Sexism in Cartooning and Manga / Anime

My Art Journey

I was always fascinated by people who can draw and for a long time, I thought that would be a talent you have to be born with to actually create amazing art as we see in Comics, Manga, Cartoons, and Anime. But with Corona coming around and me saving some time on not having to get to University and back, for example, I wanted to use that newfound time to learn some new skills or maybe get some more hobbies. Drawing or better learning how to draw became an idea that manifested in my head and nagged me till the point where I finally just started to try it out.

My goal is to be able to tell my own stories with engaging characters, interesting backgrounds, and just expressive art in general. I want it to be something in between western comics and eastern manga, but of course, I have not found my definitive style yet 😉 To get better, I am currently watching a lot of tutorials on Youtube on how to draw eyes, mouths, noses, and faces in general, since I have to start somewhere xD And while watching these various tutorials from different artists there has been something coming up again and again which just does not sit right with me, thus I feel the need to talk about it over here: Gender and Sexism.

Just as a heads up: I don’t want to talk about sexist plotlines and character actions in Cartoons or Anime, since that’s a whole other can of worms I might be tackling another day xD What I want to talk about is solely limited to the way people draw and teach how to draw people in a comic or manga style. Let’s begin with the light stuff and end on the very problematic ones 😉

Female and Male attributes

The First thing I have noticed in these videos is that there is a distinct separation between how you draw a male and how you draw a female character. And I get that there has to be some kind of indication, as guidelines. So if an artist wants to make a character of his being read as female, he should be able to do that. But some of the things which are getting taught, sits a bit wrong to me.

Like the fact that the biggest two distinctions between male and female read characters are eyelashes and lips, female characters get them, male ones don’t. Because as real people we all know those features are not gendered, male read and female read people both have these features and they are not different from each other. There are other factors like certain genes which might give BIPOC larger lips, some might have naturally red lips other have the same colour as their skin tone. But again the factor here is not the gender, but the general genes. The same thing goes for the eyelashes, some people naturally have longer ones and others might have shorter, or thinner ones, making them appear less visible.

Obviously, we all know that and what you might think to yourself now is: those features on women are extraggered because they have been known to wear makeup more often, especially in the past. And I have to agree with you on that to some extent. I am sure that’s where this phenomenon of drawing originated from but we have to ask ourselves the question: Why do we still use or repeat that kind of style? Because in these modern times, all genders are allowed to wear makeup and if they would have been in the past, there would have been a lot more men doing it already too.

“I draw caricatures, not real people!”

Now I know many people would say at this point: These are not fully realistic characters anyways and you have to make a distinction between them. It’s just normal to see eyelashes or thick lips and expect them to belong to a woman, right? But the thing is: It’s only normal to us, because we see it reproduced a thousand times. It’s not set in stone in the way our brains are wired, it’s a man-made thing and it can be changed, by representing gender differently. For example, pirates are often represented wearing eyeliner, so many people are actually totally fine with male pirates wearing makeup because they have seen it so often that it has become normal to them. Meaning that if you would show them other kinds of makeup on men often enough, that too would become normal at one point.

Since I have thought about this topic for so long here are some features that I might suggest we all try to use for drawing different genders in the future, because they are actually often(but not always) based on the gender a person is born with. The overall shape of a woman’s body is more curved, they have bigger hips for example, and if they gain weight or muscles it will show in different areas than when you would draw a man. Men are more edged, less round so to speak, the same thing with weight and muscle gain showing differently in their anatomy. And of course, in non-realistic styles, you don’t have to show every muscle, but you can keep in mind that it will take the shape of a man’s body and the shape of a women body different and you can use that to convey your message as an artist. I am sure that’s only one of many ways, but it shows that change is not impossible.

The role of women as objects

This post already is a bit longer, but I still want to speak about the other thing I have noticed and it will be a lot quicker to talk about it because sadly it’s something all women are very familiar with. When listening to those mostly male teachers on YouTube talking about how to draw the female characters, they often used words like “seductive“, “sexy” and “lushes“. But when I want to learn how to draw a mouth, why do I have to learn how to draw it in a seductive way? Why do eyes have to be sexy? Just as a reminder: those were basic tutorials. I am not against art that is seductive and I am sure there are tips and tricks on how to create art like that too, which are very helpful. But I just don’t get why that would be something taught to a beginner.

Also, why are those words only used when talking about female features? Can’t men’s eyes have a sexy look to them too? I am a bisexual woman, I get the appeal of other women, but again that’s not something I am looking for when searching for tutorials. We can’t justify that by saying those teachers were male and they will be attracted to female read people, so that’s why they are using the language like that. Are they supposed to only teach other cis-male people learning art, so we are supposed to think that is the way how they communicate and that’s why “they understand” that the teachers “did not mean it like that”? Because YouTube is available to everyone. Drawing is available to everyone. Art is something that can be created by anyone. So make it for everyone and think about how 50% of the people potentially watching will feel if you can’t stop fantasizing about the lines to draw to create a female character.

Verdict

I am not sure if there is a real verdict to be made here, since I can’t review the way people teach something in a way I can review a book or a movie. But I think it helps to speak up when you notice things like that. Because if we don’t, things will never change. I don’t expect this post to go viral, or for those teachers to read it by accident, but if just some people start to notice similarities in videos they watch or lessons they listen to and they speak up, we already made progress 🙂 It was just very strange for me to see that something like this did not really change in so many years, that artists from over 50 years ago are still referenced and copied. Not that I don’t think we shouldn’t honour the old artists! I just think with new times, there will be new artists and new ways to draw too and that we maybe should focus more on those. Go with the time and explore new possibilities^^

Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress