He's crazy, she's crazy, and, almost as an afterthought, they're all the "Worst Heroes Ever": Warner Bros.' long-awaited "Suicide Squad" movie opens in less than two weeks, and ifthe trailers are any indication, it devotes a significant amount of screen time to The Joker and Harley Quinn.

But while Jared Leto has done a great job of convincing us he can follow in Heath Ledger's footsteps, all eyes are on Margot Robbie.

It's not simply because she seems to wear sparkly underpants for the majority of the film, either. It's because her character Harley Quinn has become wildly popular in recent years. Bolstered in no small part by "Batman: The Animated Series" nostalgia and video game cameos, Harley has wrangled her own solo comic, a couple of team-up series and a new gang, not to mention a hefty chunk of floor space at Hot Topic. With her cinematic debut just around the corner, she's becoming one of the most highly recognizable female villains in fiction.

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What's more, she's probably the most important female villain to hit the screen -- in any genre -- in a long time. Whatever approach we see in this cinematic rendering of Harley Quinn will undoubtedly influence the character's depiction in comics, and it may even affect the representation of females as villains in media more generally. Because she's that popular.

That brings us to the matter of how female villains are treated in comics.

The problems began long ago, when the tradition of hero-as-proxy was only beginning. Certainly one of the most important elements of superhero comics since their inception is their function as a means of escape for the reader. Through characters like Spider-Man, readers are given the feeling that they, too, could be heroes (with or without the radioactive spider-bit). For a long while, those readers were largely assumed to be white, cis-gendered, heterosexual men or boys. That's why so many comics feature protagonists with those qualities, often engaged with villains who are the "other." There were clear elements of xenophobia and sexism in the early decades, and heteronormativity is almost always king.

As an avid reader, I'm proud to say superhero comics have come a long way in their treatment of women, people of color and the LGBTQ community. But although we continue to demand that our heroes represent more of us, so that more of us may use them as proxies, there are still qualities in mainstream superhero comics that hark back to more disappointing times.

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Case in point: The depiction of female villainy expresses the very hypersexualization and diminutization we have largely purged from characterizations of our female heroes. And, although it's tempting to suggest the villainization of sexual promiscuity will act to undermine the tendency of real women to mimic those qualities, or for real men to desire those qualities, it doesn't really work that way. That's because, unlike male villains, female foes are created to be more like ladies in distress than psychopaths, who need saving rather than shunning.

In other words, female villains aren't free to be the complex characters their male counterparts are, at least not in traditional superhero comics. Instead, they seem to have all of the same limitations.

First, they're conventionally attractive. If they're "bad guys," they're probably hot: Like the Gotham City Sirens, Titania and Emma Frost, they are usually very sexy and scantily dressed. Even Amanda "The Wall" Waller, who may not be a villain in the traditional sense, received a makeover in 2011 when DC Comics launched the New 52.

Second, female villains are almost never the arch-nemesis, at least not for a male protagonist. That alone is a powerful indicator of a broken system. If we're going to equalize heroism, we ought to also equalize villainy, and that means allowing women to be as threatening to men as other men are. Female heroes can combat male villains, and therefore the opposite should also be true.

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Finally, female villains are always temptingly redeemable. Sure, The Joker may be beyond saving, but popular opinion is that Harley Quinn was merely led down the wrong path by her boyfriend. Emma Frost can be good, if she does it for Scott Summers. If Dark Phoenix murders an entire alien race, we can retcon it beyond recognition, so that Jean Grey wasn't actually responsible. What do all of these treatments have in common? They make the women passive agents, even in their own stories.

Like the inclusion of excessive T&A, these characterizations appear to persist purely for titillation. These "bad girls" might as well be "forbidden," because they're far more interesting than, say, Marvel Girl, at least as far as potential sexual partners go. They remain trapped in a never-ending, vicious cycle: often saved from "evil" by "good" men, only to revert to their libidinous, mildly villainous, "true" natures when the narrative begins to lack zest. That makes their sexuality into a commodity, the same way their costumes do.

So before Harley Quinn hits the big screens, and we strap in for what could be a repetition of the same "bad girl" formula, I ask you: Aren't we "over" the tradition of making comic book stories only for heterosexual males? If we want our female heroes to be as capable as our male ones, shouldn't we ask the same of our villains? Aren't we done with double-standards?

If it were up to me, we'd embrace the foul or the fair, and stop doing things halfway. We would empower our female villains to be true horrors, and to menace whomever they like without emphasizing sexuality as power. We would make them more effective and more troubling, so that fewer young women would care to idealize them. Rather than Harley Quinn's charmingly idiotic, sexy-baby side, I'd like to see her fast-talking, fully clothed, calculatedly homicidal side. I would like to see her be, like The Joker, truly horrendous.

After all, if Harley Quinn is the reason many people are going to see "Suicide Squad," then doesn't she deserve to be the star?