Our culture is oversaturated with hypersexualized images of women. If you should know anything about Wonder Woman, it is that she was raised with the Amazonians - a society populated by immortal super-women that had once been victims of male abuse– thus, no men were allowed on their island. But if Wonder Woman grew up without the unrestricted commercial power of the male gaze, why does her uniform and body language always make her appear as less of a superhero?
Wonder Woman's less than superhero stance among male gendered superheroes
According to Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristoff, authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women, all should be knee-deep in the struggle for gender equality:
“It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century. In this routine “gendercide,” more girls are killed in any one decade than amount of total people slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. And in this century, according to WuDunn and Kristoff, “the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.”
Gender equality is not an issue that can be resolved in a matter months or years, but we have to start somewhere.
When I look around this summer at my colleagues, many are too busy operating in the “passive female archetype” which is, according to WuDunn and Kristoff, derived from our media and overly-infused with hypersexualized depictions of women. Our obsession with celebrities and summer anthems such as Drake’s “Fancy” keep us from realizing that there’s more to life than being “fine like a ticket on the dash.” Most women around the world are not “in the mall steadily racking up the air miles.” Nor are they “spending hours in salons on their hairstyles.” Rather, the majority of women in this world are confronted in their daily lives with the global water crisis. In most places, there is a life-threatening lack of accessibility to clean water. In accordance with traditional gender roles that charge women maintenance of the domestic sphere, most women spend eight to ten hours a day collecting clean water for their households. This leaves women with scant time for pursuing an education, taking care of their children, or even resting.
Male superheroes, depicted the same way.
As stated in www.water.cc: “time spent collecting water disempowers women by reinforcing time-poverty and lowering [a woman's] income.” Generally, women are not given the chance to be on the water-planning committees even though they are the group most involved with water-gathering. Unfair, right?
In a recent interview in Marie Claire, Olivia Wilde highlighted the divide between the media’s focus on the role of women and the actual situation of most women in the world. She stated: “I’d like to refocus everyone’s attention away from the Kardashians and onto Doctors Without Borders or aid workers. Let’s redefine scandal. Scandal is not who so-and-so is dating; scandal is the fact that 1.2 million people are still living in tents in Haiti, and cholera is rampant because Nepalese U.N. soldiers dumped shit from their Porta-Potties into the river. That’s a fucking scandal. If the average 15-year-old was hearing about that instead of so-and-so’s plastic surgery or cheating in Hollywood, I’d feel better about our future.”
Getting informed is the first step, but considering the volume of hypersexualized images we view on a daily basis, it’s going to take some effort to look past our body-image issues and see what the other 90% of the world is faced with.
Wonder Woman once said, “The only thing that can surpass super strength is the power of the brain.”
Around the world women in low-income and under-priviledged communities get less of an opportunity to show and strengthen their brainpower. As privileged individuals living in the wealthiest nation in the world, it is time we get ourselves educated and have our voices heard. It’s time to start getting involved with youth and feminist campaigns that give us the chance to move our world forward.
Editor’s note: Check out Vanessa’s blog on feminism & American Muslims at: vanessagotswag.tumblr.com
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well put, imagine if womyn of color were granted the same opportunities that the evangelical strait Caucasian male is privileged with, the world would be so much of a better place, no? Wonder Women is one example of how disgusting how society portrays womyn. Props to the author for taking the initiative to challenge the ills of our society.
Wonder woman dresses that way to sell in America, specifically it needs to sell to men since it’s men who are buying comics.
It’s like you’re not used to living in America where sex sells which is why everything is “hypersexuallized” (though i suspect sex sells well everywhere since prostitution exists everywhere)
This article makes me feel tricked as well since you bait and switch. I expect something intelligent or something that makes me think about women in comics differently, but what I get is a simple complaint which is easily answered by a simple answer, but then the rest of the article goes on to talk about how life for women kinda suck outside of America.
saying looking past our body-image issues is the solution to ignorance about life outside of America also seems to be a bit of a leap of logic to me.
why is it a leap of logic? the point is realize how idiotic some of your concerns are and refocus on other people’s lives. the hypersexualization of women’s bodies which focuses our attention on breast size and kim kardashian is part of an american-based global pop culture that distracts us from the very real issues we must all face as global citizens. there’s nothing hard to follow there.
Though I do have a criticism of the article- the last paragraph is BIZARRE. You personally are (apparently) speaking from a position of privilege, but why do you
a) assume that all Americans are as privileged as you are?
b) assume your audience is all privileged Americans?
c) assume all of these people out in the world are all not privileged?
The arbitrary division of privilege/America and no privilege/the rest of the world blinds you and your readers’ eyes to the VERY real problem of oppression WITHIN America, as well as the fact that oppression today is often carried out by local elites in other countries.
Yes sex sells, but that doesn’t mean that we should exploit it in EVERY way possible. And when we do, then we shouldn’t accept the fact. It’s true that whenever any form of mass communication has been created the first things to be published are the Bible and then pornography, but that doesn’t mean that we can sit around and let women become objectified. The American Psychological Association released a report finding that “Sexualization has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality, and attitudes and beliefs,” Aside from sexualization being linked with eating disorders, low self-esteem, and depression in girls, it also has a broader impact. “More general societal effects may include an increase in sexism; fewer girls pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; increased rates of sexual harassment and sexual violence; and an increased demand for child pornography,” the APA report notes. So it is a huge deal.
Men are not the only ones that buy comics. Please don’t tell me you also believe that there shouldn’t be a half-black, half-Latino Spider-Man, because only white men buy comics.
I’m sorry that you feel tricked, that was not my intention. Rather, I wanted to take this example of an amazingly powerful woman being subjugated to pose in a “sexy”/”damsel” sort of manner and then look at the broader issue of how this hypersexualization prevents us from reaching our full potential as women; as we’re too busy feeling bad about our appearanc; how ridiculous standards are created through such images. If we look past our own seemingly petty issues, I think there will be change. From what I have experienced, we tend to be VERY good at taking action, but it’s in the knowledge arena that we sometimes are lacking. It’s just a matter of educating ourselves about issues that go beyond our “first world problems” because being so blessed with time and opportunity aka power we have a great responsibility to all of humanity (another comic-related reference for you lol.)