Hey, Bitch! Stop Making Feminists Look Stupid!
I have some issues with the Women in Refrigerators theory as you can see here. But my biggest problem is that the theory is taken as fact by many people without any research done to examine it’s veracity. Another example of this problem has appeared in the pages of Bitch. It becomes increasingly apparent as one reads the article that the author, Shannon Cochran, has done little (if any) research to see if what she is writing has some connection to reality. I could point out the flaws in the article one by one, but I think we can see how very little research she did by looking at this statement: In the eight years since, few of the list’s characters have returned to life or regained their powers.
Below is a list of characters from the list who have returned to life or regained their powers. I might note that many of those listed actually had in the description of what happened to the character that she returned to life or regained her powers. I made this list off the top of my head, so there may be more from the original list who have sprung to life or been energized since in the last eight years that I’ve missed. And to be fair, we could also add some female characters to the original list of dead or depowered characters and we could quibble over a few on my list like whether or not this Supergirl is the same Supergirl who died. But that doesn’t change the fact that more than a few characters from the WiR list “have returned to life or regained their powers” despite what Shannon Cochran would have us believe. To me, articles like this are the foe of feminism despite the fact that their authors believe they are helping feminism. Feminism is not aided by knee-jerk, slapdash propaganda even if you call it journalism. It makes feminism look like an agenda-driven pile of bullshit, and I might add that it diminishes the credibility not only of feminism, but the feminist author of the article and the feminist magazine that published it. What has driven so many people, men and women, from feminism is not the people opposed to feminism, but the people who would smear it from the inside with ridiculous theories, male bashing, and erotophobia. If in fact, many female comic characters do return to life and regain their powers, what is the point of saying they don’t? To create a false sense of victimization? To smear the reputations of comic professionals? To make women sad or angry? How does complaining about something that is demonstrably false help feminism? If you are really concerned with women and super heroic comics, instead of writing about something you’ve imagined like that female characters don’t get their powers back, wouldn’t it make more sense to write about real issues like the lack of female writers and artists in the genre, the lack of female scientists in comics, or the fact that the exemplars of most attributes (e.g. strongest, fastest, smartest) in comics are male? Something real? Feminism does not need to be the bastion of stupidity or paranoia that some so-called feminists seem to want it to be. It can begin with research and then make theories based on that research instead of deciding on a theory and doing just enough anecdotal storytelling to support the theory. You can do actual research instead of just assuming that anything terrible men could do to women they have actually done.
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That right there would be an actual point, and not just some silly rant.