Gray's credentials:

- B.A. and M.A. in the Science of Creative Intelligence from the Maharishi European Research University.

(The Science of Creative Intelligence, invented by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, is apparently a "scientific theory for the development of higher states of consciousness, which naturally develop through the practice of Trascendental Meditation.")

- Ph. D. from Columbia Pacific University, which was forced to close in 2001 as it was a diploma mill. Degrees earned before June 1997 - as Gray's presumably was - are valid, but it makes you wonder.

- He also holds expensive workshops where he talks about magic and astrology, and exorcises demons.

*I* think a man like that's hard to take seriously as a scientific authority (someone mentioned Modesty Blaise... I'm reminded of her friend Idaho George, the guru/conman.)

More on Gray:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/women_rebuttal_from_uranus/tmbomb.htm

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/women_rebuttal_from_uranus/school.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Are_from_Mars%2C_Women_Are_from_Venus#Questionable_educational_background_of_author

Women Warriors: A History by Jones, D. is a good place to start.

Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable is a very good example of the female hero and male sidekick, though at first his lack of ability was annoying. Lately he's come into his own, but Kim Possible is still the Hero.

Wonder Woman and I Ching? (Nemesis was mentioned but there was no follow-up).

Actually, Wonder Woman often partners with males (both super-powered and otherwise) in her supposedly solo stories; Animal Man comes to mind. Then again there was that year-long period when she was partnered witha JLA member at a time.

And after all this repetition of the word "Alpha", what about Heather Hudson and Puck?

Also, I can't believe nobody mentioned Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable. One of the greatest and most entertaining duos out there.

PAKAAL: My definition for an appropriate counter argument is simply responding to what I said, not going off on some unrelated tangent. Jack Norris's comment would be a good example, as would the tangents we got off on about being raised in single-parent households. They just weren't addressing my thoughts regarding our basic makeup.

Honestly, as far as a debate goes, I could care less if anyone agrees with me or not, much less things I'm a "a great guy". I'm happy if you just understand and respond without getting personal. Check out Jeff's response #30 for a great example of this.

I can see the connection you present in response #58 about instinct and societal standards being linked. I think I alluded as much in part of #36. It may have been too vague to come through clearly, though. I do that sometimes. If anyone had ever suggested this earlier, this certainly would have taken a different turn.

I certainly disagree about the "psychology-of-the-day" comment. I don't believe these authors are just spouting off "warm fuzzy" thoughts to make us feel better. I think that's reserved for pop culture personalities like Dr. Phil. Grouping them all together is a huge dis-service. But we're all allowed our opinions on who is a good authority or not.

I agree that I should not have lumped ALL men under the same blanket statement. I should have clearly restricted it to men who would be solo heroes, thus having the traits I described. After Thenodrin's comments in #54, I had little choice but to refine my thoughts on the archetype.

My conclusion stands as it did in #57. In a partnering of solo-caliber heroes, I think the make would want to take the lead role, even if only by a fraction. In a sidekick role, it would be determined by his tendencies as a natural follower, leader, or lone wolf.

I stand corrected in that it COULD work, but only if the personalities are presented right.

No comments from anyone here about how stupid/incompetent Supergirl is? Not that it's quite on-topic, but speaking of how insulting it is when we see our own sex dissed, I got a sub to Supergirl thinking 'hey, maybe this is DC's moment where they'll actually make woman-friendly superheroinies for a change.' what I got was Green Lantern the pedophile, trying to keep his hands off of SG.

And can I also complain a moment about that incredibly annoying "Thanksgiving Back Page" showing Power Girl's "girls" above the steaming turkey, with the inevitable "I'm a breast man" comments following?

I don't doubt that the current demographics lean heavily towards males in the comics world, but getting new readers is the challenge for comic publishers, and junk like that doesn't help the industry, IMO. If the industry doesn't start looking at the success women-friendly items like Manga are experiencing, they're doomed to be left behind, with the epitaph "Boyz Only" written on the tombstone.

Yeah, OK, exaggerating there, but seriously....

Wow, if I'd known that all I needed to do to be taken seriously is to say you're a great guy but I disagree with you this time, I'd certainly have said that first. Who knows, you may be a great guy, how do I know, but I'm more than happy to give you the benefit of the doubt.

As to how you define "appropriate counter-argument", I for one am still in the dark. I'm more than happy to listen to an argument and see if it has validity. In your argument you state:

"I’m speaking ONLY to male psychology and the insticts that are hard wired in humanity."

As you yourself point out there's a difference between the psychological element and the purely physical element. Societal structure comes from how we try to mitigate the "hard-wired instincts", so it's impossible to talk about one without talking about the other. As others have pointed out here, we control our 'base' urges specifically because we as a species no longer tolerate open use of them.

Mostly I'm bringing this up today because you do seem to be interested in the subject at hand, and I certainly agree that if (as your example goes) Robin suddenly decided he was the Alpha and tried to take over Batman's role, there'd be a big fight, feelings would get hurt, all that stuff. Or, in Frank Miller's world, Batman would just bitch-slap Robin like he does in the All-Star B&R. Sure, that's the easy approach to storytelling, and there's some basis in reality for that sort of thing to happen.

But you mix that commentary with statements like "Men instinctively feel the urge to provide for and protect females. To reverse the gender roles like we’re discussing is a horrible blow to the male psyche" and you use this argument to dismiss the possibility of a strong female lead with a less strong male 'sidekick' by saying it's a "bad concept".

As we all know, not everything in comics is going to fit our understanding of how things work, but to dismiss a concept outright as "bad" with some psychology-of-the-day concepts from a book written by a man from Mars doesn't really cut it IMO, particularly when no theory is going to define all people to begin with, and people are constantly changing so we improve our understanding as we go along.

Why aren't there more female superheroines with male sidekicks? Maybe we're seeing some underlying factors that influence the situation right here in the comments....

THENODRIN: From the bottom of my heart, thank you. You are the ONE person who has offered an appropriate counter-arguement my points. Everyone but you tried to make counter-arguements with entirely un-related thoughts & ideas which had absolutely nothing to do with the principles I used. WHERE WERE YOU YESTERDAY!

Your point about heroes who don't strike out on their own and are natural followers is well taken. Let's refine and clarify this a bit. I fully concede the point that there are natural followers who will never be able to lead. BUT... we're not debating the group dynamic, but a 2-person unit.

For any long term partnering, there needs to be a leader and a follower. Two leaders will clash and the partnership will disolve bitterly. Two followers will be just as ineffective, but for opposite reasons. No, there MUST be a leader,even if it's only by a fraction of a percentage.

When I think of a partnership, I see the pair as capable solo characters who chose to act as a duo for whatever reason. In this arrangement, the male would be more of the alpha personality. She can be his equal, or even superior, but he'll still be a stand-alone hero without her, and have all that goes along with it. We've seen this happen frequently, usually evolving into a romance. It doesn't HAVE to go this route, but it seems to be the natural progression. With this relationship, the male traditionally takes the leader role.

Before we go any further with this one, let's make something clear. We've all seen marriages where the wife is the leader, and the husband is the follower. We cannot use this as an example here because we're not talking about average people. We're talking about agressive, dominant, powerful hero archetypes. Let's not mix apples with oranges and call them equal.

Back to the partnership. In the long term hero partnership with one leader, the male is most likely to want to be the lead. It is his natural instinct in this situation, where he is fully capable of operation solo.

A sidekick situation is more of a mentor / protoge arangement. With sidekicks, the mentor is clearly superior to the protoge. I suppose the kid's long-term attitude would depened on his individual personality. If he's too independant, he'd fight it every step of the way. He could very well be a natural follower, in which case the arrangement could work out nicely. If this is the case, I'll go back to my first post: It’d take one helluva writer to pull it off without her coming off as a dominating witch and him being a submissive panty-waste.

Of course, an equitable sidekick arrangement brings up another problem. A woman's natural instinct is to nurture & guide. She would need to fight off the urge to "mother" him. This is, of course, not to say that all womenwant to "mother" everyone, but the instinct would need to be addressed. Consider the situation - he's a "baby" to the hero game, and it's her chosen duty to "raise" him into a hero. How could she NOT "mother" him. If she did not have a strong nuturing drive, she'd not have taken him on as her protoge.

This being said, interesting storylines are still possible. He could be forced on her, or she could take him out of guilt or responsibility, all without her actually wanting him or having the drive. Of course, she'd likely act more like a man in these cases, which opens another can of worms entirely.

Let's play "skin the rabbit" shall we?

...At any rate, I don't really have any problem with a female/male mentor/sidekick relationship. The debate thus far seems to have centred around whether the male would be weakened - why can't we simply assume that the female would be strengthened? As has been repeatedly pointed out above, there are any number of males out there who've been successfully raised in a female-dominant household, so why not borrow those paradigms?

I know most of the books your cite. One of my business partners is devouring practically that exact list in a desperate attempt to successfully date. And you are correct, all of those books go a very long way to "explain" that men are dominant and women are submissive and that's just the way it is.

Except, it isn't.

Point one: Assuming that you are correct and that a male superhero is always going to want to be the Alpha in his pack, then how do you explain the numerous male super hero group members who never lead, never want to lead, and never strike out on their own?

I'm thinking of long-term heroes here like Iceman, Beast Boy, Metamorpho, Hank Pym (definately the alpha in his relationship, but not so much as a super hero), Johnny Storm, Wildfire, etc.

By the reasoning you've presented, these heroes should have eventually come to resent Cyclops, Robin, Batman, Captain America, Reed Richards, Lightning Lad, etc. and try to wrest leadership or else strike out on their own.

Point two: Assuming that you are partially correct, and that there are some natural leaders and some natural followers to explain the examples in my first point, you then are also assuming that all natural leaders are male and only some natural followers are male while the rest are female. In a male-dominated (as in numerically) sub-group of people, this would make sense.

Except this doesn't explain the many capable female leaders that we have seen over the last 20 years. I'm thinking of people like Wasp or Captain Marvel (who were both at time leaders of the Avengers); Oracle, Black Canary (who I think was definately the field leader of Birds of Prey); Storm, Kitty Pryde, Rachel Summers, Moonstar, and other female leaders of X-teams; Wonder Woman, etc.

The only way that this would even be possible, much less believable, would be to assume that this was a list of exceptional people in a sub-sub-sub-group of humanity (people who are super heroes who are also respected and capable leaders who are also women). And the list is quite frankly too long to assume that.

Point three: Never underestimate the power that literature has over the course of social evolution. Is it not possible that the reason that there are more male leaders than female ones isn't because the writers are male, but because the EIC's have decreed it with circular logic?

Consider: If the reason that there are fewer strong women characters than men is because strong women characters sell less to boys, then the solution would be to market to girls. But, the logic continues that the target audience is boys because more boys buy comic books than girls. And, the logic continues that the reason more boys buy comics than girls is because there are fewer strong women characters than men. Rinse and repeat.

Point four: I think that the biggest challenge to a project like this would be to not present it as demeaning to men in general. There was a time in the mid 90s (not the best of times for comic books in general, true, but the point still stands) when a comic book featuring a strong woman lead character had to go out of its way to insult men as a whole.

Ghost and Wonder Woman were the worst, but it was incredibly prevelant. A week couldn't go by without me reading in a comic book about how weak willed, stupid, sheep like, ineffective, incompetant, etc. men were. My first big cutback in comics was when I just plain got tired of being insulted by otherwise entertaining comics.

I think it would be a struggle to not be insulting. But, it is also a struggle to not be insulting to women in comics as well. So, I think that it could be done.

And, more to the point, I think it should be done.

Point five: I think that if a well written, high profile comic book showing a woman in the lead and a man in the support role could be done, then it might help teach the next generation that it is OK for a man to have a woman manager and vice versa.

It would take time, of course. I think it took about 12 years before comic books realized that there could be more than one woman on a super hero team. I'm counting 12 because I think that is how long it took from when I first saw a team with more than one woman on it (I think that was Raven and Starfire in the Titans) to when I noticed that it was commonplace (in Avengers, Justice League, X-Men, New Mutants, etc.). But, it'll never be accepted if no one ever tries it.

And, again, I think it would only work as a high profile book. Stargirl is, unfortunately, still a B character. But Robin could be Oracle's sidekick. Wonder Woman could get a male sidekick. I'd love to see Gambit as Rogue's sidekick but I think that would have had to have happened years ago, back when he was still woo-ing her, to work. A spin-off with Sue and Johnny Storm could work. They could "kill" Iron Man (again) and have Tony pretend to be yet someone else in the armour and be sidekick to someone (Iron Woman? Circuit Breaker? Photon?)

In think it could work. I think it should be done.

Theno

Now, a partnership, on the other hand, is completely different. Bucky was Cap's sidekick, but the Falcon was his partner-- an equal, not a student. And I think a partnership is certainly more amenable to long-term mixed-gender pairings than the hero-sidekick relationship which is always based on some sort of imbalance.

She-Hulk had Zapper.