A SERIES OF UN-UDDERABLE EVENTS

 

The “events” to which my title refers are all the 1959-1966 appearances of DC Comics’ original “Wonder Girl” character, whose name I will henceforth abbreviate to “WG1.” Prior to 1959, the WONDER WOMAN continuity had made loose references to the idea that the heroine had passed from childhood to adulthood on Paradise Island before taking on her costumed mantle. However, in no previous period was a younger version of Wonder Woman a frequent element of the series. But in WONDER WOMAN #105, dated April 1959, writer/editor Robert Kanigher and artist Ross Andru began making repeated use of a teenaged version of the heroine, much as the feature SUPERBOY told stories of Superman when he was a youth. WG1’s adventures were sometimes featured on WONDER WOMAN covers, while at other times the teen Amazon was just a backup to her better-established older self. Not a lot of fans, even back in The Day, were especially fond of the character, though ironically WG1 indirectly spawned DC’s second Wonder Girl iteration, and that character enjoyed considerable cachet in the TEEN TITANS series-- more on which later.

Many fans, then, would have deemed WG1 an unfortunate result of editor Kanigher’s tendency to write down to the readers of WONDER WOMAN. But it only recently dawned on me that WG1 was also “un-udderable,” in a way I can only express in song:

No boobs at all,

No boobs at all,

Double-U Gee-One

Had no boobs at all!

(Approximate melody based on a song about Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, who was said to have no “balls” at all.)

While looking through one of the WG1 stories, a question occurred to me. If one presumes that Kanigher began writing stories of a teenaged Amazon, logic would dictate that he was doing so to improve sales. Movies about the new breed of American called the “teenager” had proliferated in the middle 1950s. Such films varied between stories about “clean teens” or about adolescents with somewhat raunchier proclivities. But all teen movies dealt with youths over fifteen, meaning that the female teenagers no longer looked like kids. However, WG1, despite being called a teen, always looked significantly undeveloped.

The WG1 stories do not explicitly state how old the young Amazon is. Yet in all the character’s appearances, she goes around clothed in a very loose tunic, whether it’s some Graeco-Roman garment or a version of the famous Wonder Woman costume. Since the mature Wonder Woman was reasonably well endowed, the logical conclusion is that the creators of WG1 meant to imply that the character was too young to have significant breastitude. If Kanigher was at all consistent about deeming WG1 a teenager, the youngest she could be would be thirteen, and for some individuals this can be too young for full development.

Of course, though WG1 was not technically a kid sidekick, I believe most if not all “young allies” of older superheroes were supposed to be in this same age-range. Michael Fleischer’s ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BATMAN offers evidence that Robin the Boy Wonder was supposed to be a perpetual thirteen or fourteen before he finally started aging in the late 1960s, and most boy sidekicks looked no older than Robin. Prior to WG1, there were few teenaged superheroines in comics, and the only long-lived one was Fawcett Comics’ Mary Marvel, sister of the aforementioned Captain Marvel. Mary’s age probably wasn’t stated either, but on the whole, her figure also suggested the appearance of a girl who had just recently passed into adolescence. All this circumstantial evidence suggests that the raconteurs who worked on Golden Age superheroes were convinced, probably not without merit, that most of their readers were pre-teens, and that the only ages they wanted to see represented were either (1) kids of middle school age or (2) adults, the latter embodying the fantasy of attaining temporal power. That’s also probably one reason that Kanigher decided to devote space to stories of a thirteen-year-old Amazon. The baggy clothing may have been calculated to dodge any question of the not-yet-budding youth being exploited, since a reader couldn’t even tell if she had breasts.

Of course, if you lived back in the 1950s and listened to the Abominable Doctor Wertham, all comics in all genres were replete with what the psycho psychiatrist called “headlights.” There can be little doubt that a few superheroines were especially well endowed, particularly some versions of the Phantom Lady. But most of the genres that accentuated the positive power of cleavage were those of crime, jungle-adventure, and teen-humor—the last being the only genre in which developed female teens regularly put their goods on display.

I doubt that during the middle 1950s the very conservative DC company had to clean up very much in the boobage department. Before the Code, the potential lubricity of Wonder Woman’s costume was restrained by the quasi-Classical art of H.G. Peter. After the Code, Andru and others tended to draw her as being a bit on the slender side. Most regular female characters—Lois Lane and Lana Lang (in the SUPERBOY feature) -- sported modest cleavage, while Catwoman, one of the few well-endowed DC femmes, found herself placed in exile for having drawn the wrath of Wertham. One character, Saturn Girl of the Legion of Super-Heroes, made her first appearance as a supporting character in a 1958 SUPERBOY story, and in that story she barely appears to have any tits at all. However, once the idea of the Legion earned some plaudits from the readers, Saturn Girl’s second appearance gave her a better costume and cleavage about the same as that of Lois and Lana. But then, she, unlike WG1, was supposed to be at least fifteen. On a side-note, though the lady Legionnaire’s first appearance predates that of Kanigher’s WG1, neither Saturn Girl nor any of her compatriots appeared in a regular feature until 1962.

In any case, there’s some irony in the fact that WG1 was the first teen heroine of the 1950s to appear on a semi-regular basis, for she only appeared on newsstands about a month ahead of ACTION COMICS #252, dated May 1959. The first version of Supergirl is explicitly said to be fifteen, a topic which comes up when she auditions to join the Legion of Super-Heroes. (In a twist typical of the period, the heroine washes out when she temporarily becomes an adult and violates the group’s “no one over 18” rule.) More relevantly, from the first Supergirl, unlike WG1, did have fully developed knockers, and though they probably weren’t any bigger than Lois Lane’s, the girl’s girls got a little more emphasis because of the “S” emblem she wore on her chest.

As for WG1, Kanigher had her making references to teenaged pursuits like dancing, dating, and listening to “platters.” But she was always a pale shadow of her older self, in contrast to Superboy, whose small-town background gave him a little distinction from his mature persona. So, in 1966, fading sales on WONDER WOMAN impelled Kanigher to make a show of dumping WG1 and many other wacky creations out of the comic. The gesture didn’t prevent the writer-editor from losing his access to the venerable Amazon property. Yet just as WG1 was being knocked off, her sort-of doppelganger, Wonder Girl II, debuted in TEEN TITANS.

In the first appearance of the TITANS, three kid sidekicks—Robin, Kid Flash, and Aqualad—assembled to fight a menace. Writer Bob Haney and artist Bruno Premiani made them all look like they were in the thirteen-year range, but this didn’t last long. In the group’s second appearance, WG2—who was never decisively stated to share the complicated origins of WG1—joined the group, and remained a member for the series’ initial run, and later revivals as well. Yet from WG2’s debut in the TITANS title, the artist did not follow Kanigher’s lead in terms of putting WG2 in a baggy toga. Instead she wore a version of Wonder Woman’s costume that conformed to the contours of her body. Naturally, the new character began with the same modest breasts of other DC heroines. But unlike her predecessor, her costume was tight enough to demonstrate that at least she HAD boobs.

By the end of the sixties, WG2, like both Wonder Woman and Supergirl, became better endowed. Further, Catwoman returned to the comics, and some new characters were breast-monsters from the first, like the Barbara Gordon Batgirl and the vampy Legionnaire Dream Girl. All of which just proves the non-existent adage, “You can’t keep a good--” …no, I just can’t say it. I invite my few readers to write their own bad pun.

MYTHCOMICS: HACK/SLASH: GIRLS GONE DEAD (2004)

It's probably not a coincidence that, a week or so after finishing my ANATOMY OF A PSYCHO KILLER NARRATIVE  series, I turned my attention to an omnibus of stories featuring the adventures of two hunters of killer revenants. Of the two protagonists, only one's name, that of Cassie Hack, is in the title. As far as I can tell, "Slash" just indicates the monster-killing activities of Cassie and her seven-foot-tall male partner Vlad.`In fact, Cassie’s the one who gives her partner the name “Vlad," which is surely meant ironically. The big, slow-speaking fellow is not a smooth undead seducer, but a hulk who displays both the sensitivity and brutality of Dracula’s conceptual opposite, the Frankenstein Monster.

Though the origin-story for the duo has some mythic aspects, the solo 2004 adventure, subtitled "Girls Gone Dead," proves one of the best observations of the sex-and-violence dynamic of the psycho-killer narrative.  The title plays on a series of popular "spring break" titillation videos, "Girls Gone Wild." Making fun of the prurient Spring Break rituals of youthful idlers is at best easy prey, and it's to the credit of creator/writer Tim Seeley that he goes after bigger game.

I should note in passing that though Seeley sometimes drew his characters, in this outing, the second for the heroes, one Frederica Manfredi handles penciling chores. I can't say whether or not Manfredi contiibuted any input to the setup-- two grim hunters venturing into the surf-sun-and-sex world of Palm Beach-- but it adds a little extra to the production to see a female penciler contributing to a story that doesn't totally trash the idea of sexual embodiment.

Like many other supernatural crusaders before them, Cassie and Vlad begin their adventures by investigating media  reports on mysterious deaths. Vlad doesn't know quite what to make of all the prancing, semi-nude bodies, the wet T-shirt contests, and shutterbugs trying to snap pics of feminine nips. Cassie, having been raised in-- and essentially rejected by-- mainstream youth culture, surveys all she sees with a combination of bitterness and ill-concealed longing. Seeley makes clear that she's correct to consider the Palm Beach to be "a place where a bunch of pre-adults can spend mommy and daddy's money, drink like fish, paw at each other, and not have a care in the world." Still, it's a world she can't help but find enticing, compared to her crusade of demon-slaying-- which, the origin makes clear, allows her to fight her own inner demons by expunging killer revenants-- which Cassie terms "slashers"-- from the real world.

This “Palm Beach story” is far more Cassie’s tale than Vlad’s, since parties with her fellow adolescents belonged to a world that Cassie left behind to pursue her demon-slaying career. In the grand tradition of the Protestant Work Ethic, young Cassie tries to put aside her personal needs to investigate the slasher-murders. She finds two enemies who may incarnate a “Catholic Ethic,” even though it seems filtered through the dominant Protestantism of the U.S.

The undead member of the psycho-killer team is Father Wrath. In life he emulated the “fire-and-brimstone” rhetoric of Protestant holy-rollers, inveighing against gays and Jews, despite presenting using the name of a psuedo-Catholic priest and wearing Catholic vestments. Yet casting stones didn’t insure that he was without sin, for he secretly liked to dress up in women’s clothes, and eventually lost his life when he approached the wrong hookup.

Yet he’s wholly controlled by the still-living Laura Lochs, whom Cassie calls a “Catholic school girl from hell,” though for no reason beyond Laura’s prim-and-proper garments. Laura was once engaged, but she didn’t believe in sex before marriage. Her beau then sought easier pickings at a Spring Break wet T-shirt contest, thus giving Laura a permanent mad-on against the beach-blanket bacchanale. She somehow stumbled across a magical book full of spells capable of reviving and controlling dead people, which led her to re-animate Father Wrath.

Cassie escapes the deadly duo, but not without gleaning the germ of their plan: to massacre a beach-house full of “Girls Gone Naughty” party-goers. While Vlad waits as backup, Cassie has to force herself to act the part of a “normal girl” to infiltrate the party. Early on, her mission is compromised when one of the male party-people slips Cassie some vodka. Yet Cassie isn’t attacked, and she actually starts enjoying herself with the casual juveniles even as she thinks things like, “Why am I dancing? I don’t dance. I hate these people.” Laura and her puppet-priest show up to begin the slaughter, resulting in a big blowout in which Vlad duels Father Wrath and Cassie takes on Laura. The highlight of the battle includes a moment in which prim Laura is subjected to a “wet T-shirt” ordeal, playing off the ritual that seduced her boyfriend, before she and Father Wrath are defeated—though Laura makes at least one return appearance.

I won’t claim that Tim Seeley’s script is strikingly original. The psycho-killer subgenre is rife with narratives in which a psycho-killer is spawned by human sinfulness, resulting in the killer’s obsession with avenging those wrongs. A number of psycho-killers, whether explicitly religious or not, devote themselves to crusading against “the beast with two backs,” and their jeremiads are always pathetic, doomed to fail against the irrresitable tide of human sexuality. Seeley isn’t concerned with the social roles embodied in repressive religious practices, only with spinning an escapist story combining tits and terror. What makes “Girls Gone Dead”interesting is its resistance to other pervasive social narratives. Early in the story, a young woman—one of Wrath’s impending victims—observes that Spring Break is just “beads, beer and showin’ your tits to strangers,” and her friend replies that if the woman wanted tamer fare, “you should have went to a church picnic.” In contrast to the alleged dominant pattern of psycho-killer films, it’s the comparatively “good girl” who’s first to die.

Similarly, the relatively minor incident in which a bad boy slips Cassie vodka does not end with that guy, or anyone else, attempting to rape the heroine. Such a scenario would be fully in keeping with the narratives approved by WAPsters and their current philosophical kindred, the #MeToo movement. Cassie really does loosen up after being given strong drink, and she continues to drink on her own, as well as making fleeting connections with strangers. Only grim duty forces her to abandon the carefree revels and have her showdown with a woman as obsessed as she is, who also uses a male partner for “muscle” just as Cassie does. In the end, the wages of “anti-sin” exert a higher price than those of plain old sin, and it’s hard to believe that Seeley doesn’t want his readers to make the same conclusion—which is at least a more complicated theme-statement than one gets from the majority of psycho-killer tales.

OVERTHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT PT. 3

How wouldst thou use me now, blind, and thereby
Deceiveable, in most things as a child
Helpless, thence easily contemn'd, and scorn'd,
And last neglected?-- Milton, SAMSON AGONISTES.

All higher or moral tendencies lie under suspicion of being rackets.-- Saul Bellow, HERZOG.

In Part 1 I disagreed with Charles Reece's WONDER WOMAN essays. In order to indict William Moulton Marston's WONDER WOMAN for being propaganda for an "ideological state apparatus," albeit one based in the worship of "Aphrodite's law" rather than the state as such, he overemphasized some factors and underemphasized others.  I also compared his method with mine, asserting that in my own WONDER WOMAN analysis I'd stayed closer to the source material and attempted to represent the narrative "underthought" in concert with its literal "overthought."  The following essay touches on some related points in that respect, particularly with respect to the Mulveyan concept of "the male gaze."


Reece likens the Amazon's Transformation Island-- where criminals are obliged to wear "Venus girdles" designed to bring them to a consciousness of Aphrodite's law-- to both real-world correctional institutions and the philosophical concept of the "panopticon:"

Liberal do-gooder resistance to retributive justice can often slip into the most totalitarian of utopian ideas. By focusing on utilitarian notions of rehabilitation and deterrence, rather than a just punishment to fit the crime, the criminal’s agency can be diminished for the general good. What results is a society that begins to look like a penal colony. There are the science fiction dystopias such as A Clockwork Orange and The Minority Report, but also B. F. Skinner’s utopian model for the real world, Walden Two, where a centrally planned system of positive reinforcements has eliminated crime through the shaping of behavior (the behaviorist had no truck with talk of free will, Beyond Freedom and Dignity being one of his major popular works). And, to my mind, Marston’s Transformation Island is a more horrifying, feminine version of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon.

The concept is ubiquitous nowadays (cf., the masthead above), but briefly: The panopticon is a circular prison with a watchtower in the center covered in two-way mirrors, where guards can observe any of the prisoners through the glass walls of their cells that face the tower. It’s a model of efficiency: few to no guards are needed at any given time, because the prisoners can’t determine when they’re being watched. Thus, they learn to act as if they’re always being watched. Besides the obvious visual analogy of the tower to the phallus, the concept can be read as masculine due to its use of Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze.” [3] Similar to what’s done with Rear Window, substitute the film audience for the guards, the screen for the glass walls and images of women for the prisoners, and you pretty much have her view of cinematic pleasure. The woman/prisoner exists as spectacle (connoting “to-be-looked-at-ness”), “freezing”/disrupting the progression of narrative/legal order, which is what the masculine camera/guard’s gaze is ultimately searching for: “This alien presence [erotic or criminal spectacle] then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative [patriarchal or legal order].” [4] [p. 203, Mulvey]

Laura Mulvey's (in)famous concept of the "male gaze," whatever one thinks of it, does compare reasonably well with the panopticon concept.  Both ideas are based in the fear and anxiety one may experience-- not unlike Milton's blind strongman-- of being looked at without being able to look back.  However, I'm moved to point out that Marston's concept of Transformation Island has exactly nothing to do with the idea of visual monitoring, and so a comparison to either Mulvey or Bentham seems egregious.

The only resemblance to Bentham's panopticon is that Transformation Island does have some guards.  However, the intrinsic idea of the Venus girdles involves a spirtual awakening, rather than a deadening. In WONDER WOMAN #28 one of the Transformation Island guards explains:

[The girdle] is magic metal from Venus—it removes all desire to do evil and compels complete authority to loving obedience.

Initially this sounds an awful lot like brainwashing of the Orwellian kind.  However, in the same issue, one of the long-time prisoners of the Island, after being liberated by newer escapees, has the following mental monologue:

 “Without the girdle I feel dominant—invincible! But I don’t feel cruel and wicked as I used to—the Amazons transformed me! I love Wonder Woman and Queen Hippolyte—I can’t bear to have them hurt—I must save them!”

 
It's possible, I suppose, to view the speaker as being just as brainwashed as Winston Smith.  However, to do so one must force onto Marston's narrative an "underthought" not supported by the "overthought" expressed in the story proper.

Reece's comparisons to Mulvey, Bentham and Orwell are not without purpose.  By alluding to various methods of thought-control, he can suggest that Transformation Island is simply a tool for such control, rather than what Marston believed it to be: a means of awakening "cruel and wicked" souls to a greater understanding of their own potential for love.  One may find this sort of psycho-religiosity sappy or repelling as a matter of taste, of course.  But it's impossible to overlook that in Marston's universe, the law of Aphrodite has a different phenomenological nature than any of the compulsions from 1984. 

Another problem specific to the comparison of Marston and Bentham is that in the former, readers know that the prisoners of Transfomation Island are all guilty of their crimes.  We know this with a narrative certainty that cannot extend to the philosophical prison of Bentham.  This diegetic fact weakens Reece's case for portraying the Amazon's adversaries as pawns of an "ideological state apparatus."  Therefore, to strengthen his case he brings in Mulvey's formula of the "woman-as-spectacle," the cinematic female who is also unable to prevent being under the scrutiny of a male-dominated order.  However, the comparison is not apt.  In one case we're talking about characters as they're being controlled by other characters within a narrative diegesis, and in the other, about characters being controlled by the extra-diegetic forces (a film's producers and audiences) who bring the diegesis into existence. 

In case it's not been made clear in earlier essays like PROOF OF EMBODIMENT, I reject absolutely Mulvey's cockeyed notion that only women are sources of spectacle, either in the cinematic medium or any other.  There are some differences in the ways men and women are "spectacularized," differences which have their roots in the biological and sociological identities of the genders.  And if there's any comic-book creator who did the most to shift the burden of spectacularization from female to male, Marston would be my nominee.

In my earlier WONDER WOMAN essay, I too made a comparison between the story I analyzed and the Mulveyan concept:

“Origin” could also serve as a satirical commentary on Laura Mulvey’s oversimple concept of “the male gaze.” Though Trevor is an intrusive presence, he sees nothing of the Amazon world for most of the story, and indeed his eyes seem to have been injured from his experience, since on page 12 he comments that “my eyes must be bad again” as he sees Diana in all her costumed finery, rather than as “the scientist who saved my life.” Rather than seeing, he is the one seen as Diana and her friend Mala rescue him from the waters. Yet only Diana, the one explicitly born on Paradise Island, falls in love with him and brings him back to life. Toward the tale’s end, when Hippolyte prepares to send Trevor back to his world in the company of Diana, the physician relates that she has removed Trevor’s “eye bandages.” Hippolyte orders that Trevor “must see nothing on Paradise Island,” and Diana retorts, “Nothing except me! I’ll bind him again--myself!” While Hippolyte protects Paradise Island from the rapacious gaze of men, Diana accepts Trevor’s gaze and his desire, though the binding of Trevor’s eyes may prefigure her intent to convert him, and every other man, to the bondage of Aphrodite’s law.

Obviously Marston's scenario makes Steve Trevor the "man-as-spectacle" within the diegesis of the narrative, and makes him a "blind Samson" for the length of his stay within this bower of femininity.  Of course the extra-diegetic readers see everything Trevor does not: Princess Diana, her hot Amazon sisters, and all the ritual appurtenances of Paradise Island.  Nevertheless, the Amazons aren't precisely on display as commodities for male gazers, after the fashion of Mulvey's most prominent example of male gazin': the multi-gal musicals of Busby Berkeley.  Given that WONDER WOMAN has long been a favorite of female comics-fans, it's arguable that this particular "Island of Beautiful Women" often serves the female audience's needs for the feeling of fictional superiority.  This dynamization parallels the sense of validation which Mulvey imputes to male viewers as they observe a "narrative/legal order" that always shows the guys on top.

I note also that my essay, written and printed long before Reece's, does deal with the fact that Wonder Woman's ultimate purpose is to "convert" man's world to the law of Aphrodite.  Yet, where Reece regards this sort of mental/moral conversion as just another "racket" to keep the ideological apparatus running, I regard it, first and foremost, as a fantasy.  I don't believe that Marston's vision would have worked in the real world, but not because it's fascist or invested in mind-control.

On a more minor note, I can't help noting that Reece indicts most if not all superheroes as sharing the same quasi-fascist agenda as WONDER WOMAN: "This is your basic superhero moral gobbledygook, only encoded as feminist."  Yet he also says, in the quote above:

"By focusing on utilitarian notions of rehabilitation and deterrence, rather than a just punishment to fit the crime, the criminal’s agency can be diminished for the general good. "

Most superhero comic books do not deal with "rehabilitation and deterrence" to the extent that Marston's WONDER WOMAN does-- which is, on balance, still a small though not insignificant corpus of "Transformation Island" tales against the entirety of Marston's body of work.  Usually "just punishment" is precisely what superhero comics are about.  Though some villains die (or appear to die) as a result of their crimes, many receive what is coded in the stories as "just punishment," enduring temporary imprisonment so that the writers can bring them back again and again with impunity.  The Penguin might occasionally pretend to be rehabilitated, or Mister Element may actually be reformed, but in neither case are they subjected to Orwellian mind control.  The Penguin returns to being "cruel and wicked" because it gives him a charge, while former Wonder Woman villain Paula Von Gunther becomes the Amazon's boon ally.  One is a static view of the subject of "crime and punishment," while the other involves dynamic personal transformation and is based in what Bellow calls "higher and moral principles."  One need not agree with every idea propounded by William Moulton Marston to appreciate the dynamism of his conceptual universe.

DUCK SHOOT AT THE ANTI-EMBODIMENT CORRAL, PART 2

At the end of FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 3 I said:

...though I have just two more Thompson-related essays to get out of the way, I may have come across another resource that supplies me with more debate-worthy fodder.

The "resource" to which I alluded was this 2-26-12 essay on Hooded Utilitarian, where Noah Berlatsky takes issue with several current offerings of comic-book superhero cheesecake, comparing all of them unfavorably with the cheesecake offerings from such bygone artists as Jack Cole and Dan DeCarlo, as well as current artist Larry Elmore.  Though Berlatsky does give a nod of approval to Frank Miller's sexed-up version of Catwoman, most of his superhero-comics examples he regards as "moronic."

I don't agree that current superhero comics are quite as bereft of what he calls "feministploitation," where:

the fetish clothing and the putative power of the character are coherently working together, both in that the power makes the character more sexy and in that that the clothing adds (not necessarily logically, but still) to the sense of the character’s potency.

However, I will agree that the particular examples Berlatsky chose are indeed incompetent exemplars of current hyper-sexualization.  To take just one example, he notes that "Star Sapphire’s costume, for example, goes right past sexy and on into ludicrous," and I can hardly demur:

I mentioned in Part 1 that in real life women often had to dress in social situations to show themselves off to good effect without showing too much and looking like sluts.  Apparently this version of Star Sapphire took her social cues down at the Boom-Boom Room.

That said, I find some problems with Berlatsky's justifications:

I think there are a couple of reasons. In the first place, super-heroines are, you know, heroes. They’re supposed to have stuff to do, crime to fight, justice to uphold, and so forth. For Dan DeCarlo and Jack Cole, the woman are just there to stare at; they’re hot, hot hot. That’s the whole raison d’etre; there’s no effort to pretend that you care what these women think, or how they act, or whether they defeat the villain without falling out of their tops and being exposed to the vastness of space.

And shortly afterward:

If you make it simply about visual stimulation, it’s simply about visual stimulation, and doesn’t have to have anything to do (or at least, not much to do) with real women. Once you start pretending that you’re talking about a smart, motivated, principled adventurer, on the other hand, you end up implying that said smart, motivated, principled, adventurer has an uncontrollable compulsion to dress like a space-tart on crack. Which is, it seems to me, insulting.

Though I would agree that all of Berlatsky's chosen examples are indeed bad, I don't quite agree with the idea that a given heroine cannot be a "motivated, principled adventurer" and still wear something a little on the sassy side, as per the "belly shirt Supergirl" that I've defended earlier:

The above drawing is certainly a little on the cheesecakey side-- what I've termed the "TITILLATION" category elsewhere-- but is there anything about it that makes the character look unprincipled or stupid because she's chosen to show a little flesh?  I would say no, though I have the impression that a lot of fans protested "sexy Supergirl" to the extent that the new incarnation sports a safe generic costume with zero titillation elements.

To many fans there seems a major disconnect, similar to Kelly Thompson's false "idealization/sexualization" dichotomy, between portraying heroes as characters with high ideals and principles and as characters who look good and obviously have the power to attract many sex-partners.

Thus I'm surprised that anyone, such as the blogger for this BEAT post, would intimate that the existence of "superhero sexuality" might not even matter. Maybe I'm biased in that I didn't start collecting the genre until I was eleven (having only dallied with kid-and-teen comics prior to that), but to the best of my recollection I always thought that even the "all ages" superhero books of the Silver Age had a strong sexual vibe, even if the sexiness appeared in very simple form, as with Lois Lane or Vicky Vale trying to "unmask" Superman or Batman, and thus play Delilah to their Samson.


More later.

DUCK SHOOT AT THE ANTI-EMBODIMENT CORRAL, PART 1

In FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 2 I said:

As discussed in EMBODIMENT, it's stunningly inaccurate to assume that male characters are less sexualized simply because they are dominantly "covered from head to toe."  What I believe Thompson truly objects to is the *feeling* of greater exposure for the heroines; the sense that they are always being subjected to the "male gaze" as promulgated by Laura Mulvey.

And in QUICK SEX-COVER-UP REMARK I noted this offhand comment by one Charles Reece:

"I don’t have any stats on any of this, but just based on the gals and guys I know and see, for the most part, the former prefer wearing more revealing clothing than the latter. Superheroes just kind of replicate that tendency in a more exaggerated manner. The men who walk around in cutoffs or with their shirt open to the navel or in half shirts tend to be gay or aging rockers."

While Reece and I are miles apart in most if not all ideological stances, I would agree, purely on an observational basis, that men tend to cover up and women tend to reveal, however strategically, as per the example I mentioned before:

If Kelly Thompson surveyed Hollywood musicals the same way she surveyed superhero comic books, would she come to the conclusion that they too are guilty of objectification and hyper-sexualization purely in terms of that one element:  how covered men are and how uncovered women are? 

That would be an unfair question were I asking it in more than a broadly comparative sense.  Clearly Thompson's essay indicts current American superhero comics for more than just the covered/uncovered dichotomy.  Nevertheless, because Thompson is busy assailing the forces of objectification in the superhero comic, I find it a fault that she does not consider that there might be other factors at work in the way comic book professionals portray male and female characters.  I suggest that in American culture it's typical to identify "maleness" with a process of concealment, in which one dons a Brooks Brothers suit as a knight dons his suit of armor, and "femaleness" with a process of partial revealment, wherein the female, when making a display of herself not only for men but also for other women in her immediate society, must strike a balance between showing her appearance off to best effect without showing off too much and thus being "slutty."

Sometimes comic books actually get the balance of sexual representation correct, as per this fan-favorite scene from BIRDS OF PREY #104:

  

The above scene, in my opinion, would not be an unfair depiction of male and female tendencies of dress, as it's based on current cultural imperatives as to how males and females dress at social affairs.  By extension, I don't necessarily regard it as a vile male conspiracy simply because none of the male members of the X-Men dress as revealingly as Storm, much less the White Queen. I make no bones about the fact that most superhero comics are written to a male audience, which means that they are likely to remain more heavily invested in cheesecake than in beefcake.  That said, some of the disparity may not be attributable PURELY to the likelihood that heterosexual male readers don't want to look at beefcake.  It may also be attributable to the cultural fact that men think that other men in revealing duds look unmanly, if not outright gay.  I mentioned in FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 1 that there had been male heroes that showed a lot of skin without seeming unmanned, as with Hawkman and Sub-Mariner.

But should a counterexample be needed, here's Cosmic Boy from some 1970s LEGION tale:

More to come in Part 2.

TAKE THE COMIC BOOK "SEXUAL EMBODIMENT" TEST, PART 2

In FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 2 I observed with incredulity the way a certain contingent of comics-fandom gave Kelly Thompson a free pass re: the evidence she presented with regard to the “hyper-sexualization” of female comics-characters. Despite the fact that Thompson constructed her case on the assertion that this or that character was “regularly unzipped” and so on, she gave no indication as to what time-frame these representations regularly took place, be it in the last ten months or the last ten years. It was entirely OK for Thompson to present what one respondent to my essays called “anecdotal evidence.” However, when I presented a point-of-view that mitigated Thompson’s one-sided perspective on gender representation, more than one respondent wanted chapter-and-verse, scientifically redundant, DNA-tested evidence coming out the wazoo. If I didn’t present same, that lack proved me a no-good ultraconservative defender of sexual oppression.




All this supposed demand for rigor, of course, was merely a cover to reject any observation that might mitigate the narrative of female victimization via so-called “objectification.” From a rhetorical standpoint, there’s nothing a preacher loves better than the devil against which he preaches. Without that object of scorn and detestation, the preacher’s got no audience. For most ultraliberals, the objectification of fictional female characters is one of their personal devils, and perdition help the critic who dares suggest that sexual representation, whether in comics or any other medium, might be a two-way street.



One of those respondents challenged me to show evidence of my claim that male characters in comics were also sexually embodied—apparently with the sense that even if I could show such, it would be meaningless unless I could show total parity with female sexual embodiment. I imagine he thought that the only possible rebuttal to Thompson’s imputations of inequality in “No, It’s Not Equal” would be to prove such parity. At no time did I claim that fiction aimed at a male audience would not contain a disproportionate quantity of sexualized depictions of females. What I did claim was that there was an ongoing process of embodiment that applied to both male and female character-construction, and that male characters were constructed to be appealing to female characters within the comic-book diegesis.



I mentioned on that comments-thread that I was meditating on a possible way to take a fair sampling of a batch of contemporary comic books and examine them for both male and female sexual embodiment, in contradistinction to Thompson’s skewed analysis. Given that I had in another essay touted some titles in DC’s “New 52” as representing a new development in the formulation of adult pulp, it occurred to me, “What if I performed such a survey on every New 52 title within a given month?” Limited though such a sampling would be, it would be better than Thompson’s “anecdotal” overview.



But, given the righteous attitudes displayed by most of my respondents, I thought twice. “Why bother with a full month survey, given that most fans are so in love with being blinkered and judgmental that they’ll never alter their opinions no matter what evidence is produced?” So I saved my money and, when a sale came round at a local comics-shop, I simply bought the back issues I wanted anyway and decided to use that as my sampling.

As explained in Part 1, I’m breaking down the sexual representations in each comic surveyed in terms of my deductive categories, GLAMOR, TITILLATION, and PORNIFICATION. I imagine that another easy way to dismiss my formulations would be to simply disagree with these divisions. A thoughtful critique is certainly possible.  However it's more likely most fans would just fall back to the victimization position, implying that a costume showing bare legs (an example of GLAMOR, usually) is exactly as bad as a costume that looks like Victoria’s Secret lingerie (PORNIFICATION, of course). Should anyone make this assertion, assume that I've already deemed it unilaterally stupid and move on.



I’m not counting every sexually embodied image in every one of these titles. Rather, I’m going by page-count. A book with “5 counts of GLAMOR” means five pages on which some GLAMOR-ous image is presented for the reader’s possible delectation. Covers count as only one page, though ads are not counted.
It's impossible to state that a given drawing carries the concept of sexual embodiment for everyone.  However, I focused on those drawings that at least showed enough of at least one face, one figure or the two together to connote sexual attractiveness.


Here goes.



BATGIRL #7— No counts of male sexual embodiment. 8 counts of female sexual embodiment of the GLAMOR type.

BATGIRL #8—No counts of male embodiment. 6 counts of female GLAMOR.

BIRDS OF PREY #1 – 13 counts of female TITILLATION. 7 counts of male GLAMOR.

BIRDS OF PREY #2 – 17 counts of female TITILLATION. 1 count of male GLAMOR.

BIRDS OF PREY #3 – 14 counts of female TITILLATION. No counts of male embodiment.

BLACKHAWK #1 – 6 pages male GLAMOR. 7 pages female GLAMOR.

CATWOMAN #5 – 7 counts of female PORNIFICATION. 2 counts of male GLAMOR.

CATWOMAN #6—11 counts of female PORNIFICATION. 4 counts of male PORNIFICATION. (And yes, they’re all Batman.)

CATWOMAN #7 – 7 counts of female PORNIFICATION. 2 counts of male PORNIFICATION.

RED HOOD AND OUTLAWS #2 – 1 count of male TITILLATION. 2 counts of female TITILLATION. 3 counts of female PORNIFICATION.

SAVAGE HAWKMAN #1—11 counts of male GLAMOR. No counts of female embodiment.

SUPERGIRL #1—11 counts of female GLAMOR. 1 count of male GLAMOR.

SUPERGIRL #2 – 16 counts of female GLAMOR. 16 counts of male GLAMOR.

If I wished to invest in a scanner to reproduce all the relevant pages, I could make arguments for all my categorizations—but again, that would involve spending money to prove my conclusions to an audience in love with defending victims—or what they like to imagine as victims.

Will that be my final word on the mélange known as “No, It’s Not Equal?”


Magic eightball says, “Maybe for now.”

SEX SURVEY SEGUE

Before proceeding to Part 2 of the "sexual embodiment" test, I feel the need to draw parallels between the three categories posited in PART 1 and three categories posited in the earlier essay LET'S GET SEMI-DIRTY.

In the latter essay, I started out with two terms introduced in a yet earlier piece, which sought to analyze two aspects of what I now call "embodiment"-- that is, "sex" and "violence" in literature-- and ally them with "clean" and "dirty" versions in terms of the intensity of what the viewer/reader was shown. 

In earlier essays on this theme I tended to discuss violence, but SEMI-DIRTY is intended to focus on demonstrating an interstitial category-- "semi-dirty"-- and for that I emphasized the aspect of fictional sex:

I didn’t give [in the earlier essay referenced] parallel examples of sex, but the same standard of explicitness applies. I should note that whether a work is clean or dirty has no bearing on how exciting its kinetic elements may be for a given audience-member. Some may well find the clean but vivid courtship-rituals of NORTH BY NORTHWEST more stimulating than the explicit dirtiness of LAST TANGO IN PARIS.

The same generalization applies to the "semi-dirty" category; some may prefer it to either manifestation.  Going purely on anecdotal experience, I have one (never to be named) acquaintance who dislikes sexual explicitness of any kind.  I would presume that if he gets turned on by any sort of fiction, it would have to be something comparable to the "vivid courtship-rituals of NORTH BY NORTHWEST."

At the other extreme, I have another acquaintance whose main comment to a screening of FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! was to complain about the lack of (visible) tits.  So presumably nothing but "explicit dirtiness" would have worked for this individual.

The three categories I'll be using for the "sexual embodiment test" thus line up rather well if I say so myself:

GLAMOR-- "clean" sexuality
TITILLATION-- "semi-dirty" sexuality
PORNIFICATION-- "dirty" sexuality

The only major difference between these parallel essays is that in the "clean & dirty" ones, I didn't address narrative function at all.  In BATTLE OF THE MONSTER TERMINOLOGIES, I used separate terms to describe narrative function pertaining to spectacle, designating a dichotomy between "functional violence" and "spectacular violence"-- with the usual caveat that the same dichotomy applies to fictional sexual representation.  However, an interstititial category can be created for this aspect as well:

GLAMOR-- "functional" sexuality
TITILLATION-- "semi-spectacular" sexuality
PORNIFICATION-- "full monte spectacular" sexuality

Next up:  (part of) THE NEW 52 takes the TEST.

TAKE THE COMIC-BOOK "SEXUAL EMBODIMENT" TEST! PART 1

On this blog my first attempt to analyze the problems of Kelly Thompson's unworkable dichotomy, "idealization/sexualization," appeared here:

Though I fully understood why Kelly Thompson opposes idealization and sexualization in her essay, an accurate explanation of the processes of character construction should view sexualization as just one aspect of a more general principle. I call this principle “embodiment,” in that it takes in everything in a given diegesis that establishes the physical nature of a character.-- me, PROOF OF EMBODIMENT.

I followed this up in part by noting in FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 1 that Thompson had oversimplistically conflated various types of sexualization, some more extreme (characters wearing thongs or lingerie) than others (characters wearing belly shirts or swimsuit-like costumes).  However, in that essay I didn't attempt to define these differences.  It seems a given that I shouldn't criticize Thompson unless I can define the separate types better than she did, so I tried to come up with a logical breakdown of the differing levels in which characters had been constructed purely in terms of their sexual embodiment.

A quick prelude to my logical breakdown appears in my early essay THAT OBSCURE OBJECTIVIZATION, where I emphasized that "the standardization of sexual attractiveness" should be regarded primarily as a narrative tool:

For most genre-fiction-- particularly those media which, unlike prose, hinge on depicting the appearance of the characters-- the standardization of sexual attractiveness is a useful narrative tool. In romances, for instance, it's almost de rigeur to depict both hero and heroine as meeting a bland standard for attractiveness. This is not because the narrative is trying to convince anyone that homely people don't mate in real life, but because it's advantageous to the narrative's smooth progression to depict only good-looking people becoming romantically entwined. As long as the hero and heroine meet a basic standard of attractiveness, an audience-member is less likely to be thrown out of his/her participation in the story to think, "How can Character A possibly be attracted to Character B?"

So I start from the assumption that even the least spectacular genre-work that makes the heroes and heroines sexually attractive in some way participates in this narrative strategy.  Starting from that point, I deduced three categories, and subsequently selected a particular well-known comics-character, already mentioned in the FEMALE PART 1 essay above, to typify the three phases of sexual embodiment.


First we have GLAMOR:

Like most if not all depictions of Catwoman during the Golden Age, the villainess is meant to be appealing to both the hero and whatever readers share the hero's liking for sexy women.  However, the spectacle of Catwoman's femininity does not exceed either the dominant type of plot in Batman/Catwoman stories of the period, nor the dominant type of characterizations.  Catwoman is beautiful but only within proscribed limits, just as Batman is handsome and muscular but only to the extent that this attractive image serves the elements of plot and character.

A greater intensity of sexual depiction can be found in examples of TITILLATION:

This cover to CATWOMAN #1 by Jim Balent, in keeping with most of the interior art, actually shows less of the character's bare flesh than the Golden Age costume.  Nevertheless, Balent has chosen to give Catwoman a body type that draws attention immediately to the character's secondary sex characteristics.  The story inside may not involve any more actual sexual acts than did the Golden Age stories, but in these stories Catwoman's T&A have become a spectacle that equals or even exceeds the importance of Aristotle's primary elements of plot and character.  This category includes the gendered types of embodiment commonly called "cheesecake" for females and "beefcake" for males.



Finally, we have the neologism PORNIFICATION, handily defined by Wikipedia as "the way that aesthetics that were previously associated with pornography have become part of popular culture, and that mainstream media texts and other cultural practices ‘citing pornographic styles, gestures and aesthetics’ have become more prominent:"

And of course, I could hardly do better than to point to the "New 52" version of the Princess of Plunder:

To be sure, not every picture of Catwoman in the past eight issues has depicted her in partial undress.  Such scenes can potentially be found in both the GLAMOR and TITILLATION manifestations.  The emphasis of the PORNIFICATION tendency is that the sexual spectacle should be expected to exceed the importance of plot and character on a regular basis.  This does not necessarily mean that plot or character cease to have any importance. I may be alone in stating that the Judd Winick/Guillem March series delivers in both respects rather ably, though not exceptionally.  CATWOMAN #1 gained considerable notoriety for depicting a vivid if not precisely consummated sexual act between the title-star and Batman, but not every issue has featured such an act.  However, the possibility that such acts may appear again and again allies the Winick Catwoman with the narrative demands of pornographic art-- which is not quite the same as calling the title "pornography," by the way, nor the same as judging it on the same terms one judges literal pornography.

Next up:

The New 52 (or Parts Thereof) take the Sexual Embodiment Test.  

THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 2

Most people who read this column regularly know how I feel about these issues [of objectification and hyper-sexualization]. The short version is that I think it’s a big problem that extends far beyond comics and like other media, it really affects the way people view women, and how women, especially young women, view themselves. I don’t think “it’s just comics” and it doesn’t matter. I think media is a powerful thing in our society and that there’s a trickle down effect in seeing these portrayals reinforced over and over again. These portrayals shape how we view and value women and contributes to everything from sexism in the work place to eating disorders.-- Kelly Thompson, No, It's Not Equal.

At the end of Part 1 I said:

What I believe Thompson truly objects to is the *feeling* of greater exposure for the heroines; the sense that they are always being subjected to the "male gaze" as promulgated by Laura Mulvey. I'll address some of the problems with this tendency in Part 2.

I want to emphasize the word "tendency" because I'm not claiming that Thompson has been either directly or indirectly influenced by the Laura Mulvey essay. I'm saying that she makes an assertion which parallels the same tendency I see in Mulvey's essay, where any sexual view of women is anathematized.  Mulvey's last sentence speaks of "women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end."  Thompson's essay is neither as radical nor as academically turgid as Mulvey's, but I think that there is an oppositional aspect of the former essay that has been overlooked in the circles of comics-fan online response.

Thompson doesn't spend any time proving her case that the "portrayals" of objectivized women contribute to "everything from sexism in the work place to eating disorders"-- though she may have done so in other essays-- but focuses only on one unattributed assertion made in a comment-thread, which Thompson says that she's seen in many other versions:

The, “Comic books are sexist to women” argument does not work, simply because it is not just women who are being objectified.
It isn’t about ‘how’ the characters are objectified, it’s about the fact that they are objectified at all. And men and women are both idealized in ridiculous fashions. That is why the argument on how women in comics are objectified will forever be flawed, because it is not an objective criticism.

Just like her title says, her essay is entirely devoted to disproving this, but in keeping with her dislike of "vitriolic comments," Thompson does not *overtly* anathematize those who defend female objectification:

while you can personally decide that you LIKE seeing objectification of women in your comic books, and you can decide that you are quite content with the status quo, or that you don’t think it’s detrimental to women and it doesn’t bother you, the idea that women and men are treated visually the same in superhero comics is utter crap.

And toward the essay's end, the above thought is repeated:

again I have to say, you are free to like this, and to advocate for it if you think it’s really the best thing about superhero comics and something that you love about the medium and genre no matter what, that’s your prerogative, but please, stop with this cry of “It’s equal!” because it’s really really not.

Many of Thompson's respondents, as well as several of the negative respondents on my Sequart essays, were beguiled by this seeming tolerance for disparate tastes.  I initially had a similar response that I placed on the Thompson comments-thread on 2-27-12:

I’ll add that one thing I did appreciate about the essay was that Thompson doesn’t call for any jeremiads. She’s very explicit about saying, “If this is the type of thing you like, that’s one thing, but just don’t pretend it’s fair and balanced.”

And yet, as I've intermittently assailed several of the weak points of the essay over the past few months, most of the responses to my essays have been jeremiad-like in tone.  My most moronic critic (I hardly need name him) has accused me of trying to pretend that there is no sexism in the sexual representations of comic books.  Thompson's not responsible for these dimbulbs, of course.  But I do think she is responsible for rendering a very poor definition of the "sexism problem," and that she has constructed an oppositional "either/or" that tends to attract those who want simple solutions no less than the fans she excoriates for "tunnel vision."  So these days I tend to think that she did manage to launch a jeremiad, albeit a more *subtle* one than most of its breed.  And Thompson did so by focusing on the question of "equality."

American culture is founded on the ideals of fair play and equal opportunity, no matter how often various forces conspire to establish unfair hegemonies or hierarchies.  American feminism is from the first an opposition to a hierarchy inherited from the Old World: the bifurcation of societal roles and rights based on gender identity. 

In No, It's Not Equal, Kelly Thompson focuses most of her attention on the inequity of male and female portrayals in comic books.  This in itself could be a worthy undertaking.  However, as if to provide proof for the statement made by the unnamed poster Thompson opposes-- who states that "the argument on how women in comics are objectified will forever be flawed, because it is not an objective criticism"-- Thompson fails to define her criteria by any objective method.  She gives the impression of an empirical approach by aspiring to "break down" the problems with the equality-argument into "four primary categories."  But as I've noted copiously elsewhere, she blurs the line between "sexualization" and "hyper-sexualization" so that both terms become meaningless, and makes vague references to temporal periods without specificity:

And now let’s look at ten of the most popular marquee superheroines: Wonder Woman (strapless swimsuit, sometimes a thong, sometimes heels), Catwoman (regularly unzipped, frequently heels), Ms. Marvel (swimsuit, sometimes a thong, thigh high boots), Storm (strapless swimsuit, thigh high boots, sometimes heels), Batgirl (fully covered, sometimes heels), Black Widow (regularly unzipped, sometimes heels), Invisible Woman (fully covered – for now at least), Black Canary (swimsuit, sometimes a thong, fishnet stockings, sometimes heels), Rogue (as of late – constantly unzipped), and Power Girl (boob hole, swimsuit, sometimes a thong, sometimes heels).

I confess I didn't read every response in the mile-long comments-thread to the essay, but I'd be curious as to whether I'm the only online critic to fault Thompson for tossing out terms like "regularly unzipped" or "sometimes a thong" without nailing down a time-period during which she made these unsupported observations.  That she could have supported at least some of them had she tried; that I do not doubt.  But I do doubt the perspicacity of online comics-fandom for giving Thompson a pass on issues of empirical reproducibility, when she's so vehemently against the "tunnel vision" of those who spout unsupported defenses of "equal treatment." And yet, despite all this, Thompson got that pass because she used the right password-- "equality," which in this case carried the connotation of "fairness."

Most of the American comics-fans who could fairly be called "hardcore" (ironic though the term may be in other contexts) are male.  Some male fans, as Thompson observes, don't have a real problem with what Thompson terms objectification, and claim that the representations are essentially equal.  Other male fans may purchase sexy superheroine comics but would never overtly defend the practice, and probably would be entirely sheepish if called out on the matter.  Still others buy into the oppositional "either/or" argument Thompson promulgates, finding both sexual and hyper-sexual superheroes to be repellent, and thus using them as a club with which to beat superhero fans, as I showed in my response to a Dirk Deppey blogpost.  All of them, to the extent that all are influenced to American culture to some degree, must respond in some way to the feminist imputation of unfairness.  Thompston's exemplary unnamed poster claims that the argument will "always" be flawed, by suggesting that it's impossible to mount objectively.  But even the fact that he makes an argument, flawed in its respects, demonstrates a desire to see gender-representation in comics to be essentially fair-minded.

I have no doubt that Thompson could have justified her belief that "sexism in comics" engenders what she calls a "trickle down effect" leading to real-world inequities, but since I haven't agreed with such "monkey see-monkey do" arguments in past, I doubt I'd find her justifications persuasive.  In one of my comments to Julian Darius, I said:

I agree that male readers don’t relate to the female characters precisely the same as they do to male characters. It’s a whole different question as to whether they *should* react exactly the same, any more than female readers should react equally toward male and female characters.

In other words, there's some question in my mind as to whether either "equality" or "fairness" in the senses Thompson uses the words should be the signal qualities of any art, be it highbrow canonical literature or the sort of arts that James Joyce called "pornographic"-- which is to say, all popular arts.

But that's a subject for Part 3.

PROOF OF EMBODIMENT

 And here is the second non-accepted essay intended to follow the two Sequart essays, still responding to problems with Kelly Thompson's essay.


_____________________________

In previous essays I’ve targeted specific comic-book works that aren’t adequately explained by Kelly Thompson’s dichotomy of “idealization” and “sexualization,” as expressed in her essay No,It’s Not Equal. 

Now I want to examine the problematic nature of the terms she uses, as she and others apply them to the artistic construction of comic-book heroes and heroines. 

Thompson uses the word “idealization” without a stated definition and in a very colloquial manner, focusing only on how comics’ depictions of heroes and heroines are “idealized” in the sense of fulfilling a purported “ideal” of physical fitness—an ideal that relates, in Thompson’s schema, to nothing but the protagonists’ ability to fight against the forces of evil in a credible fashion.  Sexualization, however, seems to overlap with idealization in one section of Thompson’s essay, yet with respect to female characters sexualization manifests in ways that apparently render the “idealization” nugatory if not non-existent.  Thompson’s definition of sexualization is also ill-defined, consisting of a simple catalogue of offensive visual or narrative motifs, not a principle in itself.  In addition to reshaping Thompson’s terms into more “fair-minded” concepts, I will also respond here to a similar problematic term introduced by Colin SS in this response-thread, where he characterizes male heroes in terms of their “aspirational” nature, which seems to me roughly comparable with Thompson’s characterization of “idealization.”

Obviously there can be no objection to a loose colloquial phrase such as, “He (or she) has fulfilled an ideal of physical perfection.”  But Thompson expands this colloquial application of the word “ideal” to a process of artistic “idealization,” one not substantiated by her logic or her examples.

Every reader should be more than familiar with basic philosophical oppositions of “the ideal” and “the real.”  Happily, the more complicated aspects of these oppositions need not be explored here.  I’m only concerned here with “idealistic” or “realistic” aspects of fictional characters, particularly those who have been constructed out of what Robert Crumb calls “lines on paper.”

Though I fully understood why Kelly Thompson opposes idealization and sexualization in her essay, an accurate explanation of the processes of character construction should view sexualization as just one aspect of a more general principle. I call this principle “embodiment,” in that it takes in everything in a given diegesis that establishes the physical nature of a character.

In my formulation, embodiment would subsume not only the sexual attractiveness of fictional characters, but also anything pertaining to their bodily nature—which would include their physical fitness, irrespective to whether it’s used to fight super-villains or is maintained for aesthetic appeal.  These two aspects would not be the only possible components of embodiment, but they’re the only ones I’ll deal with in this essay.  Thus I reject entirely Thompson’s tendency to equate physical, not-overly-sexualized fitness with a process of “idealization.”

Now embodiment-aspects are often linked to ideals of one kind or another.  The phrase “a sound mind in a sound body” attributes an ideal status to the maintenance of both physical and mental fitness.  But physical fitness in itself is not an ideal in itself until it has been subjected to an idealizing process.

In comic-book literature, one of the most renowned idealizations is the equation of “truth, justice and the American way” with the embodied form of a handsome, muscular hero in a red-and-blue costume.  Similarly, as if to validate Colin SS’s characterization of male heroes as “aspirational,” Superman is often thematized in terms of an ethic of social beneficence, as in the motto, “Do good unto others and every man can be a Superman.”

Yet no matter how thoroughly the burly figure of comics’ premiere superhero is associated with authors’ ideals and readers’ aspirations, within the diegesis of every Superman story the hero has two embodied aspects not reducible to ideals or aspirations, to wit:

(1)                 Superman is almost unbeatable in a fight, which Thompson perhaps understands to be the main signifier of his well-developed muscles.

(2)                 Superman is physically attractive to most if not all female characters in his narratives, both because of his chiseled pecs and his chiseled facial features.

    

     Now, it should be noted that, in contrast to heroes without such extraordinary powers, Superman could in theory still be a world-saving hero if he were depicted as a ninety-pound weakling or a fat slob.  It should be obvious that because Superman does not need to be either good-looking or ripped in order to fulfill his ideals, these factors are aspects of embodiment, not those of idealization or aspiration.

     Oddly, both people who love adventure-comics and people who hate them often attack a character like Superman for the one physical aspect he seems to lack.  The attack goes something like, “You can’t see a bulge in Superman’s crotch; ergo, he ain’t got no balls at all.”  (For those who have not encountered this concept, it is as of today still on display in the reply-thread for Part 1 of MAKING A DIRTY BREAST).

    Extending this faulty logic, one must assume that no matter how attractive or romantic a living actor may be in his films, be it Rudolf Valentino or Val Kilmer, said actor can’t be in any way sexual unless you can clearly see a significant bulge in his pants at all times.  Clearly this is not how even R-rated films function.

      A further development of the same bad logic would be to extend the same rule to female characters: to state that they cannot be sexualized by their secondary sexual characteristics at all, but only by a clear look at the organs considered to be “primary” to the sex act.  By this logic, not even “panty-shots” would sexualize female characters if all one really sees are undergarments: nothing but pure “camel-toe” would suffice as a comparable correlate to “crotch-bulge.”

      In the real world, every artistic medium uses the appeal of secondary sex characteristics more often than the primary kind, sometimes in response to societal taboos, sometimes just for sheer convenience.  To be sure, popular fiction is better known for selling its wares with the display of secondary female characteristics (e.g., bosoms) than with the display of secondary male characteristics (the male’s more pronounced musculature).  But a comic book character like Superman is not beyond the pale of “sexualization” simply because he’s become the focus of “ideals” and ‘aspirations.”  Indeed, his physical attractiveness, though irrelevant in substance to the ideals, reinforces the reader’s investment in the ideals represented.

        The best way to sum up the practical difference between true “idealization” and “embodiment” would be the following:

       IDEALIZATION pertains to “things the hero does”

       EMBODIMENT pertains to “things the hero is”

        Next time: The Female of the Species.