SHOOTING THE SHIRT

Well, I would not have thought that in just a little over a month, the comics biz could generate another silly sex-controversy equal to that of "Spiderbuttgate." But I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The original image, from JUSTICE LEAGUE #12, was a pretty uncontroversial cover showing Superman and Wonder Woman making out in mid-air.

At some point, a T-shirt company used the image thusly:

This probably seemed only mildly provocative to the shirt-makers, whose business is come up with weird shit that people are willing to wear on their shirt-fronts.  Unfortunately, the idea that a male hero might want to shout "score" when he's gettin' some incited various netheads to view the shirt as yet another marginalization of femininity.  It also spurred artist Bill Siekiewicz to do his own version.

I'm indebted to this column on Robot 6 for reproducing the Siekiewicz image; it also features a particularly lively discussion of the moral issues regarding both the original shirt and Siekiewicz's response.  It's a better than average discussion, though I don't imagine that any of the "victimologists" convinced any of the "mansplainers," or vice versa.  The final poster as of today notes that contrary to Siekiewicz's interpretation, the original illustration isn't showing Wonder Woman closing her hand into a fist with the intention of belting the Man of Steel; it's because she's holding her magic lasso.

The selective reading of the image is on a par with the deliberate misreadings of the Manara Spider-butt, comparing it with another image in which a Manara female was "presenting" her butt for a sexual encounter. However, the shirt doesn't just present an image, but also text, and it's certainly the text that got some knickers twisted.

So what are the objectionable features of that text? If it had only featured the word "Score!," then I hypothesize that it would have been viewed as tacky, but not a marginalization of all things feminine. It seems likely that the other phrase, "Superman does it again," is what twisted the panties. The shirt might have even escaped condemnation had it left off the word "again," for with the addition of that word, the shirt as a whole implies to some minds that Wonder Woman has been reduced to a notch on Superman's bedpost.  And according to Siekiewicz, being a Lothario merits a punch in the face.

Obviously, there are creepy Lotharios out there, even when they don't resort to illegal actions like using date-drugs, etc. But the image doesn't show Superman either forcing himself on the Amazing Amazon or even using any sort of psychological tactics to get into her pants. Even with the text, all it says is that Superman is successfully seducing an entirely willing Wonder Woman. If this is a crime, then it's one of which a great many men are guilty, ranging from actors like Errol Flynn and Warren Beatty to sports figures like Wilt Chamberlain.

Ironically, the "victimology" side, in claiming that Wonder Woman has been reduced to an "object"-- e.g, that "notch on the bedpost"-- they actually subtract from her character the ability to choose. In sports, to "score" means to meet a challenge and overcome opposition, not to take something forcefully or, conversely, to take it without effort. And it's arguable that the countless women who "surrendered" to male celebrities did so because the men had gained the reputation for being satisfying on a number of levels.  Since the T-shirt image does not show Superman imposing any force on Wonder Woman, Siekiewicz's response is tantamount to his saying, "A woman has the right to assault a man for making sexual overtures, particularly when that man has gained a reputation for bedding other women."

To be sure, one can see this conceit used for comedy throughout dozens of Japanese manga-series. Whether or not the male star of a comedy-manga is a real Lothario or merely succeeds in attracting a harem of women into his orbit, it's customary for that male to be continually beaten up by at least one woman.

Here's RANMA 1/2:

Here's LOVE HINA:

And finally, CITY HUNTER:

But in these comic circumstances, the beating may be deemed a symbolic displacement for the sex-act, since the female is almost always hot for the male. On the terms of comedy, then, these assaults are amusing and thus stand as positive forces. To the best of my knowledge, there's no political content to these displays-- which is fortunate, since, as Sienkiewicz has aptly shown, applying this sort of sex-and-sadism mix to the real world is the worst kind of bad politics.

QUICK WONDER WOMAN/SUB-MARINER THOUGHTS

Posted this on a WONDER WOMAN forum-topic.

________________


Some of the zeitgeist that made Wonder Woman able to sustain two features at once was a consequence of World War II boosterism.  Both Wonder Woman and the Sub-Mariner were in part popular because even though they were not Americans, they made America's cause their own. In an inversion of the trope in which godlike Americans go to Europe to save the Allies, they're godlike Allies defending Americans and other Allies-- and Wonder Woman even drapes herself in the stars and stripes to reduce any sense of her "foreign-ness." It may not be a coincidence that neither character has enjoyed anything like the sales/popularity they once enjoyed.

Wonder Woman was also at her most popular when she was aimed at kids, the primary purchasers of comic books in the Golden Age.  Her fame and the complexity of her original setup could make it possible for her to enjoy success with an older audience-- but it would have to be in a format that modern adults would buy, and that ain't the floppy magazine format.

BRONZE AGE THOUGHTS

I recently came across this Roy Thomas observation from DRACULA LIVES #1 (1973):

"It's our firm conviction that at least a sizable portion of the future of comics lies in a larger, more expensive, even more mature product than today's color-comics market is structured to allow. In a day when Playboy and other magazines sell for a buck (and more, on such gala holidays as Christmas, New Year, and Hugh Hefner's birthday)--in a day when a forty- or fifty cent cover price is possible only to a magazine of tremendous initial circulation--in short, in a time of creeping inflation, rampant overcrowding of the newsstands--we felt that, even though Marvel's popularity is at an all-time high, we'd be fools and klutzes not to experiment with other prices, other sizes, other formats."

It's my theory that what Thomas was saying in '73 was by then common wisdom for Marvel since about 1970-71. I've always considered the Bronze Age-- which I place in 1970-- to be a new era because that's when the Big Two took their first faltering steps toward "adult entertainment," as represented by Marvel's CONAN and DC's GREEN LANTERN. I must admit that there's a big marketing difference in the two, since the former was aiming for success based on the popularity of the paperback Howard reprints while the latter was a gamble aimed at keeping a failing book alive.  Still, both are predicated on appealing to non-juvenile interests.

That Thomas was thinking in this wise long before 1973 is evinced in the 1971 premiere of SAVAGE TALES, for which Roy is billed as "associate editor." The idea of appealing to an older market would be a logical step since it's commonly asserted that sales in the late 1960s went way down, as the superhero bubble, prompted in part by the BATMAN teleseries, went kerblooey.

Marvel-- which also attempted to corner the underground market with the 1974-76 COMIX BOOK-- seems to have been more heavily invested in developing this market than DC, or even Warren. I've read very little of Silver Age Warren, so I don't know if its horror and war stories were on a par with the more mature stories of EC Comics, nor do I know whether or not the Warren audience skewed older than that of Marvel and DC. Warren did begin VAMPIRELLA in 1969, so that would seem to be a more overt courting of an adult audience by Warren, using sex-and-violence in much the same way Marvel used Conan. 

On a side-note, I'd opine that the Marvel guys never seemed to get a handle on adult horror: most of the b&w horror stuff had the same tone as the color comics.  

In 1973 it probably made all the sense in the world to assume that magazines would be a secure foundation on which a comics-company could build. For one thing, the company could expect to raise prices when other magazines did, and not lose out, as DC allegedly did when they tried to maintain 25-cent comics against Marvel's 20-centers.  But then, who could have predicted that the digital revolution would come close to making all magazine entertainment irrelevant?

VICTIMOLOGY 101, PT. 2

The book I mentioned in Part 1 of this essay-series is Mike Madrid's 2009 book on superheroines, entitled THE SUPERGIRLS.

In many respects I ought to like this book. The author appears to be a Silver-Age kid like myself. Just as I have devoted a blog to the topic of empowered female characters here, Madrid's introduction depicts the author as having an inveterate interest in comic-book super-heroines, if not for reasons identical to my own.
And unlike the only previous work on the subject-- Trina Robbins' GREAT WOMEN SUPERHEROES, a very detailed history of superheroines in comics, albeit with some major omissions-- THE SUPERGIRLS is an attempt to interpret the depiction of superheroines in cultural terms, as the book's subtitle indicates: "Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines." (Despite Madrid putting "fashion" first, possibly to appeal to academics, there's really very little about the specifics of fashion in fantasy or reality.)

Unfortunately, SUPERGIRLS is a prime example of an interpretative work laboring under a cloud of false victimology. I'm sure that Madrid must have in his mind some notion of the perfect superheroine, a figure that provides a "happy medium" between a type who is too wholesome and a type who is too oversexualized. But he does not succeed in depicting such a paradigm in the pages of his book. Thus, all through the pages of SUPERGIRLS, Madrid always seems to be carping at the imperfections of almost all those who have depicted comic-book superheroines, without establishing his grounds for true excellence.

The first two chapters don't raise many objections. Madrid divides the majority of Golden Age heroines into a few convenient, perhaps slightly oversimple, categories, and he devotes special attention to comparing and contrasting the two heroines who were arguably both the most influential and best-known comics-heroines; Sheena and Wonder Woman. However, even on page 2, he starts the victimology by claiming that "for now [i.e., 1947] women would have to be content to put on scanty costumes and assume a disguise in order to act like themselves." This sounds for all the world like one of many supercilious putdowns of patriarchy, easily countered by the observation that male superheroes are also predicated on acting like fools and diletttantes to camoflague their real natures. And if one should need a source for this observation, one can find it-- on page 5 of SUPERGIRLS, where Madrid himself admits that male superheroes had to "dumb themselves down" to mix with mortal kind.

However, when Madrid gets into the third chapter, entitled "The Girlfriends," he goes into victimology overdrive-- and both his logic and his accuracy go out the window. I'll try to keep my complaints to the most egregious examples.

Page 12-- Madrid asserts that the girlfriends of featured heroes-- the Hawkgirls, the Bulletgirls-- crusade against crime only to impress their boyfriends. It's one thing to believe this, but Madrid offers no textual proof of this species of victim-crying.

Page 36-- Madrid claims that in William Moulton Marston's WONDER WOMAN origin, "Hercules allows himself to be beaten by Hippolyta." That's not in any Marston origin I've read: as I remember, Hercules loses a fair fight, and then plots revenge through deception.


Page 56-- Madrid claims that "the most important female figure in [Batman's] world" is his "sainted, slain mother," despite the fact that the character rarely thinks about Martha Wayne at all in most of the Golden Age stories. This is a superficial Freudian reading put forth years ago by Michael Fleischer, but there's no evidence that the Oedipus Complex informs the Batman mythos. The idea that this complex is proven simply by the absence of lasting romantic relationships in the hero's life is a clear case of putting the cart before the horse: i.e., romantic relationships are *primarily* absent  from the series because they would interfere with the open-ended setup of the franchise, not because of Batman's personal trauma.

Page 92-- Madrid, having spent a long time chronicling the career of the Silver Age Supergirl, complains that she "didn't show any signs of ever growing up to be a Superwoman"-- apparently another carp about men keeping women down, even though by that time it should have been evident that both male and female characters did not age, given that the readerships were assumed to turn over every few years.

Page 98-- He tells us that the 1990s version of Supergirl "was clearly meant to be a male fantasy, and no longer a character to attract or inspire female readers"-- yet, he has just finished complaining that the tame Silver Age version, which he compares to singer Leslie Gore, also never reaches any sort of potential, even though she was putatively aimed at female readers. There's also, throughout the book, no dealing with the possibility that sometimes female readers enjoy sexual fantasies themselves.

Page 103-- Madrid describes the Silver Age in very inaccurate terms, particularly when he claims that "Magic was a mysterious enemy, meant to be defeated." Granted, a lot of DC's Silver Age books are hot for science more than sorcery, but there are a fair number of magical heroes-- the Spectre, the Enchantress, Zatanna-- and I see no evidence that magic is despised, even by heroes like Superman, who numbered it among his vulnerabilities. This may be extrapolated from Madrid's view that all magic went out the window in the WONDER WOMAN book once Kanigher displaced Marston, but I don't think Kanigher used magic any less; he just didn't use it the same way Marston did.

Page 105-- Madrid claims that there's a victim-based reading possible from the fact that Superman and Batman did not make regular appearances in the early JUSTICE LEAGUE title, griping that "Wonder Woman is not considered to be in the same 'league' as Superman and Batman." This too is better explained by extrinsic rather than intrinsic factors. Many pros and fans have attested that DC editor Mort Weisinger maintained, or attempted to maintain, a close hold on these characters, since he Weisinger edited all of the Superman books and arguably influenced the artistic direction of the Batman books even when they were 0being edited by Weisinger's associate Jack Schiff. It's been rumored, with whatever truth, that Weisinger lobbied to keep Superman and Batman out of the Justice League, and I for one find this a more likely explanation for the duo's early JLA absence than some mysterious pecking-order.

Page 112-- After claiming that the Invisible Girl's original powers are useless-- somehow overlooking that she defeats Doctor Doom in FANTASTIC FOUR #5 and engages him in single combat in #17-- Madrid claims that Sue Storm's force-field powers come about because "Reed has figured out a way to boost Sue's powers." Madrid doesn't bother to cite the issue number where this happened-- though he's careful to cite issue #12 as evidence of Sue's non-importance-- but the fact is that in FF #22, Reed only suspects that Sue has powers she hasn't used yet. The scientist's "nuclear-powered" measuring device *accidentally* stimulates Sue into manifesting her new powers, which are, like the powers of the male heroes, attributable to the original cosmic-ray accident they all endured.

Page 139-- Light Lass, Dream Girl, and the White Witch are said to thwart the sorcerer Mordru in a LEGION story. Apparently all short-haired girls look alike to Madird: 'twas Princess Projectra, not Light Lass.

Page 159-- Marvel's Black Widow is said to be facing "hard personal choices" when she deserts her romantic partnership with Daredevil to accept the more "prestigious membership" of the Avengers. Yet what the character actually thinks is not some feminist assertiveness: she accepts the membership because she wants to have time to think about her relationship with Daredevil! The Widow also only remains with the Avengers for two issues in this period; in all likelihood Marvel editors simply wanted an excuse to terminate the ongoing Daredevil-Black Widow relationship for one reason or another.

Page 189-- "Numerous stories focused on the world's obsession with learning Wonder Woman's secret identity in an effort to find her weakness."-- Gee, that's such an original notion. Uncover a superhero's ID to compromise said hero. I guess Wonder Woman must have been the first hero ever to have suffered such investigations. Or, if she wasn't the first, surely this only happens to female heroes, as a marker of the indignities they alone suffer.

Page 221-- "Out of style, Wonder Woman was also erased"-- Uh, yeah, and it was because she was going to be rebooted, as Madrid himself tells us on p. 208.

Page 249-- "The jungle antics [of jungle queens] ended in 1954"-- again, no, Atlas Comics kept jungle comics, including two jungle queens, going until 1957.

On the same page, Madrid has problems with the nefarious Catwoman becoming a "good girl." He overlooks that she only reformed during the years 1951-52, and that she went back to being a "bad girl" for three 1954 stories-- and it was at this point that she was excluded from the DC universe until 1966. Since she was "bad" at the time of her forced retirement, the goody-goody Catwoman did not "pave the way for Batman's new love interest, the more buttoned-up and sexless Batwoman."

These are others, but these examples of inaccuracy and false reasoning are the most egregious. If most of them had been simple matters of misperception-- remembering Light Lass in place of another heroine, for example-- I probably wouldn't have written this review. But most of these citations grow out of Madrid's pervasive victimology: his hectoring insistence that nearly everything ever done with comic-book heroines is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Well, with a few exceptions. Madrid does at least give props to the creators of THE DOOM PATROL for a gutsy lady crime-fighter-- which is more than Trina Robbins did, when she conspicuously omitted Elasti-Girl from her own book. But to elevate the model of Elasti-Girl, Madrid has to drag down the Marvel superheroines using pretty much the same knocks Robbins used in her book : they're too weak, they're too girly, they "pose and point."  Given that Madrid's whole project involves the "close reading" of the ephemera of comic books, one might wonder why he chose to read them so loosely.

Unfortunately, the only explanation I can devise is that he wanted to make comic-book heroines sympathetic for their having been so roundly victimized, whether they were turned into virgin schoolgirls (1960s Supergirl) or teeny-bopper whores (1990s Supergirl). But the question arises-- do we respect these heroines more for being victims-- or for being heroes, irrespective of gender? It is, unfortunately, a question Madrid doesn't even try to address.

VICTIMOLOGY 101, PT. 1

I mentioned here that I don't agree with Dave Sim's assertion that Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND was a precursor to modern feminist "victimology."  I don't know Sim's precise reasons for making that determination, so I can't refute him in detail. But I will validate him on one score: victimology is rampant in most discussions of gender-interaction, often on both sides of the discussion at once.

Victimology, to be sure, is a word that originally means "the study of victims," usually with respect to the victims of criminal offenses. Sim's use of the term, however, is pejorative: it implies what is called a "false victimology," an assigning of blame to a supposed perpetrator that is either disproportionate or inaccurate.  This is the sense that I use the term here.

One comics-fandom argument I've frequently referenced on this blog is one I consider more disproportionate than wholly inaccurate: the "male characters are idealized, female characters are sexualized." I've demonstrated why the argument is an oversimplification, but I've also stated that to the extent that there is a real disparity, that disparity is rooted in real factors. The oversimplification comes about from an over-willingness for those who promote the argument to play the victim card, which amounts to playing a chorus of Linda Ronstadt's "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me."  If feminine sexual display was *never* a road to fame, riches, and comparative prosperity, I might tend to join the ultra-feminists in shedding copious crocodile tears for their sufferings.

Other arguments would seem to be more in the vein of bearing false witness.  In my essay STINKING ULTRALIBERALLY PT. 2  I critiqued my reasons why the media stigmatized celebrity-chef Paula Deen after her aggrieved former employee Lisa Jackson brought a suit against her, alleging that Deen promulgated racist speech and behavior at a place of business.  About a month after I wrote my essay, the suit was dismissed by the presiding judge with prejudice, which according to Wikipedia "indicates misconduct on the part of the party who filed the claim and forbids that party from refiling the case." This may well suggest that the judge thought Jackson was full of hot air, but I'm not interested enough to search out his precise stated opinion, if any.

The peccadillos of comics fandom are generally not this serious. Nevertheless, the biggest problem with making false or even oversimple accusations is not only that it victimizes those who may be falsely accused, but that it also distracts the culture's attention from other, real abuses. Practitioners of indiscriminate victimology seem to believe that they can cry wolf indefinitely, and that no one will ever call them on it-- or more likely, that they can throw enough crap at the walls that some of it will stick, and seem to validate them.

In Part 2 I'll address a relatively new book that manages to throw a little too much crap, managing largely to obscure its better facets.

ABJECTION APOLOGIA PT. 2

In PART 1 I said:

I suggest that Heidi's principal rhetotical point in displaying these NSFW photos is not properly an illustration of sexualization in all its multifarious forms, but to portray a particular state of sexual abjection. This state is more or less identical with Ms. McDonald's estimation of the status of all or most sexualization for female comics-characters, who are not infrequently the victims of "boob-windows, brokebacks, etc."  Abjection is, I submit, just one aspect of sexualization as it has been depicted in art and literature.

First I should specify that I am not using "abjection" after the manner of the structuralist-- or maybe post-structuralist-- author Julia Kristeva. I have read commentary on Kristeva's work, but not her actual work. Wikipedia asserts that in Kristeva's system "abjection" connotes something that is repellent but conceals some aspect of nature or culture that should be acknowledged, asserting that Kristeva "developed the idea of the abject as that which is rejected by/disturbs social reason - the communal consensus that underpins a social order.:"

Clearly this is not in line with the highly politicized descriptions cited by Heidi McDonald. Here's an example of one-sided politicization from Amanda Marcotte's SLATE essay:

But really what it comes down to is who is in control of the butts in question. With Spider-Woman, we're looking at yet another example of a man imposing his ideas about the female body and female sexuality onto a character, creating an image that feels like she's reduced to the ass in question. But "Anaconda" is a video with a woman in charge of her own image. She's shaking her thing because she wants to and she's looking directly into the camera and rapping, too, making it impossible to reduce her to a single body part.

This is the position asserted by nearly all contemporary commentary on sexuality: if a man "imposes his ideas" about female sexuality on women-- even fictional women-- this is meant to reduce real women to a state of abjection in the sense of the dictionary definition: that of degradation, of "a low or downcast state" (Merriam-Webster).  A woman performing the same activity, however, is granted the privilege of being "in charge of her own image."

In Part 1 of ABJECTION APOLOGIA, I've asserted that the detractors of all things male have oversimplified the issue of abjection, overlooking the many ways in which male bodies are also placed in postures of helplessness or neutralization. I've specified that not all of these were necessarily of a sexual nature, though some do carry that valence.  What such depictions of both male and female degradation have in common is the threat of violence, of being simply killed rather than being sexually violated or even put on display.

What I also find fascinating is that while Heidi McDonald and others are unceasingly vigilant with regard to scenes of feminine degradation, one hardly ever reads anyone speaking of scenes of feminine empowerment that are the precise obverse of the supposed degradation scenes. Marcotte's politicized opposition is not an example of this, however, since the author chooses to view the Manara piece as intrinsically degrading to women, purely because a man drew it.

McDonald too has loaded her argument in a politicized fashion, claiming that detractors are "copletely ignring [sic] how boob-windows, brokebacks, boob socks and more are not the same thing as a man with a good physique in a dynamic pose."

I for one have no problem with admitting that a lot of superheroine costumes show more skin than superhero ones, though I've also noted that many ideological types willfully overlook any examples that run counter to their ideological certainties. Yet, even if I gave McDonald the ideological victory on the issue of "who's more skimpily clothed," I would find it egregious not only that she ignores the history of abjection in male heroic postures-- described more fully in Part 1-- but also for ignoring the sexual elements present in depicting heroes of either sex "in dynamic poses." Is McDonald's point covalent with Marcotte's, that dynamism is of no importance when it is propounded by male artists?

I for one can see some sexual appeal in abject postures for either sex. But I see an even greater potential in dynamic postures as well-- and I see no reason to assume that most heterosexual comics-readers are more attracted to the former than to the latter.

For example, the character of Phoenix seemed to captivate a fair number of male readers, and she didn't even need to expose much skin to do so.

Storm has in my opinion has also proved a perennial favorite, whether or not she sports a costume that exposes much skin:

 
I could cite many other examples. I suppose that an ideological critic would assume that any such examples would be automatically disproved by the prominence of the "Bad Girl" craze of the 1990s. I would say, rather, that dynamism and scanty costuming are both independent sources of stimulation. Thus the presence of the latter does not necessarily take away from the former, as in this X-MEN cover, where Storm is showing a bit more skin:

The obvious conclusion should be that while there is not much doubt that many male readers do like scanty superheroine costumes, it does not follow that this is the ONLY aspect that they like, nor that exposure of skin or the focus upon feminine attributes are in themselves sources of abjection.  But I've already mounted the argument for the empowering associations of body display elsewhere, so I refer the interested reader to those essays from here on.

DESPERATELY BUSIEK-ING DIALOGUE

"You’ll never get to universal agreement — as is the case with subjective matters — but that’s not a reason not to try for better understanding than what we’ve got now."

So speaks Kurt Busiek in the aforementioned BEAT thread, who claims that he advocates "better understanding." I don't think that he will achieve this lofty goal by the strategy of imputing straw-man positions to his opponents. However, I will admit that the poster named "Jim" invited such a response. Whenever a participant in an argument resorts to psychologizing his opponent, this strategy also fails to address the argument in a pure fashion, and can also be fairly dismissed as a species-member of the Straw Man Group.

Jim said to McDonald:

You’ve been posting about this for almost a month now, and I don’t mean this as a troll comment, but seriously, is your self-esteem as a woman actually undermined in some way by a drawing on the cover of a comic book?

This is not IMO a proper way to conduct a debate, any more than when Busiek attempts to paint both the poster Jim and myself as "good old boys" who don't want the status quo changed. Whatever faults my own arguments may have, I don't try to psycho-analyze my opponents. I've written that I think "Chicken Colin" acted like a coward-- first, for having written scathingly, and falsely, of my positions, and failing to debate me on his assertions, and later for hiding behind the skirts of Julian Darius, who decided that he would not permit me to comment on the Chicken's subsequent Sequart posts. I find both of these actions reprehensible. But I don't try to invent psychoanalytic reasons for these demonstrations of cowardly behavior, as Jim invents a facile psychoanalytic motive of "lack of self-esteem" to explain McDonald's fixation on the Manara "Spider-Woman" cover. (Later in the thread, Jim said that his imputation was meant as a joke, but it didn't come off that way in the original post.)

I flatter myself that even when I disagree with an opponent, my first resort is to analyze any statement as a philosophical proposition, in order to determine whether or not it proves valid in the light of my own knowledge and experiences.

Busiek's proposition in this BEAT-post is largely of a piece with the principle of absolute equity McDonald has expressed many times before. In GENDER, BEND HER I refuted this principle on these terms:

This ethic passes an unsubstantiated judgment upon all previous incarnations of Bond fiction: said judgment being that, because they were originally fictions designed principally with male buyers in mind, new iterations must and should be corrected to become more “female-friendly.” But this correction hinges on two presumptions: (1) that male-oriented fiction has no integrity in itself, but must be corrected in some fashion, and (2) that the Bond mythos did not already a healthy, though numerically smaller, female fandom even prior to feminist revisions.

Or, to cite a more concise response from this mini-essay:

Fiction is a place where fantasy reigns, and as I said in the [earlier] essay, it's simply a lot harder to sell hyper-sexualized fantasies to women than to men.

Busiek, like McDonald, does not recognize any challenges to the principle of absolute equity between fictional males and females, however, as his response to Jim in the post makes clear:

It’s that women being sexualized in comics is overwhelmingly the standard, while men being sexualized isn’t. If both were treated in appropriate ways depending on the character and story — so you had sexualized men where appropriate, and women were sexualized when appropriate but not reflexively, as they are now.

Though Busiek claim to advocate greater "understanding," it's clear from his posts that he has no interest in any explanations as to how the "standard" came about. It's not equitable, so it's wrong, and anyone who cares to explore the dynamics of the gender situation is on the same level as corporate stinkheads trying to prevent real-life women from earning equal pay.

Of course, I will admit that even if Busiek is an unlikely candidate to bridge the disagreements between the opposing sides, I'm not likely to win any prizes in that department either.  I have no idea if such a rapprochement is even feasible, for there's a sense in which people just like to bitch about these subjects.