Women Attend Comic-Con But Don’t Run the Show [View all]

[redqueen]

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2012/07/18/women-attend-comic-con-but-dont-run-the-show/

This year, 40 percent of the attendees at the just completed annual Comic-Con were women. If only that percentage was reflected in the event’s programming.

Instead, the majority of programming consisted of panels where the ratio was (at best) one woman for every five men. Though it’s true there are more strong women’s roles than before in television, film, games, comics and graphic novels (as discussed here), there is no equivalent growth in the number of women writing, producing and directing that media–let alone equivalent numbers of men and women on the Comic-Con panels.

(snip)

While older women are indeed reigning on TV, it would have been nice if more women of all ages had reigned at Comic-Con. Sadly, the women at the Con, whether real-live “booth babes” or illustrated characters, were far more sexualized and less clothed than their male counterparts. Thank goodness for the likes of Joss Whedon, who complained during the Dark Horse panel about the fact that he has been coming to Comic-Con for 10 years and has yet to find a woman hero statue that doesn’t look like a porn star. When he described the story of his career as depicting women who are not helpless, I was reminded of the “Zombie Dice” game I encountered on the Comic-Con floor, which included the characters “action hero” and “girlfriend.” When I asked the man demonstrating the game why the “girlfriend” couldn’t be a “action heroine,” he said “Oh, it gets worse … he has two brains and she only has one … but it’s OK because they save each other.” Too bad that the creator of this game didn’t take a page from Whedon’s book and create a woman with brains who didn’t need saving.

Here’s hoping that next year’s Con includes more strong women who are not only acting but also producing, writing and directing. And, who knows, maybe 2013 will be the year in which Whedon finally finds a non-pornified statue of a woman hero.