There is a comic book cover by Milo Manara that has been receiving a lot of criticism lately. The artist resorts to justifying it with biology.
…it’s not my fault if women are like that. I do the design only. It’s not me that I’ve done so: is an author much more “important”, say, for those who believe … For evolutionists, including me, on the other hand, women’s bodies have taken this form over the millennia in order to avoid the ‘extinction of the species, in fact. If women were made exactly as men, with the same shape, I think we would have already been extinct for a long time.
Just in case you’re wondering, according to this fellow women have been shaped by millennia of evolution to look like this:
Gosh. They must be a whole different species.
People, badly drawn anatomy is badly drawn anatomy. Don’t try to claim biological validation for your sexualized contortionism.
Women’s heads have evolved to float free of their bodies, so that their hair can fall through where their neck should be.
On topic: http://losttomyownself.tumblr.com/post/96251474934/
Fair enough, this heroine being depicted crawling around, being Spiderwoman and all – but this picture looks like it was drawn by someone whose research into the movement of women’s bodies begins and ends with porn.
Now, I know more than one artist who’s used adult entertainment to expand their knowledge of musculature and movement but that pose is very revealing, perhaps more of the artist and their narrow field of research than of the subject. As a medium, porn certainly contains both male and female nudes of all shapes and sizes in countless combinations and so is basically a smorgasbord for the life-artist; however it does have limitations, especially for the comic book artist – you don’t tend to see porn stars (or amateurs) doing hero stuff like climbing, running, fighting, throwing, flying, slinging webs, etc (although Rule #43 says that somewhere, they are doing exactly that).
My advice to our esteemed comic artist would be: while porn can give great insight into shape and muscle, don’t use it to inform poses unless your characters are actually having sex.
Also, I never knew one of SW’s powers was an eleven-inch neck with an elbow joint in it. You can invoke biology all you want to defend how you draw a woman, but if what she’s doing isn’t even physically possible, you should probably (erm) go back to the drawing board.
Daily Dot has a pretty awesome 3D rendering of her anatomy from a different angle:
http://www.dailydot.com/geek/3d-rendered-spiderwoman-terrifying/
Bah! Ninja’d!
@1 rossthompson:
Wow, I didn’t even notice the hair. She either has that free-floating head or she has an epic neckbeard.
That’s such a rookie, high-school error I’m surprised the editor didn’t catch it. Maybe they were both far too preoccupied with her splayed-out hind-quarters to notice the top ten percent of her body.
Erm, also, the only possible way to get clothing that tight is to forget clothing altogether and wear body paint. Yeesh.
@1 rossthompson
– Oh yeah that now I get it.
– I was initially confused, and thought the artist was sensibly referring to the reproductive value of overstressed and degrading ménage á trois positions. Or possibly prehensile buttocks. Because who could argue with any of that?
– But now I get that it was sorta meta.
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/spiderwoman
CorvusCorax:
Yeah, that’s enough to make you scream. Twice.
The Oatmeal on this subject.
Hank, #2: Would you believe me if I said anatomy failures happen often enough in comics that there is a tumblr devoted to highlighting and correcting the problems?
http://eschergirls.tumblr.com/
@4 CorvusCorax
– I’ve talked to my daughters a lot about the importance of being able to visualize in 3d, to understand as much of the whole as possible, and we’ve done imaginative exercises around that.
– This would be the best cautionary example imaginable to me. If I didn’t think it would scar them for life.
Don’t even get me started on this shit. The Mary Sue has done several articles on this subject (for that matter, so have I):
Here
Here
and here. The last link contains a detailed critique of both Milo Manara’s alternate cover, as well as Greg “traces porn images to make art” Land. The critique comes from an artist who also shows how the images of both artists are anatomically incorrect, and goes a step further in correcting the art.
(speaking of Land, Jim Smash Extended has a regular feature showcasing how much Land swipes from porn images and even himself)
I haven’t read comics in a long time, so I’m curious why Reed Richards is apparently posing as Spider-Woman.
For an amusing look at how the image of Spiderwoman looks rendered in 3-D, check this out.
That floating-head aspect is pretty frightening, and the face is odd. I don’t find the rest of the body to be that misshapen, just improbable, and the 3-d model someone made is not accurate to the drawing. I think the artist found a photograph of an actual model for the body, a nude model in an allegedly erotic pose, and just colored it to look like clothing, without making the slightest effort to show any realistic fabric or texture — he basically admits that when he says that is how drawings are made these days. It is very poor art, starting from a bad premise.
Another reason that this is a huge problem is that Marvel has been making strides in recent years to appeal to its female fanbase. Currently they’re putting out Storm, Black Widow, Elektra, an all female team of X-Men, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, and Captain Marvel, with the new female Thor, Angela, and Spiderwoman on the way. At no time in the history of Marvel Comics (or DC) have that many titles headlined by women been on the stands at one time. Marvel has been listening to their fans who want more women lead comics. Up until this shitstorm concerning Manara’s art (and I can’t forget to mention-again-that a lot of readers, especially women, are unhappy that Greg Land is on interior art), Marvel was on a roll. They had been putting out quality titles with strong female characters and little to no titillating sexualization and very little sexual objectification. They have been embraced by an awful lot of fans. Milo Manara has done multiple covers for various comics over the years, so the PTB at Marvel are well aware that he’s a popular European porn artist. They knew what he was capable of, yet commissioned him to do a piece of art for an initiative aimed at increasing female readers.
WTF?!
jste, 12: yes I would. And I would go there! Seems this isn’t Spiderwoman’s first foray into contortionism. Also, I do wonder how many comic artists have actually studied proportion and structure as well as boobs and arses.
Manara’s Wikipedia page contains an image of his softcore pornographic series, Click
That’s Manara?? I didn’t recognize his style!
Manara is a more well known comic artist, I think, here in Europe. He has indeed done mostly erotic and pornographic works (since, I think, at least the 70s), often with a surrealistic bent. So, this doesn’t surprise me.
The oatmeal did a hilarious take on it:
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/spiderwoman
“Escher Girls.” Certainly conveys the meaning. If you’re not paying close attention, you might briefly think it’s plausible, but it clearly falls apart if you change the viewing angle.
“Escher Girls.” Nice term. If you’re not paying close attention, you might briefly think it’s plausible, but it clearly falls apart if you change the viewing angle.
The artist drew another character for another piece in practically the same pose, except that piece was in a porn comic: http://observationdeck.io9.com/milo-manaras-variant-spider-woman-cover-is-uh-1623556624
Menyambal:
No. Perhaps you should try to get in that position yourself. Failing that, click the link @ #4, where there’s a 3D model based on actual women attempting that pose. (click the utube link for that one.)
For those interested, mid-way down the page of this article at Comic Book Resources is a sequence of variant comic book covers drawn by Manara over the last year and a half.
For a few years now, there’s been a website where artists and less artistically gifted folks can submit drawings using these ridiculous comic book versions of females redone as men–with the exact same pose and sometimes with a very similar costume. Most of the submissions show the original alongside the new version, and most of these re-imagined works funny as well as mutely pointing out how impossible and stupid females are depicted in that genre.
http://thehawkeyeinitiative.com/
Tony
From the comments, here’s Manara drawing her from another angle.
/snort
And I do agree that there’s more than just shitty artwork to be talked about:
Marvel’s made improvements but that doesn’t mean they get slack. All their steps forward feel kinda superficial since this is still what they go for and approve of.
Any good “Drawing 101” book, regardless of whether it’s trying to teach sketching real people, drawing comics, or manga, or whatever, covers structure and proportions. Likewise, so will any courses at uni/tafe/college/etc. Every single one of these artists is almost guaranteed to have studied proportions at some point.
jste #29
So. What’s the excuse?
jste:
Yes. There are also about a fucktonne of excellent “drawing anatomy” books out there, a number of them focused on the female form alone. I’ve used models and photographic references (When the person who wants the drawing is unable to sit), but when it comes to women in comic books, proper anatomy is blithely tossed out the window in favour of utterly impossible body shapes and poses. It isn’t a matter of not knowing proportions and anatomy, it’s a matter of ignoring them.
@30 Chigau
jste:
I’m not so certain of that. Milo Manara’s Wikipedia page contains no mention of any studies at a university of any sort, nor any training in art.
In the case of Rob Liefeld, I believe he was self-taught.
Tony:
That doesn’t mean anything. I don’t have a degree in art anything, but I still studied proportion (any many other things).
@Inaji, Iyéska, #7:
Not an accident. Manara says clearly and forthrightly that comic book characters are meant to be nudes with body paint. He describes Supes as a nude with blue paint, Spidey as a nude with blue and red paint, and Jessica Drew as a nude with red paint.
@Hank_Says, #3:
Yes. This is the problem identified and lamented by critics. Manara is a porn/erotica artist. That’s what he does. That’s what he’s known for. That’s what you get when you hire Manara.
Marvel went looking for artists to draw Jessica Drew for a book that Marvel itself has identified as an important title in gaining/maintaining a base of woman fans that includes a large subset, very probably an overwhelming majority, that are not more likely to buy a title if it sexualizes women and a significant minority (or perhaps a larger bloc, who knows?) that is less likely to buy a title if it sexualizes women in this way.
When it did so, why the fuck did it consider Manara, given that you know exactly what Manara will produce, and that what Manara produces is something a loud subset of women fans have been saying they receive in too large a quantity already? While considering Manara, if it was going to consider him at all, why wasn’t there an early red flag that the man is a porn/erotica artist? Finally, when they had the art in hand and it turned out to be perfectly, predictably Manara, why didn’t they say, “Oh, talented guy, but y’know this is exactly what we don’t want in launching a woman-welcoming title for Jessica Drew. I don’t know why I assumed he was more flexible than he seems to be, but this isn’t the image that’s right for the character Hopeless is writing”?
They didn’t have to choose the art as an alternative cover. Marvel wanted this as an alternative cover. They wanted the women fans they hope will read a book about Jessica Drew to encounter her as a piece of porn first, for the significant subset of readers that end up with the alternate cover. What does it say about Marvel and Jessica Drew’s character that Marvel wants me to first experience her as a piece of porn, or at least have a 10/20/30% chance of doing so?
I think it says something pretty shitty.
We definitely know there’s at least one “how to draw” artist who thinks that women’s waists are ball joints.
jste @ #29 I meant actually studied proportions and movements to the point of being able to accurately represent people in anatomically possible (much less realistic) positions, which obviously hasn’t been done with Spiderwoman.
I wasn’t aware of Manara’s erotic art until this very thread, but it makes perfect sense (plus, yay, it validates my earlier hypothesis that he’s probably spent more time researching [a charitable use of the term] images of naked submissive women than he probably needed in order to draw superheroes).
The (NSFW) Manara picture linked to by JAL in #28 was, subject aside and at least anatomically, far more plausible than his Spiderwoman, so there’s evidence he can depict proportion properly. I just wonder why he felt the need to contort SW’s neck into that ridiculous shape, or if he’d even noticed that he’d done it – that’s aside from the question of why he essentially replaced her costume with body paint and had her arching her back and displaying her hindquarters like a baboon in oestrus. Again, I wonder how that got past his editor.
I fully expect apologists to line up and defend this from a number of angles: first, tight costumes are a comic tradition and from a functional standpoint allow free movement; next, she’s a super so her body is more flexible; then, she’s a strong independent vigilante and kicks much ass so it’s all good and hey this is probably even feminist, y’know; eventually, comics are mostly written for hetero males, so, yah, arse in the air luv.
Conceivably you could defend any of those (though you’d need to bring your A game) but the last point – the Argument from Marketing to Men – always shits me. Regardless of what particular product is being pitched at a male audience, it assumes that I have the mentality of a 14 year-old and I simply won’t pay attention or pay money for a product unless it’s decorated with a female and explicitly aimed at my groin.
Male heroes don’t get drawn this way (unrealistic poses, yes but not as often, ridiculous oversexualised submissiveness, yeah nup) and they get the bulk of the comic dollar; why as a matter of course do female heroes have to be origami’d such that their ample buttocks or EE-breasts (which you’d think might hinder a heroine’s athletic ability) are pointing straight at me regardless of what they’re actually doing? Draw a woman moving realistically (and give her some freaking clothes instead of a battle bikini) and I’ll forget that I’m reading a comic and will happily lose myself in the story; the moment I see one of these ridiculous caricatures popping out at me the illusion’s gone and I’ll spend the rest of the story critiquing your artist instead of reading the words and watching the action unfold.
Those contortions are not even necessary to draw Spider Woman like that, even while sexualizing her. Some people redrew that cover (as well as another SW) here: http://eschergirls.tumblr.com/post/95488670851/lesstitsnass-its-a-two-fer-courtesy-of
I also don’t buy the whole different angle contributing to her inhuman pose. Even with the whole pose suggested in the link at comment 28 (from JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness), you could not see her entire back without looking straight down. The background shows that this is not the case. So that’s a pretty poor excuse.
@35 Crip Dyke
I didn’t know about Manara’s history before this thread, so it’s kinda nice to be validated :)
As to the rest of your comment, yes, it would appear Marvel wanted this cover. Ordinarily I’d understand – yet another woman in a completely out-of-context sexualised submissive pose, standard bullshit fare – but in an issue ostensibly to attract women readers? Picard facepalm.
Marvel need to grow up a little, it would appear. They’re a multinational entertainment conglomerate now instead of just a comic studio, they have Joss Wheedon & Robert Downey Jr, they shit rainbows at the box office and … they have porn artists doing porno covers for comics aimed at women. WTF?
Manara’s career has always been based of depicting porn.
To be honest, it seems a bit naive from Marvel to hire an author of porn comics and expect not to have a hypersexualised female character, and still this image is far less sexualised than the average female heroine.
I don’t understand much of formal anatomy, but besides the big butt I don’t see what is wrong with her posture.
Regarding evolution, I don’t think it’s so wrong to say that selection shaped women’s and men’s butts differently.
@40 F.O.
– First, really really first, ask a woman in your proximity to attempt that posture. Wear a helmet.
– Second, find an image of a woman in that posture. Get out your credit card.
– Third, superimpose whatever you end up with over the drawing. Unless it’s icky.
CD:
Not an accident. Manara says clearly and forthrightly that comic book characters are meant to be nudes with body paint. He describes Supes as a nude with blue paint, Spidey as a nude with blue and red paint, and Jessica Drew as a nude with red paint.Ohhhhhh. I didn’t know that, thanks.
In general: People, read the bloody thread first, the same damn links are coming up over and over and over and over and over.
Crip Dyke:
The article I linked to @26 makes the argument that it’s just as bad that Marvel hired Greg Land to do interiors for Spiderwoman given his history. I’ve begun to agree. Manara’s cover is horrible and Marvel made a shitty move in hiring him. He’s drawing one alternate cover though, while Greg Land, who has huge problems with his porny, tracing, swiping art (he traces from porn quite a bit) is the regular artist for the series. It’s like Marvel completely forgot they wanted to appeal to female readers.
F.O.
Click on my 4th link @14. It’ll take you to a Mary Sue article that shows an artists illustrations of what’s wrong with the Spiderwoman pose from an anatomical perspective, *and* the anatomically correct pose.
Quite honestly, given the long history of both Marvel and comic books in general of objectifying female superheroes, I seriously doubt that it was accidental or naivety on the part of Marvel that led to this.
Manara draws erotic comics, even pornographic ones depending on your definitions, but he doesn’t usually go straight for the naked and naughty frames right away, there’s usually some story involved before the women lose their clothes, and he doesn’t usually make such a bad fist of drawing women with and without. Allowing for their hyper-sexual characteristics, that is: very long legs and small waists, typically.
He doesn’t typically draw US-style superhero comics, either, though, so I’m inclined to believe that he took guidance from an editor when doing the roughs for this cover, and he’s just repeating what he was told about the standard issue superhero bodypaint/suit. I think that he could have drawn a perfectly cromulent sexy-but-not-too-sexy cover if that had been what the editors wanted, or even not-sexy at all. He does it for his own books, after all.
@46 NelC
So… we’d already done that’s what Marvel wanted, we’d already done hyper-sexualized, we’d already done he doesn’t usually superhero… so… your point is that he sometimes has storylines before the effects of hypersexualization kick in?
@knowknot #41 I can do that posture myself, and am not even that stretchy.
Besides that I stated already that I find the posture hypersexualised, so I don’t see the necessity of your other two points.
@Tony! The Queer Shoop #44
The link with the 3d model has it wrong: the character (as explicitly explained by Manara in the interview) has one leg stretched beyond the edge of the building. The video gets that right and (correctlly, IMHO) states that her butt should not be centered, but the real life trials are a joke.
Honestly, this image is still better that what appears every day on comics, I do not understand all the rage.
Seriously, the original page has the heroine spreading boobs everywhere. WTF!
If Marvel wanted to cater to women they could have hired a female cartoonist (or at least consulted someone familiar with women’s POV) instead of a male porn specialist, I do not understand why Manara is taking all this flak.
And I still think that his comment about evolution, while naive, does not deserve the Comic Sans treatment.
Manara’s comments about evolution weren’t naive, they were a lame attempt to justify himself with some complete ignorance.
F.O.
You must not read a lot of comics to make such a statement. Not to mention they’re put out every Wednesday, rather than every day.
I wondered when some sexist fool would be along to defend Manara’s art. I see we have that in F.O..
Incidentally, F.O., when I said the fourth link at comment #14, I meant the fourth one (not the fifth; the fifth is to the 3-D rendering you’re talking about). This is the link: http://www.themarysue.com/controversial-spider-woman-covers-redrawn/
@48 F.O.
– You can do that posture? I can’t, and I am that stretchy.
– You find the posture hypersexualized, but it is far les sexualized than the average female heroine? I’m trying to figure what hypersexualizes an image in your view, and what reduces that effect. All I can come up with for the latter is boobs and crotch pointed other than forward. In which case I’m thinking that sexual objectification is pretty much a missionary position thing.
– As for other points, there are superimposed drawings of an actual human form that point out the ridiculousness of the anatomy, in the service of the suggestive position, which the artist has used before in a specifically objectifying context (a woman in a shop window, displaying her genatalia to a crowd). That you can’t see it is, well… fine. Whatever.
knowknot:
I’m not sure how a human can get their ass in that specific position, especially given that one leg is supposed to be still on the side of the building. And for crying out loud, her head is waaaaay messed up.
@Tony! The Queer Shoop #51 I wondered when some imbecile would insult me for daring to be bland about an issue where everyone is expected to be raging.
I see that it’s you, Tony.
I even stated explicitly that I do find the cartoon hypersexualised, but that doesn’t matter when you can feel your righteous rage.
By any means, can you make a better case as why would I be sexist? Feel free to refer to my comment history in this blog.
Please use my words, not shit you make up.
Otherwise fuck you and all the angry self-righteous reading-impaired assholes that plague this blog.
@knowknot #53
A casual search on google image returns this:
http://i1087.photobucket.com/albums/j474/alucard365/laraaspensara.jpg
http://images6.fanpop.com/image/polls/1247000/1247007_1373728603512_full.jpg
http://creative.myspacecdn.com/groups/_mcb/mycupojoe/week1709/MARVELDIVAS001_cvr.jpg
Yes, I find all of those much more sexualized than Manara’s.
Yes, Manara does porn and I don’t have high expectations on his sensitivity to gender issues, I stated that he was a poor choice for Marvel, but for some reason saying that he draws porn is somehow relevant.
It’s incredible.
As soon as you don’t parrot the mainline, as soon as you agree only 99% rather than 100%, you are accused of being a sexist.
I guess that’s just easier than actually reading what I write.
Nice work. Go on.
So, according to Milo Manara, natural selection made women’s butts look like penis to ensure that men who still get suficiently turned on to reproduce?
How bad is it? This bad: http://gizmodo.com/heres-how-anatomically-impossible-that-spider-woman-1-1628838463/+katharinetrendacosta
That’s what this twisted anatomy looks like from another angle. Yikes.
I don’t think Scalzi will be able to do that pose…
@Improbable Joe #57: the model is wrong, one leg is beyond the edge of the building.
Also the neck of the 3d model is looking up.
@55 F.O.
OK, here’s the thing.
– I find Manara’s drawing of Spiderwoman more degrading than the general “hypersexualized” heroines. For me, the “breasts, butt and crotch” emphasis is prurient and demeaning, but poses like Manera used are flat out degrading, and suggest a very specific sexual “use.” So the image may not be more hypersexualized, but it is more disturbing due to my sense of intent.
– We get a LOT of MRA defenses of ridiculous crap here, and a lot of it starts out with trying to sound super sensible. Then the colors fly. So an out of the blue approach tends to be a warning.
– I’m have absolutely no idea why you’d want to defend Manera. Given what he does, it seems to me there’d need to be a whole mess of artistic reasons to make an issue of his defense.
– Maybe you really don’t get the same sense of that image. I will admit I’ve been party to someone genuinely not seeing something offensive when a mass of others did, in situations where I had a chance to discuss the issue honestly and at some length, and when the person involved was not blind to the issues overall. But these were rare cases.
– I’m have no interest in supporting the “mainline,” here or elsewhere, or parroting anyone. If people agree on an issue, I find it tends to be because they agree on an issue. I don’t find it particularly surprising that people that tend to agree end up in a particular place.
– If you were honestly dealing in good faith, which I can’t see directly but may be possible, then I apologize for any slight.
If you’re an artist drawing a woman and the neck of your model is looking **anywhere** I’d say you have a rather serious problem with recognizing and depicting humanity in your subjects.
Perhaps, F.O., you could get a slightly better grasp on reality before attempting to describe it.
In which case her left leg should be close in to her body in order to take said body’s weight, and her hips should be tilted to her right.
There’s a little exercise I do with my daughters when they look at supposedly pretty drawings of women: do that pose. It quickly shows how the”this is what women are supposed to look like” is completely impossible
@Daz, #62:
Well, no. In this particular case we *do* need to recognize that Jessica Drew, like Peter Parker, has special stick-to-the-walls-and-support-body-weight-by-touching-a-vertical-surface-with-toe-or-fingerpad powers.
As I understand it, the right leg is parallel to the building’s vertical exterior wall, but her toe is touching the wall and in that position is no less capable of supporting her weight than if she was on a horizontal floor in a hands-and-knees-ish position, had no super-powers, and lifted a knee by increasing the pressure on one foot’s toes. This is how a superhero crawls up & over a wall, and is the one bit of anatomical impossibility that I’m prepared to let slide, since it related directly to Jessica Drew’s in-story ability to do things that, out-of-story, are impossible to us non-fictional folk.
That doesn’t change the butt problems and many other issues.
Nor does it remotely touch the main issue of hiring a porn artist to create a cover for a book supposed to be a counterweight to standard comic fare that too often hypersexualizes women while dehumanizing them.
but, yeah, can’t criticize the guy for drawing her as if she can put weight on a leg parallel to a vertical wall by barely touching it with her toe. Cuz this “her” can, in fact, do that.
Are you aware of the fact that your criticism of Tony being too eager to insult you is preceded by an insult directed at him? That seems… contradictory.
The problem with the Manara cover shouldn’t so much be that it’s anatomically impossible. In fact, I’d say (with the exception of the head) that it’s got more accurate proportions than a lot of superhero artwork. I’m not defending it as a piece of comic artwork, however.
I think the render that’s posted a few times above was mostly played for laughs. Someone else posted one that’s not broken that comes pretty close to replicating the pose. (I’d still disregard the head though.)
That doesn’t mean anyone would ever get into that horribly uncomfortable pose for any reason other than composition for sexualised imagery. You certainly couldn’t climb onto a building like that, and you likely couldn’t get out of that position with no assistance, without risking a faceplant.
Menyabmal @17:
The head is not only anatomically disconnected, it’s the least accurate and most poorly rendered element. It seems to me the artist lovingly painted a picture of a nude contortionist, coloured her to match the costume, then as an afterthought slapped a rough sketch of the character’s face approximately where the head should be. He wasn’t painting Spider Woman, he was painting his idea of a sexy woman. Without a head.
F.O. @48:
The leg stretched off the building makes the pose worse, not better; the waist would be twisted the opposite way if the leg was straight, and you wouldn’t get that amazingly presented butt. I don’t think the real life trials were intended to show the impossibility of the pose, rather that the pose is completely wrong for the action it is supposed to convey: women do not end up in this pose when climbing over a wall.
The commentary around this is not about this being the worst thing ever. It’s a combination of a number of factors. This cover was apparently publicised differently than usual, so drew more attention; having garnered attention, the criticisms also spread more widely & rapidly; the combination of factors described above make it a ripe target. But also, Marvel has been showing some improvement in the sexualisation department recently, and this particular title has been a more popular comic amongst women, so seeing them get it so wrong here, and now, is what’s so dismaying.
Agreed; Marvel is the responsible party for the Spider Woman situation. (It’s not just the Manara cover; Gred “I trace porn” Land is the new artist for this title. The anatomy on his cover is worse, in my opinion, though — at least in this one instance — his is the less porny of the two.) Apart from the specific anatomy criticisms, a lot of the complaints online are directed towards Marvel’s artistic decisions on this title.
Yeah, he really does. Aside from being biologically ridiculous, reread that comment and see if you can find a way it has any bearing whatsoever on the criticisms of his composition.
Knowknot@47, yeah, I guess. What, I’m not allowed to support your position?
Actually, I think my point was that Manara’s generally a better artist than hacks like Land, and that he’s being made to carry the blame for this cover by those further up the managerial food-chain who are probably responsible (on past form) for the decision-making that led to it. We keep talking about Manara when we should be naming the anonymous editor and their boss, all the way up to the CEO (or whatever they have) of Marvel. I’d name them myself, except that, a) I’m on my iPad and will probably lose this comment box if I go look it up, and b) I’m lazy.
@66 Kagato
Very nice. Really good deconstruction. Thank you.
I agree that the linked rendering is closer in most respects, and better executed, except it’s just a little too kind. On the original the back is even more arched and twisted, the head is even more upturned, the ribcage and left shoulder are more distorted… etc. Even though the differences aren’t massive in terms of manipulating a manniquin, the results in human terms would be more ghastly.
@67 NelC
Yeah… sorry. A little out of control there. My bad.
– And, as previously mentioned, you’re right about the corporate decision. They knew who they were hiring.
– But I just don’t see what it is about his work that justifies the defense in terms of Manera. I can’t see this bit as anything but degrading and basically incompetent. So my first thought is, OK, it’s about defending this view of women in general (callout to his porn work). If, for you, it’s about purely technical merit overall abstracted from general content and this piece in particular, well… then it is.
– But I’m kinda feeling like the issue at hand is this piece. And I’m not meaning to be all contentious, again.
yeah, that Kagato-linked render is complete bullshit with respect to the head.
Take a loot at the manara art again. A careful look **near** the head, not at it. Look just to your left, Jessica Drew’s right.
See that highlight?
That’s right. Even with the wild, flying hair, there’s still room to see the trapezius form a surface detached from back and from collar bone.
Try. TRY and hold that pose with hair flying out at least a couple inches to your right while still keeping your trapezial separation visible to someone viewing you from the perspective shown in the cover.
That render has nothing remotely like the separation necessary to make the head-view work. Oh, and by-the-by, the amount of definition on the trapezial extension may be unrealistic period, regardless of whether such definition is or isn’t visible from that angle.
But, fuck, I got roped into talking about the art. I don’t want to do that. Manara’s art is Manara’s art. He can draw her with Skidmore Fountain in place of a head and I still wouldn’t care. He could leave off the red colors and just color her as naked as he draws her and I wouldn’t care. I’m not anti-all porn. The art, divorced from its context, is not the issue. Even just talking about artistic merit, he’s a better penciler than I will ever be, whatever the artistic faults of this or any other one piece of his.
The problem is Marvel choosing porn/erotica as the introduction to Jessica Drew in a title which Marvel says should function as an entree to the character for women leery of past superhero comics’ treatment of women. That they do this shows that they haven’t heard the numerous, quite clear, and quite accessible critiques. Or, worse, it shows that they love them some sexism so much, and have such a hard time conceiving anyone else wouldn’t love them some sexism, that they think doing a little extra of the shit [which is, in an individual piece of art, not necessarily sexist, but which in its overrepresentation to the point of domination of images of women has been critiqued as ridiculously and obviously sexist] is just the thing to shut the harpies up.
Olav @ 2;
Once you see it from other angles, it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t an image of Spiderwoman at all – Manara was clearly drawing John Carpenter’s Thing in the process of replicating Spiderwoman. That at least explains the creepy and anatomically impossible (for a human but not for a shapeshifting alien) pose.
To paraphrase MacReady;
That explanation doesn’t make any less sense than Manara’s excuse.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden @ 70;
All jokes about weird body proportion depiction aside, Crip Dyke identifies the kernal of what is wrong here. Either Marvel is so incompetent that they think it is a good idea to hire an artist known for pornographic work to illustrate the cover of a comic intended to attract women fans to a medium that has treated them so badly for such a long time, or they are so wedded to misogynistic depictions of women that they simply don’t care what effect it has on the target audience.
The choice seem to be between stupidity or malice.
Knowknot@69, I guess, as someone in the biz — a graphic designer — illustrator-wrangling is part of what I do, so it is of interest to me to figure out what precisely is wrong with the cover and how it got that way. The technicalities of the mistakes in his posing are interesting because they might provide forensic clues to this. Commenting on that isn’t necessarily a defence of either the cover or the artist. (And even a defence of the artist isn’t a defence of the cover; as you say, it’s the cover that’s the problem.)
Manara is an established artist with almost half a century of experience in drawing human figures, but especially human females. As the commenter Catgrin said over in the Boingboing BBS, this implies he should be better at drawing women than is evident in the Spider-Woman cover, as indeed he usually is. He should certainly know that a human neck can’t bend back that far, and neither does hair fall around a head that way. The reason the hair is like that, as Catgrin points out, is that it’s being used to cover up the mistake that Manara’s made with Spider-Woman’s left arm, which is badly placed: with the forearm in that position, her shoulder needs to be up around the top of her head.
Unlike Land, Manara doesn’t trace fragments of bodies and paste them together to form woman-like chimerae, but draws in the “classical” way, building up from simple shapes to human figures, so that hand just shouldn’t be in the position it is; unless, I surmise, it was to accommodate editorial changes to the composition made late in the day that were also incompatible with human anatomy, e.g. “Show her face and show her butt, and move that hand but don’t show her elbow”, leaving no time to redraw the whole thing from scratch to make anatomical sense. Which ends up having an effect not unlike Land’s trace-and-paste approach to illustration, which fact, I think, highlights that a major part of the problem with American mainstream comics is with the editorial and management approach to the art, and not just the artists who get to shoulder most of the blame.
Land has some good technique in detail, but the production-line mentality of his editors combined with their generic MBA “all businesses are the same” attitude have nobbled his development as an artist, when he needed to be taken firmly in hand by someone who knows something about anatomy and composition and was less concerned about cynically showing skin-painted, rounded female flesh in every frame just to cater to a supposed core market of adolescent boys.
Axel Alonso, editor-in-chief of Marvel (I did go look it up, after all), claims that the Manara alternate cover was for “collectors”. I think we know what kind of “collectors” he was hoping to sell it to. Alas, as long as Marvel’s management continues to pander to the hyper-adolescent boy mentality with this kind of shenanigans, it’s going to continue to sabotage any kind of effort to broaden their comics’ appeal. And that is the message that needs to be taken away from this mess of a cover.
Well, there are fundamental problems with the anatomy — go ahead, blame it on editorial shenanigans.
But there’s no avoiding the fact that Manara drew that ass and illustrated her as a body-painted nude. Those were his decisions, and those are clearly porn-influenced.
In that 3D reconstruction (don’t link to it! There are enough links to it already!), I noticed that they didn’t do the obvious thing, which was to rotate the reconstruction to view her from behind…which would make it even more obvious that this is a porn pose, with legs open and back arched to raise the buttocks, like she’s in lordosis.
Perhaps I’m being needlessly meta, but I’m not sure that it was entirely down to Manara to draw Spider-Woman that way. The fact is — as a glance at Escher Girls will confirm — that this is the culture of US mainstream comics at the moment. The management at Marvel decided to do a “collectors'” alternate cover, and they wanted Manara to draw it, not just because he’s a good artist (this cover notwithstanding), but because he’s an erotic or pornographic artist and that is what they wanted to attract the collectors they were aiming for. I’m sure Manara understood what he’d been hired for, and he provided it. That this entire decision tree runs counter to what Marvel claim to want isn’t, I think, down to him.
I’m hoping that this cover is an example of an extinction burst of the type I’ve just been listening about on the You Are Not So Smart podcast, where just when you think the subject has completely adopted a new behaviour they go and revert to the older one that you’re trying to train them out of. The downside is that when the training is happening internally, as when someone is trying to break themselves of an old habit like smoking or gambling, it can be very hard to climb back on the wagon again. Hopefully, the fuss about the cover will serve to reinforce the quest for broader audience appeal at Marvel, and they’ll be able to break out of the ultimately self-destructive behaviour.
…or opisthotonic postmortem posture.
@75 NelC
@76 David Marjanović
Dear Mom –
This is why I love it here. Can I stay?
– kk
Well of course it was David Marjanović who dropped opisthotonic postmortem posture into the thread.
I wouldn’t have remembered the term if I had to produce it, but seeing it in this thread AND seeing it under the David Marjanović nym, I couldn’t help but to instantly remember it and a couple places I’d read it.
The artistic and editorial problem thus revealed, however, is that Jessica Drew is Spider-Woman.
It occurs to me that what marvel REALLY needs is a new super heroine. DeadBipedalSaurischia-Woman would probably fit their corporate identity quite nicely. If they really wanna appeal to the masses, they can go with DeadCoelophysis-Woman or something. Then they can lecture us all about how DeadNothronycus-Woman is economically infeasible because boners, or something.
@knownot, #60:
– I can see how you can find Manara’s drawing more hypersexualised and degrading than others, but is it worth to get so angry for something quite subjective?
– Yes, I acknowledge that a lot of people on this blog (including @Tony) have very good reasons to be exasperated with MRAs, concern trolls and other cretins. I understand the sentiment and the utter frustration, and I know I over react myself when it comes to issues where I am routinely exposed to the same stupid gambits, but I think I still have the right to call out people when they dilute the meaning of “sexist” and “misogynist”.
– I find that Manara is taking a lot of flak while normal comic authors are given a pass, because we are desensitized to they particular style of misogyny. I find this inconsistent and unjust.
– Thank you for the rest, I hope I made myself as clear as I could.
To reiterate: I am defending Manara’s drawing style only relatively to what I see in other comics.
I’m not sure why he’s being singled out.
I don’t find his or other comic covers in good taste and I agree that they are degrading to women.
@Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden #61
While I appreciate your clarification @Daz, just being pedantic as debating style seems petty.
@Daz: Experiencing A Slight Gravitas Shortfall #61
Come back when you do a static mechanics analisys of the latest Catwoman’s cover.
@Kagato #66: I agree with most of your comment but the part about the biology.
Manara’s statement that we’d be extinct if our butts weren’t different between the sexes is wrong, but the sexual dimorphism of our butts, as I understand, does arise due to selective pressure of efficient gait versus easy delivery.
There is a good biological justification (falsifiable?) for women having a bigger butt (whether he drew it properly or not).
To construe this as sexist you need to make assumptions about Manara’s thoughts, which I don’t think are warranted.
@PZ #74: Manara does have a point when he says that all superheroes, regardless of gender, are mainly drawn with clothes painted on them to “pay lip service to decency” (often times not even that) and show every single muscle.
I think the only difference is that we are used to one style of hypersexualization and not the other, hence the reaction.
I think we are building some sort of consensus on the sexism of the image, and I hope people will excuse me if I let go the posture argument here, because I find it besides the point.
F.O.
Yes, I know, and I don’t like that you’re defending him.
Manara’s cover is crap. Compare it to whatever you want (and I’m a comic book, so yeah, I’ve seen a lot of bad art), but it doesn’t change the fact that this alternate cover is a sexually objectifying piece of shit that is horribly rendered. There shouldn’t *be* any defense of it. As I pointed out @26, Manara is capable of drawing much better cover art that isn’t sexually objectifying (although some of the covers highlighted at that link are problematic; not all of them are however). Whether Manara is not as bad as other artists, as bad as other artists, or worse than other artists is no reason to ignore the fact that his cover is shit.
There’s nothing wrong with taking artistic liberties, so why is he pretending not to do just that? He could have just said, “I exaggerate features for dramatic effect,” and left it at that. With this comment, he is tacitly, in unintentionally, admitting that this kind of erotic imagery, especially in spaces that aren’t understood as “erotic”, is often not read by audiences, male or female, as fantastical and therefore women feel obliged to look this way and men are trained, sadly, to expect this, even when it’s not physically possible. And he’s doubling down on that by suggesting his drawing of a woman is somehow more indicative of what occurs in nature than an actual assessment of women’s natural-grown bodies would suggest.
F.O., complaining about Manara being “singled out” is missing the forest for the liverworts.
The criticism has always been directed at comic art in general, and comic book artists in general. Manara is simply an opportunity to raise greater awareness, since this example just happens to have penetrated a little bit more into the general public awareness than all the others. (And if you has bothered to follow many the links so generously provided up thread, you would have known that many of them are sites the critique all comic art and artists who hypersexualize women with unnatural poses.
And there was at least one site that showed that the pose was wrong and useless even from the standpoint of superhero action physics – of Spider-Woman tried to launch a jump from that pose, as is the typical move for Spider-Man, she would have face planted into the concrete.
F.O. @79:
The question he’s answering is regarding criticism of his work: that he drew her in a sexually objectifying way in an unnatural provocative pose. His answer is that it’s not his fault women have sexy bottoms!
He didn’t address the criticism at all.
Spider Woman can have a sexy bottom. I doubt anyone would object to her sexy bottom. But most people expect her to at least have the vaguest impression of wearing clothes, and not have her twerking or presenting herself for sex on the cover of issue 1.
In discussions of the achievability of that pose, I’ve seen a few pictures offered showing women in somewhat similar positions. But every one of them was from a lingerie model shoot, an overtly sexy music clip, or outright erotica. (No gymnasts, free runners or rock climbers, which would be more appropriate references.)
That pose serves one purpose only.
wow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Ape
still lives
wow
F.O. @79:
Manara must not be paying attention then.
Classic Thor
Female Thor
Wonder Woman (it’s an armored swimsuit)
None of the rest of the Justice League (as they’re wearing armored looks since 2011)
Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers)
Ms. Marvel
Captain America
Iron Man
Hawkeye
Batgirl
Robin
Those are off the top of my head. I’m sure if I flipped through my comics, I’d find quite a bit more characters. So no, Manara is NOT correct in saying that “all superheroes, regardless of gender, are mainly drawn with clothes painted on them”. Perhaps if he qualified his statement by saying “In the past…”, but that’s not what he said.
Chigau @ 85:
Heh. I read that when I was ten years old.
Iyéska #87
and yet you survived
Well done.
@80 Tony
Tony! Tony!! um… Tony?
Of course you can be whatever you want, and we’ll support you, we really will, honest, but you’re not bad. You’re just not. Please believe us.
Oh… and please hold on, dear… Marvel will not be available for intervention purposes due to management issues which we’ve already discussed. In the meantime, maybe a nice NYT & tinfoil hat? OK???
@Tony!:
Silverclaw
Masque
Raven
Cloak
Black Knight
Dani
WonderMan (Simon whatz-iz-last-name)
Sif
Scuttlebutt (I fucking dare Manara to tell me Scuttlebutt isn’t a superhero)
Jocasta & Vision? Each is a push, I’ll grant.
knowknot @89:
Sometimes failing to preview produces some wonderful results. This is one of those times. Thanks for the laugh.
Seriously, shall I start analyzing the original cover of Spider Woman?
What about all those pics where she is hanging upside down and her boobs are still huge and round?
Shall we talk about breast/waist/hips ratios?
Maybe if I was American and eating comics for breakfast I wouldn’t even notice.
I really think that the only reason people are raging is because they are used to a specific kind of distorsion.
@Amphiox #82: If you had bothered to read my comments you would have seen that I actually bothered to visit those websites.
But hey, why bother?
@Kagato #84: Again I agree with most of your post, but note that Manara spends a lot of the long interview addressing the criticism, or at least trying.
He just doesn’t find it objectifying.
He states that he thinks he picked, among all possible poses, something uncontroversial.
And this is the crux of the problem: you can’t spread boobs around all a cover and then complain because of an ass.
If she looks like she’s twerking, is it possible that it’s subjective?
Will answer Tony later.
If you had visited those websites, F.O., and actually read and understood what they were saying, you would not be making the arguments you are currently making.
“Bothering to follow a link” means more than just clicking on it and staring at it slack-jawed for a bit, all while absorbing NOTHING of the content of any of them.
Multitudes disagree.
I repeat: the pose he selected is typically seen in three situations — sexy photos, sexy music videos, and porn. It’s not an action pose, it’s not a practical pose, it’s not a powerful pose. If someone was really climbing over a ledge as he claims, their back would arch in the opposite direction, and her butt would barely be visible. The only purpose of the pose is to show off a nice ass.
Here, compare and contrast: http://www.buzzfeed.com/ianxcarlos/spider-woman-as-nicki-minaj
Of course you can. Once again, the problem isn’t that “there’s an ass in the picture”. Boobs and ass, for better or worse, are all over comics. And it’s true that most superhero costumes are unnaturally shrinkwrapped, and that’s a valid compaint across the board. Multiple blogs are set up to criticise the horribly wide spread use of the spine-breaking boobs-and-ass shot, and rightly so. It’s not that this is the worst example of exploitative imagery in comics.
This is just
* one of the most recent,
* one of the most clear-cut (because of the pose, not just the body parts visible), and
* especially high profile due to a number of factors.
We can also complain about any number of other pictures in comics, but right now we’re complaining about this one. Pointing out how bad some other pictures are is not an argument in defense of this one.
The other cover by Greg Land is also pretty bad, but for different reasons. It’s got the typical female superhero pose issues (without being as extreme as this), it’s got the vacuum-packed boob issue, but most egregiously it’s got some truly awful anatomy problems. But at least it doesn’t look like straight up porn!
(Though given Land’s history, it’s only a matter of time…)
#92 F.O.
Because this is the first time people are outraged over a comic book cover? Good god, people have been critiquing them about all these problems and more for years. Just because this one instance has spread far and wide doesn’t mean he’s getting more flak while others are skating. Those that care have been talking about it and are trying to awareness on the whole problem, not just one cover or artist, using this publicity to do.
You keep saying this and claiming that you’ve visited the links like Escher Girls and The Hawkeye Initiative where they’re constantly critiquing this shit. (There are places too you know.)
You make no damn sense. It reads like you’ve just decided everyone’s got their panties in a bunch over a single cover while ignoring the larger phenomenon and the critiques of such.
@92 F.O.
– No one is angry. Heat on a topic is not equivalent to anger. (Well… maybe it is here in Seattle, but almost everyplace else is further east.
– Honestly and without disrespect, I don’t think you particularly like the vernacular here. That’s fine. I don’t always, either.
– You don’t see it. Others do. I find the art obnoxious and degrading, and more so than many other “hypersexualized” images. You don’t. I haven’t convinced you of anything. You haven’t convinced me of anything. I have not said anything to comply with the herd. It feels to you like I have, which is unfortunate but fine, because people do that sort of thing, and you don’t know me. I don’t understand what seems like a need to defend this work. You don’t understand what feels like a need to denigrate his work. I’m not clever enough to figure a way around any of that.
– Due to the scope of the issue and the potential for tectonically varying interpretations of illustration (at least most illustration) this topic alone does not and can not define anyone’s overall attitudes toward women/sexism/mysogyny absent some potential flagrant statement. As far as I know, you haven’t made such a statement.
– I’m not suggesting you give up. I have no right to insist that you change your mind. But I also do not expect to see the issue much differently than I do now.
– All of this is just me, I am obviously not the center of the discussion, and I’m not speaking for anyone else.
– Anyone with a more insightful approach to what appears to have become a brick wall should feel free to step in.
Poop cakes.
Should have been “… almost anywhere else is further east, at least stateside).”
@81 amandamarcotte
QFwisatcouT,d
amandamarcotte @81
I would really like to see evidence that:
A) People who read comic books about super heroes are unaware that the characters, and their physical abilities, are fantastical.
B) That women feel obliged to look like Spider Woman, rather than say, Beyonce, or the woman in some advert for the latest advance in cosmetics.
C) That men are trained to expect women to look like Spider Woman.
Crip Dyke #64
Oops. I somehow missed your reply yesterday; sorry!
And also oops! Kinda embarrassed at having not taken spider-person powers into consideration. Thanks for the correction. Still an’ all, it still looks more like a set, deliberate pose, to me, than a snapshot of a person in motion, which was my point.
@92 F.O. :
That Manara doesn’t find his image objectifying is irrelevant, because plenty of others do. That you didn’t think something you did wasn’t offending anyone is not a defence. That he doesn’t think the pose controversial is equally irrelevant – again, because others do (because of an existing and long-standing complaint about the needlessly sexualised depictions of female comic heroes vs the male counterparts) and because as an erotic artist (something I don’t have a problem with per se) Manara quite possibly draws women in sexual poses a dozen times before breakfast. Manara’s intent is irrelevant and his defences are weak.
If Manara wanted to pick, from all possible poses, something uncontroversial, he might have drawn Spiderwoman doing something other than a head-down splayed-out doggy-style. Like, I dunno, maybe her climbing a wall plausibly or swinging from some webbing or socking a badguy – something comic hero-ish. Perhaps as research he should’ve read a few comics where that kind of thing regularly happens (I’d suggest Spiderman, for starters).
The reason people are focusing on this cover is not because it’s the first to show a female super in a ridiculous and out-of-context sexual pose; it’s because it’s the latest in a long line of such problematic depictions and because the Spiderwoman series this cover is introducing is apparently intended to attract more female readers to the Marvel universe.
Ruling out deliberate PR-baiting on the part of Marvel’s editorial staff, two mistakes occurred here: 1) Marvel didn’t pull Manara up on his bodypainted doggy-style heroine with a hairdo that appears to continue beneath her jawline and a neck that appears to be eleven inches long and have a hinge in it and 2) Manara didn’t think to research how a superhero might move her body in the course of her duties as opposed to how a porn star does so in the course of hers.
For the record: I don’t begrudge Marvel hiring a porn artist to draw a cover; I just wish both parties had paid more attention to their alleged target audience and, generally, to human anatomy.
Many of us (here and comic fans in general) have criticised the excessive, out-of-context sexualisation and the ridiculous, impossible poses female heroes get drawn in for years (Escher Women and The Hawkeye Initiative, linked to upthread, are just two of the sites addressing the stark differences between depictions of male and female heroes).
This is really very simple: Manara’s Spiderwoman cover is not some new problem people have just started to jump up and down about because of her lovingly-drawn butt cheeks. The cover is symptomatic of a long-standing problem that the comic industry doesn’t appear to want to address; the choice of cover was also highly questionable for a series that its creators hope will draw in more female readers.
@99 procrastinatorordinaire
OK.
A) Greg Land. Porn. (etc). Fantastical in contour, but not in use, because otherwise, why bother? (Maybe completely abstract beauty? Embodiment of metaphysical wonder? Passively transmitted, virtuous fertility?) If you can’t piece that together, well…
B) Cumulative effect. Reinforcement. You obviously saw images of this kind differently than I did as a young boy, or talked to other young boys about them (because damn, the closer the girl in front row was to that), and you obviously have never been in the presence of young girls viewing them. Or seen a Barbie Doll. Or noticed Pamela Anderson (et al) or her fame (as an actress). If you can’t piece that together, well…
C) See B). Also, good job on the whole literal as a Commodore64 thing.
@101 Hank_Says
Oohhh. Nicely put.
If Mark Twain were here, I believe he’d approve.
Gotta admit that I’m not sure which is funnier: the stupid picture or the artist’s stupid attempt to justify it….
@103 knownot
Ha! Thanks. I’d be glad to get the approval of Mr Clemens, though I suspect I’d have to explain to him what a “porn star” was (whether he’d approve of that as a vocation is another question entirely).
@104 George Peterson
I’d expect an artist to defend their work; what I find amusing are other people trying to defend it for him.
If you believe this then there’s a bridge on sale in Brooklyn for you, cheap.
Manara is a porn artist choosing to do a porn pose for a title well known to be supposed to be targeted to attract a female audience. He didn’t find it objectifying? He though it uncontroversial?
He’s lying.
And that, incidentally, is one of the main reasons he is singled out for criticism here. It is not just his artwork, but the disgustingly dishonest and ignorant fashion he has responded to criticism, which you could have figured out from, oh, the TITLE of the OP, which clearly refers to his excuses rather than his artwork itself.
@Daz, #100:
Oh, despite the niggling correction, I’m in agreement with the porn thrust of your argument.
I don’t know one can say that some objectified poses can be worse than others, but at least with those twisted back come hither poses there is some hint of agency for the woman, whereas this porn pose is pure submission.
Crip Dyke #107
I chortled. I am a bad person.
@Amphiox, #108:
Context matters. For an example of how, even though this example has nothing to do with the current examples under discussion, consider objectification within the context of a long-term sexual/romantic relationship.
In contrast to some simplifying assertions, it’s not that objectification never happens in a healthy, collaborative, respectful relationship. It’s that objectification of body parts or sexual performances, which is by definition a barely-metaphorical hard-on for one of those things regardless of the humanity of the person having the part or performing the act, does not happen to the exclusion of the appreciation of the rest of the person’s body, the rest of the person’s behaviors, or the person’s desires, personality, mind, or agency.
In other words, it’s not magically not objectification when my partner gets hot noticing my nipple poking my shirt into the nipple’s own shape. However the damage that objectification threatens – to tempt my partner into causing injury to body, compel my acts, ignore or quash my desire, override my personality, enslave my mind, and kill my agency – is made impossible by the context of a love and an appreciation and a habit of communication that together guarantee (or should) that if I ask her to stop salivating over my tits because I’m afraid that her mom might notice, the new awareness of possible harm to me effectively quashes the desire sparked by the objectification and successfully reminds her to consider things other than my nipple pertinent.
It isn’t intrinsically bad to “objectify” in the sense of enjoy, sexually or otherwise, individual acts that make up only momentary parts of a person’s life, or individual shapes that make up only minimal parts of a person’s body.
Objectification is extrinsicallybad because it tempts other actions, inherently bad actions. It’s not bad to want a hundred bucks. Yet greed is decried.
Following this logic, we might then say that depicting objectification and/or depicting a person in an objectifying pose, isn’t intrinsically wrong. It’s extrinsically wrong because it may tempt other actions, inherently bad actions.*
IF that is true, then depicting objectification and/or depicting a person in an objectifying pose could certainly be said to be better or worse depending on the other messages of the art (and/or its context) that minimize or oppose any encouragement towards those other, possible, inherently bad actions.
Your example, a “come hither look” could reasonably be seen as only promoting objectification when it was desirable to the objectified person to be seen and treated so. I think it’s more complicated than that, but since that’s one reasonable message that could be read into the art, I’d certainly rate that art as “better”, in the sense of less harmful, than art that promotes objectification regardless of the character’s desires. For all the character may be non-existent, a fiction, the message possibly communicated (that the object’s consent or desire is irrelevant), is among the worst messages among those we oppose in objectifying art. Indeed, it lies very close to the root of the opposition to this art.
So, yeah, I’d say some art can be “better” or “worse” than another piece of art even when both pieces cannot reasonably be argued to contain no objectification.
*I’d actually probably limit this further, so I’m not even fully endorsing it in this form, but I need some time to think about exactly how this paragraph might be mis/interpreted and how I would best communicate the limited message with which I fully agree.
@Daz, #109:
but…but why? What in my straightforwardly factual comment is possibly amusing?
============
Okay, okay, I can’t keep up the innocent pose, I’m worse than Rizzo.
On the plus side, I considered but managed to refrain from writing,
because it might be
a) ambiguous to some that the “asshole” in this case is Marvel Worldwide Inc.
b) despite the somewhat apt comparison to something that produces shit, I did feel assholes didn’t deserve the association.
I don’t think Manara even knows what objectification means. Looking at his art, he seems unable to imagine or depict the converse—a woman as a subject, as her own agent, who is not offered up for male consumption in any way. I think like a lot of men he sees the objectification of women as some sort of default or neutral state, and that a character can only be more or less sexualized within that state. (I mean, he couldn’t be a porn artist if he didn’t understand degrees of sexualization.) So he’s mistaking the complaint about objectification as a complaint about sexualization, which must seem absurd to him since Spiderwoman is much less sexualized than a lot of his stuff.
I couldn’t resist doing this any longer.
Spider Woman’s secret revealed
@A. Noyd, #112:
Very good observation, and clearly argued as well.
Ok, my apologies.
I’m not exposed to *all* American culture and I grossly underestimated the extent of the movement against objectification of women in comics, Pharyngula is the only US blog that I read regularly.
(I did check the blogs provided, but two anecdotes are not data).
Given this, my objection that Manara is being treated unfairly falls.
I’m also very happy to know that the tide against sexism is moving so strongly.
@Tony: Sorry, no answer for you in the end.
As an aside, I’m still pissed that Thor has a boob armor.
http://womenfighters.tumblr.com has some great examples (unfortunately, not all) of great armor.
Perhaps you could have asked for more information about the subject instead of making some badly uniformed statements.
@112 A. Noyd
!!!!!!! Go you.
Attempted paraphrase, as a definition:
The belief that the result of objectification of women is, in reality, only women’s natural state, and that as result any degree of sexualization necessarily occurs, and can only occur, within the bounds of that state.
Suggestions for the defined term, anyone?
@110 Crip Dyke
Some really important stuff here. I mean there.
But then, that should be obvious… so LOOK! LOOK UP THERE! READ THAT AGAIN!
@microraptor, #116:
F.O. could have done that, but really: it’s far harder than it looks to concede significant error in public. It’s hard enough face-to-face. It might seem that the internet would make it easier, what with the anonymity and all, but this page lasts **indefinitely**.
one’s mistakes are there for anyone to google 5 or 10 years from now. If one leaves it up and concedes the argument, others will witness one not merely wrong, but without a defense for one’s error. None of us want others to think badly of us, intellectually or otherwise.
F.O. is publicly conceding the point. Obviously F.O. is really taking the time to analyze the actions taken/statements made. I appreciate that.
While I don’t think you’re wrong in #116 and that your suggestion is unhelpful as a suggestion…
…in this context I think it comes across as salt in the wound, and whatever benefit F.O. might gain from your suggestion is undercut by making it just a tiny bit scarier for lurkers who remember our comments to admit error themselves, in some other thread or in some off-line context.
Something to think about – again, not saying your suggestion is wrong or unhelpful, just that it context it may have additional effects you would not want it to have.
To F.O. for #115
Thanks for thinking hard. Thanks for being willing to admit error. You can’t have a really good discussion without the presentation of multiple perspectives. Sometimes none of those perspectives are wrong, but it’s really humanly impossible to get multiple good discussions going, with multiple disagreements, and not have someone end up wrong. On this thread, with regard to one of those disagreements, one wrong party happened to be you.
Thanks for being a positive model in thinking about others’ words and being willing to concede one’s own errors when and where one finds them.
In the future when I’m making a mistake that you recognize, I hope you take me to task as clearly, and, if I get to a point of repeating my own positions without really taking in others’ arguments, as fiercely, as anyone has done on this thread with your positions/arguments or anyone else’s. it’s really the only way that I get any better: good people who care push me when they notice me being wrong.
If and when it comes to you correcting me, I hope I (ultimately) respond as well as you did in your #115.
No worries. I fear I just opened another can of worms in another thread anyway. ^_^
I just figured out where he really got her posture, Precioussssss