Fandom has always been sleazy; I just never paid any attention

[fpb]

IN one form or another, fandom has dominated my life. I started out in comics when I was sixteen, and since then I only left comics fandom to plunge right back into JKR fandom in the internet age - which, to us old-time dead tree users, is fandom on steroids.

One of the hardest things

Comments

[elegant_bonfire]

That article about Angelique Trouvere brought back some way old memories for me. She was around years and years ago when I first got into Trek fandom. I'd never heard the story about Heidi Saha, though. Very sad.

Honestly, the scantily dressed women in the costume competition have been around forever at SF cons. I think it is an attention-getting thing on occasion, because you can be moderately good-looking at a con and still have every guy following you around. LOL sad but true. I'm not Heidi Klum by a long shot, but back in the day when I was I better shape than I am now, I hall-costumed as the chick from the Heavy Metal movie (can't remember now if she even had a name), costume borrowed from a friend, and yeah it was kind of fun to turn heads.

[fpb]

Well, that confirms my views. But you have to go even further back. One founding moment was when DC comics paid a psychologist named Charles Moulton Marsden to concentrate the whole imaginative world of the world war two pin-up in a character, and Moulton produced Wonder Woman, with her aggressive and deliberate overtones of bondage and lesbianism. The placing of Wonder Woman in the heroic context of the world of The BAtman and Superman may be seen as the matrix for everything that came later. The publishing industry had known and used the commercial appeal of softcore porn for longer than the United States had been an independent country; pornography effectively financed the transformation of publishing from an artisan trade into a corporate business. And it follows that an imaginative world that depends on capitalist publishing for its existence was almost doomed to involve a softcore element, however inappropriate.

Wonder Woman

[inverarity]

Moulton had issues.

Even so, he really did envision her as a figure of female empowerment. Unfortunately, his version of "empowerment" was wrapped up in his own personal kinks. However, WW has evolved to be much closer to the ideal Moulton espoused, and I'd argue that especially in recent years, she's become much more worthy of being a flagship DC character.

The only lingering problem is the fact that she still dresses like a half-naked pin-up girl, something so irreconcilably at odds with everything she stands for (both explicitly, by her own words and background, and implicitly, by the nature of her character) that writers don't even bother trying to justify it; that's just WW's costume and that's the way it is. It would be great if they could do a real revamp on the character and have her dress more appropriately for a modern superheroine, but being that she is a flagship character, it would be almost like having Superman give up his cape.

Re: Wonder Woman

[fpb]

That is the point. The character comes with its past. And it is a past I do not want to have anything to do with. I am, actually, one of the minority of writers, like Chris Claremont or Otto Binder, who would rather write heroines than heroes. Ricky Attanasio is something of a break in that. Only I do NOT put my heroines in bikinis or basques, as you know. (http://fpb.livejournal.com/446633.html)