Women in Refrigerators (or WiR[1]) is a website that was created in 1999 by a group of comic book fans. The "Women in Refrigerators Syndrome" describes the use of the death or injury of a female comic book character as a plot device in a story starring a male comic book character. The website features a list of female comic book characters that had been injured, killed, or depowered as a plot device within various superhero comic books. Also, the site seeks to analyze why these plot devices are used disproportionately on female characters.
The term "Women in Refrigerators" was coined by writer Gail Simone as a name for the website in early 1999 during on-line discussions about comic books with friends. It refers to an incident in Green Lantern #54 (1994), written by Ron Marz, in which Kyle Rayner, the title hero, comes home to his apartment to find that his girlfriend, Alex DeWitt, had been killed by the villain Major Force and stuffed in a refrigerator.[2]
Simone and her friends then developed a list of fictional characters, superheroines who had been "killed, maimed or depowered."[3] The list was then circulated via the Internet over Bulletin Board System, e-mail and electronic mailing lists. Simone also e-mailed many comic book creators directly for their responses to the list.
The list is considered “infamous” in certain comic book fan circles.[4] Respondents often found different meanings to the list itself, though Simone maintained that her, "... simple point (had) always been: if you demolish most of the characters girls like, then girls won't read comics. That's it!"
Where was I in the 90's when this was happening? Oh yes, I was a closet feminist with Dial-up.
Some great points in this article. While some of these assumptions may seem unfair, I defiantly agree that if you kill off all of the good relateable female characters, females wont wanna read these. Times have changed, especially with the success of female centric comics, like Buffy etc, but this for sure still happens.
Full wikipedia entry
