Comics by Women

This was a fun week. I read all of This One Summer and enjoyed it a lot. I was expecting something different I suppose, something with a more concrete ending and explanations of everything, but I enjoyed reading it. It reminded me of the summers I used to spend upstate New York in the middle of nowhere with my cousins.

And now for something completely different.

I typically enjoy works by women more than I do works by men. Women genuinely get it when it comes to art or writing. To me, when I hear that a production team is filled with only men (or worse: only white men) I get a little scared. I mean, we've all seen how male comic artists draw women. Awkward, sexualized proportions, revealing outfits that are like that for the male gaze not because girls can wear whatever they choose, poorly designed armor that's more for showing cleavage than it is for protecting cleavage. There are a lot of negative aspects that come along when men who know jack shit about women write or draw women.

As for women, I feel like they're good at both portraying women and men. They're good at writing women because, duh, if you define as a woman then most likely you know a thing or three about women. Women also know how to write men because they don't see men from the narcissistic central viewpoint that men often see themselves from. That viewpoint isn't always so outright, but I feel that it's a way of thinking ingrained into our society: males > females. But women can see men outside that viewpoint and see them for who they really are. Men can show feelings besides Edgy Stoic Protagonist with a Little Bit of Stubble. Men can fail at things and feel bad about it. Men can be losers, men can be self conscious, men can be confident, and men can be nice.

From how I see it, I feel that women know how to write men because men open up to women more than they do to their close male friends. So yeah, women get that men and women are both complex creatures because they see how both are complex, men sometimes don't. And sadly those men usually run entertainment businesses.

What I liked about Diary of a Dominatrix was that even though we know the protagonist is an extremely sexual person, she doesn't come off that way. She comes off as just your average girl trying to make it in the world, and she makes her way by being a dominatrix. Simple as that. There's even a scene where she's lackadaisically spanking a client while thinking about her list of chores to do for the day. We see her clients as the hypersexualized lustful seductors, when often we see women depicted in those roles. If a man wrote Diary of a Dominatrix, it would be a completely different story.