All Posts Tagged as 'Art'

With most of the United States still social distancing and living in relative isolation in response to the growing novel coronavirus pandemic, award-winning comics writer Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, best known for his creation La Borinqueña, has put together work from a number of famed comic book artists to provide fans (and their kids) with a free, downloadable coloring book to use at home. Miranda-Rodriguez has always had a way of bringing big names together, having brought people like George Perez into his creator-owned book and then assembling an all-star roster of creators and characters for his Ricanstruction comic, which raised funds for Americans living with the impact of natural and financial disasters in Puerto Rico.

"... who make no attempt to pass as actual women, and don’t necessarily want to be women, but dress up as a caricature of a woman. Sure, some have bawdy names, and in the context of a late night gay bar, they can say some bawdy things. But they’re not really about sex at all. They’re about costume and play; their clothes and hair are exaggerated, over-the-top parodies of women’s appearance; their makeup is often cray-cray, their wigs absurd. They also reinforce, rather than undermine, gender norms in a weird, over-the-top way...."

When Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit the airwaves in 1997 it was an instant hit. Based on a movie of the same name and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy, the show was a fun, fierce change of pace. We were told that in every generation a slayer was born, and Buffy was ours.

Buffy not only learned to embrace her role as a vampire slayer, but she also surrounded herself with a group of friends to help her through. She and this “Scooby Gang” took care of each other and faced all the evil that came their way.

Who killed the sex symbol?

It's no mystery that in the era of #MeToo, the rules of combat have changed on the sexual battlefield. Women will no longer tolerate condescending or degrading treatment that was once business as usual in the workplace or dating arena. But in this long overdue push-back against sexual coercion and exploitation, has something valuable been lost?

The sex symbol was arguably Hollywood's most brilliant artifact, propelling the young movie industry to world impact from the moment that Theda Bara flashed her coiled-snake brassiere in Cleopatra (1917). Sex was great box office. With its impudent populism, Hollywood crashed through stuffy proprieties lingering from the Victorian age and stationed itself at the bold forefront of the modern liberalization of sex. Movies were in sync with the radical new spirit of American women, who won the right to vote in 1920 and kicked up their heels throughout the flapper decade of the Roaring Twenties.

The great sex symbols of Hollywood were manufactured beings, engineered by trial and error, with the mass audience as their ultimate judge and jury. Decade by decade, the movie industry rediscovered primal archetypes that have animated myths around the world since the Stone Age. Major male sex symbols like Clark Gable, Cary Grant and Sidney Poitier have a mesmerizing natural authority onscreen, a supranormal power of personality and density of being that transcend their roles. Like their antecedents in ancient hero sagas, they inhabit and explore physical space, whose frustrations and dangers they endure but ultimately defeat.

The female sex symbol, however, commands emotional or psychological space. Her sensual beauty is an alluring mirage, hypnotizing and sometimes paralyzing. Never entirely present, she is attuned to another reality, an extrasensory dimension to which we have no access. There is an unsettling aura of the uncanny around the major female sex symbols, who channel shadowy powers above or below the social realm.