I'm writing this because I'm getting ready to do what will most likely be a very funny review of Avacyn cards but I wanted to address the outragey part elsewhere.
Ok so Jesse Mason, whom I find hilariously accurate and a necessary corrective to many aspects of Magic Culture wrote and article on a reaction to Triumph of Ferocity, and Avacyn Restored Card, that looks exactly like an uncontrolled enraged bestial man is getting ready to torture and kill a medieval stripper.
And it caused a week of outrage:
This is actually an improvement for both of the characters in terms of Trope Portrayal - because at least Lilliana gets to look like a medievil stripper instead of just a regular stripper. I am in no small part amused by this on a regular basis because the local "disreputable" strip club is named "Wizards" and normally Lilly looks like she works there but with Innistrad she got a a wardrobe upgrade and now she looks like she works at the "Gentleman's Club" here called "Deliliah's." Much better crowd.
Here's what Lilliana looks like on the Duels of the Planeswalkers - which is apparently the real point of entry for a lot of new players.
Lilly is the mostly undressed one in purple and Garruck is the masked Man Towering over everyone in the back.
Now lets compare Lilliana to actual strippers wearing what is actually sold and advertised as working wear for strippers
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| from Snaz75 http://www.snaz75.com/gowns.html#top |
I do this not because I have a problem with either srtippers or Lilly but to demonstrate something called "cultural context". More people have seen strippers than read Magic the Gathering's well . . . anything.
They know what a stripper looks like, they might even know what a sex-positive feminist looks like:
This is Annie Sprinkle - do not look her up on GIS if you are under 18.
So you have to understand that when I agree with Jesse, it doesn't mean I'm horrifically offended or I'm going to quit magic or anything it means '
This is the color Blue
And the art on this card looks like he's going to rape her before he kills her,
or maybe after :
Not because it's Garruk or Lilly or their backstory or anything, just because they styled one planeswalker to look like a hypermasculine "wildman" trope and they styled and other planeswalker to look like a stripper. So it looks like the wildman of the forest is going to dominate and kill the "evil sexual civillized woman"
Tale as old as time . . . .
What??? It's such an archetype that they write monorgaphs about it in cultural anthropolgy. And how many times is the evil woman trying to depower our hero a "seductress" whom he has to destroy or kill in order to be free?
Tons of times. That's why it's not something I'm going to quit Magic over, and why I'm willing to offend household objects by stating the bleeding obivous. I don't care how powerfull the two characters are, there a sexual apsect to the card art and frankly it's incredibly lazy visual storytelling that not surprisingly fell into the archetype that has existed since Civillized Woman , a temple prostitute was paid to seduce Enkidu cutting him off from his wildness.
And frankly we all know what's going to happen to the girl who dresses like a stripper in the movies or TV show she will be evil/dumb/have-a-heart-of-gold and she will be mocked/humiliated/or killed. Because media uses "dressing like a stripper" to signal lots of things that make that character being hurt, humiliated, used or killed acceptable, implying that they deserve it. Because well they're strippers or dress like them. It's just that in the course of things this time someone actually made the implicit explicit and called the artist on it.
But really it's WotC's fault for creating tropes that make it so easy to accept this instead of not dressing their sexy, looks obsessed death mage like a stripper.
By the way she can and does look like a sex positive sexually empowered female dressing for herself and pleasure and not exclusively the male gaze in this picture. Lilly looks totally hot here, and like she's wearing clothes made out of actual fabric not spray on latex (not that there's anything wrong with spray on latex clothing, it's has it's place and it's an uber cool special effect)
Now, I've decided that I'm going to actually do a review of all of the art of Avacyn, because apparently no one really knows what a female person thinks when they see the card art. So I'll deal with this card later. But I did have a response to Jesse's commenters - which is when they refused to admit that the card even had a sexual component, that it was exclusively violent, that there was no sex in this card at all.
I even read a completely awesomely incorrect defense of the fact that Garruck HAD to part her legs with his knee defensively.
Bullshit. This posing has as much to do with an actual fight as porn does with actual sex or the cool Conan the Barbarian sword swirling move does with anything that will block someone's incoming sword.
It's staged to show off something that the artist thinks is cool compositionally - Garruck is open to attack in about about three ways I can see off the top of my head and most of that exposure is because he's insisted on sticking his knee between her legs.
But then I started to wonder - what if there was some other problem, that makes them truly unable to see this. Or makes them able to see it but makes them angrily defend it anyway.
I'm becoming aware of how very sheltered some middle class men are in their 20's. It would never have occurred to me before.
And I wrote a response, and then I realized I just didn't want to fight the fight and educate those who were already defensive and that it would be very hard to have a deep conversation about what this is bringing up for me as a woman, a mother of a son , a "girl" and a magic player.
So I'm puttting it here in my competitive journal. Because if nothing else this journal is one woman's interaction with the game and these conversations have been a deafening clamor. My reaction to them is part of the competitive environment - this is something I thought, took the time to write and didn't post - I mulliganed the comment.
Here it is:
The Repsonse I didn't Post
OK - really the first thing I though of when I saw both of them is "breasts in corsets don't work that way".
Mostly because there was no way not to notice her breasts.
As to the guys who see the raised arm and assume that the violence about to be done to her discounts the idea of sexual assault let me say this in the most complimentary way possible because I mean it - I really do mean it
I REALLY AM SO GLAD THAT YOU DON'T THINK SEXUAL ASSAULT IS PRECEDED BY VIOLENT BEATINGS.
That means you are HEALTHY NORMAL MEN WHO CAN'T IMAGINE MIXING VIOLENCE WITH SEX.
Which is good. Really good.
And therefore when you see impending violence you remove the sexual implication from the picture.
And really that makes you a good guy dismissing two really important things - sexual assault is frequently about violence and a lot of sexaul assault and domestic violence starts off looking just like that.
And violent rape frequently starts with slapping beating or punching a person ( men can be assaulted too) because rape is about dominance. So you could have shown Lilliana losing a fight while fighting back ( which I assume is what the fire in her hand is supposed to represent) but she is shown as prone, passive and more than the implied violence I still happened to notice her breasts and her crotch because well - his knee is grinding all up in it.
She's dressed like a stripper. He's about to beat/kill a stripper. The artist chose to have a knee in her crotch - I'm actually almost pleased that you can't recognize this as "rapey" because it means you've never been involved in a rape or worry about a rape, or wonder if the guy who's getting in your face because he's mad at you is going to think he "deserves" something from you for upsetting him if they guy following you in his car with his pants down while you walk through the parking lot or to school is going to get out of the car and do this to you.
That's fantastic.
Now those of us who do look over our shoulders in the parking lots and take the longer but more public route home from school look at it and go -"Oh yeah, that's rapey." Way to go WotC. And most of us aren't going to stop playing or boycott or even bring up this card when there are worse ones. Or bring it up at all. Because we have to see it everywhere ALL THE TIME. Woman dressed like a stripper is going to be humiliated/beaten/killed for the plot hook or just some color somewhere in the movie or TV show, not surprising at all.
But yeah- it's a trite choice, it could have been done better. I'd rather have seen them upright with his pointy punch embedded in her shoulder and her flame in her hand dwindling because of the physical disruption while she counter attacked to show she was losing.
But I do wonder what healthy normal non-violent men think sexual assault is? Is it only "mixed signals"? Is it because the way we've been brought up to fear being raped and killed you've been brought up to fear a false accusation of rape? That's legitimate and should be discussed.
Because maybe that's the breakdown in the conversation - we're raised in a way that we are aware that sex is used to cover up violence and involuntary and shift the blame to the victim ( she was asking for it) and you're raised to be aware that consensual sex is a tool that can be used back up a lie to destroy your life by the perp.
When we see this picture we don't see the same things, and because the image is shown so frequently we never think about what the other group might see.
Magic is disproportionately young men, they haven't usually had a lot of experience with domestic violence or general war or crime because we live in a pretty good society that is a lot safer than it used to be.
But I am a girl ( and an old girl) who has been threatened, assaulted, sexually harassed at work, followed by pantless men in cars when I was 13 and looked 10, when i was 16 and looked 12, when I was 28 and probably looked like a homeless 18 year old. And frankly, I'm not all that attractive.
And I am the mother of a son and I know what I taught him to be careful of because there are women who will lie about lots of things, for lots of reasons and the laws are not kind to young men.
Jessie's critique is accurate. I'm not sure how big a deal it is combined with many worse images in worse places, but I am beginning to think that discussing the defense of the image might be the more illuminating discussion. But I'm not sure anyone is ready to or wants to have it
I didn't even notice Lili until someone pointed her out three weeks later, I was too enthralled by the movement captured in Garruk's half of the art.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I 100% worry constantly about being blocked out by female peers because I'm male and they assume my behavior can only be explained as derivative of infatuation or sexual obsession
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