Blackmoor Vituperative

Although comicbooks get a bad rap for gender inequity in certain circles, I believe that this is a reflection of how women are treated in the arts as a whole. While women have nearly reached parity with men in terms of civil rights and political power, women are treated in a very different manner than men when it comes to paintings, dance, fashion, literature, and practically every other endeavor we would place under the umbrella of “the arts”. I’ll give an example.

“So You Think You Can Dance” is a show produced and judged by mainstream choreographers and dancers. If you’ve never seen it, it features a competition for dancers using an “American Idol” type of model (although of a much higher quality). During tryouts, male dancers who aren’t “manly” in their movements, who are too “feminine”, are literally mocked and eliminated from the competition. At one point, a pair of male dancers auditioned together, and the reaction from the judges was almost comical dismay. One said something like, “It was just confusing. I didn’t know which of you was supposed to be the man.”

In the “group numbers” that open each show, it is not uncommon for all of the female contestants to be in their underwear, and for the male contestants to be wearing jeans and baggy T-shirts. You can put some of this disparity at the feet of it being a television show, but the fact remains that, across the board, regardless of their particular dance specialty, the dancers and choreographers who make this show possible perpetuate this perception of gender roles.

These are not TV executives, Bible Belt televangelists, or hypocritical Yankee politicians. Nor were they teen-age boys who grew up wanting to draw boobies for a living (which is the common accusation whenever the depiction of women in comicbooks comes up). These are respected, professional dancers and choreographers, who’ve worked for years to hone their craft.

So I think it’s more than a little unfair to single out superhero comicbooks when, in other forms of the arts, real men and women are being cast into gender roles every bit as fetishized as Power Girl’s peek-a-boo cleavage.