The Lack of Female Superheroes Social Sciences Essay (Essay Sample)

The Lack of Female Superheroes
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The Lack of Female Superheroes
American comic books gained popularity a decade after they were first created in the 1930s. Their widespread success was thanks to the magical formula, a hero you can love, a villain you’d love to punch, and a pretty girl to fall in love with. The trend of a male lead was the only available one as comic books were mostly marketed towards young boys. Along with the presence of a social taboo around women and, young girls reading violent, heroic, crime-fighting stories, instead of further adhering to their role as elegant ladies and nurturing mothers.
After the second world war, women started gaining more access and rights to education, property, and a wider variety of career choices, the stereotypical image of the average woman changed drastically from what it was in the 1940s and the 1950s, but the shift in the comic book industry was barely noticeable. As women’s presence became stronger in American societies, the desire to have them represented in the most popular medium of the times surged, but the result was an oversexualized woman with barely any clothes on, who’d eventually, regardless of her strength, become a love interest and would always need her male counterpart to rescue her, further catering to their mostly male audience, while ignoring their ever-growing female one