I Can Officially Start Sentences with, "Back In My Day..."

This week, a fellow English teacher asked me to visit her undergraduate class to talk about comic books. To which I promptly replied, "Name the time and I'll be there." I didn't really have a big plan. I can talk comics all day, I knew they were discussing "ICON" and I had plenty to say about that book. So I showed up, introduced myself as the woman who enraged a thousand Slave Leias and started talking to them about my niche specialty, feminism and it's intersection (and occasional lack thereof) within the comic book world. Where comic books where when I was a kid and where they are now and why.

I taught them about context and why it matters. Where did Wonder Woman's outfit originate? Sidebar: I theorize that the famous WWII pin-up Betty Grable influenced the design of Wonder Woman's costume. When Wonder Woman first appeared in 1940, she was wearing a skirt. After Betty's famous pin-up pic a couple of years later, the skirt vanished giving Wonder Woman that much coveted "bathing beauty patriot" look. Essentially making her a hero for revealing that much skin. Betty Grable did it for America! And now all of the sudden, here's a woman dressed like a pin-up kicking rear and taking names. This is what made her outfit revolutionary. But in our modern context without that vast bank of collective knowledge in the public, what does her outfit mean to most people? Why do all action heroines look about the same? Does that "look" of spandex and boots still signify anything, stand for anything? But this is all beside the point...I guess I'm stewing about it while I form my opinion of the just released pictures of the new Wonder Woman.

I talked with them about how Rocket from ICON broke the mold. Why did we need a character like Rocket? (Who is black, fifteen, pregnant, and from the wrong side of the tracks...and she absolutely rules on the page with panels in which she punches out racist cops saying things like, "And I ain't no Rodney King either!" Which made me shed a tear of pride.) I had us make lists on the board of all the female comic book characters we could think of, then think about what they had in common, what they wore, etc. It was like an archaeological dig into the images of female superheroes.

I passed around a dozen or so of my first edition action heroine comics. The first Mystique, the first Batgirl, the first solo Catwoman run, the first Harley Quinn, etcetera, etcetera. None of which any of them had ever seen. This has less to do with age probably and more to do with obsession. What are the odds that I would walk into a classroom full of undergraduates who just happened to be as obsessed with comics as I am? But anyway...

I told them how "back in my day" action heroines were new, a wonder to behold for my role-model hungry child's mind. They started popping up en masse for the first time after "Alien". I asked how many of them had seen "Alien". One or two hands out of twenty shot up. I asked several similar questions about Star Wars. Same result. And I realized...holy cow...I'm getting older. I talked with them about action heroines and to them, they were nothing new. These kids have grown up with action heroines as a regular part of their summer movies, their Saturday morning cartoons, and even their live action TV shows. I mean, most of my students were nine or ten when "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones" came out. While I was rolling my eyes at the oh-so-convenient bodice ripping of Padme Amidala's costume during the Battle of Geonosis...they were watching it without thinking twice. (Or in the case of the students I talked with, not seeing it at all.)

I mean, I'm twenty-eight. It's hardly time to pull out the rocking chair. But I had a student in my own class this week turn in an essay trying to imagine a world without the internet and smart phones and how crazy it must've been. I grew up without the internet.

I've been thinking lately about all the things that I know that my undergraduate students don't know and it's more than pop culture trivia from the eighties. Though I do know plenty of that. Getting older is giving me a lot of gifts. When I was in my late teens/early twenties, I had to defend my knowledge of pop culture. I had to justify it in my own mind, why I was spending so much time watching JAWS over and over again. Why I was an obsessive fan. Now it's like...okay, I've been in the world for almost thirty years. I've seen some things. Here's what I think about those things, and just being around for that long and counting myself an expert in feminism of film and comics justifies those observations, no matter how much I get accused of "over-thinking". (Beware the dissenting opinion in the geek world, it will get you plenty of "Just shut up and watch the movie/read the book" backlash.)

Now it's become a niche that allows me to write for a living and teach young people how to look at film, television and books with a critical eye. I'm trying to teach all my students that looking at something with a critical eye doesn't mean you "don't like it". It just means you give yourself permission to ask why you're seeing what you're seeing. Who decides what female characters look like, how they behave and why? (Still mostly men, just FYI.)

Because you can love comics (and comic movies)
with all your heart and still be occasionally
annoyed with the over-sexed depiction of women

If we don't ask those questions as an audience, we might be participating in something that hurts instead of helps, or at the very least annoys instead of entertains. I guess I sometimes see the world of comics like "Idiocracy", with some of the images sliding into soft core territory under the argument that "that's how they've always looked". As a female reader, sometimes that makes me feel isolated. I know that comics and sex appeal are inevitably intertwined, and I love most of the traditional costumes, but sometimes it's like turning the pages of a fourteen year old boy's mind and that can make me road weary of my beloved comics.

Anyway, that same fangirl obsessiveness of my youth has helped me in the academic and journalistic world. I never would've imagined even seven or eight years ago that all my long walks to the comic book store on lazy summer days would give me a platform from which to ask students questions like, "With all the female readers of comic books today, why isn't there more variety of appearance in female superhero characters?"

I used to feel kind of embarrassed for not letting go of comic books and movies. But getting older doesn't mean letting go of the things you love, it means making something out of them.

Even if it gets you accused of being a feminist harpy...or sounding like a curmudgeon.