I'm going to be honest with you. When I first saw the sketch, I was tickled. Absolutely giddy. My meat name is Gwen, and when I was a kid, I climbed on things and pretended to be "Spider-Gwen," your friendly neighborhood wall-crawling badass seven-year-old. Now I'm in my late thirties, and I'm sexy as hell, and I still love superheroes.
Not realizing that Spider-Gwen was a real thing, I believed that Cho was making a cheeky joke that coincidentally tapped into everything I needed to see at the time. I made the image my avatar on facebook. I defended the image on comment boards. And once I became aware that she had her own comic, I became Spider-Gwen's fan, vehemently, enthusiastically, and for life.
Now, I understand why people were upset. They have every reason
and every right to be. Women have been sexualized in comics to a ridiculous
degree. Websites like The
Hawkeye Initiative and Escher
Girls have
hundreds of posts illustrating this point, and it's both hilarious and sad. The
Mary Sue made the point that the comic’s intended audience is
teen girls, and that Gwen Stacy herself is a teenager in that universe.
Spider-Gwen co-creator Robbi Rodriguez was unhappy with the drawing as well, and to a certain degree, I’m always
going to empathize with an artist’s feelings about responses to his work.
At the same time, I still feel good about Cho's drawing. I've got
big boobs and a big ass, and I want to feel sexy, and beautiful, and powerful.
Cho’s drawing gave that to me at a time when I needed an ego boost. While I
agree much of the time with what feminists have to say, this sort of thing
kicks me right in the nethers.
There's a deeply scary thread running through some versions of
feminism. This point of view assumes the male gaze is the all-important,
ever-present villain. The hourglass figure must never be portrayed, lest it
give the menfolk a boner. Anita Sarkeesian criticizes female video game characters with my body
type almost exclusively.
As Liana Kerzner put it:
There are women like me all over the world who have found ways to be proud of our flawed, unique bodies, and we refuse to accept that breasts or hips over a certain size indicate anything inherently immoral. This puts us in direct opposition with Feminist Frequency, since they call out characters in the Tropes vs. Women videos just for having large breasts.
The Cho
drawing with my childhood alter-ego as a sexy bad bitch showed up right at the moment
I was thinking about this. Spider-Gwen becomes almost tangential when looking
at the larger picture. I’m reminded of the weird time when the right-wingers
and certain feminists were united in the cause against women’s sexuality in the
1980’s.
Man, was
that a drag. Just when I was learning about what it was to be a girl, when I
was learning about politics, when I was absorbing concepts of the world that
would be sure to stick with me throughout my life, the people who said I could
be anything said I couldn't be sexy.
Today, it’s
the same. Pearl-clutchers fall against the fainting couch because women have
tits, love sex, and use their hard-won agency to flaunt it. Next time, we’re
going to talk about Black Widow, and how a great many of the people in the media who were complaining
about supposed sexism in Age of Ultron were men.
For now I
will close with this: we still need feminism to battle against perniciously
right-wing forms of feminism. The hourglass exists, and will not be erased. And Spider-Gwen is fucking awesome.
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