Both Wonderwoman and Kusanagi are women designed by men. They are literally characters designed by men that dictate their views on how women should be. Even if they are relatively positive, they are still men transmitting their thoughts on how women should be.
Both Wonderwoman and Kusanagi are modeled with apparent sex appeal by male authors. Could they really still be good role models? I ask this as someone who don't know much about either comics.
What's interesting is that both of those characters have evolved considerably beyond their beginnings. I think it is oversimplifying to say that they represent men dictating "how women should be", but both Marston's Wonderwoman and Masamune's Kusanagi have been interpreted in drastically different ways by other writers.
If you believe that a character who's gender is the opposite of its creator is somehow invalid or cannot be a role model then I don't know what to say other than I don't agree. It's a subjective point and not particularly interesting to debate in my opinion.
The creation of Wonder Woman is actually pretty interesting -- it was done in collaboration with the creators wife, and she was modeled somewhat after a woman they were in a polyamorous relationship with. She was also explicitly designed to be a good role model for girls.
These are not hypothetical comics. If the characters are primarly tools to entice male audiences, then they are unlikely to also serve as good role models.
Of course they can. Imagine a hypothetical comic with characters of both genders who are all sparklingly excellent role models in the way they behave. Now imagine that this comic was drawn by people who designed all those characters to be blatantly, panderingly sexy -- a fairly common situation, since sex sells, and cross-demographic appeal makes commercial sense. Does this make the characters poor role models, in spite of their good personalities and deeds? I doubt it.
The Wonder Woman Film title has been published by DC Comics almost continuously except for a brief hiatus in 1986,Wonder Woman is a Princess of the Amazons (based on the Amazons of Greek mythology ) and was created by Marston, an American, as a "distinctly feminist role model whose mission was to bring the Amazon ideals of love, peace, and sexual equality to a world torn by the hatred of men.
This is a problem deeply routed in society.
Men are seen as the strong hunters and protectors that have to take care of their family in physical ways and women are seen as the subordinates that stay home and take care of the kids and their men after a hard day. It's really hard breaking out of that way of thinking when kids and teenagers grow up being bombarded with that role model their entire life.
The perfect example for that would be how superheroes are being portrayed based on their gender and barbie dolls in particular are a bad offender of subconsciously changing girls and young women into that role model of always looking perfect and aiming for that marriage as their life goal.
Edit: Someone commented on this, telling me how Black Widow, among others, don't fit that stigma. Since he deleted his comment before I could respond, the answer to that is simple.
Black Widow isn't directly portrayed as a 'typical' woman, but think about the way she acts. Does she show brute force and kicks asses everywhere she goes, or does she use cunning and her looks to make men dance around like puppets?
She may not fit the role model at the first glance, but on a deeper, more abstract level, she works as well as any at subconsciously influencing teenagers into roles based on their gender.
In case you're unaware, Wonder Woman came out of Marston's repressed S&M fantasies and belief in feminine superiority. The costumes and weapons (a lasso/rope...) reflect that specifically.
Wonder Woman has always been a feminist symbol, with the Doctor Psycho appearing as early as volume#5 to explicitly have Wonder Woman fight a short, weak, male misogynist.
Like, Doctor Psycho's earliest plot was involved with getting rid of women's contributions to WW2. You literally can't get any "more woke" than Wonder Woman, she and her comics have always been like this.
> Mars, the God of War, receives a report from one of his slave girls. She tells him how women are taking a more active role in the U.S.'s war efforts. Mars does not want to see women rise to power and escape the domination of man so he sends the Duke of Deception to Earth in order to create distrust toward female members of the U.S. military.
Nah dude.I get what you are saying, but if that is the case, why are male villians often grotesque, but female villians always (or almost anyway) just as sexy as female heros?
Heros are drawn for you to identify with as a power fantasy. The female characters aren't about who you want to be. It's about what you want to see.
That's why superman gets to be fully dressed, whereas super girl shows her belly and wears a skirt.
And even if you were right, that would mean that the ideal female super hero is usually wearing a skimpy outfit showing skin, and what does that say?
For what is is worth, women played an early role in Japanese literature, probably because men thought there wasn't any status to be had writing fiction. Funny enough, many Japanese comic creators such as Rumiko Takahashi and Naoko Takeuchi are women too, but nobody in the U.S. compares to male creators such as Wolfman, Lee, Kirby, etc.
I agree with the title, as it's not optimal for role models to be primarily women who have power, success and happiness because they were born into it by luck.
However:
"Mulan is a bold Chinese warrior, respected and followed by her people…all of whom think she is a man, because she has deceived them by cutting her hair. The point here appears to be that to become a good leader, a woman should look and act like a man."
This person has severely misunderstood the point of Mulan.
It's not that men are portrayed as fools and women are not. It's more likely that women in the shows you are describing are there as fillers and not as characters of their own right -flawed or not-.
I suppose that depends on whether you think women should be doomed to the role but it takes some extraordinary imagination to pretend the stereotype doesn't exist, or that one gets around it by making the woman in question an artificial one
kinda like if I made a software called arnold with a picture of he-man as a logo I doubt one would be considered backward for thinking I had a guy in mind
It's not about anatomical correctness. It's that the sexualization–of both the male superheroes and the female ones–is explicitly male-based. Female gaze sexualization looks different.
Your initial argument was essentially "but men are sexualized too!" And that was irrelevant, because we're talking about ladies.
That comic you posted actually sums it up pretty well, super heroes are drawn as male power fantasies. Also notice I never said anything about women finding Batman unattractive, the problem is that women are drawn almost exclusively to please just men. (Look up male gaze)
If I started reading romance novels, then I too might give a damn if my gender is normally portrayed in certain ways. But I read comic books and found myself enjoying the ones where women get to be people to.
Tell us more about female role models please!
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