Tentacle Rape and Mary Jane Watson: Comicbook "Respect" for Women

Marvel has recently been hit by a deluge of criticisms regarding two of its — well you’ll see:

Exhibit 1: the cover to Heroes for Hire #13

… so, Marvel is taking scantily clad women with 6 inch wastes and 90 inch chests in costumes that can’t possibly work except with enormous amounts of superglue and subjecting them to tentacle rape. As one can imagine, the comic blogosphere is not very happy. This of course, inspired one enterprising individual to take the original Heroes for Hire before this incarnation (Luke “I am Powerman” Cage and Danny “Iron Fist is an awesome name” Rand) and subject them to similar treatment:

Mmmm… titillating

Exhibit 2: Sideshow’s new Mary Jane figure designed by renowned artist Adam Hughes

Ahh yes, Mary Jane Watson — in all of her impossible bodied, sexually posed, big boobed, LAUNDRY-DOING goodness. As before, the comic blogosphere is not happy. And it’s not just the comic blogosphere, as the New York Post, MSNBC, and Fox News have also commented negatively. Creator Adam Hughes attempts to defend the work by stating that it wasn’t his intention to make this a piece about the proper role of a woman (as a sexy laundry washer) and was supposed to be a playful piece about Mary Jane discovering Peter’s identity…

Right. So, why not create something with an equally sexy Peter Parker doing his own damn laundry — oh wait, like this one?

Gee, why didn’t they make this into a toy?

In all fairness, while each piece may have its own legitimate merits as to why they’re not misogynistic constructions (although the Heroes for Hire cover has, in my humble opinion, absolutely no excuse or redeeming qualities whatsoever), they do seem to underly a very disturbing trend of employing the sexual and physical demeaning of women to sell comics to a male-dominated customer base who seem to not only turn a blind eye to it but seem to encourage it. Comic writer Gail Simone crafted a website Women in Refrigerators which details some of the worse aspects of this trend (the name comes from the fact that Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend was cut up and put in his refrigerator in one of his earliest adventures as a means of … character development), showing just how prevalent and far-reaching this goes. This is not to say that any particular comic book company or author or artist is particularly at fault — many of the stories detailed in Women in Refrigerators were, in my humble opinion, good stories — and taken one at a time there is no problem with the occasional “pinup girl” or use of the “damsel in distress” motif — but the far-reaching trend suggests that this is, above all, a trend, not an imaginary excusable problem, and it’s a trend which I think needs to be whittled down if the comic industry is to grow beyond its current diminutive out-of-mainstream mode and if society as a whole is to progress beyond traditional conceptions of femininity as merely subservient and sexual.