By Mitra, you dogs are staring at my comely thighs!!
One of my all time favorite characters is Red Sonja. I would like to say that I have been a fan since her creation back in the 70s, but in all honesty I didnt get into the character until the mid eighties. By then, she was wearing a blue off the shoulder tunic, thigh high boots, and a wide leather belt (so 80′s, like, fer shure.) So I missed out completely on the whole chainmail bikini thing. Its not that I didnt know it existed, its that it was an incarnation of a previous era foreign to me just like that “Keep on Trucking” picture. So I never really felt any nostalgia for its return.
Fast Forward to the 90s, and the fine folks at Dynamite Entertainment decide to bring her back from the obscurity of the back issues vaults at Marvel (you are doing God’s work gentlemen. Pure and Simple.) Now, the first thing I notice about the first issue, in all its black and white testing-the-waters glory was that the chainmail bikini was back. I immediately flipped to the back of the comic to see if there was an R. Crumb picture that said “Keep On Trucking” while I was at it. Seriously, someone wanted to bring that ludicrous garment back??
And of course, there was the rationale they used, which is the point of today’s tirade. By dressing in a bikini of chainmail she is alternately “distracting her opponents” with her awesome inner thighs, or she is causing her opponents to underestimate her because no one whose breasts clink and jiggle at the same exact time can handle a sword like a man does. This particular rationale has been used and reused over and over again in defense of the costumes that we have placed our heroines in. Just look at Power Girl, or Ghost, or even Wonder Woman.
I have two problems with this argument though. First, it doesnt make sense. If they are making a logical, tactical decision as to what to wear based on the nature of combat, wouldnt they come to the conclusion that any psychological benefit gained by cheesecake is inherantly less than the benefit gained by, I don’t know, protective garments such as actual armor? So what, women can wield a sword, but can’t reason through a problem to a logical conclusion for shit? And can they really think any less of their opponents — men are easily distracted in life or death situations, trailing behind the unthinking blood engorged madness of an erection? My God, how much more Fruedian can we get?!? Its insulting to everyone involved. The people Sonja fights are stupid horny beasts, Sonja is a man hating bitch that thinks little of them, and you the reader are a moron for buying into that argument.
The second problem I have with the rationalization is that it is anti-thietical to the art form. Comic Books, for the most part, are derivative of pin-up art. Open any comic book drawn by Jim Lee or J. Scott Campbell or Ed Benes, and I can guarantee you that almost any panel where a female appears, you could probably remove them from the comic book setting and paint them on the side of a World War II Fighter Plane and it would still look natural. Does it have to be this way? No. Does Rock and Roll have to have a 4/4 beat? It just does. It’s part of what makes Rock different from Waltzes, and its part of what makes Comic Books different from book illustrations. There is nothing wrong with this. It is simply the nature of the art, and for the most part we all understand and accept that. We don’t need to rationalize it, any more than we need to come up with an explanation of how Superman flies. He’s an f’ing alien, he’s super saturated with Yellow Sunlight, and he can fly. Done. Next.
For the record though, I do have to say that I am still not a fan of the Chainmail bikini.
I have this as a print. I would kill to own the original. Thats not a figure of speech by the way. I would really pop a cap in your ass if I saw you walking alone in an dark alley downtown carrying this. Just saying, is all.....
By the way does anyone else really, really want to cry when they read this?