I love the webcomic xkcd and wanted to share today's edition. The premise is a set of images of the human body, presumably for an anatomy textbook. The gag is the photo session is taking place at a TGI-Friday's and fellow customers are less than thrilled with the naked photo session by the salad bar.(If you go to the site, make sure to read the pop-up text when your mouse pauses over the image. Randall's commentary is usually just as funny as the comic itself.)
Here's the cool part, the first two panels of the comic are about the female body: a female breast with the nipple and areola labeled, a close-up of female genitals wtih the clitoris, vagina and both labia labeled.
I imagine making a feminist statement wasn't necessarily the artist's main objective. But in a world where references to female genitalia are seen as incredibly taboo ("dick" is sometimes acceptable, but "vagina" or "pussy" are perceived as REALLY raunchy) I think it's a pretty cool occurrence. One small step for vaginas, one giant leap for vagina-kind. Or something like that.
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Really? Because I thought it was just another example about how it's OK to show women naked, but not men, because obviously everyone in the world is a heterosexual man to whom the sight of a dick will instantly turn them gay or like a woman, and obviously there is NOTHING worse than that!
(Note extreme, extreme, EXTREME sarcasm.)
Not to mention the author's creepy fixation with this "Megan" character, which is bordering on outright stalking.
If Megan is supposed to be a proxy for someone in Randall's life, then I see your point about how this is creepy. But I always assumed she's just made up, and therefore I don't see how her insertion in comics of a sexual nature can be that creepy.
And additionally, even if he is fixated on her, what's the big deal? I'm a writer, and I'm fixated with the characters I create as well.
Yeah, as far as I could tell, The comic was all about how most people aren't going to complain at the site of a female breast - and a few more might complain about female genitals, but if a man "whips it out" people are going to go crazy.
Not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with it - just seemed like that's what the artist intended.
That's exactly what I thought when I first saw the comic. It's cool to not be afraid of showing genitalia and all that, but why doesn't he actually show the male genitalia pics too? My guess is that he's catering to a heterosexual (and perhaps a little homophobic) male audience. I've been on the xkcd forums from time to time and let's just say, it's not too hard to find misogynistic comments from immature boys.
If you consider the target audience: predominantly engineering, math and science students, then the number of immature comments is surprisingly low. slashdot has a similar demographic for example.
The problem, predominantly is that this audience spend most of their time in classes with a female population less than 20%. If you combine that with the fact they are already social outcasts and the portrayal of women in the media, it's easy to see how a large portion have a distorted view of women.
The difference is due to Randall portraying female nerds in as positive a light as the male protagonists of his comic. So, alot more women frequent the forums, and the 'immature boys' get an education pretty quick.
I say this as someone who for 3/4 of an undergraduate career in physics believed that it was pointless for me to date because there simply weren't girls who shared my interests. It took me 5 years to get to know one who did. Only then did I stop asking why girls weren't interested in physics and start asking why there weren't more. It was a great epiphany to learn that there were girls who thought like me. Randall's comic allows others to have this epiphany without the 5 year wait. By showing females enjoying the same (nerdy) things as the male characters he is doing the community a service.
I don't frequent the forums all that often, so maybe I've just been unlucky to have had a couple bad experiences with sexist jokes and things like that. In particular, Randall once did a really great comic about girls in mathematics, but unfortunately on the forum there were a lot of people defending the idea that women are inherently inferior at math/science.
Well, don't confuse the forum for the author.
I wasn't confusing the two. The fact that the comic has two clear drawings of female genitalia, but refrains from showing even the slightest trace of the two male genitalia photos implies to me that the author was catering to heterosexual males. My discussion of the forums was simply a related note about his audience and how they may influence some of his artistic choices.
If Randall has a fixation on anyone it's Summer Glau. Yet she seems to get her own back by beating Randall up as the conclusion to this 4 part comic: http://www.xkcd.com/580/
This made me happy too. XKCD has had posts that fit well with feminism in the past. Here's a good examples:
http://xkcd.com/385/
I love it because Randall Munroe, the brains behind the comic, has a huge and insanely devoted/obsessive audience of geeks who participate in what is a particularly misogynistic community. I'd like to think some of them have looked at themselves a little harder through the lense of XKCD jokes, which often contain profound truths.
I've read all the xkcd comics. If not a feminist per se, I would definitely say Randall Munroe is a strong force for breaking down the 'only guys are nerds*' stereotype. He shows girls doing intelligent cool things, and there is a similarity between his male and female characters that I find wholly refreshing.
He's also not afraid to encroach on social taboos in order to make a joke, which is the issue here. But I think you'll find his audience is down with it. A lot of them often seem to get insights out of his comics - sometimes feminist insights.
If you read through the comic discussion forums you'll find that around half his audience is female, which is highly unusual for a web-comic about science, math and computing pop-culture.
*To me nerd is a positive word. A nerd is just someone who enjoys intellectual pursuits for their own ends. I'm proud to be a nerd.
I've read all the xkcd comics. If not a feminist per se, I would definitely say Randall Munroe is a strong force for breaking down the 'only guys are nerds*' stereotype. He shows girls doing intelligent cool things, and there is a similarity between his male and female characters that I find wholly refreshing.
He's also not afraid to encroach on social taboos in order to make a joke, which is the issue here. But I think you'll find his audience is down with it. A lot of them often seem to get insights out of his comics - sometimes feminist insights.
If you read through the comic discussion forums you'll find that around half his audience is female, which is highly unusual for a web-comic about science, math and computing pop-culture.
*To me nerd is a positive word. A nerd is just someone who enjoys intellectual pursuits for their own ends. I'm proud to be a nerd.
This comic stopped me in my tracks for a moment. I wasn't sure exactly what the purpose was. My first instinct was that is perpetuated that women's bodies are owned by society so it was fine to throw it up on display. But then i wondered it if was more innocent, like, this is the female form and there is nothing dirty or wrong with sex organs. I'm still torn. Maybe i'd like to see a penis too, who knows.
I don't know why he chose to go with the female's genitalia instead of the male's, and you're right, the reasoning behind it might be problematic. But I took "the message" or at least the intended message to be dependent on the alt text (which is often integral to understanding XKCD). With the alt text in mind, I interpret "the message" as:
"You know all those pictures of sex and body things on Wikipedia? They're not always exactly like medical text photos. Some of them look casual and wacky. I wonder what the back story for them is."
Which, to me, is kind of funny and cool, because it seems to be about people being out-there and confident with their bodies -- being playful and casual instead of ashamed. But I may be reading too much into it.
The "I wonder about wiki photos" angle was what I took from it. And maybe he chose to go with female genitalia because, as the creator of the comic, he's used to the role of the-one-documenting, so it was natural to translate that into the characters as well.
Wikipedia, of course, has an embarrassingly gluttonous excess of explicit photos of male genitalia, and a very much more limited set of photos of female genitalia. While they're (usually) ostentatiously for educational purposes ... not so much, no. It's pretty regular for administrators to delete excess unused photos of penises without discussion. There are way, way more photos editors have taken of themselves uploaded for [[Penis]] than [[Ear]]. This isn't nearly this imbalance for female anatomy bits.
But we'd probably (generally) interpret J. Random Guy uploading naked photos of himself to Wikipedia as pathetic or creepy far more than J. Random Lady, so from a comic perspective, a penis probably doesn't come across the same way. (Whether it ought to or not.)
I liked the images because I didn't see them as objectifying the female body. They were explicit, yes, but they were also charted and labeled diagrams. To my mind, labeling them robbed them of the "dirty, sexy, naughty" connotation that so many situations of female nudity have.
I ALSO liked it, because the vagina wasn't the punch line. This wasn't a "PUSSY! There I said/showed a PUSSY! Isn't that funny! Ha Ha!" kind of joke. The punchline was about two people getting naked for an anatomy photo-shoot in a TGI-Fridays. If the comic had run in reverse, if the vagina image had been the LAST image of the strip, I might've had a problem with that. But, as I saw it, this strip wasn't about laughing at the female body, it was about laughing at the antics of a few wacky people.
And yes, I do agree that showing only the female body and not the male body is a bit problematic. It would've been nice had he shown both. BUT I maintain my previous statement: putting the vagina out there, REALLY out there, without any kind of embarrassed "tee-heeing" about it is a net gain.
Given the writer's history of feminist comics, I think his use of the female body parts in the strip rather than the male was deliberate. It doesn't matter which sexual body parts he used given that the main joke is about taking naked pictures in Friday's, not about the naked pictures themselves.
Well said Frumious.
I don't think Randall was "catering" to heterosexual males as much as he drawing from the perspective of a heterosexual male. Randall doesn't run his comics past an editorial board or advertisers before posting them. So using a vagina over a penis isn't representative of any kind of group think or sexist social norms - it was just what he, as an artist, decided to use. Yes, there are many instances in which male anxiety influences the use of the male vs female body, but I don't think this is one of them. And again, I think drawing the vagina for something other than a punchline is more significant than the presence or absence of a penis.