Strange fallout from the War on Women

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Wednesday May 02, 2012 · 7:24 PM PDT

2012/05/02 · 19:24

There is indeed a war on women, it's real, it's relentless, and it's everywhere.

It has even infested superhero comic books, of all bizarre things.

The superhero books were already notorious for sexist attitudes, sexist imagery, sexist treatment of female characters and, worse, female comics creators. But it's gotten worse.

DC started out its brand-new "New 52" relaunch by reintroducing familiar characters "new for the first time", and in at least two cases the sexism was blatant, extreme, and in-your-face. Did you ever wonder if Catwoman hooked up with Batman? Wonder no more - they "do it", graphically (pun intended), still in costume, at the climax of a first issue of her own book that teased tits and ass all the way through. (Apparently Catwoman isn't a person to the artist - just a female body to tease the male fans with.)

And Starfire...she's thrown into Red Hood and the Outlaws as eye candy and sex toy, with some outrageous BS about her "not perceiving" humans as different individuals and not caring who she shags as long as she shags. (They may have backed off from this a little, but it was a horrible start.)

Think that's bad? Think there must be limits? Think they'd respect the oldest extant symbol of feminine empowerment, Wonder Woman?

No such luck. She's a passive reactor to events in her own title, she's lied to and bamboozled and gulled in issue after issue, she's depicted as a sucker and a fool and almost completely useless - and then, in issue #7, we get the kicker: her entire background is a despicable lie. Her "loving sisters", the other Amazons, go out raiding once a generation for male sperm, murder the sailors once they've had their lay, and sell off any resulting boy children to the forge-god Hephaistos in exchange for weapons. (That's right, the poor nasty vicious helpless little dears can't even make their own weapons to do their murdering with.) Oh by the way, this is entirely Hephaistos' side of the story - the Amazons have all been turned into snakes previously, and her mother has been turned into a stone statue. And when she tries to "free" her "brothers", they side with the forge-god and tell her to butt out. And she just stands there with egg all over her face, looking even more stupid and useless than ever.

William Moulton Marston must be spinning in his grave.

But wait, there's now Earth-2, isn't there? Surely that version of Wonder Woman gets a little respect? Well...sort of. If you mean fighting-mad with vengeance for the slaughter of every single one of her Amazon sisters and her mother and the destruction of her home...and if you mean being skewered in the back while facing overwhelming, hopeless odds. (Comics artists have this obscene obsession with showing a bloody sword-point emerging from between a female superhero's breasts - doing it once was too often,and they've reused it too many times.)

All of this, at precisely the same time that women's rights are under savage, relentless attack? It's not chance - not with so many instances. It's rather too many for coincidence. Could it possibly be - enemy action?

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Strange fallout from the War on Women

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