Women in Refrigerators, 15 Years Later

Even in the fictional universes of superhero-dom, women still spend an uncommon amount of time in the kitchen, or, more specifically, the refrigerator.

The refrigerator is a metaphorical place where women go to die. It’s also a literal place where women go to die, thanks to a 1994 issue of Green Lantern in which Kyle Rayner (the second Green Lantern) comes home to find his girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt, dead and stuffed in his refrigerator.

This event was a starting point for one of the most notorious tropes in comics. The Refrigerator Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World, leading to the “Women in Refrigerators” trope. The term was coined in 1999, when comic book writer Gail Simone (whose credits include Batgirl, Wonder Woman, Birds of Prey, Deadpool, and Secret Six) created a website called “Women In Refrigerators,” (WiR) the point of which was to feature a list of female comic book characters who “have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator.”

By Simone’s own admission, the list is far from complete, but at the time it was made, there was an impressive (disheartening) 111 characters spanning the Marvel and DC universes that had been killed, depowered, or otherwise maimed. Of these 111, sixty-seven had died, while the rest were depowered or abused.

Based on a list of dead characters compiled from Wikipedia, the number of dead females has risen to at least 175 since then, and this still isn’t including characters who have been depowered or abused. (Comic Vine has an updated WiR list, but this includes mostly main characters and is likely an incomplete list as well.) Women make up about 24 percent of all dead characters, often dying in spectacularly gruesome ways: Women are shot in the head, ripped in half, heart removed, devoured, neck snapped, and incinerated…to name a few.

It’s simple enough to count the main characters who have died, because it would seem that every good hero has died at least once, including but not limited to, Captain America, Batman, Iron Man, Superman, Spider-Man, and Green Lantern. (There have actually been eight characters who have called themselves “Green Lantern,” and at least two of them have been resurrected from the dead.)

The reappearance of certain (dead) characters means that Women In Refrigerators has an opposing trope: Dead Men Defrosting. This trope is signified by (generally male) characters who are brought back from the dead by their writers, either within the continuity of the story, or by simply starting a new series featuring the character that ignores the character’s death.

Roughly 73 percent of characters who return from the dead are male. In the Marvel universe, about 25 percent of resurrections are mutants (members of the X-Men arcs). If mutants are thrown out of the resurrected character data, about twenty women have been resurrected, which falls at 22 percent for Marvel ladies. DC’s Surprise-I’m-Alive rate is a bit better, with twenty women in sixty-six total resurrections.

Overall, though, the percentage of male and female characters (living and dead) is split at about 75/25. While there are more male characters in general, this is still a vast majority. Women who die tend to die forever. In a world where women make up 49.6 percent of the real-life human population, a 3:1 ratio of male to female characters is poor representation at best and killing women means decimating an already-small population of characters.

The lack of representation becomes an even bigger problem when looking at the reason these women are killed. While some women are killed in battle, it is not uncommon that a woman dies to further a man’s plot. In other words, these women are “fridged” (a term that, yep, comes from “women in refrigerators”) and reduced to a plot device rather instead of functioning as a fully fleshed-out and complex character. Notable fridgings include Gwen Stacy (Spider-Man), Janet van Dyne (Marvel; also known as Wasp/fashion designer/Avengers founding member/socialite), Lois Lane (Superman), and Batwoman.

This is a dangerous trend. While both women and men die in battle, women are much more likely to have other forms of violence inflicted upon them. Based on information gathered from Simone and Comic Vine, eighteen characters on their lists were raped. Twelve were victims of domestic abuse, and both of these numbers are only counting the main characters appearing on these lists.

The way many of these women have been written shows that their bodies are not their own. They are abused for the sake of abuse and killed for the sake of a man’s plot; this violence has been normalized. It is expected.

These characters deserve better, because they’re a reflection of how society treats women. Women deserve representation beyond media that reduces them to skimpy outfits and victimizes them despite their powers. Women deserve positive stories. They deserve complex backgrounds and well-written arcs and diverse personalities, sexual orientations, and body types.

There are some great arcs and fantastic female creators in the business right now, but comics still cater to men. For an industry with a 46.67 percent female audience, the lack of representation and penchant for killing off female characters is non-inclusive at best and downright alienating to half its audience at worst. This needs to change. Representation matters; the female audience members deserve to know they matter. At the end of the day, it’s not just about characters deserving better, it’s about creating media that reflects and celebrates the diversity of women instead of systematically degrading, abusing, and killing them.

#comics #feminism #womeninrefrigerators