Caught in a Bad Romance

The male gaze writing for the female gaze

Simon and Kirby's romance comic series Young Romance is an interesting look back to a time when the gender gap was abysmal. The stories are meant to appeal to the young female audience, one that was not and maybe has never been a very big part of the comic book/comic strip world. Keeping in mind that back in those years it may not have been as uncommon as today to see a fairly young girl (in her late teens) to be involved with an older man (in his thirties) the stories are still very objectifying of women. They were thought up and written out by men, probably older men whose fantasies and sexual ideals are clearly evident in the comics as opposed to the ideals of the audience they were directed toward.

It was interesting to see the extent of the comic series and how it was fairly successful despite its shallow nature. All that aside, I was very intently reading the stories, almost getting wrapped up in them like an intense soap opera. It was probably because of the shock factor, everything about the comic that I found preposterous like the age of the men and the carelessness of the women that kept me interested and kept me asking: what craziness will happen next? I feel that this is because of my latin background that I find confounding soap stories entertaining, but I also find interesting the fact that these were a serious part of pop-culture in their time. I do wonder if the women reading these decades ago were entertained by them for the same reasons I was or because they played into those male-gaze centered ideals that are so clearly displayed in the comics; if they believed that this was laughably entertaining, or if they believed in the stories and the ideas they communicated because of the society they lived in.