Stories are told to us from a very young age. Whether it be religious, children's books, or superheroes, every story, through how they are told, teach us morals or give us a message. This website is dedicated to giving a specific message: Girls need superheroes and action figures as much as boys do. 

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Some may ask, “What about Disney princesses?” Of course, they teach us important lessons too, but short of Rapunzel in Tangled, we don’t see many Disney princess movies covering abuse, rape, and other hard topics that superheroes comic book character arcs have. Superheroes “validate our sense of justice and give hope through all the darkness and chaos that can be in the world. Superheroes promote the idea that anyone can do good deeds, that hidden talents lie in us all, and that one person can make a difference” as Lauren Dydiw said in a Huffington Post blog. Comics are commonly seen by creators (as well as the public at large) as a boys’/men’s pastime, despite there being female comic book readers and creators since the beginning.

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​But before we can get into the superheroines, the action figures, and what we can learn from them, we need to understand what makes a superheroine, why they are so commonly sexualized, what advancements have been made in the last few years, and what possible further advancement could be made in the next few years.

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You ever notice how there’s more “girl” superheroines than “woman” superheroines? Invisible Girl, Marvel Girl, Batgirl, Power Girl, Supergirl, Aqua Girl, Squirrel Girl are all heroes. But very few women in comics are graced with the maturity of “woman” in their names, most prominently being Wonder Woman, Batwoman, and one could include Invisible Woman (which some can argue as a “promotion” related to a man because Invisible Girl got married first in order to obtain that title). Imagine Batman as Batboy or Superman as Superboy at their inceptions. That would be ridiculous because you would not take them seriously on principle.

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In addition, superheroines are very sexualized: from Power Girl’s “boob window” to being a designated love interest, women have been for the male gaze, not for female empowerment. Even Wonder Woman has not escaped being sexualized for the male gaze with her various outfits over her seventy-six year history. In “Fangirls in Refrigerators: The Politics of (In)visibility in Comic Book Culture”, Suzanne Scott says:

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To male comic book fans who frequently rationalized or openly dismissed complaints about the representation of women in comics by noting that the male superhero body is hypermasculinized, these female bloggers argued that “the ‘ideal’ nature of male superhero bodies will always focus on strength and fitness while the ‘ideal’ nature of female superhero bodies will always focus on sexiness and vulnerability…Thus, despite comics’ great potential, they still fall prey to many of the same issues Mulvey identified with respect to film, and perhaps exacerbate the male gaze via this gendered control of the regazing and the bodies of female superheroes. This unprecedented control of the gaze also evokes the panoptic power of the prison guard, with superheroines arranged in their panels/cells, performing this state of constant visibility for an invisible male spectator.

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While superheroines are sexualized, it does not stop them from teaching us valuable lessons about important topics. They can teach us about love as well as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and its repercussions.

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What about comic books with female readers? Even if conventional wisdom says it is a boy’s medium, many women read superhero comic books. The Internet has given female fans a voice they did not have previously. In The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky talks about female comic book readers in his article “The Female Thor and the Female Comic-Book Reader”:

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Gerard Jones in his book Men of Tomorrow mentioned a survey that showed that 90 percent of the readers of Wonder Woman were men – and if women weren’t reading Wonder Woman, you’d think they wouldn’t be reading many superhero titles. However, when I asked Jones for details about the survey, he said he had only heard about it second-hand, and expressed some doubt about the accuracy of the figures. Trina Robbins was even more skeptical, declaring that the survey results were “absolute bullshit!” She herself had read Wonder Woman, Gloria Steinem had read Wonder Woman, and both of them remembered other girls reading the series as well.

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Today there are more female comic book writers including Gail Simone, G. Willow Wilson, Trina Robbins, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Denise Mina, and Jodi Picoult, among many, many others. And Berlatsky concludes with this: “At a moment when superheroes are becoming more popular and comics are becoming more respected, it makes sense for publishers of superhero comics to start trying to create stories for the other half of the population” and he’s right. Even if mainstream comics have been resistant to female-led superhero stories, Wonder Woman has existed for seventy-six years and there have been all female team-ups at both Marvel and DC Comics.

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Some have pointed out the beginning of change, but we still have a long way to go. The animated shows like Teen Titans and Young Justice being cancelled because of female demographics, despite the show having a gender neutral marketing campaign comes to mind. Young Justice has since been revived by Netflix and there is a DC Supergirls television show, but the latter looks more like a “girl” demographic rather than a gender neutral one. There is also the appeal of the Arrowverse on television’s CW with Constantine, Arrow, The Flash, and Supergirl with their titular characters running around in their own universe aware of each other. While one might assume that Supergirl is the only female demographic show, all the shows offer something for everyone (If my mom could get into Constantine, there’s hope for everyone. My roommate even watched Iron Fist, knowing nothing about comic books).

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The point is, there’s something for everyone in comic books and it’s about time we start marketing them to everyone, including women and girls.