Dream Girls

Women in comic books are, regrettably, portrayed completely surreally, with strangely proportioned bodies that almost always feature larger-than-life breasts, tiny waists, and legs that, apparently, stretch on for miles. The outfits they wear also seem strangely chosen for their day’s work: what good are corsets, bikinis, miniskirts, and high-heeled boots when you are meant to be keeping evil at bay? The answer is, they are not, which is why so many women characters in comic books are portrayed as secondary to the men these same books feature. They are meant to look pretty as the superhero’s girlfriends while the men do the “real” fighting. Even in cases where the woman is the main character, her outfit is hardly less revealing, showing that these characters are, on the whole, not as important as their male counterparts. However, although this does put women in a lower place in the comic book world, the real world does not necessarily reflect these sexist views.
Even if everyone who read comics believed, upon seeing these women objectified in well-known publishers’ (Marvel, DC, etc.) books, that women themselves are to be treated as nothing more than the subject of fantasies, that all women should have figures in the shape of ridiculously exaggerated hourglasses, and that women are in all other ways not as capable as men are, and then treated women they met in real life in this manner, they would still make up a relatively small percentage of the world, and cannot single-handedly be blamed for all the acts of sexual violence committed against women. Secondly, not all readers of comics do believe these ideas, just as all illustrators probably do not intend to state that women are inferior to men, even if their drawings imply this idea. Therefore it cannot be said that comic books are a huge factor in causing men to commit acts of violence against women in real life—in fact, it may even be better for men with these impulses to read a book and fantasize over fictional characters rather than attack a real woman to get the same feeling.
Of course, it cannot be said that the objectification of women in comic books is a good thing: in fact, it is the complete opposite. It is a sad reflection of our times that while men and women in some parts of the world are slowly reaching equality in workplaces and the home, the traditional view of women is preserved from the nineteen-fifties, and this view itself goes back through the ages, all the way back to cave dwellers’ times: that the woman must beautify herself at home while the man goes out to do the “real work”, which is, essentially, what many female characters in comic books are doing. Even female superheroes who supposedly are strong women are less muscular than the men. However, while this is a sad and backwards part of the pop culture, it is no more than that: it is unlikely to influence people to behave differently with women in real-life situations just because they have different expectations from their comic book dream girls.