An Open Letter to Sci-Fi and Comic-Book Geeks Everywhere
I'd like to start by setting up my "subject position," as they say. I'm a straight man. I like women. I like how they look. I like how they move. As a straight man who grew up reading comics and consuming incredible amounts of fantasy that was largely visual (movies, TV, cartoons, more comics), I find the aesthetics of those genres appealing, often erotic. Women with pointy ears are hot. Four-colour costumes are super hot. I won't deny and I won't apologize for it. I bring this up to demonstrate to the straight dudes among you that I am one of you. I'm not a voice you can simply dismiss.
Here's the thing. The movies we watch, the television we blithely consume, and the comics we read are full of images of women that--setting aside objectification and dehumanization, the reduction of the female body down to parts to be ogled for our (always implicitly straight, male) pleasure--are simply anatomically impossible. These women don't exist. As long as we live, none of us will ever have a girlfriend, a wife, or a lover who looks like this because there are no such women on this planet Earth, and as much as we all hope and pray otherwise, we're unlikely to meet women anywhere else.
I'm tired of my entertainments, which are capable of amazing insights, powerful social commentary and philosophical discussion, presenting to me a version of the female body that is literally unattainable. This is not helping us. This is not making our lives better. It is merely ensuring that real women, the flesh-and-blood kind, will never measure up. Why, straight men of the world, do we not object to this? Scream at the tops our lungs that we'd like some vaguely real women to look at? The irony, my friends, is that once you have a chance to be with a real woman, one whose body is large enough to actually contain internal organs, one who does not perpetually crouch in an S-curve so that she can show off the T and the A simultaneously, one whose breasts do not present a serious balance problem, you just can't go back to the hyperbolic doodles that dominate our animated worlds, or the $5,000 push-up bras that ensure that every woman in Starfleet has uniform D-cups.
Real women are really hot, especially the ones who indulge our patently silly desires for pointy ears and four-colour spandex. So please, artists and filmmakers among you, take back your skeletal Amazonian warriors with anatomically improbable breasts and give us some women who actually look like women. Trust me. It'll be way more fun for all concerned.
Posted by orion at January 28, 2007 8:57 PM