A single panel comic created by York University students Jane Kim, Shayna Lauer, Helén Marton to raise awareness about sexual assault and combat victim blaming.
Article from the Toronto Star about it here.
This sounds like a good campaign, and taking a different tactic to raising awareness and getting people’s attention, hopefully people get the message and don’t just laugh it off.
I know the obvious point is “it would be ridiculous if Superman was blamed because he wore tights right? So why are we blaming rape victims by what they wore?” But, I think using Superman is also really powerful, because (besides the use of him in tights to send the message about clothing) it shows that no matter how physically powerful you are, or if you’re a man, you can still be assaulted. The clothing message is the obvious one, but by using a powerful superhero icon, there’s also the messages about not victim blaming people by speculating on if they could have fought back, or inventing ways of how they could have fought back (and therefore should have) or “but you’re so much bigger than them”, “why didn’t you try to escape?”, or that you must believe somebody has to be “weak” to be a victim of sexual assault (either claiming they must have wanted it because they’re not that “weak”, or insisting that they are because they were assaulted).
And if we can believe Superman can be assaulted, then maybe we can believe the non-powered people we meet IRL when they say so too.
I wanted to share this because it’s about superheroes, feminism and using superheroes to get a really important message out.
