Curious about the feeling towards Green Lantern on the Girl-Wonder.org boards, I drafted a list of questions about how female characters are treated in Green Lantern and posted them on the Females in Comics forum. For comparison, I posted the same questions on the Green Lantern forum at Comic-Bloc and on the You’ll All Be Sorry board at CBR. I received only a small sampling, 32 responses total — 10 from Comic-Bloc (the Fanterns), 10 from YABS (the Neutral community), and 12 from G-W (the Feminist community). This is by no means a conclusive survey, this is an extremely small sample. However, the answers were actually a lot worse than I had expected.

For starters, I asked people if they’d read Green Lantern before. Then I asked those who had never read Green Lantern to describe the franchise’s reputation towards women. I got 15 responses all around to this question (some from people who were reading who answered anyway), all of them negative. 7 referenced Kyle’s girlfriend who ended up in the fridge. 3 referenced Arisia, Hal’s 14–no, 28–no 14-year-old alien girlfriend (who may or may not be considered an adult by her homeworld’s standards, depending on the writer). 2 referenced Carol Ferris.

Then I asked people who had read the series if it was misogynistic, and was shocked. One community returned 4 nos, 3 yeses, 2 abstentions and 1 sexist but not misogynistic (1 other respondent split the same hair and landed on the side of misogynistic) argument. Nearly split down the middle, and it wasn’t the Feminist or even the Neutral community. It was the Green Lantern fan-forum that was split like this. The other two forums leaned slightly on the yes side. Very few people on any board were willing to answer a later question that asked if it “was getting better,” but that may be vagueness on the part of the question.

The rest of the questions were personal curiosity about which characters were popular in which community, and what era of GL most people were familiar with. The answers are compiled, question by question, on Zamaron.

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