(A surprising number of things, actually)
There’s this Women Write About Comics Carnival and as I am a woman who has been known to write about comics from time to (all the) time I really want to contribute. The thing is, they’ve got a theme and it’s Women in Refridgerators, 13 years later.
For those who aren’t familiar with the concept of Women In Refridgerators, it’s the brain child of that champion of women in comics, Gail Simone. As the story goes, one day Gail noticed a pattern, whenever things got too good to be true for our doughty (super) Hero something terrible would happen to heighten the drama and spur him into action. Frequently “something would happen” meant the violent beating, rape, or death of a female member of his supporting cast. A mother, an aunt, or, as in the most famous example from Green Lantern (vol. 3) #54, a girlfriend. The list of characters is long and it’s scary and it’s one instance where my particular brand of “how I got into comics” works against me.
You see, I’m very much a Jenny-come-lately as far as comics goes. I bought my first X-Men comic in 2006 and I’ve read a lot since then, but since I’ve missed so much, I’ll probably use something like Wikipedia or UncannyXmen.Net to catch up on the backstory of anyone I don’t recognize. Which means I get spoiled for everything, which in turnt gives me a layer of distance from those traumatic events. I know they happen before the more visceral experience of reading the books. It’s a necessary thing, but it means that I can think of precious few examples of seeing this trope in action where it actually affected me.
So, I have no huge dramatic story about how I read The Adventures of Suchandsuch #Number and the death of female protagonist seared my young soul to the bone. I do, however have my usual level of righteous indignation over the way women in comics (both characters and creators) are treated.
Because Women In Refridgerators is only a part of the problem. So’s cheesecake and every single thing that fails the Bechdel test. You see, there’s this faulty assumption in not just comics, but the larger nerdy community that there just aren’t that many women to offend, so it doesn’t matter if you do. This is blatantly wrong, of course, but being blatantly wrong has never stopped a perception from damaging anything.
I came to my decision back when the furor over Starfire went down. It came from an exchange I had with my buddy Tim on Twitter. It went like this:
We had it right. It’s not enough for us to be indignant and to speak out. It’s not enough to confront the writers and editors over this online, in the letter pages, and at cons. The only way to change the comics industry is to become the comics industry.
I accidentally reread part of Mira Grant’s Feed last night and one part stood out at me in the context of this situation:
You could tell the ones who were genuinely young from the ones who’d had all the plastic surgery and regenerative treatments money could buy, because the young ones were the ones looking nauseated by all the human contact around them. They hadn’t grown up in this political culture. They just had to live with it until they became the old men at the top of the hill.
~Mira Grant, Feed p. 483
I genuinely hope that this is true of us in the comics industry. That nerdy women are coming into our own and as our generation rises to the top of the heap we’ll be able to shed the nauseating focus on violence towards and sexualization of women. I hope that this happens, but hoping isn’t going to get us anywhere.
So I shifted a few projects around on my “to write” queue. I’m not as ready as I’d like to be and everything’s in a very early stage, but I’m talking with collaborators. We’re working on it. Because I can’t just sit around and hope anymore. I’ve gotta work towards change.
That was the end of post, but if you’ve still got an earworm from my terrible pun in the title, here’s what I’ve been hearing for the last hour while I wrote this:
Pingback: Roundup three | women write about comics
See ya on creators’ panels in a couple-five-ten years, yeah?
That’s the plan! I’ve got some good things in the works.
Pingback: Master Post: Women In Refrigerators 13 Years Later | women write about comics
Alright, I’m going to correct you on a couple of things. The first & most powerful is that WIR is bullshit. Yes I am a long time comic book reader (more DC then Marvel, but frankly the new reboot is annoying me so I’m dropping a lot of titles) & yes I am incidentally female, but most importantly I’m aware of critical thought & that’s why I know for a fact WIR is sexism.
WIR is the perfect storm of Cognitive Bias & reporting bias, feeding into Expectation Bias. WIR is neither correlative nor causative as a list, it exists just to try and shame writers who are predominately male into giving female characters “Plot Immunity.” now having said that a lot of people will disagree & start pointing to the WIR list as evidence… Its not evidence of anything but bad things having happened in comics to female characters.
However if we actually look at the list it includes such “fridgings” as
- Jocasta (deactivated – more than once)
- Betty Banner (abused, changed into a harpy, multiple miscarriages, dead)
- Shrinking Violet (lost a leg in Giffen’s Legion)
- Snowbird (child and husband murdered, insane, dead)
- Wildcat II (dead)
These are some of my favourites because they best encapsulate the subjective nature of the list & at the same time show cases the sexism of the list. Jocasta has been deactivated more then once, that’s good so has the vision.
Betty Banner became the Harpy & then died, that’s a shame Bruce Banner was just beaten as a child, grew up emotionally stunted, became multiple different versions of the hulk was separated from the hulk, shot to another planet where he was depowered by a degree & then came back to earth as a monster & oh his wife died, came back & then wanted nothing to do with him.
Shrinking Violet lost her Leg in Giffens Legion? That’s nice Lightning Lad loses his arm, has it replaced, then in Legion Lost he is killed in a bloody fashion & then inhabits the body of a dead teammate who himself had become the very villain who killed Lightning Lad.
Wildcat 2 died… That’s nice how many Dr Fates died from that same Era? What about Northwind becoming a bestial monster incapable of thought or compassion? What about Starman going bonkers, or any of the other mishaps of that eras JSA related characters?
Last but not least, Snowbird: Child and husband murder? So it’s a travesty for women when a female character is killed to motivate a male character, but it’s also a travesty for women when male characters are killed to motivate a female character? Heck if that’s a qualifier for fridging, then Spiderman was fridged by the death of Gwen Stacy & Kyle Rayner was fridged by the murder of his GF.
Do you see how stupidly reactive & intellectually dishonest this list is. If I built a list using exactly the same evidential standard then the list would include every single male character ever. The evidential standard is so low that any female character who was sidelined for even a second is on it.
If anything what this list shows us is that if you look at it objectively rather then with the “oh no, we must protect all fictional female characters from those nasty men” goggles on, women in comic book fiction are actually equal to there male counterparts. It also shows that people both male & female will stupidly protect women against negative consequences until the cows come home, but when the same thing happens to a male character as a female readership we shrug our shoulders an say “so what.”
We have to accept that the negative consequences of actions or inactions are a prevalent & important part of serialised fiction & WIR is just an attempt to shame comic book writers into giving women “plot immunity” by pretending there is a trend in comics where women are unduly targeted. Fact is if we calculated the negative consequences, men would make up the majority of the list, not women.
So as a female long time reader of comics (how long time of a reader you ask, I own a complete run of Infinity Inc, ‘nuff said), I ask all female readers including Gail Simone (if someone would pass this on to her) to stop talking rubbish. WiR is a sign of just how entitled and pampered we are by society as women & demanding “Plot Immunity” & pretending there is some sort of woman hating trend in comics just portrays us a bitter & self entitled. Or failing that lets add a couple of other fridgings to WiR, here are my suggestions
- Oracle (depowered, striped of Tech based technopathy powers, beaten by the joker, possessed by Brainiac)
- Black Canary (mentally violated, severely beaten to a pulp)
- Knockout (killed in a mindless fashion to motivate scandal)
- Vixen (went crazy, becomes a villain)
- Lady Blackhawk (mentally controlled to be the sex fantasy of a super villain)
Guess who wrote all those plots? Gail Simone, in the pages of Birds of Prey & those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Rosie the Riveter would be pissed with how stupidly we are all acting.