Week 8: Stereotypes and Feminism in Powerpuff Girls

I think it’s appropriate to talk about stereotypes in regards to comics, as comics latch on to what’s the most iconic/recognizable image and when a comic artist wants to portray a member of a marginalized group, they’ll go with a depiction that most people know: the stereotype. Not to mention the impact and reach of political comics, which people will take as fact.

It was interesting to talk about Gamer Gate in the classroom. When I was in high school, I didn’t really appreciate Anita Sarkeesian’s analysis, in one part because it was told too dryly for my hyperactive attention span, and in another part because she discussed an episode of the original Powerpuff Girls that she argued negated all of the feminist ideals of the show. The episode in question, titled “Equal Fights”, was about a female villain named Femme Fatal who would hold the fact that she was a woman over the main characters so she could escape from crime scenes unpunished. Femme Fatal is an obvious strawman stereotype of a radical feminist and convinces the girls that because she is one of the few female villains in the world, she shouldn’t be arrested and makes the girls think they’re oppressed. The girls start to see oppression where there is none, like when their dad asks them to do chores or the Mayor asks them to open a pickle jar. In the end, the girls learn that “equal rights” doesn’t mean women should get special treatment over men. Sarkeesian deposited that this episode was trying to say that the Powerpuff Girls rejected the identity of “feminist”, but I didn’t see it that way. There are other episodes where they were expressly pro-equal rights, such as “Members Only” where they are excluded from a stereotypical all-male superhero club because they are little girls, but in the end that’s what makes the Powerpuff Girls the only ones able to save the day.

Now that I’m older, I can see some of the critiques that Sarkeesian had of the episode were valid critiques, such as in the beginning where the narrator says that Townsville is a place “where everyone gets their fair share”, expositing that Townsville has essentially no inequality. Ms. Bellum and Ms. Keane, who are women the girls look up to, do say that there are inequalities in their world later in the same episode, but then why did the narrator open up with that if it wasn’t true? Again, in other episodes, the Powerpuff Girls have actually been oppressed because they are girls.

Sarkeesian’s critiques definitely had merit, but a big detail she failed to mention was that the episode’s writer was not the creator of the show, Craig McCracken, as she effectively attributes him to be. It was actually written by Lauren Faust, who later in the show’s run became McCracken’s wife. Faust has since expressed regret with the episode and both her and her husband share feminist values.

At the time of the Gamer Gate controversy, I tended to side with the gamers mainly because Sarkeesian didn’t seem to do enough research on the video games she covered. I refused to be identified as a “feminist” because I thought it was uncool (I was, ironically, also uncool). I never thought that was a good excuse for the death threats she was getting. Since then, I now identify as a feminist and often view media with a feminist slant.

One other thing I want to quickly talk about before I end my post is the idea of “Born Sexy Yesterday”, where a woman with very little real-world experience is reliant on an average man who she falls in love with by being the only nice man she is exposed to. When that video came out, the last season of Samurai Jack was premiering on Adult Swim. In Samurai Jack, the main character meets Aki, an assassin who along with her sisters were breeded to kill Jack in the name of Aku, but she eventually becomes Jack’s sidekick. When the show started, I assumed it would be a father-daughter dynamic because the audience sees her grow up and at one point Jack literally tells her a bedtime story. Unfortunately, she becomes his love interest and embodies the trope. The show’s creator, Genndy Tartakovsky, has never been good with convincing romance or strong female characters, who are either sexy or stupid. His past work including creating Dexter’s Lab and directing all three Hotel Transylvania movies, the latter could also be classified as “Born Sexy Yesterday”. Powerpuff Girls (of which Tartakovsky also worked on) had a lot of great female characters in comparison.