Opinion: The great Spider-Woman sexist derriere scandal

Sometimes feminists make, uh, asses of themselves.

A prime example is the Great Spider-Woman Sexist Derriere Scandal, in which female commentators in media ranging from Elle to Time to the Guardian waxed outrageous over a variant cover unveiled by Marvel Comics for the premiere issue of its forthcoming “Spider-Woman” series, scheduled for release in November.

The cover, illustrated by award-winning Italian graphic artist Milo Manara, depicts Spider-Woman clambering over the roof of a skyscraper with her hindquarters stuck up in the air.

The horror! Elle’s Megan Friedman wrote:

“All in all, the image seems to toe the line of pornographic; imagine Spider-Man in that position instead, and the concept would have never gotten this far …. [I]f they want to attract female fans, they should at least have their male superheroes pose like this too.”

Time’s Eliana Dockterman, seemingly forgetting that Marvel characters are fantasy characters who can do things ordinary humans can’t, chimed in:

“[T]he (physically impossible?) pose — bottom up — is familiar to anyone who has read erotic comic books. More importantly, there’s no way that is an efficient method of climbing that rooftop. And what kind of material clings to a posterior like that? ...

“I get it: superheroes wear Spandex and a lot of excitable teenage boys read these comic books. But this cover takes the sex-factor to a new extreme, totally alienating those 47% of [female] comic book fans I mentioned earlier. A male hero would never be placed in the same physical position.”

Rob Bricken of io9 wrote:

“She looks like she’s wearing body-paint, and that’s a big no-no for an industry still trying to remember that women exist and may perhaps read comics and also don’t want to feel completely gross when they do so …. Here’s a simple rule: If it’s inappropriate for a male character, it should also be inappropriate for a female character.”

The only problem with all this moral posturing: It turns out that a male Marvel Comics superhero — namely Spider-Man himself — had appeared on the cover of one of his comic books in the exact same pose: clambering atop a building with his hindquarters stuck up in the air.

“Nobody cared or even noticed,” said the humorist Maddox, whose hilarious (although somewhat NSFW) video uncovered the striking similarity between the two cover images. Maddox even superimposed the Spider-Man image on top of Spider-Woman’s, and the congruity was nearly line for line.

Furthermore, as Maddox pointed out, since the earliest days of superhero comic books, it’s been customary to draw superheroes, male and female, as though they’re wearing nothing but body paint and boots (though the female heroines seemingly have bullet-proof brassieres on under the paint). They’re essentially nude, like Greek gods and goddesses in classical art, with every muscle of their perfectly toned bodies in high definition. This is why, until the current era of high-tech fabrics, it was almost impossible to craft a costume for an on-screen Superman that didn’t look like Grandpa’s long johns. Remember the telltale wrinkles in Adam West’s Batman costume for the 1960s television show?

One lesson to be learned from this egg-on-the-face episode is how fundamentally prudish supposedly “sex-positive” feminists are. Elle’s Friedman even had complaints about the far tamer official Spider-Woman premiere cover “it does seem to throw her bust into the spotlight.” Well! Jill Pantozzi of The Mary Sue argued that Manara, whose art is famous for veering toward the soft-core pornographic, had deliberately modeled his Spider-Woman figure on a spicy illustration for one of his erotic graphic novels.

But the more salient lesson is this: Feminists, before you go shooting from the hip about sexism and double standards in superhero comic books, find out something about superhero comic books first. They have legions of fans, many of them on the Internet, and their fans tend to be obsessive-compulsive about acquiring an almost pathological depth of encyclopedic and fine-grained knowledge about the comics themselves, their characters, their plots, their writers and their illustrators (as James Sturm explained in Slate). One of those fans probably remembered that Spider-Man cover of a decade ago and tipped off Maddox.

It’s always a good idea to do some homework before making broad generalizations about a subculture and its art.

Charlotte Allen writes frequently about feminism, politics and religion. Follow her on Twitter @MeanCharlotte.

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