alliterate:

skalja:

alliterate:

emmahouxbois:

sistervenom:

Their response is almost always: “Oh, I just read it because X-23’s hot.”

Bask in the absurdity of that statement for a minute.  Let it marinate…good?  Okay, because it’s about to get worse.

WITHOUT FAIL the guys who tells me this after I go into detail about what I don’t like about it (let’s just say what I do like about it is that Mike Choi drew several issues and…that’s about it) and they reply with that—without fail: the guys in question are in their late twenties.  Talking about how they want to have sex with a sixteen-year-old girl.  Then again, one of those guys went on about how he was going to train me to be a “proper” comic fan (i.e. I read comics with my bare hands and not with gloves like he does)—and, yes, “train” was his exact wording.  Furthermore, when constantly bitching for no valid reason about a character who’s important to me after I politely told him to stop calling him “Douchester Gold” at least while I’m around—but, uh, I’m getting off-topic.

Basically, I find it sexist and rude and disgusting that your only defense for a shoddily-written series is “Lolol this underage girl is hot and I want to have sex with her so I read this book.”  Especially when the people saying it are pushing thirty.

I’m not sure that I’m ready to accept that this is reality. I mean yeah, I can count on one hand the number of straight cis male comic book fans that I respect and will give the time of day to but this is getting into Deliverance territory.

I have found the most disgusting things while looking for X-23 art on the internet. There are fanboys in their 20s and 30s all over the place talking about how totally hawt Laura is and how much they want to fuck her, and how sexy she was in X-Force (where, as Jamie pointed out, she was A SIXTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL, and where she spent a good chunk of time being tortured and psychologically abused). IT REALLY SUCKS BEING A (FEMALE, YOUNG, MENTALLY ILL) X-23 FAN SOMETIMES, IS ALL I CAN SAY.

One of the things I hate the most about mainstream superhero comics is the institutionalized ephebophilia. All those creepy older male fans are enabled by all the creepy older male creators. On Marvel’s side X-23 is the most notable subject of this, and over at DC it’s Supergirl and Mary Marvel, but most teenage superheroines have been subject to this at one point or another and it’s. So. Creepy.

Of course, in this respect comics are pretty much a reflection of American society as a whole. I kinda wonder whether there isn’t a link between our culture’s “the younger she is, the hotter” mentality and its foaming hysteria over the subject of sex offenders, but it’s way too late at night for me to mull this over right now.

(I hope this isn’t a derail and will delete my post if previous participants feel it is.)

That is something I really really hate about mainstream comics too, yeah. Jubilee also got it a lot (do not look her up on comicartfans unless you want to see a ton of creepy male gaze-y underage T&A), and then there’s things like that possibility that Pixie got aged up to late teens in order to make it easier/more acceptable to objectify her. It’s so disgusting and so pervasive, and the people (both creators and readers) participating in the ephebophilia somehow never seem to even realize how goddamn creepy what they’re doing is.

Oh god, yes, all this. I think it passes because creators and publishers legitimize it so much. Particularly in the 90s (but Teen Titans before that, possibly). All those Swimsuit Issues of the 90s are the height of it, where you get all the salacious sketches (and boy, are they sketchy) of Gen 13 or Generation X or others, where characters that are canonically in their mid-teens pose in bikinis and thongs. The fact that it was named creators doing this stuff, published with accompanying gleeful nudge nudge, wink winking by the publishers, legitimized something that should not be seen as acceptable.

It’s a cultural thing too, of course, and not limited to comics. The number of guys who had countdown clocks until Miley Cyrus or Emma Watson or Hilary Duff or the Olsen twins turned 18… (And, for that matter, Daniel Radcliffe.) But there does seem to be some awareness of how inappropriate it is, unlike with the comic readership, where, apparently “because they’re fictional, it doesn’t count as skeevy”. (That may be an optimistic view, and institutionalized ephebophilia is certainly widespread culturally, but people don’t seem quite as proud of it as comic book fans.)

I guess it was Kitty Pryde that started it all, whose age was repeatedly established as really young, but was then frequently shown in skimpy outfits. But I don’t think she was sexualized, so much as then readers fixating on her. When you got to the late eighties and early nineties, the readers had become creators and started drawing the characters, who were still canonical teens, through adults eyes and making them pinups for THEM. And it’s happened with the readership too - comic readers are, generally, no longer kids and far more likely to be older, and most likely male. It’s okay to crush on the 13 year old comics character when you’re a 13 year old reader. It’s not to look at them in a sexual way when you’re a 30 year old and the character’s still 13. 

I guess the most obvious example of the creator aging but the character not, is Joss Whedon’s Kitty Pryde in Astonishing X-men. He made a big play out of being a fan of hers when he was a young reader and having a crush on her and Astonishing X-men didn’t read so much as a love story to the character as a “skeevy older man sliding up to a girl neighbor who he’s known since she was a kid and who has just had her eighteenth birthday and talking her into bed” story. 

(Source: vileplumage)