HOW TO SHAME A BIG GREEN SLUT PT. 2

Upon re-examining Part 1, I don't think that I made my concluding points clear enough.

Having established Craig Mazin's implied criteria for his act of "slut-shaming"-- or maybe "slut-concept shaming"-- I gave this example of a species of comic-book heroines who did not display the "exaggerated images" he found so objectionable: heroines who were conventionally pretty but not "exaggerated:"

So, by Mazin's logic, none of these characters could be "slut-concepts" because none of them display the exaggerated aspects he finds to be characteristic of evil sexist marketing.

Yet what's the appeal of a scene like this, in which three cute-although-not-exaggerated girls vie for the affections of one male character? Is there no possible element of titillation here?

For that matter, its interesting that the Legion of Super-Heroes was one of the few hero-teams in comic books to sport more than one female. I will admit that the reasons for this can only be a source of speculation, since comics-fandom has no reliable testimony from writers, artists or editors of the Legion's early period as to motivations for this unusual state of affairs.  Did the creators simply want to feature more female characters in order to draw in female readers?  That's not impossible, but based on the way most superhero comics of the period were written, the professionals behind the comics would have regarded the reactions of male readers as their primary measure of financial success.

So it's feasible that Mort Weisinger-- the editor who liked to have Superman play pranks on Lois Lane to "teach her a lesson"-- might have decided to allow more females in the Legion not because he was a great defender of burgeoning feminism, but because an increase of even limited pulchritude might make the series more appealing to that male readership.

IF that is the case-- and I admit there is no defiinitive proof one way or another-- then Mort Weisinger would be using female sexuality as a marketing-tool. So if one pursued the logic of Craig Mazin's accusations without heeding his shallow justifications, the Legion females would be sluts too. In fact, any female character could be a slut if she was used in any way to market anything-- and yes, that includes Vladimir Nabokov's underdeveloped LOLITA, a book which became a best-seller not because of literary merit but because it popularized a covert paraphilia.

Plainly it will not do to simply point fingers as Mazin does. It should be admitted that the evocation of sexual attractiveness is a key appeal in all forms of literature, just as it plays a comparable-- but not at all identical-- role in real life.  Only from such a position can one speak intelligently about the question of good or bad representations of sexuality.

HOW TO SHAME A BIG GREEN SLUT

Just to finish up my comments on the already waning "She-Hulk controversy:"

I shouldn't have focused so exclusively on the dopiness of the David Goyer remarks w/o commenting equally on those of host Craig Mazin, who started the ball rolling thusly:

The real name for She-Hulk was Slut-Hulk. That was the whole point. Let’s just make this green chick with enormous boobs. And she’s Hulk strong but not Hulk massive, right? … She’s real lean, stringy…
The whole point of She-Hulk was just to appeal sexistly to ten-year-old boys. Worked on me.

Later he wrote the following here:

First off, my point wasn’t that I think She-Hulk is a slut. I don’t. I don’t think anyone is a slut. I don’t think there’s anything shameful about female sexuality or the female body.

What I don’t like is the practice of pushing exaggerated images of female bodies to boys because it sells comic books or video games. Women in comics and video games aren’t accidentally drawn over and over and over again with outsized breasts, long legs and narrow waists. It’s marketing. Having a character remark recursively on that marketing doesn’t negate the marketing, of course. It’s a clever way to defuse criticism with grownups while selling issues to hormone-addled boys. 

I need not repeat my basic defense of She-Hulk from HIGHLIGHTING ANXIETY PT. 2, but I will point out that Mazin wants to have things both ways. He basically says, "Yeah, when I was a hormone-addled boy, I got pleasure out of sexist images." Now, he doesn't say anything about the wrongness of sexist stereotyping in that segment, because no one would have respected a male who didn't admit to some susceptibility to sexual stimulation at that age. To state the converse-- "Oh, I saw others taking forbidden pleasure in nasty She-Hulk comics, but I was too pure for that"-- would be to label himself a wimp, if not a sexual neuter.

His latter-day contempt for "exaggerated images of female bodies," though, allows him to label the She-Hulk concept-- not, as he repeatedly states, the actual character-- as a "sluttish" concept. The equivalence he voices is confused, but I have to presume that he's saying that any such "exaggerated image" qualifies for "slut-dom."

What is a slut? Predominantly, it means a person-- usually, though not always, female-- who is sexually promiscuous.

Yet the two definitions are at odds. Being sexually promiscuous is a pattern of activity, not a collection of physical attributes.

Since the 1980s She-Hulk-- the one on which Mazin claims to base his original statement-- was not sexually promiscuous, though, it stands to reason that her promiscuity is defined, in Mazin's terms, by the fact that she's a "green chick with enormous boobs."  Thus any character with any "exaggerated" attributes-- be they breasts, legs, or waists-- is just a contrivance of marketing, an attempt to get young readers to purchase periodicals and wank off to them.

But then, if a given work features female characters who conform to no more than a basic standard of prettiness, then by Mazin's logic these character-concepts cannot be sluts because they are not "exaggerated."

Like these, from THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES:

Or for that matter, a literary character who is entirely underdeveloped:

At the end of his defensive statement, Mazin claims he intends never to write another word on She-Hulk again.

I could hope that he might extend that principle to anything regarding the phenomenon of human sexuality, just to keep a little more garbage off the already littered byways of the Internet.

SOMETIMES HE FEELS LIKE A NUT; OTHER TIMES, HE JUST IS

To David Goyer's suggestion that the She-Hulk was created as an implicit sex-fantasy for all male readers; i.e., " the chick you could fuck if you were Hulk." Stan Lee responded in this Washington Post piece by saying, “Only a nut would even think of that.”

As I detailed in HIGHLIGHTING ANXIETY PT. 2, Goyer's actual comment is lame and smacks of facile attention-whoring-- a verb I find appropriate, given how free Goyer and Craig Mazin with their use of the term "slut." That said, though the specific accusations are all but worthless, they do raise the spectre of unfair sexual representation once more. Note this passage from the "Comic Riffs" section:

So, how about She-Hulk’s tremendous physique, Stan the Man? “As for her looking beautiful and curvy,” Lee tells Comic Riffs, “show me the superheroine who isn’t.”

From a hardcore ultraliberal standpoint, this light-hearted statement would confirm the Goyer allegation that She-Hulk was designed as a "wank fantasy." I don't think Stan Lee would ever admit to having written "wank fantasies," nor that he would ever fully understand modern objections to them. But though I've argued earlier than SHE-HULK was not poised as an especially "sexy" comics feature, there can be no doubt that Stan Lee has edited and created many comic books that fit that bill.

I've previously cited this MY FRIEND IRMA panel as one of the few overt boob-jokes I've found in a commercial comic book of the period.

And of course prior to the Marvel era Stan edited and/or wrote a vast number of "working girl" comics-- none of whom were about the type of "working girls" Goyer and Mazin would've referenced.

And then there were the curvaceous jungle-queens, like the 1950s LORNA THE JUNGLE GIRL, written for the most part by Don Rico.

No one would doubt that all of these female characters are drawn to be ostentatiously sexy-- certainly more so than the 1980s She-Hulk, IMO.  And I for one don't blush to admit that any time a female character was drawn to be ostentatiously sexy, there's a better than even chance that publishers knew that a lot of young horndogs would indeed use such comics for "wank fantasies."

At the same time, overt sexiness was not the only avenue through which young horndogs fulfilled themselves.
I admitted in the previous essay that it's quite possible that the Vosburg-Springer She-Hulk met with approval with some fans, even though the artists did not strive to be extremely titillating. Perhaps the semi-ripped clothing did it for some people-- possibly including the estimable Kurt Busiek-- even though I for one found She-Hulk's attire about as sexy as the Hulk's pants, since it was evident that the clothing was never going to get torn any further, no matter how much physical punishment the character endured.  But there's no accounting for taste, and it's easy to imagine male comics-readers being turned by any number of relatively unexceptional images. As problematic as Frederic Wertham is, his testimony that some readers were turned on by nothing more than high heels seems to be a typical enough phenomenon-- and certainly not one confined to comic books.

Having established that sexual titillation can take place whether or not an image is structured to be titillating, we're back to the Square One established by Goyer. Even if he's wrong, wrong, wrong about the motives behind She-Hulk's creation, there can be no doubt that some comics have been created to be "wank fantasies."

But even when they are created with the conscious intent to have such an appeal-- are they all the same?

Some comics aren't much more than this. Stan Lee features like SHOWGIRLS and MY FRIEND IRMA had occasional moments of snappy dialogue, but I doubt anyone bought the titles for the dialogue.

On the other hand, the example of LORNA THE JUNGLE GIRL presents a different paradigm. I didn't choose the panel above at random; while LORNA certainly is a comic book featuring a pneumatic jungle-princess, it rises above the mediocrity of most jungle-comics with its ongoing gender-humor. LORNA had just one basic gag: the protagonist's boyfriend keeps telling her to quit playing jungle-heroine because women can't hack the adventure-game, and she proves him wrong every time. No one would claim LORNA to be the comics-version of Noel Coward, but there's obviously more than just titillation at work here.

More on these matters in a future essay.

HIGHLIGHTING ANXIETY PT. 2

This article for THE BEAT is my source for the following remarks of film-scripter David Goyer:


Goyer: I have a theory about She-Hulk. Which was created by a man, right? And at the time in particular I think 95% of comic book readers were men and certainly almost all of the comic book writers were men. So the Hulk was this classic male power fantasy. It’s like, most of the people reading comic books were these people like me who were just these little kids getting the s**t kicked out of them every day… And so then they created She-Hulk, right? Who was still smart… I think She-Hulk is the chick that you could f**k if you were Hulk, you know what I’m saying? … She-Hulk was the extension of the male power fantasy. So it’s like if I’m going to be this geek who becomes the Hulk then let’s create a giant green porn star that only the Hulk could f**k.


Now, though I've often caviled against elitist remarks by critics, whose dominant aim is to persuade readers to read "better stuff." Goyer, a sometime comics-fan himself, is no critic, or even much of a thinker, despite his inappropriate use of the word "theory" above. As far as I can tell, his remarks are merely a means of attention-getting, a common enough practice in the world of self-publicizing, the primary object of the podcast in which the remarks were made.  Making inflammatory remarks for publicity's sake, however much they may or may not be the speaker's real beliefs, is a tried-and-true strategy older than the comic-book medium itself.


Goyer's remarks had the usual effect: triggering objections from fans who didn't like what he said, and keeping his name prominent in the blogosphere. One may object, of course, that a scripter who has become a Big Deal in terms of adapting comic books to big-budget movies hardly needs such publicity. So it's possible that on some level Goyer doesn't just want publicity for his own projects; that he wants to castigate certain aspects of the genre by which he's currently making a living, as a means of convincing himself that he is "above" such politically incorrect content as "male sex fantasies."


I hardly need point out the self-serving superficiality of Goyer's "theory." The only significance of Goyer's screed is that it once more points out the seeming desperation of those who would ascribe "negative compensation" as the defining characteristic of whatever they happen not to like.


Happily, one of the posters on THE BEAT defended the remarks of Goyer and others in the podcast, giving me the chance to make this response:

The problem with your interpretation, as with those of Mazin and Goyer, is that you’re assuming that a character like She-Hulk can’t also be a power fantasy for any male readers. only a sex fantasy, which speaks poorly for your view of your own gender, if you are indeed of the XY persuasion.

(I assume from the way you start off your post– “Women love Power Girl,” and so on– you do admit that female heroes, even scantily clad ones, can be power fantasies for women.)

The fact is, though, female heroes are not only sex fantasies for men, any more than male heroes are only power fantasies for their male readers. There are a small number of male heroes, particularly the Hulk, who are not particularly attractive and who may be judged as almost pure power fantasies. But the great multitude of male heroes are also sex fantasies in the sense that they are designed to be thought of as “handsome” or “studly.” The hetero male then identifies with the character getting action because of his hot bod, his chiseled chin, etc.

Conversely, it should be obvious that hetero men can and do identify with female characters in the sense of power-struggles. She-Hulk wins most or all of her fights for the same reasons the Hulk does; nearly nobody wants to see the main character beat down.

Some female characters sell the sexual aspect more aggressively than others. She-Hulk, though, is not a particularly good example of this syndrome. But people will see what they want to see.

By way of supporting my above claim-- that She-Hulk was not automatically grounded in the appeal of "good girl art," I cite the remarks of the character's first regular penciler, Mike Vosburg, on the subject of She-Hulk's attractiveness:

The oddest thing about that book was that [inker] Frank [Springer] drew really beautiful women, I drew really beautiful women, and yet, the She-Hulk was never overly attractive.

I would concur with Vosburg's appraisal, that both he and Springer could draw attractive women very well, but that for whatever reason, the art of the original She-Hulk magazine was not conceived as "good girl art," as evinced by this example:

In stating this I'm not saying that no male-- or female-- reader ever derived sexual pleasure from this iteration of She-Hulk. I'm only saying that the art here is not oriented on "selling" the character's sexuality. I don't think any fan will doubt that when Marvel Comics wanted to sell sex, they generally knew how to sell sex.

So if anything, despite the character's artfully ripped clothing, the original SHE-HULK comic book does seem poised more to offer the character as a "power fantasy" than a "sex fantasy."  Later iterations could, and did, sometimes place more emphasis on She-Hulk as a "FBB," or "female body builder," which may also have offered sexual titillation.  But even in these versions, the titillation-factors would not necessarily exclude the possibility of hetero male readers identifying with the character's struggles with her assorted opponents, as opposed to seeing her as a "giant green porn star that only the Hulk could fuck."


I'll note, though, that this notion of the sex-object's supposed inaccessibility has been expressed in other venues: I recall one poster who was convinced that the beauty of female stars on some STAR TREK show "proved" that the target audience was convinced in advance that they, the Trekkies, had no chance with such women.  Just as with Goyer, this is merely an ad hominem attack on such fans, rather than any sort of sustained analysis of the mechanisms of psychological coping.