Author J. Ishiro Finney decodes the Strong Female Character™ trope in his new book Boobs of Steel: Decoding the Amazon.
Lara Croft… Power Girl… Tifa Lockhart… They’re three of the most loved and loathed characters in all pop-culture. Since the late 1990s all three have also been favorite targets for outraged feminists and woke keyboard warriors who believe that a bountiful cup size is a crime against humanity.
Within these pages, sci-fi author J. Ishiro Finney chronicles the history of the Boobs of Steel trope, its associated archetypes, and the impact these Amazons have had on our art, literature, and cultural landscape. Often assumed to be a modern creation, the so-called “Boobs of Steel” heroine is an outgrowth of a storytelling tradition as old as humanity itself. This first installment of the Boobs of Steel series explores the legacies of the Amazon, the Valkyrie, and Jungle Queen, and how they formed the basis for nearly every action heroine today. It also addresses these archetypes in the age of cancel culture, and how the heroic feminine is being systematically purged from all media. In here you will learn exactly why the woke mob are dead wrong when they scream that our favorite busty heroines are “sexist, racist, and offensive!”
So, suit up and strap in. It’s gonna be a fun ride.
“…a deep dive to find the historical and political forces that have chipped away at traditional female archetypes to give us women who act (and often look) like a poor copy of men.”
-PHOENIX RISING
You can read it here.
T&A aren’t inherently evil. It’s a good litmus test of someone’s morality and/or brain size if they’re offended by what proportions men find objectively beautiful on a woman.
There’s a twitter thread I saw a year or so ago talking about feminine beauty, but a key (thesis) statement was “Men are the sole authority on what beauty is.” Women have looks, but how do they know they are beautiful if not by men accepting them according to their standards?
I try to walk a fine line with this topic because while I love seeing women with appealing T&A like what Frank Frazetta paints, there is a point where it becomes too gratuitous to the point of being distasteful. It really comes down to artist intention and presentation. Kind of like the saying “I can’t tell you what porn is, but I know it if I saw it.”
Tifa and Lara don’t exactly count as Amazons. But if you look at Wonder Woman (pre Gal Gadot) and Xena Warrior Princess and Power Girl…these are big girls, tall and wide with wide chests to match. They are some kind of Aryan master race babes that probably in real life could fight men, at least men less Aryan than them.
Interesting take on Yuri on the cover.
Like what you’d see if there was a 90’s comic version of Dirty Pair, along the lines of the Project A-ko comic by Malibu.
Though on investigating further, apparently there were several US Dirty Pair comic mini-series.