Boobies boobies boobies
I've been glad to see the topic of sexism in fantasy art being discussed lately (beginning with Tempest's post about the covers on Realms of Fantasy, then on Doug Cohen's LJ, then Jim Hines'. This post processes my own thoughts on the subject (some have long been simmering away) as someone who started off a fantasy reader, then also a fan of fantasy art, then also an artist, and then, occasionally, an art director at Two Cranes Press.
Becoming a "full time" fantasy fan when I was 13 years old (as opposed to just being partly committed to it), I took (I think) a rather holistic approach to the whole thing. I had opinions about plot, the writing, the characters and world building, I had opinions about editorial decisions in the industry when I ran into writing that was pretty atrocious, I also loved imitating cover art, interior art (where applicable) and book design, and analyzing the problems when I thought a book looked bad. Poor Jason knows I can get really anal about books when we're making them. As "practice", we stand in the SF&F shelves in bookstores and analyze covers, which I'm pretty sure must be annoying for anyone unlucky enough to be in the vicinity when we're at it.
In that sense, yeah, I'm shallow. I do judge books by covers and design. (On a small tangent, I think good covers are even more important for small presses and e-publishers. It's one of the fastest, most direct ways to project that you've got quality control.)
Now, to the art.
When I started making my own fantasy art, I looked at a lot of it. The libraries and local budget bookshops carried (American) fantasy art compilations where Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, and Rowena Morill were hailed as the masters of the genre. Their work occupied the majority of the pages, while other artists like Bob Eggleton (think big spaceships) and Michael Whelan maybe got one or two pieces published, with the more testosterone-y stuff having been chosen for display. I decided very early on that while Vallejo and Bell painted anatomy superbly, I was not a fan of their work. Which set me against almost everyone else I knew in my teens who looked at fantasy art. ("You don't like Boris Vallejo?" has been said in disbelief to me more times than I can count.) I did like the better Dungeons & Dragons art I saw during the 1990s, and I really liked the art books coming out from Paper Tiger, a UK publisher, that really opened my eyes to different styles and media in fantasy art (including collage and colour pencils--still damned unusual today). The UK books also tended, generally, to have less cheesecake and beefcake. Strange, yeah?
My sensitivity to sexism in fantasy art got heightened when the Internet came along. I think I joined Elfwood when it was still just elfwood.lysator.liu.se ( ;) ) and the artists on it were still only in the double digits. (Over 10 years ago.) This was the site for aspiring fantasy artists everywhere to upload their work, and as membership ballooned, so the number of pictures of buxom beauties in magic underwear. It became a bitter joke that their magic floating boobies were what made them fantasy. Although, some people meant this quite in earnest.
"It's fantasy. What are you getting upset about?"
Look, I get it about the beauty of the female form. They're just curvier, even when they're skinny, they're visually appealing... while guys are just (again, this is going to sound very familiar to poor Jason) icky and rough looking and have too many difficult muscles to draw, unless you're painting lithe, waxed elves, or a guy in spandex.
I also get that it's fantasy. But it seemed no excuse for artists (especially male artists) to invent women from their imaginations where the only ones worthy of being depicted were of chest size 40DDD and in worlds where gravity was 1/4 that of earth's, and the climate always too warm for the ladies and freezing for the men, if one had to judge from the clothing. But voicing these criticisms on Elfwood was actually bad, very bad. Worse when the artist in question was, by all evidence, a nice and approachable guy. There was a picture I once saw on Elfwood that nearly had in tears and screams, I was so angry. It was this:
White, plain background (because painting backgrounds is for the professionals). Ink and colour pencil drawing of four characters, all standing together. Three females, one male. The females are all young, lithe, curvy, and naked (full frontal) and looking at the viewer. The rightmost female is partly leaning upon the lone male. He is completely clothed, from neck down to his feet, because he has been given full military dress. He might have been holding a weapon.
I think the picture would have been less offensive to me if the man had been completely absent. Because what it said to me was that the women needed Mr Man to defend them, and this Mr Man was entitled to, and lord and master over these three women, who were happy to be completely naked in his dressed presence, because it would please him and they owed him the sight of their young, perfect, and perfectly identical bodies. There was just no story I could come up with for the picture that wasn't sexist and demeaning to women. And it pained me to do so to a nice and approachable guy, but I posted an anonymous comment that tore it apart. On both technical grounds and what it implied for the sexes. (It didn't change anything. He never got it. From ink and pencil, he would later go on to working in Poser, and his 3D model women were always naked and in sexual poses. Look, today I recognize his right to make porn. But that's what it is to me, porn.) To this day, I don't regret my comment or that it was anonymous, because the answering flames my comment received were fucking vicious. With the "it's fantasy" defense coming up in almost every flame, and "But the artist is nice!" in every other. No one would talk about gender equality. (Maybe I shouldn't be too harsh on this fact. I bet the majority of us on Elfwood were in our teens. But couldn't it have been used as an opportunity to recognize what sexism is?)
As an artist, I've dabbled in erotic/cheesecake art. Rarely, though--if artists paint what occupies their minds, then, well, draw your conclusions about me from there. In my darkest hours, during my desperate episodes of trying to work out how to sell more, to become more prominent and popular, I've done pictures which were what I thought people wanted to see. Unsurprisingly, it's not very satisfying painting stuff you don't believe in.
Now, to the present. Barely clad women still vastly outnumber barely clad males in fantasy art. I bet you most artists would be found guilty for this imbalance (for reasons I've mentioned above, for me personally), but they are not the only ones guilty. Art directors and publishers are as well. There are fantasy art books dedicated to the female form, and few (if any) for the male. As I've mentioned in Doug Cohen's post, it's not that I want to see more fantasy beefcake (though I've joked about it--it would be great to see how male viewers would react to being as constantly sex-objectified as women are in fantasy art), it's just that such art really makes the fantasy art genre and the fantasy fiction genre look bad when such misogynistic and shallow visual representation is accepted as the norm. I think everyone (artists included) could benefit from recognizing this. It's also not merely about the female being painted more often than the male--it's about whether the picture also tells you she has a story and brains, or is just "o hai do u think im hot?"
You can tell this subject is near and dear to my heart.
(I didn't even get to female objectification in advertising and popular culture, or the history of calling females vain because male Renaissance artists kept drawing them naked and looking in mirrors, or the label of black women as wanton sluts during America's slavery era when the female slaves were deliberately presented nude at auctions. I think this rant has been long enough.)
In my next post (because now I've got to go work on a painting and aurgh, do the housework), I'm going to go into what I think makes a good fantasy book cover, and just how I'd like the fantasy genre to be visually represented at the bookstore. Because it still is the section of the bookstore I feel a bit embarrassed being seen in. I'm not the only one, right?
Becoming a "full time" fantasy fan when I was 13 years old (as opposed to just being partly committed to it), I took (I think) a rather holistic approach to the whole thing. I had opinions about plot, the writing, the characters and world building, I had opinions about editorial decisions in the industry when I ran into writing that was pretty atrocious, I also loved imitating cover art, interior art (where applicable) and book design, and analyzing the problems when I thought a book looked bad. Poor Jason knows I can get really anal about books when we're making them. As "practice", we stand in the SF&F shelves in bookstores and analyze covers, which I'm pretty sure must be annoying for anyone unlucky enough to be in the vicinity when we're at it.
In that sense, yeah, I'm shallow. I do judge books by covers and design. (On a small tangent, I think good covers are even more important for small presses and e-publishers. It's one of the fastest, most direct ways to project that you've got quality control.)
Now, to the art.
When I started making my own fantasy art, I looked at a lot of it. The libraries and local budget bookshops carried (American) fantasy art compilations where Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, and Rowena Morill were hailed as the masters of the genre. Their work occupied the majority of the pages, while other artists like Bob Eggleton (think big spaceships) and Michael Whelan maybe got one or two pieces published, with the more testosterone-y stuff having been chosen for display. I decided very early on that while Vallejo and Bell painted anatomy superbly, I was not a fan of their work. Which set me against almost everyone else I knew in my teens who looked at fantasy art. ("You don't like Boris Vallejo?" has been said in disbelief to me more times than I can count.) I did like the better Dungeons & Dragons art I saw during the 1990s, and I really liked the art books coming out from Paper Tiger, a UK publisher, that really opened my eyes to different styles and media in fantasy art (including collage and colour pencils--still damned unusual today). The UK books also tended, generally, to have less cheesecake and beefcake. Strange, yeah?
My sensitivity to sexism in fantasy art got heightened when the Internet came along. I think I joined Elfwood when it was still just elfwood.lysator.liu.se ( ;) ) and the artists on it were still only in the double digits. (Over 10 years ago.) This was the site for aspiring fantasy artists everywhere to upload their work, and as membership ballooned, so the number of pictures of buxom beauties in magic underwear. It became a bitter joke that their magic floating boobies were what made them fantasy. Although, some people meant this quite in earnest.
"It's fantasy. What are you getting upset about?"
Look, I get it about the beauty of the female form. They're just curvier, even when they're skinny, they're visually appealing... while guys are just (again, this is going to sound very familiar to poor Jason) icky and rough looking and have too many difficult muscles to draw, unless you're painting lithe, waxed elves, or a guy in spandex.
I also get that it's fantasy. But it seemed no excuse for artists (especially male artists) to invent women from their imaginations where the only ones worthy of being depicted were of chest size 40DDD and in worlds where gravity was 1/4 that of earth's, and the climate always too warm for the ladies and freezing for the men, if one had to judge from the clothing. But voicing these criticisms on Elfwood was actually bad, very bad. Worse when the artist in question was, by all evidence, a nice and approachable guy. There was a picture I once saw on Elfwood that nearly had in tears and screams, I was so angry. It was this:
White, plain background (because painting backgrounds is for the professionals). Ink and colour pencil drawing of four characters, all standing together. Three females, one male. The females are all young, lithe, curvy, and naked (full frontal) and looking at the viewer. The rightmost female is partly leaning upon the lone male. He is completely clothed, from neck down to his feet, because he has been given full military dress. He might have been holding a weapon.
I think the picture would have been less offensive to me if the man had been completely absent. Because what it said to me was that the women needed Mr Man to defend them, and this Mr Man was entitled to, and lord and master over these three women, who were happy to be completely naked in his dressed presence, because it would please him and they owed him the sight of their young, perfect, and perfectly identical bodies. There was just no story I could come up with for the picture that wasn't sexist and demeaning to women. And it pained me to do so to a nice and approachable guy, but I posted an anonymous comment that tore it apart. On both technical grounds and what it implied for the sexes. (It didn't change anything. He never got it. From ink and pencil, he would later go on to working in Poser, and his 3D model women were always naked and in sexual poses. Look, today I recognize his right to make porn. But that's what it is to me, porn.) To this day, I don't regret my comment or that it was anonymous, because the answering flames my comment received were fucking vicious. With the "it's fantasy" defense coming up in almost every flame, and "But the artist is nice!" in every other. No one would talk about gender equality. (Maybe I shouldn't be too harsh on this fact. I bet the majority of us on Elfwood were in our teens. But couldn't it have been used as an opportunity to recognize what sexism is?)
As an artist, I've dabbled in erotic/cheesecake art. Rarely, though--if artists paint what occupies their minds, then, well, draw your conclusions about me from there. In my darkest hours, during my desperate episodes of trying to work out how to sell more, to become more prominent and popular, I've done pictures which were what I thought people wanted to see. Unsurprisingly, it's not very satisfying painting stuff you don't believe in.
Now, to the present. Barely clad women still vastly outnumber barely clad males in fantasy art. I bet you most artists would be found guilty for this imbalance (for reasons I've mentioned above, for me personally), but they are not the only ones guilty. Art directors and publishers are as well. There are fantasy art books dedicated to the female form, and few (if any) for the male. As I've mentioned in Doug Cohen's post, it's not that I want to see more fantasy beefcake (though I've joked about it--it would be great to see how male viewers would react to being as constantly sex-objectified as women are in fantasy art), it's just that such art really makes the fantasy art genre and the fantasy fiction genre look bad when such misogynistic and shallow visual representation is accepted as the norm. I think everyone (artists included) could benefit from recognizing this. It's also not merely about the female being painted more often than the male--it's about whether the picture also tells you she has a story and brains, or is just "o hai do u think im hot?"
You can tell this subject is near and dear to my heart.
(I didn't even get to female objectification in advertising and popular culture, or the history of calling females vain because male Renaissance artists kept drawing them naked and looking in mirrors, or the label of black women as wanton sluts during America's slavery era when the female slaves were deliberately presented nude at auctions. I think this rant has been long enough.)
In my next post (because now I've got to go work on a painting and aurgh, do the housework), I'm going to go into what I think makes a good fantasy book cover, and just how I'd like the fantasy genre to be visually represented at the bookstore. Because it still is the section of the bookstore I feel a bit embarrassed being seen in. I'm not the only one, right?