In an NPR interview last week, Kelly Sue DeConnick talked about how some fans reacted to her reimagining of Captain Marvel: Carol Danvers went from a long-sleeved bathing suit with thigh-high boots to a full-cover flight suit, and that among other changes caused an outcry of “feminist agenda” and “angry feminism.”
To paraphrase DeConnick, who seems fairly laid back and thick skinned but doesn’t like the internet jumping on her any more than anyone else would, she responded with “This is not angry feminist. You want to see angry feminist? Let me show it to you.”
Out of that came Bitch Planet, a stand-alone series from Image Comics. A graphic novel of the first five issues came out last week, and I had no idea what to expect when I started it; I had some vague idea I might be offended, and that it’d either be some campy cheesecake prison fluff, or enraged political propaganda.
Turns out, it’s hilarious, and at the same time incredibly powerful, if you’re not the easily offended type. There’s tons of nudity, and the men in this world are most definitely the bad guys, but if you can jump past any knee-jerk reactions you have to those things, you’ll find a funny, intelligent, very entertaining book.
DeConnick isn’t, as far as I know, a man-hater. Or anywhere close. It’s a sign of the times that I feel I have to explain that before you’ll read any further. I’ll say something about that later, but first you need to know what the book’s about. (Very minor spoilers follow; if you’d rather skip the review and go read the book instead, I promise I won’t mind.)
In DeConnick’s world “the Patriarchy” is in charge. Men make all the decisions and women are the wives and girlfriends and homemakers. And women need to fit into whatever role men want, because if they’re too loud, too quiet, too bossy, too weak, too heavy, too thin, too brown, too black, too sexy, or not sexy enough, they can be labeled as “non-compliant.” And the worst cases, the women who will just not step in line, are called “terminally non-compliant” and they’re sent away to a prison planet where they can only hurt each other.
Or they could get sent there because their husband wants a younger model and he can just say he caught them being non-compliant. Because it’s his word against theirs, and who are they going to believe, a woman?
Obviously there’s a lot of not-so-subtle meaning in every page. But the book is fun. There’s fights and sassy comments and shower scenes all over the place. The characters, men and women both, have depth and personality, and you adore hating them or you feel bad for liking them. They’re in a prison in space. How is that not interesting?
Not to mention the art, by Valentine De Landro, which is fantastic in a gritty, exploitation-movie way. There’s a great scene where the main character is running on a treadmill, and fellow prisoners talk to her on adjoining treadmills one by one. They’re plotting escape, or mutiny, or just trouble, but what’s awesome is the prison riot that slowly goes out of control in the background, with none of the main characters paying the slightest attention to it. It’s an amazing couple of pages that makes me laugh every time I see the silent, flying tackle.
But yes, DeConnick had a point to make other than her love of 70s exploitation and blaxploitation movies, underground comics, and prison TV shows. (I have no idea if she watches Orange Is the New Black. But I wouldn’t be surprised.)
Given that it’s not a subtle book, you might think the main message is “ISN’T THIS HORRIBLE THIS WOULD BE HORRIBLE AND YOU’RE A HORRIBLE PERSON IF YOU THINK OTHERWISE.” But that’s not the main point.
And despite what you’ve heard, the message also isn’t “MEN ARE EVIL AND IF YOU’RE A MAN YOU’RE EVIL AND IF YOU’RE A WOMAN WHO ACTUALLY LIKES MEN YOU’RE PROBABLY EVIL TOO.”
First and foremost I think the main point is “a book with a strong, independent woman isn’t necessarily angry feminism. You wanna see angry feminism? Here’s a book where the men have taken control and any woman who isn’t a cowering sex doll will rot in prison until she either dies, knuckles under, or learns to stand up for herself. That’s what angry feminism looks like.”
A book where Carol Danvers is as kickass and sexy as she always was, with slightly more clothes, is just a comic you should read, because it’s well-written and cool. (Sorry, that last sentence isn’t really the message from the book, that one’s from me.)
Part of the problem is that we’re so fond of labels that we’ll take something we don’t agree with (a book, a character, a person we know) and call them names and reduce them to a stereotype we don’t have to think about. I’ve said it before: if you don’t like something, say why, and be specific. Name-calling isn’t helping. Getting a discussion going about all of it will.
But in case any guys reading this think there’s a lot of fingers being pointed at them, I think another message is that we women buy into a ton of media-promoted ideals of fashion, body type, and relationships on our own. It’s hard not to.
But in between the chapters of the book are pages that look like the ones you remember from 70s and 80s comic books: tiny panels selling X-ray glasses, spy cameras, joy buzzers, and whoopee cushions. Those were fun, and these are fun too, in a creepy way; devices that can see what your man thinks about you, change your personality into something a man will like better, or a tapeworm that will live in your intestine and melt the pounds away.
In case you think the message was too subtle there, the fine print on the tapeworm ad was:
“…if any part of you has ever been jealous of anorexics or considered extra-medical hormone injections or parasites, or used body-hate to bond with girlfriends, you have bought in. It’s near impossible not to, but maybe today TRY not to believe that your VALUE is inextricably linked to some asshat’s assessment of your desirability. Fuck that dude. Fuck that CULTURE.”
So yes, not subtle. Fun, though.
At one point one of the prisoners, Penelope, is strapped to a machine that will read her mind and tell the Patriarchy how she sees her “ideal self” so they can use it to make “a road map for her treatment.” They’re fairly sure a large, dreadlocked, angry black woman will wish she could change a lot of things about herself.
The machine projects the image, and it’s Penelope. Exactly as she is now. Except she’s laughing.
If we got stuck in the same machine, I think a lot of us hope we’d do as well.
An independent, intelligent, strong-willed female friend and I were talking about a movie we liked. She strongly disagreed when I said it was feminist; she had no idea I meant it as a compliment. She interprets “feminist” as “man-hating and bitter.” It’s not just some men that write off feminists as humorless and angry.
So I feel like I need to apologize when I call myself a feminist, or at least explain myself very quickly. “I’m a feminist but-I-don’t-hate-men-I-like-them-a-lot-actually-and-I-don’t-think-they’re-all-awful-just-some-of-them-but-not-YOU-obviously.”
I interpret it as women’s equality and confidence in our strengths, but honestly there’s as many different interpretations of “feminism” as there are people on the planet with an opinion about it. So we should definitely keep the discussion going.
You should read this book even if you think it’ll offend you. You should read this book because you think it’ll offend you. It’s not just naked shower scenes and fistfights (though it’s those things too.) There’s a message in there, and the message is not “MEN ARE PIGS AND WOMEN SHOULD TAKE OVER!”
It’s that we should every once in a while check out the worst-case scenario, just to see what it looks like. As ridiculous and funny as Bitch Planet is, we can all agree this isn’t a world we’d want to live in, right?
Right?
Images courtesy of Image Comics. The views of the reviewer aren’t necessarily the views of the website. I would LOVE to talk about this more, shout out in the comments!
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