Should there be men?

A few weeks ago, I was browsing some genre-related websites when I came across a review of a video. I don't remember the reviewer's name, or the name of the video, but he complained that the video violated one of his cardinal rules: there should be no men anywhere in the story.

I used to subscribe to this same philosophy. I often drew whole stories in which the fighters, spectators, referees if there were any, and all other characters were women. As an example, I've included this really fucking awful panel from a story I gave up in on 2001. Obviously, you've got the macrocephalic jungle girl locking up with – Liza Minelli, maybe? – in the foreground, but in the background all the spectators are women.

Well, maybe not all of them. It looks like I was perhaps at the point where I felt comfortable showing male onlookers, as long as they were standing all the way in back and were shown only in silhouette.

I think the reason some of us don't like seeing men portrayed is because we view the fighting women as sexual objects. We want to watch them fight, and maybe even make out, but we also want to fuck them, and any man who appears on the scene, even in the background of an illustrated story, represents a potential rival.

Silly, I know, but we're talking about a bunch of stuff that makes no sense to the rational mind in any event.

Eventually, I got used to the idea of men appearing in stories. I have no personal interest in femdom stories where the guy gets beaten to a pulp or squeezed between powerful vice-like thighs until his head explodes or whatever. I have only slightly more interest in scenarios where the guy wins. Give me a girl-on-girl slugfest any time.

(I am interested, purely from the standpoint of creative decisions, in Art Ardoni's 'Crosstown Matchup' stories, which feature both men and women fighting each other. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like that before.)

But I realized I was tying my own hands and limiting my options by creating female-only plots. Eventually, I got used to the idea that I didn't have to be insanely jealous because some fictitious cartoon man got to watch my fictitious cartoon women fight.

I'm curious what the rest of you think, though.