Two of the five women on this cover have been drawn to show their boobs and butts simultaneously; two others are bent in unfeasible S-curves; and the last one you can’t see anything much of.
I’m given to understand that many women find male butts attractive; but where are the male butts on this cover? Two of them are cropped out, two are hidden behind other bodies, and the last male is facing us. And primary or secondary sexual characteristic, there’s not a male bulge in sight, detailed or otherwise.
If only there were some means of communicating outside your immediate area, say an electronic network of interconnecting cables and devices, a web around the world if you will, so that you could find out the opinions of people not like yourself, even women!
I don’t assume that women don’t find the way that men are drawn in US comics attractive or the women inspirational, they say so, frequently and at painstaking length and detail. They post in forums and blog threads about it; they write individual blog posts about it; they base entire blogs on the subject.
Meanwhile, why would you assume that women’s and men’s ideals for the representation of men and women would be identical; and having realised that you were assuming it, why would you not want to check your assumption?
You must be kidding right? Besides the fact that there are thousands of covers you could choose from and using one wouldn’t prove a thing beyond that one cover is ridiculous, you decide to go with one where the only people who have their crotches exposed and topless are men.
No offense, but you must be absolutely blind if you think the men on that cover aren’t idealized to a standard that no normal male could possibly obtain. Don’t get me wrong, the women are too. Hell, the robotic suit guy is.
But butts? Seriously? You look at that cover and you see the women’s butts first? Not the significantly larger muscle bound men? I had to actually search for what you were talking about because all I could see were abs.
Teenagers who feel powerless and live out their fantasies of who they wish they could be through comics?
Answering this in detail would require practically a whole essay to explain my understanding of sex, gender, cognition, and the plasticity of human morphology. Which I have been told is counter-intuitive and extremely complicated. The short answer is that I have done some cursory research, but most criticisms I have encountered did not outline the sex nor gender of the writer, nor their opinions or enthusiasm for comics generally. I just haven’t had time to do more involved research about perception of superheroes online and grasp for details that would have taken me seconds to know IRL.
What I said was that these idealized forms are exaggerations of actual secondary sexual characteristics which are well-known to exist in real life. This is not to imply that they are desirable.
My comics background is mainly non-hero comics, as I always thought they were dull juvenile stuff. My focus has been on sci-fi and underground work. Also, as one who practices yoga and martial arts I simply find bendy, contorted people more interesting to look at. But despite being fairly omnisexual, I don’t generally find superheroes to be sexually attractive.
If you will excuse me, this silly track comes to mind, so I’ll just leave it here:
The first one is Bradley Wiggins, although I admit it’s not a great one of him. Chris Froome has more of a Skeletor without the muscle suit look to him. As for the sprinters, I could have picked Robert Försteman but wanted to go with someone who didn’t look completely photoshopped.
You seem to be intent on proving my point while missing it entirely. The men in this cover — which is what is known as an “example”, btw, chosen simply because it was recently posted, there are manymoreexamples to be found — are powerful and the women are sexual. These are not equivalent idealisations.
I think it depends on what you mean by ‘athlete’. Athletes in sports like American football, rugby and baseball can use some extra weight to their advantage, but often they will be in particular positions. Thin weightlifters or wrestlers will generally have less strength than those with some bulk. The examples from the last two links are going to be held back by their weight if they compete against athletes with similar levels of fitness but less weight - while people with lots of body shapes compete in marathons, the standard deviation is pretty low when you get to the top 10%. If I’ve gained a few pounds and try to cycle up a mountain, I’ll feel it, even if I could still make it to the top in a reasonable time.
On the other hand, keeping an optimised body shape for a particular sport may be pretty unhealthy in the long term. Someone like Carin McCoy is a successful athlete and may well do more to improve other people’s motivation to get out there than people with a more typical body shape. As the HuffPost article points out, keeping active is much more important to your health than having the ‘right’ body shape.
I think that if we’re talking about superheroes, it would be most logical to model them after combat-style athletics- Boxing, wrestling, martial arts- Rather than say, weightlifters or figure skaters.
That is, unless their build would reflect a particular type of activity- Say Aquaman having a swimmer’s body, or Quicksilver modeled after a sprinter.
Of course, if their power is energy-based, it probably doesn’t matter. Let’s face it- A telekenetic is probably not going to bother getting off the couch when he can get a beer out of the fridge with his mind-power, let alone get to the gym all that often. He’s going to look like Homer Simpson in spandex.
A friend who is a very geeky lady painter of fantasy, recently posted these wonderful reimaginings of female characters - I love these. They do not feel like the opposite of something, but like real full-fledged lady figures:
One, female bodies should not be treated primarily as eye candy for the men, and two, that batman should have a pot belly.
I agree with the first, not sure i’d agree with the second. Comics used to be a drawn medium. Now that Marvel is determined to cash in, the realism of some of these depictions can be called into question.
Since 5 percent body fat is nobody’s natural condition, fitness plans are geared to peak on the days of the sex scenes or shirtless moments. To prep for these days, trainers will dehydrate a client like a boxing manager sweats a fighter down to weight. They often switch him to a low- or no-sodium diet three or four days in advance, fade out the carbohydrates, brew up diuretics like herbal teas, and then push cardio to sweat out water – all to accentuate muscle definition for the key scenes.
The last-minute pump comes right before the cameras roll. Philip Winchester, the hero of Cinemax’s action series Strike Back, recalls seeing the technique for the first time on the set of Snatch: “Hundreds of extras were standing around,” he recalls, "and Brad Pitt would drop down and do 25 push-ups before each scene. I thought, ‘Why is he showing off?’ " Then Winchester figured it out. "I realized he was just jacking himself up: getting blood flowing to the muscles. I’d always wondered, ‘How do actors look so jacked all the time?’ Well, they don’t. Now we ask: Is it a push-up scene? When I shot that Strike Back poster, I was doing push-ups like a madman, saying, ‘Take the picture now! Take it now!’ "
Man, I don’t know what you consider overweight, but it’s too thin by half for that category. These characters may not be svelte, but there is a middle ground between overweight and 5% body fat.
This suggests a false dichotomy. Men putting on lots of angular muscle is a secondary sexual characteristic. Just like rounded butt and boobs are secondary sexual characteristics on the female form. They are not “sexual” in the sense of being engaged in sexual activity, but rather sexual in that they represent poles of human sexual dimorphism. But I do agree that focus on the extremes of this polarity tends to be uninteresting.
As for “power”, there are many different types. Women often have distinct advantages of speed, flexibility, and emotional awareness. Also, on the cover you posted, most of them appear to be flying, which could be considered a powerful gesture.
