And there's this incredible post by ocelott that covers a lot of the same themes, whilst showing that women can be totally sexy in comfortable, powerful poses. (Imagine that!)
Also, for a rare not-boobs-and-butt pose, scroll down until you see Twilight. *gasp*
And because this is sometimes hard for people to see, the differences in Submissive Woman Pose and Powerful Man Pose, here are two more subtle examples with Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade.
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| Original |
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| Redraw |
RECOMMENDS! What have you been seeing lately?
Other open thread possible topics below: Boobs-and-butt pose, why we don't see it on the Twilight covers, submissive head-tilts, why genuinely strong poses for women aren't considered sexy by the people making these posters, and anything else you've got going on.
32 comments:
Ha, it must be boobs-and-butts season again!
Not that it isn't always, but my morning newspaper landed on my walk this morning-- well, what passes for a newspaper in these degenerate days-- with the Football Team Cheerleaders Swimsuit Issue prominently advertised. I just wasn't expecting so many boobs and butts with my morning coffee.
(And, y;know, I originally typed that as "Football Team Swimsuit Issue" and had to go back and insert the "Cheerleaders." No, the quarterback hasn't been featured in a boobs-and-butt pose in a companion issue.)
Recommends: While I was still chortling over at the Jim Hines site, I noticed that he has a guest post for today by Marie Brennan, who occasionally drops by the comments sections here (and whose Onyx Court books are sitting in the New file in my Kindle even now; maybe I can just do nothing but read for the next two months, until I catch up?) Anyway, it's a discussion of the difference between folktale and legend, and how each relates to the current fantasy genre. Very interesting for readers of Twilight and Narnia!
I wonder if Redraw!Luke would look better with longer hair.
Or his chin down a little. There's something weird happening beyond the position there - maybe the proportions? Mara Jade looks fab on Luke's body, though. Rawr.
Speaking tangentially of covers, if y'all missed this epic book rant on SBTB, you really should go read it. The book material includes rape, but it's only touched on in the review. TW, maybe?
http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/blog/book-rant-guess-this-book
The Luke/Mara redraw is incredible. I can't believe how much more vacant Luke's stare is just by virtue of tilting his head a bit more.
Mara's chin is definitely lower in both shots, but it's a photoshop so that's understandable. As to the stare, I have seen a surprisingly large number of shots of Luke where he just looks stoned (though that shot is especially bad). Really, it's kind of surprising he can fly a starfighter.
Heh, I love these pose posts.
Only yesterday I happened upon a promo pic for the next Batman movie, showing a young lady in only a bra and pants slung so low her lack of undies was apparent. My brain immediately flashed to the Marx Brothers Cocoanuts in which they sing to the tune of Carmen, He lost his shirt! He wants his shirt! He can't be happy without his shirt!
It took me ages to see the difference between Mara and Luke's poses. I finally get that Mara is sort of tilted back, her legs are together somewhere in front of her so she's in danger of toppling over backwards while Luke seems to be standing on both feet in a stable pose. Is that what I'm supposed to be seeing?
I immediately thought of a young lady who doesn't have to pose like that: Avatar Korra.
And dudes can look mighty alluring in the slinky poses, too. I mean, how could eighty gazillion pieces of Avengers fanart be wrong?
Interesting that this topic came up today; I was just looking at the cover of my (hardcover! signed! yaaaay!) copy of Ragamuffin and comparing the people on the cover to the people in the scene depicted on the cover. They didn't lighten anybody's skin, which is good. The previous book, Crystal Rain, did that, and it was really confusing, because the one white dude in the whole book was never on the airship and...
So anyway, the scene makes sense, but protagonist Nashara is shown with her jumpsuit unzipped, showing cleavage, for no apparent reason...but it doesn't come across as objectifying (to me). She still looks utterly badass and all business. The scene even mentions breasts, in terms of how it hurts to have a massive gun recoil into them, but that's a tad better than having it break your ribs.
My martial arts teacher spends a lot of time trying to teach her senior students how to look at a junior student and tell if s/he is in balance, relaxed, on the balls of his/her feet, and generally doing the right thing.
A side effect of this is that poses like Mara Jade's original one look AWFUL. This woman is not over her own center, so she is unstable and could not launch an attack with any strength without risking falling over. Also her shoulders are up in a way that suggests her strikes will be tense and weak. She couldn't move quickly or with force from there.
In Luke's pose he is solidly over his center and his shoulders are down. There is no twisting or slouching. If you shoved him in any direction he wouldn't fall over. If he had to move in any direction he could.
The funny thing is, to me Mara not only looks more functional in the redraw, she looks sexier too!
Dav, I have tears rolling down my cheeks and I've not even finished reading the linked post. Thank you.
The funny thing is, to me Mara not only looks more functional in the redraw, she looks sexier too!
I couldn't agree more, which begs the question:
Why do the artists who use these poses think the audience feels otherwise? DOES a portion of the audience feel otherwise? I wonder.
It took me ages to see the difference between Mara and Luke's poses. I finally get that Mara is sort of tilted back, her legs are together somewhere in front of her so she's in danger of toppling over backwards while Luke seems to be standing on both feet in a stable pose. Is that what I'm supposed to be seeing?
Yes, Mara is quite clearly leaning against a starship's exhaust plume.
Makes it easy to see the problems just with a headswap. I'm also very impressed with those people who risk their flexibility to try and match the implausible poses of cover art.
Unrelated to topic: the particular Catwoman costume and actress in the Tor blog thread reminds me of the Julie Newmar Catwoman. I liked the Dozier Batman, so this has positive associations for me.
Back on topic: I wonder how much of a shock it would be to the intended Male Gaze audience if someone in a boobs-and-butt shot were able to turn and shoot, or already had the gun pointing at the camera, which would suddenly explode in red, in the same way as the classic Bond openings.
I'm also surprised, somewhat, that Isabella Swan its the one in that whole set that doesn't get the boobs and butt treatment. Perhaps because she's not an Action Girl or even a Faux Action Girl in her movie? (And would such a rule like that actually hold?)
I just tried to pose like Mara Jade there and almost fell over, it's really awkward to stand like that
I'm wondering if it's more because Twilight simply isn't and never could have been marketed with a Male Gaze. There was never any question of confusing male viewers into thinking it was going to be a T&A Supernatural Action film, right? That's just a guess, though.
True, although I could make the argument that such a promise would not have been wrong, just that the promoters neglected to mention that it would be beefcake shots rather than cheesecake ones. There still could have been plenty of "T-and-A" shots of Bella swooning into Edward's arms, or Jacob's, that would focus the gaze on Bella being scantily clad and attractive and the man being string, controlling, and powerful. (Actually, if we could also add "abusive", it would be an accurate cover poster. Except, maybe, that Isabella Swan wouldn't have a textual excuse to be scantily clad until a few books later.)
Augh, it's Fern Michaels. The author who exists as proof that you can spew anything onto paper and get published. She may be the worst writer of all time.*
Though, I'd always half hoped that the horrible book of hers I read - Weekend Warriors - was published because she used to be a good writer and her popularity had remained. Nope, she was always terrible. Why, publishing industry, why!?
*I don't throw this around lightly. Weekend Warriors had pretty much every possible writing fail in it: repeating information more frequently than a badly written childrens' book, did not do the research taken up to eleven (any research would have invalidated the plot - in multiple ways), drama piled on with a trowel (a person's dead husband had MS and Parkinson's), a tendency to have people describe events rather than have the reader see them, serious inconsistencies, outrageous implausibilities, the second most incompetent secret organization I've seen in fiction, the list goes on. And it sounds as though all her books are like that.
The part that had me rolling around was "trimming" a few inches off the long trousers and ending up with Daisy Duke Pirate Hot Pants. LOL LOL LOL
Also, it's clearly not really TRAGEDY if the dead husband didn't have at least THREE fatal diseases. Because anything less is just Not Enough. LOL.
That was epic.
Her stuff looks so tame on the shelves (in the modern covers, anyway), but I now have to assume it's all lolerously baaaaaad. (And if it weren't for all the rape, I'd almost be tempted to read them for the hilarity. Based on that review and the one I read, I can only assume that she - or she and some friends - write them over several bottles of wine. At one setting. With no revisions, ever.)
It is a shame, because I like Feisty Pirate stuff. I remember loving to play Catalina in Uncharted Waters 2 (SNES) back in the day.
Oh, Ana, it get's better. The wife and husband had degrees in...oh crap, I don't remember, engineering, I think, but when he was diagnosed, instead of either of them going into the field they studied for, they became over the road truck drivers.
Her stuff really is epic, for all the wrong reasons.
I. You. It. Buh.
Well, you really can't underestimate the kind of health care that comes with...
No, I can't. It's too easy and too wrong. Flat What.
I'm sure there's good Feisty Pirate stuff out there. Or even entertainingly bad Feisty Pirate stuff that leaves out the rape.
I read a ton of hilariously bad romance novels over my lunch breaks in my first bookstore job. I actually enjoy hilariously bad romance novels (and humorous good romance novels), but I prefer them without rape.
Her books might make good party games. Read them aloud and award prizes for the number of WRONG!s spotted.
It's a YMMV thing, I'm sure. I don't mind it if it's handled well, but that's a hard line to walk. I would kind of prefer it to be left up to interpretation (as in the classic "fade to black and assume something awful might have happened, but you don't have to assume this thing") rather than splayed all over the page.
When I was younger someone gave me some vaguely Arthurian books... about a guy who is transported into a magical Celtic world... and trains to be a warrior... and becomes a King with a Silver Hand... and his best buddy is the Merlin expy who is blind but with Inner Sight... and the Inner Sight "inconveniently" doesn't let him look away from really terrible things that the reader TOTES needs to see... does anyone remember those? Anyway. Point being, those were way too rapey on-page and I still get a little queasy thinking about them.
But I've read other things with rape and not minded at all, so it's definitely in the handling, for me.
Yeah, the handling does make a huge difference. I prefer my fiction without it, but it's a preference, not a requirement.
When I was a teenager, it was a deal breaker. Largely because I'd just gotten into sci-fi and fantasy and every book I ordered from the Science Fiction book club that had a female main character began with her being raped. And then there was the author at the writer's thing in Nebraska who couldn't understand why that bothered me and who'd opened a book that way herself because she "wanted to get the character in trouble." Twenty years later, I'm still going AUGH! WHY? WOULD YOU DO THAT WITH A MALE CHARACTER? CAN'T WOMEN HAVE NICE THINGS TOO? In retrospect, I'm sorry that wasn't my response. I think all I managed was "Guh?"
Yeah. I've seen the argument online before. The Pro-Rape side goes that rape is a real thing that happens to women -- and disproportionately so more than to men -- so portraying rape as an obstacle overcome is Empowering and Realistic and so forth.
The Anti-Rape side is, as you pointed out, that the handling is used way too much and some women want to get away from rape in their escapist literature, plus eventually you hit this weird critical mass where it seems like the ONLY obstacles women face are rape and that's utterly unfair and gendered and ugh. And -- frankly -- a LOT of authors simply don't write rape well and can come off as fetishizing it or being exceedingly disrespectful to survivors. I'm kinda of the opinion that rape should not be used narratively without it being vetted by multiple survivors because it's just too easy to accidentally eroticize it based on That One Porn The Author Watched That One Time or whatever. (I have seen this happen too many times to count and it's a Big No button for me.)
Melissa McEwan had a great post this month -- I'm not going to look for it, because I'm lazy -- that suvivors who go on to do great things do so in SPITE of their rape, not BECAUSE of their rape and that "crediting" the rape for the survivor's good works is really fucked up and strips agency (again!) from survivors. Seems related.
The message I came away with was that escapist fiction for adults only came in "male main character" variety. I've found a few exceptions since then, but I'm still wary of books with female main characters. I suppose the problem is that I like my escapist fiction more in the wish fulfillment vein, and somehow that's harder to find for women.
It very definitely felt like there was a whole list of obstacles that authors would throw at male characters they wanted to "get in trouble," but only one they'd throw at female characters. And, while owes scary person money, accused of a crime, kicked out of the military, betrayed, mistaken for someone else, injured, etc, etc, can/do have an element of emotional trauma, they're generally handled more lightly (even being betrayed) in fiction. For obvious reasons.
And the whole rape as motivation or inspiration for heroism or the like thing really creeps me out.
@ Chris: Glad to know I wasn't the only person whose first interpretation of the Luke/Mara picture was "bunch of miniature stormtroopers desperately propping up Mara Jade to keep her from toppling over backwards and crushing them".
Luke gets that vapid stare more than any other single character I can think of. Like someone only heard the "farmboy" part of the character history, and gave him this empty goggling expression to try and express it. It's like all the worst stereotypes of uneducated bumpkinry rolled into a single character. Bleh.
(I may, just maybe, not like Luke.)
Agreeing that Mara looks even more awesome with sleeves and a solid stance, though.
I'd love to see genderswapped!Thrawn. She'd be just as terrifying as he always is, though, so I don't know how much ground there really is to explore.
Just wanted to chime in and second everything Mary Kaye says about how this looks if you have martial arts experience. It really does look (a little) like the stance of a beginner who's going to need a LOT of guidance.
I kind of use sharing what I've done for the past week as motivation actually do something durring the week which can result in frantically typing up a post so that I can share it in the weekly recommends post or the This Week in the Slacktiverse post the day before
I do that too! I'm like "I have to finish this second post this week so I can send it to This Week in the Slacktiverse!" It's a good motivator. Plus, your Google hits seriously drop if you post less than twice a week.
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