The female gaze
Tomorrow marks the start of Women’s History Month (with March 8 being International Women’s Day), so it’s probably a good time to mention that I’m one of those double-x chromosome types. That fact automatically puts me, along with the majority of the population, in the category of non-default, of Other.
Which always confused me; how can a majority not automatically be considered the default? Well, it’s a matter of historical societal power, isn’t it? Take South Africa under apartheid; the white rulers there were certainly the minority, outnumbered 4 to 1, yet they were the Default among South African citizens, and the blacks they oppressed were the Other. The accepted wisdom was that they needed to be Other, in order for the Default to remain in power. (The fact that the minority oppressors had weapons as well certainly helped reinforce that.) The Default controls the culture, most especially cultural thought.
A lot of people today have no notion of how revolutionary a step it was for feminism to succeed in getting gender neutrality language accepted in this culture a mere 30 or so years ago. Before that, you never heard "he or she" — the default was "he" and that was that, the majority population devalued to the point of invisibility in terms of anything of significance or importance. Heck, it’s been less than a century since we were first allowed to cast a vote in most of the United States!
But you’ll be getting enough of those historical factoids during the month to come. What I want to discuss is something else.
Via the 
This coming Sunday, March 4, the gamer channel G4 will be airing the fourth episode in its Icons series, this time featuring a 
When writer John Broome, artist Gil Kane, and the real villain, editor Julius Schwartz, reinvented the Green Lantern in 1959, they were corrupting the youth of America, or at least the comics reading segment thereof, by promoting authoritarian attitudes and glorifying barely disguised fascism.
