While job duties prevent me from working on my submission to the next Carnival of Feminists, Heidi MacDonald has a post up about women and comics - heck, about women and feminism in general society - which blows away anything I could have written. I hope you see why I am so in awe of this woman, and amazed and delighted to call her my friend. The only thing I want to add, as I mention on Colleen Doran's blog when she ran the link to Heidi's magnificent essay: I've yet to see one single male comics blogger on my blogroll talk about this subject. (Granted, my Kultcha Guys comprise fellows who talk about stuff other than comics, but out of 50+ bloggers nobody's even mentioned it? It's part and parcel of the overall industry problem, methinks, that women often don't seem to exist except to each other...) Correction: With one notable exception; thanks for bringing it to my attention, PJ!
Update: A bit more from Heidi, who summarizes reactions and has done with the subject for the moment. I second her recommendation of Ragnell's blog Written World and particularly of When Fangirls Attack, probably the best link-dump site out there now for who's saying what about women and comics. When I get home and can play with my template again, both sites will be added to the sidebar, along with Kalinara's blog Pretty, Fuzzy Paradise. Incidentally, Heidi says "Interestingly, we heard from a lot of men who disagreed with our 'A woman will never be as good as a man' statement. We've never really heard a woman disagree with it, from a rhetorical standpoint, anyway." I think that's because many of us gals interpret that statement as meaning "A woman will never [or rarely] be perceived to be as good as a man" by the people (generally men) who pass judgments on these sorts of things, and having borne the brunt of that perception from our own experiences we can't refute its existence. That perception isn't fact ought to be agreed upon by everyone.
Also, I have a fairly long response to Marc Mason's post about this, based on a rather unpleasant surprise I got when clicking on a link this afternoon. As I say in the comment, I'm not going to mention the URL of the pop-culture site in question if the point is for people not to patronize places that do this, but I must say I'm disappointed in these folks. Perhaps I should have accepted their earlier entreaty to me for ideas on how help them expand their readership, as one of my first suggestions would have been "don't turn off half your potential readers by posting gratuitous objectification."
Update: A bit more from Heidi, who summarizes reactions and has done with the subject for the moment. I second her recommendation of Ragnell's blog Written World and particularly of When Fangirls Attack, probably the best link-dump site out there now for who's saying what about women and comics. When I get home and can play with my template again, both sites will be added to the sidebar, along with Kalinara's blog Pretty, Fuzzy Paradise. Incidentally, Heidi says "Interestingly, we heard from a lot of men who disagreed with our 'A woman will never be as good as a man' statement. We've never really heard a woman disagree with it, from a rhetorical standpoint, anyway." I think that's because many of us gals interpret that statement as meaning "A woman will never [or rarely] be perceived to be as good as a man" by the people (generally men) who pass judgments on these sorts of things, and having borne the brunt of that perception from our own experiences we can't refute its existence. That perception isn't fact ought to be agreed upon by everyone.
Also, I have a fairly long response to Marc Mason's post about this, based on a rather unpleasant surprise I got when clicking on a link this afternoon. As I say in the comment, I'm not going to mention the URL of the pop-culture site in question if the point is for people not to patronize places that do this, but I must say I'm disappointed in these folks. Perhaps I should have accepted their earlier entreaty to me for ideas on how help them expand their readership, as one of my first suggestions would have been "don't turn off half your potential readers by posting gratuitous objectification."
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