BW Media Spotlight

I don’t think this is how Chun-Li trained for her spinning bird kick.

This week we’ve covered James Bond’s sex appeal (in the form of the “Bond Girls”) and sexy armor in various fantasy settings. I don’t think the problem of women being sexy is…I don’t want to say as bad as certain parties says, although militants will always exaggerate everything, but it isn’t necessarily nonexistent either. The cover above for example was used by two different articles about the “Hawkeye Initiative“, which highlights how silly some men would look in similar poses that are clearly meant to just show off a woman character’s boobs and butt. While I think some of the artwork falls into the “you’re exaggerating” department they’re right on when it comes to others. Then you have artists like Ed Benes, who will take every opportunity to draw a woman in a sexy pose, or Rob Liefeld, whose idea of “sexy” is a woman with large breasts and a pipe cleaner-thin waist, or Greg Land, who outright traces porn. I don’t know if it degenerates women as a whole per say since porn and strip clubs exist but it certainly doesn’t treat the superheroine the same way it does the superhero.

On the other hand……

I have covered a number of instances over the years of complaints by usually militant feminists (I have to stress that because militants ruin everything on all sides of any political or fan-based debate and despite not wanting to write “militant” over and over I’m not talking about the entire group) about sexually attractive women or outfits. For every instance of an overtly endowed Wonder Girl (Cassie Sandsmark version) you have that time Spider-Woman was supposedly in an overly sexual pose…when she was just climbing up the side of a building. The pose was the only thing wrong about that one. Then there was a shot of teenage superhero Miss Martian that gave an upskirt shot, which came off more as an unfortunate angle than the artist intending to show a teenage Martian girl’s bike shorts. Or that time everyone freaked out over a slightly aged Dora The Explorer based solely on her silhouette. Wonder Woman, a character once praised by feminists, was denounced by the militants when she was chosen as a spokescharacter for girls in a UN project because of her outfit, despite her creators being all about girl power before there was a girl power movement. The last one that comes to mind relevant to tonight’s topic is when militants upset with body shaming and promoting only sexual aspect of women did their own body shaming when they demanded Tifa from the Final Fantasy series get breast reduction, which was insulting to real-life women with large chests since Tifa was never about her boobies except to the perverts. It wasn’t necessarily fanservice…I’ve SEEN blatant fanservice and it never fails to be stupid. I’ve also known women who have larger breasts and they’re basically telling my friends they have no place in this world.

That raises the question of how much is too much? Is a woman drawn sexy or wearing a sexy costume necessarily a bad thing? Is it even the case that these women ONLY exist to titillate or are they just women who happen to be sexy? Or possibly both? I’m going with both.

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