[ SECRET POST #144 ]

[shahni.livejournal.com]

⌈ Secret Post #144 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

- Con returnee is happy and sleepy. Thus you get early post!

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 75 secrets from Secret Submission Post #021.
Secrets Not Posted: 0 broken links, 0 not!secrets, 0 not!fandom
Next Secret Post: Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 30th, 2007.
Current Secret Submission Post: Here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[katsu]

Considering that the art is the first thing you see any time you open a book, it tends to stand out. There is certainly textual sexism, but the other thing to consider is plot in general. I've been away from comics for quite some time - about eight years, now - but when I was still reading, the plots tended to cater toward male audiences, which made sense considering that the majority of comics were drawn by men. I'm certainly not saying that all women like soap opera plot lines or other things that are prevalent in shoujo manga, (and I'm also not saying that women don't read shounen manga or comics that fit in the same category, because I certainly do) but it also is worth noting that the audience for shoujo manga is primarily female, and the writers/artists are primarily female. Comics really don't have any kind of equivalent to the vast industry that shoujo manga's become.

It annoys the hell out of me when I run across anime fans that think anything Japanese is good and anything Western is automatically crap. But I also don't think the misogyny runs that differently between comics and manga, at least in shounen manga. Because what do you get? Women with enormous boobs in tight clothing. (Or, more accurately, annoying women with yadda yadda ya.) There's also a lot of the same (disturbing) violence against women in both. Not acknowledging that is very unfair.

On the shoujo manga side, it is different, more of the classic sort of thing you tend to see in romance novels - oh look at the weak little woman whose only goal in life is to get hooked up with one of the guys in her love dodecahedron. However, that said, shoujo manga (particularly in the "magical girls" type series) has a pretty good record of strong female leads. So there's still a lot of reinforcement of negative stereotypes going on, but there's also quite a bit of plot/character that is going in the right direction and does positively capture the attention of female readers. I'm thinking we'll see a lot more of this as well as Japanese women gain more ground against the basic misogyny of their society.

I don't read both comics and manga equally. I used to, about eight years ago, and then I simply gave up on comics (with the notable exception of Sandman</i) and haven't found anything to motivate me to start spreading my fun money that way again.