- A few thoughts about the sexual harassment of the woman who dressed as Black Cat at NYCC. Her name is Mandy. She’s a 22 year old freelance designer (here’s her Etsy page) and more who lives in NYC. Reading about her experience at NYCC, from her own blog, is just a disgusting feeling. Especially as a man. To think that a large group of men didn’t think twice about the way they were behaving — or worse, some did but were too big of pussies to say anything about it — is just inexcusable. This isn’t 1952 anymore, and you can’t go around saying these types of things and behaving this type of way. Obviously. That being said, the comics community (fans and creators alike) are missing a massive opportunity to fix, or at least talk about, something that’s been plaguing mainstream books for sometime now: sexism. Mainstream comic books, mostly superhero ones, not only condone sexism, they thrive off it. Don’t believe me? Did you know THIS book exists? Go ahead and Google image search some pages. Not only in the pages but on the covers too, you will find poses that would make Sasha Grey blush. It’s really bad, and has gotten more and more out of hand the past 5 years or so. So I guess I wasn’t surprised when a bunch of adult-adolescents harassed this woman. Not one bit. They probably all read that things like Gotham City Sirens! And Black Cat is one of the characters who gets taken advantage of the most by artists. And I don’t mean making her “sexy”, there is a difference between sexy and gratuitous (go out to a bar on Halloween this year and you’ll know what I mean). Now, of course no one deserves to be sexually harassed when they dress up like Black Cat, or Emma Frost, or fucking Linda Lovelace. But what does it mean when women are dressing as Slave Leia? What kind of subconscious themes are at work amongst those seeing these beautiful women at Cons? Are we just simply feeding the machine to continue to keep female characters down? Will they ever rise from the box they’ve been put in?
Here’s a great article on sexism in comics from February.
And another one from last year.
- I’m realizing that there is a fundamental flaw with democracy: to get elected you need votes, to get votes you need to appease people now, to appease people now you need to focus on what ails society now. It’s instant gratification on a very large, sociopolitical scale. And right now more than ever before, we need to look at problems in the long term because what we face has plagued us since we’ve been the modern version of ourselves. Of course, no one’s gonna win with a platform of “We’ll be in a lot better shape by 2060!”.
- The Iron Man 3 trailer is up:
- I’m going as Walt from Breaking Bad for Halloween. Here’s a cool piece of Walter White fan art:
-Sonny
