My Terrible Misogyny
December 20, 2009
As you can probably tell I crafted The Mall of the Red Wizard as something of a send up of the sort of pulp stories that were the fantasy genre’s bread and butter before everything got Tolkienized. While creating this parody I really took it without thinking that my buxom female protagonist would be traipsing around the frozen wastes in a fur bikini. This wasn’t even intended as an element of parody per se (if it were wouldn’t I have made that outfit even skimpier?) Believe it or not the ridiculousness of Hilde’s wardrobe hadn’t even occurred to me. That is until I read this article about the cheesecakey pandering of the Twilight franchise. Long story short the only thing that separates transparent fetishization and objectification of Twilight’s male protagonists from the rest of genre fiction is that it’s the MALE protagonists that it’s happening to.
So now I feel a bit like an idiot and a misogynist, but the deed is done and I ain’t about to redraw anything now, I guess we’ll just have to learn to live with it.
You know what? I never really paid that close attention to what she was wearing. Could be because she isn’t human, and I believe that she’s covered in some kind of fur no matter what.
Are you telling me that I could have all the characters running around naked and you wouldn’t bat an eye?
This opens up some exciting new directions for the next chapter.
You are being way too hard on yourself on this one. First of all, the story comes across as good clean utterly silly Christmas fun. Secondly, Hilde may look ridiculous, but she acts ridiculous as well, so it feels appropriate. If a woman rides a monstrous polar bear up the side of castle because she thinks there is a wizard inside who needs to be smashed over the head with a spiked club, I’m not going to take exception to the impracticality of her outfit. You chose to draw everyone else properly clothed (and that is very important) so obviously Hilde isn’t cold because she’s just that tough, and she clearly lacks the self-awareness to realize how inappropriate her clothing is. (I now have a hilarious image in my head of Hilde standing over terrified men and informing them how beautiful she is.) It’s like the intentional symbolism you wrote about, how she never dismounts during the story.
Now, if all the women in the story were dressed like that, or if Hilde were featured in lots of close-ups clearly intended to show off her body, that would be different. But you didn’t do that.
Perhaps it wasn’t as sexist as it could have been but this isn’t a binary assessment. While there may be no misogynist intent on my part this stuff tends to creep in there as the unfortunate byproduct of my background as a white male. This wouldn’t really be a problem, but our culture is dominated by media made both by and for white males, making it easy for sexist memes to creep into the cultural landscape unchallenged.
Whether I’m being to hard on myself or not, I don’t know. But, I believe the process of challenging my own preconceived notions is something worth doing, regardless of whether or not I ultimately find these notions to be valid.
Here’s a little something for arguing with me:
And for the record Hilde isn’t cold because there’s so much lava out there in the Metal Lands that the temperature pretty much balances out.