I love being a nerd. It’s great. Normally whenever someone gets so obsessed with something that they don a weird costume and camp out on a sidewalk for 48 hours the next logical step is a restraining order; but flash your nerd ID badge, and behavior that some would consider psychopathic becomes merely creepy. It’s like belonging to a cult, in a way; you wear costumes, speak in tongues, and convene regularly for sacred meetings at the local GameStop. And sometimes it’s all I want in the world to just get the nerdiest t-shirt I can find and plaster that logo across my chest. But thanks to the help of numerous t-shirt websites, that simple goal is a lot harder than it sounds.
It seems like a lot of retailers are unaware of the
existence of female fans. Nerdiness has always been characterized as a guy
thing—I say nerd, and you probably think of a spindly dude with
centimeter-thick glasses and a pocket protector. People refer generically to
“fanboys”, assuming that the ladies are too busy making sandwiches to be
interested in pop culture. But lately that stereotype has gotten more and more
outdated, as women have taken their place alongside their male comrades in
headshotting all the pathetic n00bs and storming all the conventions.
Unfortunately, the media and its outlets have done little to realize this new
world.
For one, it is nearly impossible to get good merch
(specifically t-shirts, because most everything else is gender-neutral). I am a
chick and have the body to prove it. I don’t want to have to get by with
throwing a small guy’s-cut shirt in the wash 5 times so it doesn’t look like
I’m wearing a sack. Beyond that, getting nerdy girls clothing is a pain in the
ass for a bunch of other reasons:
1. Expense.
For plenty of online retailers such as J!NX and ThinkGeek (both of which I love
in spite of this), a woman’s shirt costs around 2-3 dollars more than a guy’s,
and uses less fabric. That might not seem like a lot, but think of it this way:
with the money you’d save on 3 t-shirts, you could go down to Wal-Mart and buy
an Iron Man DvD.
2. Material.
The stuff they make some women’s t-shirts out of is so flimsy. Maybe they think
it will stretch over our boobs better, as opposed to not ripping in half when
you pull it off the hanger.
3. Availability.
I went to Adventure Island one time, and they had like 3 different comic book
shops in their Marvel area. It was totally awesome, except for the fact that
the only women’s t-shirts they carried all said something to the effect of “I
only date superheros” or “my boyfriend has iron abs, literally!” I might find that sort of thing vapid and mildly
sexist, but that’s just an opinion and I have no problem with people who do
wear those shirts. I do have a
problem with the manufacturers who think that the only kind of t-shirts female
nerds want to wear are ones that lock them into the role of a girly sex object.
Some of us actually want to wear Cap’s insignia emblazoned on our chest without
the subtext implication that we’ll be banging him later on.
The bias goes beyond the apparel section. Walk into any
comic book store and flip through the covers; I’ll bet that one thing you won’t
be wanting for is a plethora of unnaturally large breasts. Sometimes it seems
like the majority of women in comic books have a rack comparable to if
Christina Hendrix’s boobs had twins fathered by a watermelon. And on top of
that they dress these characters up in skimpy outfits that are very rarely
practical for punching a bad guy’s face in. Take Wonder Woman's costume, for example. I
highly doubt that a nip slip is something you want to worry about while trying
not to be incinerated by a death ray. Not to mention all those spinebreaking
poses to show tits and ass at the same time. Seriously artists, I know proper
anatomy is for losers and all but our bodies don’t actually bend that way. The problem isn't that comic book women tend to have large breasts and skimpy clothing, because there's nothing inherently sexist about that; it's that they're being exploited for their sexuality, treated merely as eye candy for an audience with a serious sweet-tooth.
The issues are more than just skin deep; whether it’s because many comic book authors are dudes with no
clue how to write a woman, or because they think their readers have no interest
in such things, strong female personalities are in short supply. Granted, there
are some good ones as well: Kitty Pryde, Wonder Woman, and Barbara Gordon to
name a few. But for every good female character there are a plethora of poorly
written, underdeveloped, overly-sexualized ones to boot. There’s also the “women
in refrigerators” conundrum, which describes the way many female characters are
often ruthlessly punished or treated as plot devices to spur their manly men to
action.
One root of this problem is that the comic book industries
keep assuming that their audience is composed entirely of straight dudes. There
is some truth to that, of course; many women-centric comics don’t sell as well
as their male-centric counterparts, and the fanbase has been an unequivocal
sausagefest in the past. What I don’t understand is how alienating 50% of the
population with over-sexualized and internally flawed characters is a good
marketing strategy. Many women can be and already are interested in comics, and
the industry could make a buttload of money off of them if they would only make
more of an effort to be less gender-biased.
Funny how whining about finding the right t-shirt size can lead
to a feminist critique of the comic book industry.
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