Women in Refrigerators/ Sexual Violence is Everywhere
Who doesn't love talking about corpses in refrigerators?This trope was created by Gail Simone in 1999 in response to an issue of Green Lantern where his girlfriend
The examples on the site range from the tame (e.g. dead, depowered) to the extreme and mildly bizarre (e.g. Wolfsbane: Raised to fear God and to believe she was a devil. Traumatized over death of boyfriend. Stripped, depowered & locked in werewolf form for a while. Lost powers. Repowered. Fired as a teacher after an affair with a student. Kidnapped & brainwashed. Ate her biological father. Pregnant with an Agrarian's child who she birthed by couching him out of her throat, and seconds later witnessed how it killed a man.)
It hasn't been updated since the early 2000's
This trope isn't just limited to comics, it's just easier to show the examples as they're often the most extreme.
I hate this trope because it just highlights how creators don't think that female characters can be anything other than plot devices, obviously this has got a lot better. Unless we look just at sexual violence towards women, that's as prominent as ever, painfully so. Because there is no fictional world where the worst thing that can happen to women isn't sexual assault. Which is completely unrealistic, but what do I know?
Some fiction hides the sexual violence as romance, which is completely gross but Fifty Shades of Grey exists and that's one of the most abusive romances in fiction. And it's based
What a great message we're giving to people, especially younger people.
The original Women in Refrigerators website can be found here.
What's your opinion? Who's the most extreme Women in a Refrigerator you know? Tell me in the comments below.
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