The Four Color Media Monitor

A writer for Racked (via National Review and Hot Air) makes such a big deal out of the lack of ponytails in Avengers: Infinity War, and claims it's "sexist" because they didn't fasten back their hair. The PC clown says:

...one thing you won’t be seeing a lot of when you watch the movie? Hair ties.

Which, to anyone with longer than shoulder-length hair who has played on a recreational soccer league as a kid, seems nuts. Aren’t these people, like, fighting each other? While doing flips and jumps and stuff? Even Violet Baudelaire, the protagonist of A Series of Unfortunate Events, famously had to tie up her hair with a ribbon in order to focus, which requires basically zero physical exertion.

So why don’t Black Widow, Gamora, Scarlet Witch, and Mantis — and even superheroines beyond Infinity War, from Wonder Woman to Jessica Jones, Elektra, Storm, and She-Hulk — ever seem to take a second to throw their hair into a chic chignon (or, more likely, a half-assed messy bun like the rest of us do before an activity as simple as getting on the elliptical)?

The answer should be utterly simple: because it's a surreal movie at best, and real life rules need not apply. But she just drags it on with the following:

The simplest answer is that comics are a visual medium, and a bunch of long, flowing hair swirling around during an already epic fight scene looks pretty cool. Camille Friend, the head of the hair departments for Marvel’s Black Panther, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and the upcoming Captain Marvel starring Brie Larson, pretty much confirms that that’s at least the way Hollywood sees it.

It's the way comics see it too...or at least until Marvel decided to masculinize their heroines like Carol Danvers, one of the biggest victims of this social justice mockery of theirs. That said, the Racked writer actually does acknowledge what comics tried over past decades:

“In the history of superhero women in comic books, the hair has always been drawn down and flowing,” Friend explains. “When you are seeing them in action or flying, you want to be able to see the hair moving freely with the hair in constant motion.”

And that's because, again, surrealism played a leading role even in Marvel's products when they actually put entertainment first and not leftist politics. Unfortunately, the writer, as evidenced in the next paragraph, clearly despises that, using another leftist to make her limp points:

But there’s a reason we don’t see many male superheroes with waist-long hair just so we can watch all that cool hair fly around. Christina Dokou, an assistant professor of American literature and culture at the University of Athens, explains that the “boys’ club” legacy of comic books, in which female characters were stuck with sexist stereotypes, still endures. “Even today, the physical attributes and feminine beauty of superheroines are exaggerated to make them look like, well, frankly, porn stars at worst, and sexy female athletes at best,” she tells Racked over email.

The hair, by the way, isn’t only impractical in combat, Dokou notes, but also would have the effect of giving away one’s secret identity, causing a whole lotta sweat, and making the character suffer the unfortunate consequences of helmet hair.

Of course, comics are fun because they aren’t real life. But even in superhero universes, hair still has meaning. “Red or black hair is usually reserved for the strongest superheroine around, or the one with the most flamboyant personality — see, for example, Phoenix, Red Sonja, or Wonder Woman — while blondes are still mostly treated as glorified bimbos, regardless of their powers,” she explains, pointing to Supergirl and Smallville as examples of the latter.

So...another one of these arguments that bases claims of sexism on physical attributes that're part of wish fulfillment, not whether the superheroines are capable of defending themselves against supervillains. And it's enough to fall of the couch laughing when she acknowledges comics are fun because they're not real...but then boomerangs right back on the "realism" argument again, and to make matters worse, she even makes more hilarious claims that redheads and brunettes are always the smart and strong ones, while blondes always the dumb ones. Apparently, she's never heard of Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, Valkyrie, Jesse Quick, the 2nd Wonder Girl Cassie Sandsmark, Tandy Bowen of the Cloak & Dagger duo with Tyrone Johnson, Halo from the Outsiders, and while Black Canary is a brunette, she dyed her hair blonde after the early 90s, if it matters. Say, what about Shiera Sanders, the original Hawkgirl, whose hair was usually brown? It doesn't take much to figure out this is another "outsider" pretending to be an "insider".

But interesting they cite Supergirl, if they're talking about the TV show, because, given how ultra-politicized it became, that's just why you could figure Kara Zor-El was turned into a bimbo by ways of the clueless scriptwriters, if all the producers care about is leftist politics. Yet it's clear they don't pay attention to recent Marvel stories back in the pamphlets, which have been tooled to suit the columnist's twisted vision, what with all the repellent artwork already littering their books in the past few years. Actually, that proves no matter what they'd do to appeal to her SJW viewpoint, she still won't buy them.

Meanwhile, a shaved head often indicates a godlike mental ability — think Deadpool’s Negasonic Teenage Warhead or Stranger Things’ Eleven — but can also double as a signifier of sexual preferences. Dokou points to Moondragon, a ’70s-era telepathic martial arts superhero with a shaved head, who was eventually revealed to be bisexual after dating the pixie-cut alien Phylla-Vell. Then there’s the anarcho-punk outlaw Tank Girl, known for her mostly shaved head, who inspired weekly lesbian “Tank Girl nights” in London.

“To put it in a nutshell, the shorter the hair, the more precarious a character’s relationship with traditional femininity,” Dokou says. But she adds that over the past two decades, “comics and graphic novels seem more willing to experiment with hair color and length (as metonymies of gender identity), suggest[ing] a welcome, albeit still small, relaxation of gender fascism in favor of inclusiveness and equality.”

As if they didn't work on hair lengths and colors decades before! What nonsense. And just how does the use of longer hair not tied in ponytails qualify as "gender fascism"? What I do know is, they're being awfully offensive to parrot some of the most revolting notions Fredric Wertham might've pioneered, like claiming superhero comics emphasize fascism. The blabber about inclusiveness and equality's been done before, and this is no improvement now. It's sickening how they make punk subculture out to look like that's a positive role model, because it's not. What it does do is make any movie where bald heads are turned into a big deal look tasteless.

I think the movie writer at Racked has to just quit the profession she's in, because she's not representing anyone well, and her visions denigrating to femininity aren't doing women any favors.

Labels: Avengers, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, politics