eruditechick:

dresdencodak:

QUESTION OF THE DAY: Who do you think is the most mismanaged/objectified female character in mainstream comics? (ie: the character with the most potential squandered due to all of the  terribly sexist, etc. writing/art/editing).  I know there are lot, but try to pick the worst one in your opinion.

Respond by either reblogging this with a comment or sending me a message!

oh my god where to even begin

all of them

The argument for Rogue is a strong one, though, just because her powers are hooked so intrinsically into her sexuality, her perception of sex, her ability to be sexual. First off, she can’t touch anybody. That’s a pretty big obstacle. Second off, every time she does, she absorbs a piece of them, and as we see when she gets molested on Genosha, some psychic residue stays. These facets of other people’s personalities have the ability to warp her perception of reality, color her reactions to people she maybe doesn’t even know, etc., so if all of a sudden Rogue discovered she had, say, some lesbian feelings! She wouldn’t be able to really tell if they were her own or something that had become integrated into her personality from stealing a piece of someone else’s. 

It is a hugely complex power set, and they try to simplify it or write over past decisions with it A LOT because it’s so damn hard to deal with it.

Because of that, they seem to go back and forth with Rogue as to how assertive she is about her sexuality, her feelings, her maturity level, how flirtatious she is and isn’t. How IMPORTANT sex is to her as a character.

In Uncanny 172/173 and 183 we start to see Rogue go from being recklessly flirtatious to dealing with the emotional ramifications of her powers, including what it feels like to be in love with someone you’ve never met, who actually hates you. It’s really interesting stuff. Up until she goes through the siege perilous, Rogue is a flirt who has occasional sulky spells over the fact that all the other X-Men are flirting and married and whatever, and she has to tease jet fighter pilots (while they’re flying their jets) to get her rocks off. When she comes back from the Siege perilous, and starts being drawn by Jim Lee, she’s all jungle sex kittened up, and while she continues to be sassy and in charge of her shit, her sexuality becomes more of an issue for her. Long gone is the crush on Longshot, here comes Gambit.

So the 90s are just a nonstop dramafest with her and Remy and every once and a while Magneto, who is young now and has a ponytail. She doesn’t date anyone, she doesn’t have any more weird psychic-residue relationships. The biggest development, really, is that after forever and ever of kissing people to borrow their powers and getting as close as possible to Gambit without ever actually touching him, they get stranded in Antarctica (I think? Frozen wasteland, anwyay) and in one night when they don’t have their powers, have sex in a cave while shackled.

Probably not how she always dreamed of it happening, but shit, after 20 years of publication history’s worth of sexual tension, I’d probably just suck it up and make do, too.

Remy, I love you, but it is not easy when the writers make you such a fucking skeeze. Anyway.

So she’s had flirtations with magneto and a long term ongoing kind of antagonistic extremely sexually frustration no-touching ‘relationship’ with Gambit. Then she’s FORCED to absorb Gambit and dumps him. Okay.

Fast forward, they make up, still no touching, but they love each other so whatever. Then X-Treme X-Men happened but let’s pretend it didn’t, so ignore that. Then Mike Carey let her get control over her powers and then she was like ‘jfc Gambit gimme a minute’ so now they’re not together and she’s boning Mags. Atta girl. Work those options.

Then Paul fucking Jenkins decides out of nowhere that the Sentry and Rogue had hooked up at some point in the past, though their timelines don’t even kind of line up and it makes them both into cheaters, and completely undermines every single moment of romantic physical contact we’ve seen her experience on-panel since like 1994. I’m not even exaggerating. One writer decided on a fluke to retcon a physical relationship between a largely unpopular character with a high profile and short run, and a character whose identity as a mutant is intricately tied into her sense of loneliness, isolation, sexual identity and desire for love.

What the ever loving fuck.

So yeah. As tl;dr as this is, it’s the short, uncited version of why I’d say my vote goes to Rogue for mismanagment.

ALSO WHY DO THEY ALWAYS DRAW HER IN DAISY DUKES AND CROP TOPS WHEN TOUCHING HER SKIN CAN KILL YOU WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING THIS THROUGH

panasonicyouth:

horkbajir:

mark this reblog is for you yes i waited til you were on because you need to see this most perfect gif for you okay

everyone

the internet is won

oh my god

swagrid

I really just wanted this on my dash again.

So my buddy Jackson had a rant a couple weeks ago and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. It’s called Dinosaur Sex. What I don’t need on my Screen. (Not sure if SFW) Then last night on “Great White Invasion” I was a little squicked out about all the talk of shark mating habits. It just seemed a little tawdry.

I really have no idea whether it is SFW or not. It is a discussion of how fucking dinosaurs…fuck. Not for nothing but I see enough of these things on the L train, taking up the seats and complaining about the thin-ness of the mammals they’re hunting in McCarren Park these days. I don’t need to be informed that they are a) capable of having sex or b) how this would happen.

Ok, I see the point of his (yes Jackson, I’m going to refer to you in the third person) premise “I don’t need to see Dinosaur Sex on TV” but I think that it’s as much about a double-standard as anything else. I mean, on the internet the NSFW line is pretty spotty, it’s more like a mist where occasionally the cloud clears enough for you to get a clear OMGWTF reaction and quickly click away know for certain that that WAS NSFW but otherwise, there are a lot of grey areas.

TV on the other hand should definitely know better. I mean, there have been nature shows about “mating” forever, but as anyone who’s been to brooklyn knows, dinosaurs are sentient and contributing members of society. I mean it’s not like the discovery channel hasn’t done human sex docs. For instance “Science of Sex Appeal” is Tyrannosaurus Sex any more exploitative than that?

I’m not sure I’d call that porn, which is what I think Jackson is trying to say, but I don’t think it’s MORE exploitative than other sex-based shows on cable. I mean, it’s not Starz, it’s not even Cinemax. I mean, it’s weird thinking about dinosaurs that way, but who are we to say they wouldn’t watch a discovery channel show about mating either?

Isn’t it a little dino-racist? speciesist? I mean, 1) I know Jackson, he’s not a dino-racist, but don’t we need to take a good hard look at why these things make us uncomfortable. I mean, I don’t have a problem with dinosaurs, I don’t necessarily want to watch them boning, but I know some and they’re perfectly nice individuals. 2) IDK, it just doesn’t seem more exploitative to me than other shows on the discovery channel.

120 million-year-old fossil is the ‘world’s oldest pregnant lizard’, say scientists

A fossil from north-eastern China is the oldest terrestrial reptile to give birth to live young ever found - at least as early as 120 million years ago.

The fossil of a pregnant lizard proves some lizards and snakes were giving birth to live young, rather than laying eggs, in the Early Cretaceous period - much earlier than previously thought.

A full-speed dig in a glacial hole

More than 130,000 years ago, in the Illinoian ice age, a glacier left a hole atop a 2,700-meter-high ridge near what would become the town of Aspen in the Colorado Rockies. The depression filled with snowmelt, and for tens of thousands of years, the lake drew the giants of the Pleistocene - mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths half again the size of grizzly bears, supersize bison, camels and horses - that came to drink, and in many cases to die.

Also, I totally wish I were spending my summer in Colorado on a dig like this

“That was from Oct. 14, when workers on a reservoir dam turned over the first fossil bones (of a young female mammoth, promptly nicknamed Snowy) to last weekend, when work on the reservoir resumed. A tight contract schedule dictates that the reservoir, which will supply the condos and ski lodges of Snowmass, must be completed by late this year. The result was a frantic race to find and catalog everything possible before the site was entombed once more by water.

The breakneck pace of the fossil dig was matched only by what scientists said was the extraordinary richness of the site, one of the best windows into the thundering megafauna of its time.

“The speed of this thing is so unlike normal science - from discovery to completion of one of the biggest digs ever in less than nine months,” said Kirk R. Johnson, the chief curator of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who oversaw the project. (He is no relation to this reporter.)”

Manahatta Project and Welikia are teaming up for botanically historcial EPICNESS

These diverse microfossils include mostly simple single-celled organisms, but do include some rare multicellular structures with organic walls that measure up to one millimeter long. The team reports that these simple eukaryotes lived in ancient lakes that periodically dried out, exposing life directly to the atmosphere. This discovery places eukaryotes in freshwater settings approximately 500 million years earlier than previously thought.

Life probably originated in the sea more than three billion years ago; however, the first signs of life on land are less well-defined. The identification of eukaryotes in non-marine settings described by Strother’s team indicates that eukaryotic evolution on land may have commenced much earlier than previously thought.