[New Title Pending]: On Female Superheroes or Vaginas Are Not Evil

I was checking out Jezebel and I came across this article, which had a link to another article on Rope of Silicon about why there aren't any successful female hero movies. I was actually talking about a very similar topic just the other day with a couple friends of mine.

We were talking about a potential Batman 3, and who should be the next villain. I'm really championing Catwoman because the first two movies, while excellent, were such a testosterone fest and it would be nice to see Batman go up against a cunning female equal. But they're picking super-obscure male characters (which in fairness sounded cool, but are general unknowns). We were then on the subject of obscure characters when I tossed out the idea of a Batgirl movie, which I'd like to see but I think would never work. To which they responded with "Yeah, who wants to see a chick Batman?" That line irked me, because my point isn't that she's Chick Batman, but because writers wouldn't be able to write or view her as anything other than than Chick Batman.

It really does bother me that I can think of virtually no successful superhero movies with females as developed viable leads. There is something strangely homoerotic about this obsession with male superheroes with big muscles and bigger codpieces. Even though society is so afraid of showing a penis in a major motion picture, there is no problem with having sweaty shirtless guys fight each other to verify their manhood. And there is still an endemic problem with using female characters only to further the male characters' angst (either by killing or raping them).

And it's not like strong female-centered stories can't be written. For example, I can think of Marc Andreyko's Manhunter (which manages to telling a compelling tale of a hard-working prosecutor who doesn't get her hair pulled by some jerk every issue) or Gail Simone's Birds Of Prey (which has women who can kick ass and joke about things that have nothing to do with boys or money or ponies)*.

I mean I am a guy, but sometimes (most times) male writers just have wrongheaded ideas about women. I was a huge fan of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but there were just so many virginal/whore tropes that undercut the idea of a strong female character. Hell, every time sex was brought into the picture, someone died or went evil or got pregnant and gave birth to something evil (which usually ended up killing the woman who bore the thing in the first place). And I saw these same disturbing tropes in his run on Astonishing X-Men. Kitty Pryde actually has sex with Colossus and bang, she's shot out into deep space and probably died (Colossus walks away unscathed). Mr. Whedon, I love your work but vaginas are not evil. I don't see why it's so difficult to have a confident woman who wears spandex and happens to have some nookie on the side.

And don't get me wrong, I loved The Dark Knight Returns, but I had to agree with Thera Pitts, Rachel Dawes was irritatingly underdeveloped. Here was a strong intelligent law-abiding assistant DA who ended up being little more than a casualty/footnote in Batman's crusade against the Joker and Two-Face's blind twisted vengeance. The only other major female character was Anna Ramirez, a tough street-smart cop, who ended up being a(n extremely minor) henchman who gets punched in the face by a man. I don't say this to cry "Sexism!" but it does speak to a major issue at hand about how male writers, directors and artists view women as viable characters.

I would like to see a successful Catwoman movie, or a Storm television miniseries, or yes a Batgirl movie. I guess you could call me a fe-man-ist, but I want to see these characters come to life too and become a successful franchise. I just wish we as a society can move on from our 1960s Batman thinking where women are only good enough to kick high and be untied from train tracks.

*NOTE: Gail Simone is no longer writing Birds of Prey. I lost track of who's writing it now and the book is getting cancelled (sigh!) so I don't know what the fate of the Birds are. But you should grab back issues (I believe it's issues 70 - 110) or buy it in trade.