Fuck, I love dolls*. Dolls made from my favourite comics and cartoon characters are pretty much the coolest thing ever, and I have photographic proof.
Look! Here is Lego Batgirl, about to take down a giant Venusian snail that threatens the Emperor and Empress of Heian Japan! Go, Lego Batgirl, go!
Where was- Oh, right. Okay! Dolls are awesome. Figure busts and statues, I’m not so into. You can’t dress them up, and they’re stuck in one position and it’s hard to make them kiss each other. But some people like them and I’m okay with that. We can all like different things and still be friends, and when you want to play with something that has moving limbs and can totally kick the crap out of your bust while it stands there posing, I’ll be glad to help you out.
But.
I was cruising through the DC Direct homepages, looking for trouble (and also for dolls), and I have to ask – why? Why are most of the female statues so cheesecakey? A statue should be iconographic, capturing the essential personality and powers of their subject. What does it mean when most of the female statues say nothing more vital than “Look at my breasts!”?
This Wonder Woman bust doesn’t really say “Amazon warrior, most powerful woman on Earth.” It says “I’m wearing body paint instead of armour.”:
And then there’s Big Barda, coat-rack, which has been rightly and powerfully derided here:
This is not to say that some of them aren’t very good indeed. This Barbara Gordon Batgirl one is great, though I’m wondering why she took her mask off. We don’t usually see Batman busts with his face exposed:
And here is a statue which combines both cool posing and cheesecake posing in one piece:
Amazing. How do they do it?
The problem is that this doesn’t look that strange at first glance. Like the pictures where women are posing slightly off-balance while men are standing strong, it’s often hard to tell what’s wrong. Power Girl and Huntress have strong faces, their muscle definition is good and we’re so used to seeing women like this that it doesn’t really trigger the Weird Alert.
But imagine that the statue above is of Superman and Batman, with the men posed exactly the same way as their female counterparts.
In the mind’s eye, Batman looks actively heroic and dark. And Superman… looks ridiculous. Because Superman, although well-muscled and handsome for Western standards of handsome, is not meant to be attractive before anything else. He’s meant to be heroic. But Power Girl, before anything else, to the point where her character was created around her breasts, MUST be sexy.
Here’s a Supergirl (sort of) bust:
And here’s a mock-up of Superman in the same pose, drawn by Super. Girl. Jessica Plummer:
Isn’t that weird?
The DC busts are not, exactly, the problem. They are symptomatic of the wider misogyny that infects superhero texts – that superheroic women, by virtue of being female, must be attractive and that this is a vital part of their heroism. How many times is a female character described as “beautiful” or “sexy” in canon? How many times do male characters get equivalent descriptors?
Of course there’s nothing wrong with individual statues being beautiful, or even cheesecakey. But when that’s all that’s offered – when superhero women are nearly always posed as sexy, and superhero men nearly always posed as strong – then there’s a clear indication of gender imbalance, and a clear message that these are the respective functions of women and men in superhero narratives.
The only male DC character I can think of who just might be sexualised to a vaguely comparable degree is Nightwing.
What does his bust look like? This:
Yeah, he looks tough! But I bet Lego Batgirl could take him in a fight.
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* If you’re really hung up on it, you can substitute “action figures” here.