Are These the Hills You Want to Die On?
By Amanda Marcotte has an interesting entry up about comics editor, Janelle Asselin, who had the temerity to point out that maybe giving a teen girl comics character the body of a porn star* wasn’t such a great idea. This was received as well as you might imagine in the geek community. Male geeks everywhere were like “You know what? You’re right. She looks kinda ridiculous and not age-appropriate.” HA HA HA!!! I’m just joking. That’s not what really happened. What really happened is…guess!:
A.) She received flowers and candy and from admiring feminist men?
B.) She was harassed.
C.) She received rape threats.
D.) She received year’s supply anal lube, because, well why not?
If you guessed B and C, congratulations! You’ve just won a year’s supply of anal lube because you are incredibly smart and I’m an incredibly thoughtful prize-giver.
Now, this story is, in and of itself, like, super-boring, because shit like this happens to geek girls/women ALL. THE. TIME. I mean, crap, I check my watch (because let’s pretend for this sentence I am 70 years old) every 2 minutes and I say to myself “Some geek girl somewhere is getting shit for being anything other than a chill girl.”
But Amanda asks a really really interesting question I thinks she gives short shrift, and it’s this: Would it be so bad if women had more say in/control over the geek world? Would it really be bad if there were fewer super-sexy (I guess), busty characters in video games and comics? If comics and and video games were less chauvinistic would that really be bad? Would it harm these mediums in some way? I’m asking. Seriously.
*Some people in the comments objected to Amanda pointing out how ridiculously busty the girl was, noting that some young women are very busty. Well, no. Not really. The truth is that the amount of women–young or old–who are that busty are fairly rare, and the vast majority of those women also have fat elsewhere on their bodies–it hasn’t all been miraculously deposited into
gravity-defying breasts. Sorry. It just doesn’t happen. OK, it does happen, but it really is–sorry to burst your bubble–INCREDIBLY RARE.