Yes, I fixed the title but couldn’t be bothered to fix the actual map. One is easier to do than the other?

Travis and I have decided that we’re going to read a few comics with female leads and analyse how they are portrayed.  Okay, that is fine and good and all, but I’m already spending upwards seventy bucks a month on comics (actually, according to my bank statement, I’ve spent 120 bucks on comics the past four weeks.  But I also bought a box, at least one tpb and seven back issues in those weeks – if you factor those out, it is about 60-75 bucks) and, get this, I’m freaking unemployed and just bought a car in the beginning of September.  Oh, and I have about 2.5 grand in tuition due by the end of January.  And I need to buy gas.

And, yet, I’ve decided to pick up four more titles for the express purpose of poking holes at (or praising) the portrayal of women in comics.

All this because I think that Invincible Iron Man’s Pepper Potts is a terrible character since, well, she has no character.  Despite the awesomesauce of the suit and the electromagnet, Pepper herself is pretty annoying.  First she freaks out when Tony saves her from death-by-skyscraper by putting an electromagnet in her chest (‘oh noes, it’s STARK TECH.  That is BAD because it is WEAPONS and stuff’.  But it ends up not being Stark tech so Pepper is okay with it since it is nonviolent.  Uh, hullo?  She’s been working for a weapons manufacturing company for how many years now?  And, recently, Tony made her the CEO of said company and her only freak out was over the mess he left for her), then she has a stint at being pretty awesome and kick ass (though everything she does is defined by Tony which, to a certain extent, is acceptable since she’s a secondary character) and now she’s freaking out because Tony can become undead (not a zombie undead – wrong universe, despite the existence of Deadpool’s zombie head) since, omg, Happy didn’t have that choice…. and she’s the one who begged Tony to pull the plug on Happy.

Yeah.  Kinda flip-floppy there.  Pepper is just a vehicle to tell a story, not a character in her own right.

Also in IIM, Natasha is kinda just… there (probably for the boobs factor and the lesbian subtext between her and Maria) and Maria went from being cool and kickass to a psycho bitch to a recovering psycho bitch… and for no real reason.  Did we even find out what was on that hard drive she went through all of that effort to steal?  If we did, it must not have been all that exciting of news since I don’t remember it.

Of course, this was also prompted, in part, by the SGU sexism drama – personally, I feel that there is no sexism in the show.  Yes, Chloe is annoying and whiny and too quick to jump into bed with people but that isn’t sexist.  If it was, I’d know a lot of women who are somehow sexist just by existing!  Sure, Cloe is pretty stupid, I’m not arguing with that (I’m not a fan of her myself), but she isn’t sexist.

And calling the Stargate writers sexist?  Even more stupid – how can a group of people who made two shows with strong, kickass female leads be sexist?  And SGU has TJ, who is shaping up to be pretty damn awesome, and Wray, who is potentially kickass and awesome but, sadly, doesn’t have enough screen time.

So, yeah, long story short?  I’m going to be reading three more comics and using that mostly random selection to judge how women are portrayed in American comics.  The four comics we’re going to be reading?  Batgirl (because we were both reading it anyway), Wonder Woman (because she is the female superhero), Black Widow and Marvel Girls (because it is a miniseries and, thus, easier on the wallet as well as having an utterly ridiculous name) and Empowered (because I’ve been meaning to read it and the wiki article sounds like Empowered is a believable character).

We shall see how it goes.

Buuut I’ll put it under a cut cuz I really hate uncut long articles on blogs.

• House – I’m pretttty sure the perma-stubble gives away the gender of the lead character
• Chuck – The last time I checked, Sarah wasn’t the lead character
• Castle – Third show in a row to be named after the male lead? Niiiice Nikki, niiice.
• The Big Bang Theory – One female character in the regular cast. ’nuff said.
• Fringe – I’m not sure on this one… Olivia is sorta the main character, but Walter steals the screen and Peter is almost as important as Olivia.  It is a bit too ensemble-y with the three leads to really count as a female lead. Getting close, though!
• Criminal Minds – This show has not one, but two male leads
• Bones – Brennan and Booth are equally important, as seen by the title screen with both Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz in the most equal manner possible
• Eleventh Hour – Canceled, yes, but Rufus Sewell (aka, the male lead) is yummy enough for me to watch the show again… and again… and again…. Oh, the science is great too.
• Sanctuary – Amanda Tapping!
• Eureka – Male lead. But, wut wut, the not-Tony-Stark character is on the screen?  Get that sheriff outta my line of sight!
• Stargate SG-1 – While Sam Carter should have been the lead character after Richard Dean Anderson left the show, it was not to be.
• Stargate Atlantis – Ultimately, John Sheppard is the lead character of this series… though Elizabeth Weir and Sam Carter lead the expedition for four seasons and (Meredith) Rodney McKay stole the show with awesomeness.
• Star Trek: TOS, TNG, ENT – Combined cuz I’m lazy and, well, the Captain is male. ’nuff said.  (DS9 is excluded simply because I haven’t had a chance to watch that series yet.)
• Star Trek: Voyager – Honestly?  I find most of the male characters rather boring. But, yay, short redheaded female captains ftw!
• The X-Files – C’mon, there are only two main-main characters (what? I need to separate M+S from Skinner, Reyes and Doggett somehow) and they share the lead pretty well – whilst Mulder will run off without Scully, the weird stuff tends to happen to her, not him.
• Warehouse 13 – It’s in the vein of The X-Files and Bones so Myka and Pete are co-main characters, I guess
• Defying Gravity – Ensemble cast, but the two leaders of the expedition are male

So, yeah, long story short?  There generally aren’t any clearly dominant female leads in the stuff I watch.  This also applies to novels (unless they were written for women), but I’m not going to make a massive list of that because A) I’ve read way too many books in my life time and B) I don’t even remember all the names or the authors of most of the books I’ve read.

And I’m not going to bother listing comics because those are written for men and I expect the lead characters to be male and I half expect that the female characters are going to suck.  Some of them don’t, but I find that male writers tend to have women that are just… weird.  They don’t seem like they’re people, y’know?  Not that I’m dissing male writers – the opposite definitely holds true for female writers.  Seriously, read any yaoi recently?  Half of the time one or both of the characters take on a distinctly feminine feel.  And that’s even in fanfic where the character isn’t canonically girly.

Again, the opposite often is true for men writing femslash.

Naturally, I began wondering why it is this way and, wellll, beyond the ‘women/men can’t write men/women’, I haven’t come up with a good reason.  Of course, I’ve come up with reasons, but my idealistic self doesn’t want them to be true and my feminist self doesn’t believe that they’re good reasons.

Simply put, my other reasons all involve sexism – too many male writers/producers/executives that all believe that men could never relate to a female character.  And, thus, for whatever reason they have decided that lead characters must be male because either A) women don’t count (from a marketers standpoint, that’s technically true since, in some workplaces, women still make a lower salary than men.  Add in the fact that it still seems to be women who leave the workforce to raise children and you have a definite skew towards men making, and thus spending, more money.  Thus, you’d want men to be watching the show and commercials and, thus, buying stuff) or, B) they feel that women can relate to men (or throw in a secondary female character for women to relate to).

Yeah.

You can see why I hope that I’m not right.

For interests of full disclosure, I’m kind of guilty of this as well – my lead characters tend to be female and, in the story that still only has a WIP name (currently Forced Fate), my two main characters are both female and, of my three secondary characters, two are male.  Not a very gender balanced cast, but I’d rather have the cast skewed in one direction over it being dead even because casts with exactly as many women as there are men often seem a little bit contrived.  It can be done, but I don’t think I could pull it off.

Besides, I don’t think about that sort of thing while writing – I just come up with characters and put them together.  If they happen to be male, fine by me.  It really does not make a difference to me.

And, perhaps, that’s just how tv is written as well.

But I doubt it.