The Open Harassment of Geek Women is Absolutely a Thing

Internet trolling is not new. Nor is it exclusive to women. Those facts, however, do not mean that it is any less important to discuss it. There is an alarming amount of vitriol and hate pouring out of every nook and cranny aimed directly at women who dare to refer to themselves as geeks, and (even worse) decide to openly speak about their fandom. This happens regardless of what these women are speaking about, but it is particularly harsh and abundant if/when a woman speaks critically about an aspect of gaming or comics. Recently, I had a rather disturbing back and forth on Twitter with a guy who apparently saw nothing wrong with the Milo Manara Spider-Woman variant cover. It seems that some guys still feel the need to mansplain just how much women everywhere have over-reacted to the now infamous cover art (often completely misunderstanding or blatantly ignoring why we’re upset about it). In this particular instance, the guy started off with a common argument: claiming that she’s supposed to be posed like a spider. When I pointed out just how not spider-like the pose is, his true feelings quickly emerged in a string of tweets that essentially called my intelligence, knowledge of the subject, and even my own sexuality into question:

Marvel Responds to Spider-Woman's Butt!

I wrote a post earlier this week about the 'Spider-Woman' variant cover controversy. In it, I expressed my displeasure for the only reaction I had seen from someone at Marvel about their distasteful choice to have an erotic artist produce a variant cover for the first issue of a series aimed at women. At the time, all that had been said was from their VP of Publishing, Tom Brevoort, and it was less than stellar. In fact, it was dismissive and ignored the actual issue altogether: 

"It’s also, for a Manara piece, one of the less sexualized ones, at least to my eye. Maybe others feel differently. But given that the character is covered head-to-toe, and is crouched in a spider-like pose, it seems far less exploitative to me than other Manara pieces we’ve run in previous months and years."

Now, thankfully, we have a more in-depth statement from Marvel's Editor-in-Chief, Alex Alonso via an interview with Comic Book Resources. He says, in part:

Spider-Woman's (now) Famous Butt

I wasn't going to write this since there are so many wonderful criticisms already circling the internet, but since a conversation was sparked among friends on Facebook via an article I shared, and since several people have asked for my opinion about it, here goes:

In case you've been living under a rock, the controversy I'm referring to started when the variant cover for 'Spider-Woman #1' by Milo Manara was released. Now, it is important to keep in mind that it was announced that 'Spider-Woman' would be getting her very own series at the Women of Marvel panel at this year's San Diego Comic Con. These panels are wildly popular sit downs where some of the prominent female writers, artists, creators and editors at Marvel speak openly with fans about topics ranging from sexism in the comic industry, to getting a foot in the door, to their favorite series. Make no mistake, these panels exist because Marvel (and the comic industry as a whole) has finally started to acknowledge that women not only read comics, but crave story lines that don't involve putting a superhero's dead girlfriend in a refrigerator, or the brutal rape and murder of an otherwise capable and formidable female superhero in order to elicit her male counterpart's heroic revenge story arc. Considering, then, that this series has essentially been touted as another instance of Marvel's current strides to court female readers, it came as more than a slight shock when we found out that Marvel had tapped legendary erotic artist, Milo Manara, to create 'Spider-Woman's variant cover. This is what he gave us:

Is she mooning the city, or is that just an open invitation? (Image from Comic Book Resources)

Now, there is a list of basic things that are wrong with this cover art that need to be touched on before we delve into the controversial, sexualized depiction of Spider-Woman. In my opinion, this is an all around poorly produced piece of art. This isn't the caliber of work one would expect from a professional artist working in the industry since 1969; it's first year art student quality, at best. His lines are sloppy, the shading is either too heavy or too soft, and her features are flat. While realism isn't exactly the first word that comes to mind when we think about comic art, artists should take things like human anatomy and basic physics into account when drawing figures. Manara, clearly, did not. In fact, she appears to be in need of medical assistance: her right shoulder is dislocated, her left shoulder is missing, her right hand appears to have been run over by a car, and judging by her left leg, her thighs are twice as long as her calves. That's all without even touching on that anatomic nightmare going on between her chest and her enormous butt (which, taking perspective into account, I've estimated to be about 4x the size of her head).