Twilight of the Girls
In the days since we posted our roundtable about Girls and Fandom at Robot 6, there’s been a spirited online debate about what we’d said. A number of excellent writers have offered their own responses to our post, including Sarah Jaffe (Newarama), Noah Berlatsky (The Hooded Utilitarian), and Tangognat. Rather than hijack the comment threads at their sites, I decided to backtrack here to elaborate on a few points I raised both in the post and in the subsequent discussions at Robot 6 and Newsarama.
Noah and I had a lengthy exchange about an article that blogger Tom Crippen wrote in January 2009 in which Tom explained why he didn’t like manga. Noah felt I’d unfairly dismissed Tom’s comments because of some unfortunate word choices (e.g. “googly eyes,” “kindergarten feel,” “girls’ stuff”). Noah pointed out that Tom was not categorically dismissing comics for girls, just trying to put his finger on why Japanese sequential art left him cold. Fair enough.
I had difficulty expressing why Tom’s comments ruffled my feathers so much until I read Tangognat’s eloquent rebuttal:
I can see why many of the commentators on Robot 6 are still reacting strongly to the “kindergarten feel” comment about shoujo manga. Not only is it demonstratively false (see Banana Fish, Tokyo Babylon, They Were Eleven, and Nana*) invoking the idea of a child when discussing entertainment for women is incredibly problematic and a distressing example of the way romance as a genre continually gets less critical respect than male oriented genres, like murder mysteries or science fiction.
For me, her comment gets to the heart of the issue: there’s an awful lot of popular entertainment for women that’s categorically dismissed simply because… it’s for women. All we want is for critics to actually look at the thing itself — be it a comic, a young adult novel, or yes, a Lifetime movie — and evaluate it on its merits, not who reads or watches it. No one would argue that all shojo is brilliant or sophisticated (hello, Orange Planet!), just that it needs to be reviewed with the same consideration afforded the Transformers movie or the latest JLA event series. As Sarah Jaffe put it:
Listen, ain’t no one arguing you have to like Twilight. But if you haven’t read the damn thing, how do you know it’s crap? It sounds entirely too much like the people who go “You read COMIC BOOKS?” at my day job(s).
At Newsarama, several commenters felt that we’d been making “mountains out of molehills” by focusing on the Twilight controversy, and suggested that the real issue was creating better comics for girls:
I still fail to see how this is a real story. The majority of the issues raised have been about the location and time of the showing. Again, it seems like this is a self-perpetuating story covered by a handful of sites. Now, if we want to have a discussion on why comics targeted at girls are marginalized, let’s have it. But that has nothing to do with the Twilight situation at SDCC. Heck, a better discussion would be why we NEED comics that are targeted at girls, as opposed to, say, making mainstream comics more friendly to people who aren’t straight guys.
Others felt strongly that trying to create female-friendly comics was the wrong objective, that we should be striving instead to create intelligent comics that were gender-neutral in their appeal:
There should be no such thing as “girls’ comics” or “boys’ comics.” By making the distinction, you’re making the line in the sand bigger. Because both sexes appreciate action or romance to some degree, even if they don’t admit it. Because targeting an audience by relying on stereotypes only perpetuates the myth. There should simply be comics that don’t adhere to sexist, racist and other -ist conventions. You can’t create equality by pointing fingers. You can only do it when you’re leading by example.
I’m largely in agreement with the first comment, but with a caveat: if the original Twilight story had been met with a few grumbles about ticketing practices at SDCC, I don’t think anyone would be beating this nearly-dead horse anymore. It was the ad hominem attacks on teenage girls and their fandoms that steamed my buns; many folks were positively rude and hateful, portraying Twilight fans as a squealing, irrational mob of oversexed Robert Pattison devotees who would ruin SDCC with their uncouth behavior. I wish I could say this response was unique to SDCC, but it isn’t; male observers have often dismissed female fan behavior as childish and hysterical as a strategy for containing it.
I agree with the second comment in principle, but not in fact, as it doesn’t reflect the way books are marketed here or elsewhere. In Japan, for example, the most basic marketing categories for books reflect both gender and age: shonen is for boys, shojo is for girls, and so on. For the most part, those labels are a reasonable predictor of who reads what. Boys tend to read series that appear in magazines like Shonen Sunday; girls tend to read titles in Hana to Yume. There are exceptions, of course: girls are much more willing to read comics written for boys than vice-versa, which is why shonen series such as Full Metal Alchemist and Naruto have been such big hits in Japan and the US. (And what’s true for comics is also true for prose novels: girls are more likely to read something written for boys than boys are likely to read, say, Nancy Drew or Twilight.)
Comics for younger kids tend to be less “gendered” than comics for teens and adults. As kids reach puberty, however, their tastes cleave along more traditional gender lines. That doesn’t mean that comics for tweens and teens need to be mindless drivel — car chases for boys, prom angst for girls — just that kids are looking for titles that reflect who they are at 12 or 17, and gender identity is a big part of that equation. That doesn’t negate the importance of creating comics “that don’t adhere to sexist, racist and other -ist conventions,” but it does suggest that creators have an obligation to think of their audience. Some books may be gender-neutral by design — say, Mouse Guard or American-Born Chinese — but there’s still a place for comics that speak more directly to boys or girls.
In the end, the controversy over girls and fandom boils down to respect. As I noted at Robot 6, I don’t want to distance myself from other female fans just to be taken seriously as a comic book reviewer and consumer, nor do I think my “bonafides” as a manga fan should be contingent on liking Satsuma Gishiden and Akira to the exclusion of Love*Com and Tenshi Ja Nai!!
If you’re looking for a positive, productive way to express how you feel about the controversy, why not buy one of the spiffy “Women Make Comics” t-shirts designed by the awesome Deb Aoki? They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and all proceeds go to benefit comics-oriented advocacy groups such as Friends of Lulu and The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Make that righteous indignation count for something!
Not surprisingly, the people who usually have a problem with distinct target audiences in manga are usually comics fans who have had very little contact with manga.
I believe their problem is usually that they can’t seem to be able to grasp the concept that comics could be a product, as they have a very personal approach to comics. They simply can’t perceive comics as anything but “art”, so the idea that there could be comics spesifically targeted to certain ages or genders feels intimidating to them. It essentially feels like badmouthing their favourite entertainment to them – as if comics could be similar to, say, TV shows…
That’s an interesting point, and something I hadn’t considered — I was too blindsided by the vitriol directed at teenage girls.
Over at Newsarama, several folks were offering suggestions for boosting the profile of girls’ comics here in the US. Interestingly, no one mentioned manga. I read some very impassioned pleas for girl-friendly superhero comics, but no one acknowledged that there are already plenty of shojo manga titles available in English. I’m all for a Wonder Woman comics that appeals to young female readers, but that alone won’t fix the problem.
[...] Dacey, who participated in our roundtable on girls’ comics fandoms, contributes a few more thoughts at The Manga Critic. And at Heart of Manga, Laura talks about the difficulties of being a grownup [...]
“There should be no such thing as “girls’ comics” or “boys’ comics.” By making the distinction, you’re making the line in the sand bigger. Because both sexes appreciate action or romance to some degree, even if they don’t admit it. Because targeting an audience by relying on stereotypes only perpetuates the myth.”
Good god, that’s a stupid comment. Here’s something that should be common sense, but seems to freak people out for some reason: It’s okay for something to exist that you aren’t interested in. When you try to make entertainment appeal to everybody, it ends up appealing to nobody. Imagine if somebody applied this logic to restaurants. “How dare you label your food ’seafood’ and differentiate it from my steak? You shouldn’t draw a line in the sand between Red Lobster and Texas Rib House!” Well, gee, maybe some people prefer seafood and others prefer steak, and THAT IS OKAY. Grow up.
Perhaps a better way to express what I think that person was getting at is this: artists shouldn’t rely on gender stereotypes to create comics for girls (or boys, for that matter). That’s a far cry, however, from saying that women are being provocative or difficult by asking for comics that appeal more specifically to their tastes.
I guess relying on gender stereotypes works better, however, than going along the lines “how could we sell our superheroes to not just boys, but to girls too?”
It all just comes back to the fact in Japan comics have not just one but several possible target audiences, and those audiences are large enough to allow specialization from the publishers – and authors too. Just like there are different clothes, bicycles and lifestyle magazines for each gender – when the industry is large and healthy enough it would just be stupid if you tried to make everything unisex, as there are differences in general tastes. Whether everybody liked it or not.
Western comics fans seem to have trouble grasping the fact that having different target audiences in the industry does not mean that the same authors get up every morning, think “oh, today I have to do comics for girls – what did girls like again?” and then make comics for stereotypical target audiences that the publishers dictate. Instead it just means that those authors that find they want to make romance comics can send their submissions to another magazine than the ones who want to make action comics.
I’m jumping on this a little late.
“Just like there are different clothes, bicycles and lifestyle magazines for each gender – when the industry is large and healthy enough it would just be stupid if you tried to make everything unisex, as there are differences in general tastes.”
Bringing fashion into this made a light bulb click in my head. There is the equality of fashion theory – when women and men’s clothing are more similar, they are more equal, and when they are more different, the society is more patriarchal. There are exceptions to this theory – for example, Classical Greek fashion was almost unisex, yet it was a very patriarchal society – but it’s true more often than not. It’s not a coincidence that it became fashionable for women to cut their hair like men around the time they were first allowed to vote in the United States, nor is it a coincidence that many women started wearing pants during the 1960s feminist movement. And now that I think about it, popular literature – including comics – follows the same trends.
The fact that girls freely pick up boys’ titles is not to be taken for granted – before the 1920s, such a thing might have been considered a corrupting influence on the pure minds of young ladies. The the current rift between girls’ comics and boys/everybody’s comics reflects the rift in society. Though I see it as the effect rather than the cause – I don’t think requiring a fully unisex dress code would solve any problems, nor do I think forcing such a thing in comics would do any good. However, I suspect that as society changes to become more unisex in cultural expectations, it will become harder to distinguish literature aimed at males from what’s aimed at females.
Thanks for your ten cents, Sarah! I’m definitely in sympathy with your argument, though I think that we’ve reached a stage in feminist consciousness where unisex culture isn’t the only means for achieving equality.
I know I’m a little late, but I found this article (and the original Robot 6 debate) so interesting that I wanted to leave my two cents as well.
I’m an 18-year-old girl and recent high school grad who has experienced the Twilight phenomenon first-hand, and yes, I have read the original Twilight book.
I realize that male and female fans can act very differently, and I definitely get excited when people realize that women are a big part of any sector of the entertainment industry. I’m a fan of shojo manga (I LOVE Vampire Knight) and will watch the occasional romantic comedy, but even I have a big beef with Twilight fans.
Someone pointed out in the comments on the other article that the Twilight fandom is full of “mean girls”- TRUE! One or two of my friends enjoyed Twilight, even a little obsessively, but from my experience the majority of Twilight fans at my high school (to stereotype just a little) were from the “popular” crowd. As opposed to my fairly nerdy/smart friends and myself, these were the kids who skipped classes, drank and partied excessively, and were generally apathetic at best about academics and other serious stuff. One manga, even if it is related to their favorite books (probably the only books they’ve read for fun in years), will not bring them back from the dark side. Just because it is a comic book, they will probably never even touch it.
I feel like this particular demographic creates a VERY annoying fan base. While I would have been made fun of for showing anything Vampire Knight-related at school, these girls were very publicly hyped up over a poorly-written, badly constructed, boring novel (remember, I’ve read it) that happens to tell a story they enjoy, mainly due to its (arguably) attractive male lead.
I totally think that comics, books, or movies for women should be treated with respect, but Twilight, in my opinion, is absolute drivel. Women and girls deserve better! I would have been very unhappy about Twilight fans at SDCC because not only does the franchise not deserve the attention it has gotten, that attention has come from a sector of the population that is particularly hateful to others. Girl’s manga? Sure! A well-crafted romance novel? Awesome! Twilight? NO THANKS.
Wow, sorry about the long rant. Hope someone finds it at least a little interesting.
Cate: Your two cents are very welcome, especially since so many of the people writing about the Twilight phenomenon are considerably older than the book’s core fanbase. I think you’d find that many of us defending Twilight’s fandom are doing it purely on principal; you won’t find too many of us arguing that it’s great literature, or that Robert Pattenson is the second coming of Peter O’Toole. (Or Cary Grant, George Clooney, Johnny Depp, or Denzel Washington, for that matter.) All we’re saying is that certain male comic fans have been especially nasty in their dismissal of the Twilight set, as if Twilight fandom is inherently worse than, say, Transformers or Star Wars fandom.
I definitely agree with you that most Twilight fans are unlikely to become comic readers after picking up the graphic novel adaptation. They’re fans of the story and the characters, not the medium, and aren’t likely to think, “Gee, I liked this. What other comics might I enjoy?” I’m a little rosier on sales prospects, as Yen Press and Tokyopop have both enjoyed commercial successes with graphic novel versions of other popular young adult franchises such as Maximum Ride, Cirque du Freak, and Warriors.
I’m going to challenge you a bit, however, about the way you’re stereotyping Twilight fans as “mean girls.” It sounds like that’s an apt description of who reads it at your high school (and those girls certainly sound like pills — you have my sympathy). Talk to teen librarians, however, and you’ll learn just how diverse the Twilight fanbase really is.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!
Whoops, I did go a little overboard with my stereotyping of Twilight fans. I actually know teachers who enjoyed it, and I don’t want to knock my friends for reading it since most of them can keep it in perspective. I guess I just wanted to point out that a good portion of the fans that I personally know have an attitude I find very hard to swallow… which really doesn’t justify being flat-out rude to them like the other fans you mentioned. It just makes me a little less likely to jump to Twilight’s defense.
Love your blog; keep up the great work!
Thanks for reading, Cate, and for taking the time to post a thoughtful addition to the discussion!
I am a hardcore anime fan, like to watch any kind of anime. Found your site on google, keep up the good work.
Hi !
My first commentary on Your blog, much like You to read
this is great. I’m a true new moonie and a total Twilight series fanatic…
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