of about that age make that I've heard.
ReplyDeleteAnna:
ReplyDeleteMRA?
But yes it doesn't really read as anti-feminist by a woman which is why I mentioned the Nice Guy Letter. Because it seriously reads to me like the companion piece.
Oh, MRA = Men's Rights Association.
ReplyDeleteSee, according to the MRA crowd, white men are the truly oppressed group, whereas we wimminfolk are secretly running the world with our evil wimminfolk ways. And we control sex and ruin children and hate men and... yeah. Heaps of fun.
Well well well, NO'MAM lives and is for real. Who'd have thunk it.
ReplyDeleteIt reads like certain types of Christian tract. A while back Rem and I found a tract attributed to some dude named Sailor Bill. And Sailor Bill had been, well, a sailor, and a tattoo artist. But he'd found Christ and repented of those evils. And we were meant to be happy for Sailor Bill.
ReplyDeleteNow, the zeal of the converted (to any cause/religion) is a well-documented phenomenon, but this woman's letter just reads like the kind of thing that someone would contrive if they wanted to comprehensively denounce feminism as a social evil. It's hard to imagine that someone genuinely "repenting" of feminism would tick every stereotype box so neatly.
Well, if a woman wrote that, I'm a newt. Hateful stuff. I need a shower.
ReplyDeleteI just read what guys think I'll become when I say I'm a feminist.
ReplyDeleteI think the world got smaller and slightly scarier again. I don't even know how to react. People think that I think I am flawless because I am female?
I have no idea how woman wanting to be respected as equals = woman want to be treated as flawless goddesses.
Do people actually believe women are like that post?
Oh god, the comments say they do.
I wouldn't take those comments at face value, Camila. This whole filthy concoction's so transparently a pep talk for the petulant that every positive response to it must be considered bankrupt of credibility, too. No man believes women think and talk like that -- well, we can bloody well recognize our own crybaby voices when we hear them, at least! Even the goddamned misogynists can.
ReplyDeleteI'd put my hand on the freakin' Bible and testify to that.
Sorry for charging in wearing the White Guy hat, and ordinarily I wouldn't; but, this is also aimed at me, right? After all, I'm the clown who's supposed to be so desperately embattled that he'll support -- no, be grateful for! -- any lie that puts his own comeuppance onto That Bitch. Even if it's got the word "LIE" written all over it in bright fluorescent paint. Hell, especially then, since there's only one place you can get this lie, and that's from the other guys (I use the term loosely) in the women-fearing circle-jerk. Jesus, what cowardly, cowardly bullshit. It's contemptible.
Sorry, as it happens I actually do have further thoughts on what Willow said about comics, there, but...rrrrgh! The thought that someone might believe any of that post/comment suite was remotely motivated by honesty is just too horrible. I think it would be stretching a point to call any of it "opinion". And grrr.
And sorry for the hijack.
Time for another shower.