THE READING RHEUM: YELLOW PERIL (1978)

Given that this year I finished re-reading and reviewing all of Sax Rohmer’s “Fu Manchu” stories, I decided I might as well also address this light-hearted Rohmer-pastiche/satire.

All that I know of author Richard Jaacoma is that he reportedly worked for “Screw” Magazine. Possibly this experience led him to the notion of rewriting the pulpish but sexually restrained Oriental adventures of Rohmer into what the Berkley paperback cover-copy calls “a porno-fairytale-occult-thriller!” There are indeed assorted scenes of pornographic encounters or of sexual rituals allegedly based on the disciplines of Tantrism. Yet it would not be impossible to write out all the sex-scenes and still have a reasonably coherent pulp-adventure, so the pornography seems of secondary interest.

In the late 1930s, central character Sir John Weymouth-Smythe works for the British diplomatic service in Bangkok. However, he’s actually an agent for his government, and unlike the more noble lawmen in the Rohmer novels, Smythe regularly undertakes missions to assassinate anyone who might threaten British interests in the region. Jaacoma, however, is not that interested in the seamy side of early imperialism, though he does have Smythe and other characters justify their actions in terms of service to “the White Race.” Despite his desire to keep the “Yellow Race” in its place, Smythe is in love with Beth-Li, the half-Asian daughter of his Bangkok superior Laight. Yet their love seems not meant to be. The insidious Doctor Chou en Shu, master of a murderous band of dacoits, shows up in the diplomatic offices, conducting a bizarre sexual ritual in which Beth-Li and both of her parents willingly participate. Smythe interrupts the ritual, but Chou en Shu escapes with Beth-Li. Later, for reasons that are never really explained, Smythe is hoaxed into believing that the evil doctor has killed Beth-Li. This does motivate Smythe to follow Chou to the ends of the earth in quest of vengeance—though it does seem that the kidnapping alone would’ve accomplished the same thing.

Smythe is forced by his superiors to make common cause with other agents of a “white power” in order to track down Chou—and they just happen to be extremely perverted and vicious agents of the Third Reich. To his credit, Smythe doesn’t find the Nazis to his liking, even though to the last he remains ignorant—like many real persons in The Day—as to the nature of Germany’s “final solution.” Smythe’s mission is further complicated by learning that what the Germans want from the Chinese doctor is a mystical talisman, the Spear of Destiny. (Jaacoma even provides citations from non-fiction author Trevor Ravenscroft to buttress the story of the talisman.) Significantly, Jaacoma’s book appeared in its first edition three years before Spielberg’s RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK made it to theaters, though the basic idea of opposed groups chasing after super-weapons extends back to serials of the 1930s decade. To his chagrin, the chauvinistic Smythe learns that Chou en Shu is more or less fighting on the side of the angels, attempting to prevent the deadly powers of the Spear from bringing about planetary destruction. (There are also a couple of references to the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, though I tend to think Jaacoma just threw these in as window-dressing.)

Although Sax Rohmer sometimes strained credibility by having his Asian supercriminal utilize comic-booky devices like disintegrator rays, Jaacoma has even less restraint than the creator of Fu Manchu. YELLOW PERIL contains such delirious scenes as the German agents slaughtering a horde of dacoits with the help of a band of killer yetis, and Chou en Shu and Hitler fighting for possession of the Spear in a struggle showing that both are possessed by eldritch entities. But this is not a complaint: the pulps—to which Rohmer’s works are thematically related—were great because of their unbridled extravagance.

Now, given that Jaacoma borrows from Rohmer such character-names as “Sir Denis” and “Weymouth” (a minor support-character in early Fu Manchu books), it would not be hard to view YELLOW PERIL as an invidious satire of the Rohmer books. I cannot be sure that this was not Jaacomas’s intent, for without question he means his readers to sneer when his characters prate about the fate of the “White Race.” Rohmer was not a doctrinaire racist, but he can be fairly accused of having played to the chauvinism of his readers with the trope I’ve called the “brown or yellow killer hiding under every bed.” Jaacoma guides his readers to realize that Smythe’s casual bigotry is only skin-deep, and much of the novel shows how he transcends those attitudes to some extent. In the Fu Manchu books the starring villain shows admiration for the dogged efforts of his opponent Sir Denis Nayland Smith, and here Chou en Shu shows an almost fatherly affection for Smythe despite the agent’s desire to kill him. Some Oedipal issues are suggested by the fact that (a) Chou en Shu has sex with Beth-Li not long after Smythe does, and (b) in the end Smythe feels moved to address Chou as “father”—though purely in a symbolic sense, since Smythe’s real father was a distant man who died long ago. I don’t think Jaacoma gives any of his characters any of the psychological depth one can find in the best pulp-ficiton characters; neither Smythe nor his Oriental opponent are as resonant as Nayland Smith and Fu Mamchu. However, because Jaacoma does critique the sociocultural attitudes of 1930s racial attitudes, and because he attempts to show some of the grey areas in the black-and-white worldview of the pulps, I do give YELLOW PERIL a rating of high mythicity, despite its assorted flaws.

MYTHCOMICS: "SHE TRIED HER OWN ON" (DOMINA NO DO PART 35, 2008?)

Though I've devoted a number of mythcomics to the topic of sexuality, none of the comics I've addressed deal with the act of sex itself, but with sexuality as it occurs within culture, usually in such genres as adventure and romantic drama. Sex itself-- which I talk about under the blog-label "sex" rather than 'sexuality"-- is, within the literary continuum, primarily a cosmological phenomenon, in that it deals with bodily functions. Sex can also have, in literary works, psychological, sociological and metaphysical connotations, but most of these are manifested within the corpus of "sexuality."

What people commonly call pornography is literature that focuses primarily upon some aspect of the sex act. The acts depicted may be "hardcore" or "softcore." In my estimation the more specific the work is about the specificity of the sex act, the less it is about the symbolic discourse surrounding the plot and characters involved. However, I have found at least one exception, thanks to a writeup on TV Tropes.

So far as I can tell, DOMINA NO DO is an original manga work, written by one "Zappa Go" and illustrated by Sankichi Meguro. It's a comedy-romance in the "hentai" style. Most of the material in its 41 chapters is softcore, along the line of LOVE HINA, but there are a few scenes are close to hardcore, though in Japan there are still various restrictions on what is shown. Part 35 displays these restrictions, for even though it's a comic take on the differences between male and female sex organs, a lot of the imagery is adumbrated through devices such as dream-imagery.

Some quick backstory: average high-school youth Takeshi is abducted and taken to a private estate owned by an insanely rich family, the Dominas. He learns that the oldest daughter, Hikari, is a previous acquaintance, with whom he enjoyed a brief friendship back in grade school. However, teenaged Hikari has recently been encouraged by her parents-- a practicing sadist/masochist couple-- to make a marriage of convenience. Desperate to avoid an arranged marriage, Hikari convinces her parents that she still holds a deep romantic longing for her childhood friend. Since her parents are both rich and insane, they more or less buy Takeshi from his worthless middle-class parents-- who almost completely disappear from the narrative-- and make him their permanent "guest' in their capacious mansion.

Most of the stories in DOMINA are, despite their hentai aspects, pretty typical comedy-romance. Obviously, once Hikari is forced to remain in close propinquity to Takeshi, she begins to relate to him as a human being more than as a possession. And in Chapter 35, this is exploited for comic effect with regard to one of Freud's favorite tropes: what he termed "penis envy."

Because the Dominas are super-rich, they have access to all sorts of mystical resources. Hikari, despite having seen Takeshi's penis and having deemed it less than impressive, has dreams in which an incredibly well-hung Takeshi advances on her. She wakes up before anything happens in her dream, and she theorizes that it's because in a previous adventure she seemed to witness Takeshi making love to another girl. Adding to her distress is the fact that she sees Takeshi socializing with Hikari's twin sister Kageri, which threatens her potential relationship with the young man. 

Hikari's youngest sister Akari and one of the estate's many maids observe Hikari sulking around, and for some reason decide she needs a lesson in male sexuality. Then, when that doesn't seem to soothe Hikari's adolescent sensibility, her grandmother decides to let her walk a mile with male equipment. Not only does this mean that she has to adjust to new bathroom habits, she even gets to find out what it feels like for a male to get busted in the balls. Since she did that very thing to Takeshi in the previous adventure, this causes her to experience a degree of guilt, and for the first time, she tenders an apology to Takeshi, who can barely understand the change in Hikari's attitude. The grandmother then takes off the spell, and everything goes back to normal-- except that Hikari has one more comic dream. I won't describe the dream, which almost seems like a direct refutation of Freud.

NIETZSCHE AND THE NEOPURITAN NANNIES PT. 3

In Part 2 I drew comparisons between H.G. Wells-- at least as he was when he wrote THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME in 1933-- and that modern species of ultraliberal that I've called "Neopuritans." One thing I neglected to mention, though, is that Wells himself uses the term "Puritan" in an approving manner in order to characterize his ideal world-state:

The Air Dictatorship is also called by some historians the Puritan Tyranny. We may perhaps give a section to it from this point of view.

"Puritan" is a misused word. Originally invented to convey a merely doctrinal meticulousness among those Protestants who "protested" against the Roman version of Catholicism, it came to be associated with a severely self- disciplined and disciplinary life, a life in which the fear of indolence and moral laxity was the dominant force. At its best it embodied an honourable realization: "I shall do nothing worth while and nothing worth while will be done unless I pull myself together and stiffen up my conduct." If the new Air Dictatorship was schooling the world with considerable austerity, it was certainly schooling itself much more so.

I don't know if "Puritan" carried the same negative value for 1933 English-speaking audiences as it generally does for many if not all such audiences today. It may be that Wells thought that the term's associations with austerity-- and with the process of rejecting the corrupt hierarchy of "the Roman version" of the Catholic Church--  would resonate with his readers, to whom he hoped to justify any and all measures in order to defeat all the evils of the world-- capitalism, nationalism, religion. Modern Neopuritans will not usually go quite as far as Wells in desiring to see humanity purged of everything that suggests contrariness, but they too define the world, as Wells did, in terms of finding security and placating fears.


I don't know what if any response Wells may have made to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. But given that he posits a World State so well-managed that it can, as I mentioned before, change the nature of the human animal so as to "evolve" away from combativeness, I feel sure that Wells never "got" Nietzsche's assertion that the "will to power" pervaded even the most non-combative situations:


From THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, "On Self-Overcoming" (trans. Thomas Common):




WILL to Truth" do you call it, you wisest ones, that which impels you and makes you ardent?
Will for the thinkableness of all being: thus do I call your will!
All being would you make thinkable: for you doubt with good reason whether it be already thinkable.
But it shall accommodate and bend itself to you! So wills your will. Smooth shall it become and subject to the spirit, as its mirror and reflection.
That is your entire will, you wisest ones, as a Will to Power; and even when you speak of good and evil, and of estimates of value.


Then, toward the end of the section:




Thus did Life once teach me: and thereby, you wisest ones, do I solve you the riddle of your hearts.
I say to you: good and evil which would be everlasting- it does not exist! Of its own accord must it ever overcome itself anew.


With your values and formulae of good and evil, you exercise power, you valuing ones: and that is your secret love, and the sparkling, trembling, and overflowing of your souls.
But a stronger power grows out of your values, and a new overcoming: by it breaks egg and egg-shell.
And he who has to be a creator in good and evil- verily, he has first to be a destroyer, and break values in pieces.
Thus does the greatest evil pertain to the greatest good: that, however, is the creating good.-
Let us speak thereof, you wisest ones, even though it be bad. To be silent is worse; all suppressed truths become poisonous.
And let everything break up which- can break up by our truths! Many a house is still to be built!-


________


Nietzsche is probably saying a great many things here, but the one most apposite to Wells and his Nanny-World-State is that even though the "wisest ones" like to think that they're serving an abstract morality with their "values and formulae of good and evil," in truth they're just as in love with the exercise of power-- their "secret love"-- as are outright tyrants.


Nowhere does Wells show the would-be tyrant's love of absolutism than in Section 4 of Book Five, when he indulges in a rant about the supposed virtues and vices of the England in which he himself lived:

The contrast between present conditions and conditions seventy years ago is paralleled in history by the contrast between English social life in 1855 and 1925. There also we have a phase of extreme restraint and decorum giving way to one of remarkable freedom. We can trace every phase. Every phase is amply documented. There are not the slightest grounds for supposing that the earlier period was one of intense nervous strain and misery. There was a general absence of vivid excitation, and the sexual life flowed along in an orderly fashion. It did not get into politics or the control of businesses. It appears in plays and novels like a tame animal which is not to be made too much of. It goes out of the room whenever necessary.

One wonders if Wells was aware that one of the "remarkable freedoms" of Victorian England was its proliferation of extremely well-concealed pornography.  However, to hear Wells tell it, this was more or less an invention of 20th-century England:

By comparison England in 1920 was out for everything it could do sexually. It did everything and boasted about it and incited the young. As the gravity of economic and political problems increased and the structural unsoundness of the world became more manifest, sexual preoccupations seem to have afforded a sort of refuge from the mental strain demanded by the struggle. People distracted themselves from the immense demands of the situation by making a great noise about the intensifications and aberrations of the personal life. There was a real propaganda of drugs and homosexuality among the clever young. Literature, always so responsive to its audience, stood on its head and displayed its private parts. It produced a vast amount of solemn pornography, facetious pornography, sadistic incitement, re-sexualized religiosity and verbal gibbering in which the rich effectiveness of obscene words was abundantly exploited. It is all available for the reader to-day who cares to examine it. He will find it neither shocking, disgusting, exciting or interesting. He will find it comically pretentious and pitifully silly.

As noted earlier, I didn't give SHAPES an exhaustive reading, but from what I could see, at no point in the book did Wells identify what authors he deemed to be responsible for literature "displaying its private parts."  The passage above shows an extreme Puritanical outlook unmediated by logic or personal taste-- in tone very like the rants of Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman. Yet, for all the flaws of those worthies, at least they cited a lot of particular works that frosted their respective butts. No specific accusation, no matter how unjust, can be as egregious as a blanket condemnation like Wells'.


It's been remarked that Wells' world-state is just another version of Plato's Republic, except for the fact that Plato's city was never supposed to encompass the whole world. Plato too believed in the suppression of "inconvenient truths" for the betterment of the greater good, and Nietzsche may have had him in mind when he spoke this particular aphorism:


To be silent is worse; all suppressed truths become poisonous.

BITER BIT: FILM AT ELEVEN

Though this essay still concerns Alan Moore's most recent-- but probably not final-- rant-fest, I'm separating it from the "Elitist Neopuritan" series because I want to make a broader point about the ironies of scapegoating.

Back in 2009 I wrote of one of Moore's rants:

...scapegoating has an indispensable function in both literature and religion. The notion that one can dispense with evil (be it moral evil or mere physical calamity) by dispensing with a representative of evil is well-suited to both of these forms (to use the Cassirer term).

Scapegoating isn't quite as suited to politics. It's true that every political system advances itself by excoriating (whether directly or by implication) an opponent who represents a contrary belief. It's also true that this excoriation can sometimes lend to a process of scapegoating. But political systems inherently require compromise between rival factions. Even Machiavelli, who as Cassirer noted was the first to speak openly of the *realpolitik* that took place in Renaissance versions of the smoke-filled back room, admitted the necessity for compromise between rival powers.

A scapegoat, then, is not the same as an opponent. You may compromise or come to terms with the latter, but the former exists to be sacrificed.

In this essay my problem was with Moore's simplistic-- and badly substantiated-- reading of American culture.  In this 2012 essay, I found his view of Ian Fleming's James Bond no less problematic.  While I allowed that Moore might have valid reasons for his ire toward the injustices of masculinist culture in real life, I found that his satire of Bond was almost purely Moore's own projection, and as such, another example of scapegoating rather than a genuinely thought-out criticism.

Now, neither of these developments is ironic.  What is ironic is that over the past few years Moore himself has become the target of another form of scapegoating.  And golly gee, guess who doesn't like having his work cherry-picked for anti-liberal meanings!


I'm not sure what started the trope "Alan Moore Writes Rapey Comics," though I did find one blog-post from 2009 on the topic.  In the rant-fest Moore blames Grant Morrison for continuing the trope, but I for one have been seeing it for at least the past three years on various forums.  Moore's response to this accusation is muddled and verbose, suggesting that readers have overlooked the number of "far greater prevalence of consensual and relatively joyous sexual relationships" in his work.  Further, what scenes of rape or other violent sexual encounters Moore did pen should be seen in a spectrum of truth-telling about real life: "my thinking was that sexual violence, including rape and domestic abuse, should also feature in my work where necessary or appropriate to a given narrative, the alternative being to imply that these things did not exist, or weren’t happening."

Though I would debate many of the specific political observations Moore makes in the rant-fest, I'm completely on his side in stating that an author seeking to address adult themes should be free to do so without fear of, well, scapegoating.  Yet Moore, offended though he is by being misrepresented as a rape-happy sadist, fails to see that he's been so victimized because the topic of rape itself has become an ultraliberal hot-button issue. In this essay I traced how Mark Millar was pilloried last August for making a simple-- if somewhat obtuse-- statement about the potential use of rape as a story-element. Various ultraliberals-- I define the term here-- jumped on Millar for not having defined rape the way they wanted it defined.  And at heart they are no different than the ultraliberals who have decided that Moore's use of violent sexuality goes over some ill-defined line.  It's a line that suggests the hectoring tone of Susan Brownmiller, co-founder of the feminist organization WAP:

We are unalterably opposed to the presentation of the female body being stripped, bound, raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered in the name of commercial entertainment and free speech.

If Alan Moore were exposed to this quote, would he perceive that the censorious voices of the comic book world have evolved along the same lines as pundits like Brownmiller?  That, even though Moore is far more esteemed in the comics-world and the "outside world" than Mark Millar is, he has been stigmatized precisely because he has invoked the trope of the raped female at times.  To this mental and political outlook it does not matter how many times Moore has written of "consensual and relatively joyous sexual relationships." I don't imagine Moore would agree that he has used rape purely for mere "commercial entertainment," but he does believe that it was within his rights of "free speech" to write seriously on these and other adult topics as he pleased.

Nor can I see any compelling or worthy reason why I, or any other writer, should restrain themselves from addressing whatsoever issues they feel are worthy of address, if they have the courage to engage with those subjects in the face of the possible approbation and loss of livelihood which may be entailed.

I have always maintained that art-- not just fine art, but also popular art-- must be free to explore all such aspects, whether they represent "real life" or not.  I don't credence Moore's attempt to portray himself as nothing more than the noble teller of uncomfortable truths, especially when one sentence before the one quoted, he tries the old dodge of attacking the commercialization of non-sexual violence:

I genuinely cannot see any reason why lethal non-sexual violence should be privileged over sexual violence, other than a residual middle class discomfort or squeamishness over all matters pertaining to sex, which in this instance has taken on the protective colouration of a fairly spurious appeal to contemporary sexual politics.

But of course the "appeal" is not spurious.  The scapegoating of the hideous anti-liberal icon is intrinsic to both ultraliberal and ultraconservative ends of the political spectrum.   Alan Moore himself is just fine with scapegoating, as shown in the essays referenced. 

He just doesn't like being the one with the teeth in his rump.

 

OFF THE BEAT AGAIN

Well, I thought my next essay would be a follow-up to STRENGTH, IN NUMBERS, but instead it's a reprint of an argument from this BEAT post. I reprint it here in case I choose to develop any of the points later.
___________________________

"People commission and collect drawings of superheroines. How many people have ever commissioned text stories of any length about one?"


I can't offer you any stats, but I have heard that prose commissions have been purchased with respect to people writing sex-stories about superheroes and various other pop-icons.  Perhaps it could be demonstrated that that more comic-art commissions are turned out each year than prose commissions.  But even if such a generalization was confirmed over the space of (say) ten years, that in itself would not prove that prose intrinsically is less useful for purposes of raunchy stimulation.  It would only prove that there existed more customers for one thing than the other.


"Graphic child pornography gets a person in trouble immediately, while even ambiguous images raise suspicions. Pornographic text, conversely, is prosecuted very rarely."


This proves only that legal authorities feel more comfortable in prosecuting images rather than words.  This suggests that the law places an implicit faith that the image, more than the word, can inspire the fabled "monkey see monkey do" reflex.  But that's all it proves.


"It’s hard to imagine someone having the same reaction to a text description of a heroine that he would to a picture of her, especially after repeated exposures."


There are a lot of sites online focused on sexy pictures.  Also a lot of them focused on sexy prose stories.  Are there more of the former or the latter?  I would say the latter, but YMMV.


"There’s little effort made to write superheroes as people in stories for children, because the children don’t need the realistic details. "


Anything I could say to refute this opinion has already been better said by CS Lewis in refuting the notion of the inherent juvenility of fairy stories.

THE SHE-RA MAN-HATERS CLUB PT. 2

Ferdinand: And women like that part which, like the lamprey,
Hath never a bone in't.
Duchess: Fie, sir!
Ferdinand: Nay,
I mean the tongue; variety of courtship:
What cannot a neat knave with a smooth tale
Make a woman believe?
The Duchess of Malfi, Act I, Scene ii.

So, when I impute the existence of a "She-Ra Man-Haters Club," who are the club's members in the comics world?

Though I disagreed with statements made by Trina Robbins in Part 1, I don't think her remarks put her anywhere near the company of Andrea Dworkin. I've seen a few remarks by Heidi McDonald that come a little nearer that territory, but still, I've no sense that she's set up shop in WAPville.

In essence, the comics-world members would be anyone who calls for the unconditional neutering of male fantasy-material in the name of an alleged benefit to female safety. Here's a remark I reprinted in THE GENRE-GENDER WARS that sounds pretty much like WAPster sentiments:

The hypersexualization/objectification of female superheroines makes female readers uncomfortable, and sexual violence as a plot point has got to stop.

One immediate problem with this sentiment, of course, is the old question, "Who decides what is objectification?" Probably the only true answer will be some variation on Ellen Willis' answer as to what constitutes pornography:

"What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic."

That said, and with all my objections to WAPster intolerance of the erotica they don't like, I stop short of saying that women are universally wrong when they, with the Duchess of Malfi, cry the modern variant of "Fie, sir!"

(Took me awhile, but I got back to it; didn't I?)

While I'd not endorse that biology is destiny, I certainly don't believe, as do some feminists, that gender roles are entirely sociological in nature. I have endorsed Friedrich Nietzsche's notion that men and women have the same emotions, albeit separated in their manifestation by what Nietzsche called "tempo." Nietzsche's idea of "tempo" might be glossed by Joseph Campbell's adaptation of the ethological idea of "supernormal sign stimuli," which I addressed somewhat more fully here.

Be that as it may, both biology and social conditioning insure that men dominantly prefer very extreme fantasies of sex and violence, and women dominantly decline from same.

This declination from the crude and rude world of boys' fantasies, however, is not necessarily an "Unconditional No" that declares that said world should not exist; that it should be legislated out of existence because It Contributes to the Victimization of Women. It is a "Conditional No," which might be framed more on the level of, "Keep This Crap Out of the Kids' Sight and Don't Scare the Horses Neither."

I don't agree in full with the theses of Leonard Shlain in SEX, TIME, AND POWER as to the rise of human culture. However, he does advance (or pass on) an interesting conception of "women's power to say no." In brief, following homo sapiens' evolution away from seasonal estrus-cycles, Shlain suggests that the female power to say no to the male's advances did in fact provide a primary motivation for the evolution of love specifically and culture generally. Culture, for Shlain, evolves from man's ceaseless efforts to figure out what the woman wants.

I don't believe that this was the only motivation for said evolution. But I do think it's a little more insightful than Camille Paglia's notion that culture evolved out of the human male's tendency to "project," which in turn evolved out of the fact that he, unlike the female, could write his name in the snow.

I will probably continue to be appalled by many of the exaggerated claims that feminists of both sexes level at mainstream comics. I will always believe that most of them misapprehend the extent to which sociology can trump biology.

But the woman's power to civilize has to be respected.

Otherwise we guys would never have come up with DVD players on which to play our favorite porno movies.

WAPsters VS. FACTsters

I've read a smattering of works that touched on the different philosophical currents within the American feminist movement, including Camille Paglia's SEXUAL PERSONAE and Christina Hoff Somers' WHO STOLE FEMINISM? However, I have AMERICAN PSYCHO to thank for making the philosophical division clearer to me than ever before.

I'm referring neither to the Bret Easton Ellis novel (which I've not read) nor the so-so film adaptation, but the DVD of AMERICAN PSYCHO. In what seems an attempt to justify the gorey, lady-killing excesses of the film, the DVD included a special feature: Holly Willis' "The Pornography of Killing," which took the form of a performer reading Willis' script to the viewer. The script asserts that feminism evolved into two distinct philosophical camps, mostly during the decade of the 1980s. As it happened, these camps formed two advocacy organizations, WAP (Women Against Pornography) and FACT (Feminists Against Censorship Taskforce). Of the two, FACT is apparently defunct while WAP seems to have toned down its activities in recent years. Clearly the philosophies are still extant, though only one of the two shows up much in the world of comics-fandom.

WAP's orientation was, as Willis avers, oriented toward praxis. Gender equity, in terms of such real-world benefits as equal pay, could only be achieved by banishing the image of Woman as Victim. Pornography was regarded by WAP as perpetuating stereotypes of women as either victims of male violence or as servants to the male will, as seen in this Susan Brownmiller quote:

We are unalterably opposed to the presentation of the female body being stripped, bound, raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered in the name of commercial entertainment and free speech.

WAP's conception of pornography, then, was that it was a zero-sum game for women, and therefore was to be opposed despite its protection under the rubric of "free speech."

FACT, however, evolves from a more long-range theoretical approach informed by academic post-structuralism. The Willis essay quotes both George Bataille (whom I've quoted here often) and Angela Carter (whose non-fiction I have not read) to advance the notion that for FACT and its fellow travelers pornography could "include sexual representations by and for women." Fellow traveler Ellen Willis (apparently no relation to Holly) is credited with this oft-used quote:

In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to "What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic.

In support of this view of pornography (which, not coincidentally, is meant to serve as a justification for AMERICAN PSYCHO's employment of violent pornographic scenarios), the Willis essay particularly quotes Carter's SADEIAN WOMAN. Carter defends the works of the Marquis de Sade by finding that through the tedious repetition of his scenarios of sex-and-violence he actually neutralizes the appeal of what he writes. In this way, going by Willis' essay, Sade becomes "moral pornography" in that it critiques the society based on gender inequity, much as Ellis' AMERICAN PSYCHO also does.

As I've read neither the Ellis nor Carter works in the original, I can't comment on them in detail. However, though Sade is an important author for many reasons, it's wishful thinking to consider his pornography any more moral than that of any raincoat-wearing fetishist.

Nevertheless, FACT's theoretical approach to pornography and the depiction of sexuality is far closer to being accurate than that of WAP, though both philosophies are tainted with what I've termed "ratiocentrism." This is the inability to see a given phenomenon in elemental terms that do not fall wholly within the parameters of a rational construct, such as (predominantly) Freudianism and Marxism.

And of course, the Willis essay is tainted in that it chooses (as a strategy for defending AMERICAN PSYCHO) to define pornography at the outset in terms of violence alone: calling it a "fascination with blood, murder, and mayhem, and especially sexual violence as it is enacted upon the bodies of women." Clearly this is a slanted definition that would leave out huge sections of pornographic work ranging from FANNY HILL to your basic violence-free Skinemax softcore.

I've seen quite a few WAPster voices raised in comics-fandom, but not so many FACTsters. Perhaps some of the WAPsters would benefit from a reading of Bataille, who, as I've noted in previous essays, throws a certain light upon the twisting pathways of sex-and-violence representation. Though it's likely that most of the WAPsters known to me would much rather curse the darkness than light a candle.