User talk:Gdswamp

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File:Selina Kyle, Catwoman41 cover by Kevin Wada.jpg

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Template:Z33 Jytdog (talk) 20:08, 2 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Male-dominated?

While technically true (there are more men than women on the list), it seems like a contentious label. Just wanted to get your opinion instead of outright removing it. Thanks.--TriiipleThreat (talk) 20:45, 3 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hey there. I appreciate the inquiry. Here are a few observations. The part of the prior text I replaced which relates to my use of "male-dominated" was this: "As female readers preferred romance comics, the genre had a vast majority of male artists and readers at the time." That text, which was apparently uncontroversial, makes the same factual claim (that the genre was male-dominated in the sense of having a "vast majority of male artists and readers") but adds an unsupported gloss about causality: superhero comics were male-dominated because female readers preferred romance comics. Read without bias, the term "male-dominated" means "dominated by males," and is a far more neutral descriptor than the prior wording. I agree that there are some who will read into the term and find it contentious, simply because it describes comics as dominated by males without offering a causal gloss that negates the possibility of systemic sexism. Rewording so as to favor that point of view would not be neutrality, it would be adopting an active editorial bias to favor the viewpoint of some readers over others. Comics were male-dominated. Whether that gender-skewing was because of implicit and explicit sexism, or because females left a genre they found uninteresting to the boys, or because of some complex combination of those and other factors, it is not contentious to observe in plain terms that the genre was dominated by males. Avoiding making the observation directly, so as to avoid triggering defensiveness on the part of some readers, is not neutral. --GDswamp (talk) 01:56, 4 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

And: HA - you're referring to my edit on the Carol Danvers page. It's basically the same argument but a finer point in that case. The criteria by which someone might judge the relative "greatness" of any fictional Avenger are incredibly murky and subjective, starting with basic questions of whether you're ranking based on criteria within or outside the story-world (how powerful they are vs. how popular with readers). Clearly if IGN had any sort of systematic formula, it was a highly subjective one (thus e.g. Hawkeye is >20 ranks "greater" than Dr. Strange). A big pattern within that subjectivity is a preference (in the most objective sense: a non-random pattern of choice) for male characters - though of course there are also fewer female characters to choose from. So using the descriptor "male-dominated" here does point to a pattern of subjectivity in the composition of the IGN list, partly because that pattern is helpful for understanding why the top-ranked female Avenger does not crack the top ten "greatest" Avengers overall, according to this list. As with the above argument, my point is: the situation being described is itself shaped by non-neutral choices. Describing that with adjectives like "male-dominated" is pushing towards, rather than away from, objectivity.--GDswamp (talk) 16:33, 4 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Catwoman

I appreciate that you added the additional information to keep the image relevant. Please note that a particular format for citing comic book titles is used in the captions. DrRC (talk) 19:01, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK thanks for this - can you point me to that formatting guideline? I am finding the maze of linked pages on formatting regs and prefs pretty labyrinthine (to extend a metaphor). --GDswamp (talk) 18:29, 2 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]