Women in Refrigerators website

Simone and her colleagues developed a list of fictional female characters who had been "killed, maimed or depowered", in particular in ways that treated the female characters as mere devices to move forward a male character's story arc, rather than as fully developed characters in their own right.^[4][5] The list was then circulated via the Internet over Usenet, bulletin board systems, email and electronic mailing lists. Simone also e-mailed many comic book creators directly for their responses to the list.

The list is infamous in certain comic book fan circles. 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!"^[6]

Journalist Beau Yarbrough created the initial design and coding on the original website, named after the trope, "Women in Refrigerators". Technology consultant John Bartol edited the content. Robert Harris,^[7] a librarian and comic-book fan, contributed to site maintenance and updates along with fan John Norris. The idea for placing the list online originated with software developer Jason Yu, who also served as the original site host.^[8][3]

In 2000, several national newspapers ran articles that referenced the site, generating discussion on the topic of sexism in pop culture and the comic-book industry.^[9] Some universities also list the content of Women in Refrigerators as related to analysis and critique of pop culture.^[10][11]

"Dead Men Defrosting"

In response to fans who argued that male characters are also often killed, content editor John Bartol wrote "Dead Men Defrosting", an article arguing that when male heroes are killed or altered, they are more typically returned to their status quo. According to Bartol's claim, after most female characters are altered they are "never allowed, as male heroes usually are, the chance to return to their original heroic states. And that's where we begin to see the difference".^[15]

Discussing the site in his book Dangerous Curves: Action Heroes, Gender, Fetishism and Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University professor Jeffrey A. Brown noted that while male comic book heroes have tended to die heroically and be magically brought back from the dead afterwards, female characters have been likelier to be casually but irreparably wounded or killed, often in a sexualized fashion. To support his claim, he cited the Joker shattering the original Batgirl's spine just for fun, resulting in her being written as a wheelchair user for over a decade. He also cites the torture and murder of Stephanie Brown by the villain Black Mask.^[16]

Deadtown

In December 2018, Deadline Hollywood reported that Amazon Studios was developing a television series called Deadtown, an adaptation of the Catherynne M. Valente novel The Refrigerator Monologues. The story centers upon five recently deceased women who meet in a purgatory-like location called Deadtown, where they discover that their entire lives, including their deaths, were merely in service of providing emotional backstory for male superheroes.^[20]