Comics Misread by Conservatives

[ouroboros]

I was actually just telling someone their Spider-Man pics weren't the proof of equal treatment he thought they were, so no, not retracting it.

I read the essay and honestly you just hand-waved away the similarities without addressing them. Not very illuminating.

It's not about an acceptable level of desire, it's about specific type of representation in which the woman represented's primary purpose is to stimulate male sexual response.

You're getting your arguments confused, so I won't bother trying to disentangle them.

Yes, I tend to wave away anything insubstantial, and that's what the Mary Sue argument was. I have no problem with the notion that artists recycle their old work in other contexts, but the earlier context does not, contrary to the MS writer, determine the context of the later work.

Is the CLICK excerpt meant to be sexually stimulating? You betcha, though it's not at all demonstrable that it's only set up to cater to male readers, as the MS writer contends. Manara has asserted that he has a substantial number of female readers, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. There's nothing in the CLICK panel that makes it purely representational of male desire. Some women, I have to believe, may even like seeing hetero sex in which the lady gets naked.

Posters on this thread have gone back and forth on the Spider-Woman cover, as they did when the story was new. It would truly be an "all or nothing" attitude to believe that all the ones who cry "sex" are right and all the ones who say "not that sexy" are wrong. All that can be said is that there's a widespread difference of opinion on the subject, one which ultimately based in taste. Taste can't be argued: there's no argument I can mount that would make the Mary Sue writer cease to behold rampant lubricity in the Manara cover. But for her to make claims about what Manara did, intentionally or otherwise, she has to mount a substantive argument. And she did not. It amounted to nothing but finger-pointing; not unlike the postwar conservatives who damned liberal filmmakers by calling them "Commies" if they included anything in their films that criticized American mores.

[Shawn Hopkins]

Har har. And now we see your own version of "all or nothing:" if a poster criticizes favorite liberal positions, that poster must be "conservative," no matter what he may have said to the contrary.

Happily, this is not an accurate representation of reality. It's quite possible for, say, a centrist liberal to critique a Far-Left poseur when it's demonstrable that said Leftie-- be it Wertham or Mulvey-- doesn't know what he/she is talking about.

So if I had propounded any misreadings here, they would be Centrist Liberal misreadings-- and not germane to the OP. That post, BTW, also called for examples that wanted to read conservative content into stories that didn't support them.

It's because you seem like a doggedd anti-feminist, especially after looking at your blog. I don't think you can be an anti-feminist and also a centrist liberal. That's just something that makes you a conservative, whether you like the label or not.

[ouroboros]

It's because you seem like a doggedd anti-feminist, especially after looking at your blog. I don't think you can be an anti-feminist and also a centrist liberal. That's just something that makes you a conservative, whether you like the label or not.

No one's an anti-feminist just for disputing Bad Feminist Arguments.

The term only applies to people who dismiss both Good and Bad ones-- which I didn't, even in the essay to which I linked.

[John Aston]

As for sexism, well ...

One person's sexism is another person's Friday night.