SOCIAL JUSTICE VS. SADISTIC EROTICISM PT. 1

 When I began this blog in 2007, ultraliberal SJWs were still in the process of attempting to brainwash American audiences into viewing straight white male privilege as an unforgivable sin. Back then, the paradigm claimed, this privilege was expressed in the form of the hegemony’s employment of sadistic acts upon the bodies of all those who did not share this privilege, be they women, nonwhites or LGBT. In the world of comic books, Superman could get beaten to death and Batman could have his back broken, and those manifestations of extreme violence said nothing about the repressiveness of conservative America. But ifa female hero like Tigra got beaten up, or if Spider-Woman lifted herbutt up high enough for males to gawk at,  SJWs insisted that this represented nasty straight white males exercising their privilege, and so It Had to Stop. It was, as I’ve pointed out before, the rebirth of a liberal form of lynch law that had in the forties had been largely confined to outliers like Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman.

In the greater world beyond comics, most such lynchings came from the conservative side of the tracks, as per the Moral Majority’s ill-fated 1980s attempts to “cancel” extreme sex and violence in popular entertainment. However, the 1990s gave rise to a subtler form of censure: the view of America as the “fruit of the poisoned tree.” In the 1960s the radical Malcolm X had more power to inspire the aggrieved than to effect change for Black people. However, American culture’s uncritical acceptance of Spike Lee’s 1992 biography (or hagiography) of Malcolm X might serve as a flashpoint for future developments, promoting the view that those who had suffered most from the old hegemony ought to become the arbiters of the new one.

The past five years gave rise to spectacles like the 2017 Oscar Awards, in which Hollywood liberals lined up to be flogged for the sin of whiteness. But once Americans started seeing once marginal groups achieving dominance, we started seeing less of the politics-as-sadism argument. Once the new boss is in charge, how credibly can he complain that the old boss is still putting the screws to him? Given far fewer depictions of marginalized groups being subjected to physical torments, the SJWs found a new lyric for an old song: preaching that SWM privilege leads to everlasting economic abjection. Since it’s also a given that, as someone in the Bible said, “there will be poor always,” ultraliberals finally found a cornucopia from which they can draw endless supplies of social outrage.

Most of the SJWs in the comics subculture who had pursued the old Wertham-Legman legacy seem to have dropped the sadism angle. I confess I don’t read THE BEAT regularly these days, but I’ve the impression in the past five years none of the BEAT’s clickbait has been as audacious as the 2008 post “The One with All the Comments.” In this blogpost—which did indeed garner a lot of comments —Heidi McDonald aligned American superhero readers with the audiences of the woman-bashing site “Superheroines Demise.” The Heidi-post has been deleted for whatever reasons, so it may be that the only surviving references to its audacity (and philosophical dishonesty) are those on THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE, particularly an essay entitled SADISM OF THE CASUAL KIND.

I suppose that nothing I wrote back then to refute Wertham, Legman and McDonald can be used to combat current SJWs and their reliance on the “economic abjection” argument. Still, on occasion the anti-sadism meme still crops up, most often in modern anti-pornography crusades that often sound barely distinguishable from the WAP crusades of the 1970s. I’ve repeatedly argued that sex and violence are integral components of literature, though without validating a given work just for being either sexy, violent or both. Therefore, in part 2, and the “near myths” essay following, I’ll explore some of the ways that sadism in literature can be fairly evaluated.

SHADOW BOXING WITH BATGIRL'S GREATEST ENEMY

Just to get the title-explanation out of the way, the "greatest enemy" of Batgirl-- and indeed, of most if not all fictional characters-- is the ideological critic, the sort who reads fiction in order to see only what he wants to see. I've already critiqued the misrepresentations of Ennbee's Guardian essay on the KILLING JOKE DVD, and I truly meant to leave it at that. But it occurred to me that are deeper issues involved in the ideological reading of KILLING JOKE than just whether or not a given critic renders a careless, ideologically over-determined reading.

A bigger issue is that ideological critics like Ennbee are unable to understand the inevitable contradictions inherent in their position. For instance, here's Ennbee arguing that even if the DVD adaptation had been better than the source material, it still would have been a bad idea:

Rebooting stories that are racist and sexist is one way that racist and sexist narratives and ideas get replicated and perpetuated. You can sometimes change the story and make it better – and then, sometimes, you can’t. The Killing Joke didn’t have to be as wretched in cartoon form as it turned out to be, but remaking it was always going to be a bad idea.

Now, here's Ennbee arguing for what DC Animation should have done, rather than perpetuating an evil sexist story:

Instead, maybe, DC could have done an animated Birds of Prey – a series in which numerous female superheroes, not least Barbara Gordon, fight crime together without having to ask Batman for permission. 

As I mentioned in the previous essay, Ennbee made no mention of the film's allusion to Barbara Gordon becoming Oracle at the end; of continuing her heroic activities in another manner. This by itself is mere sloppiness on his part. But Ennbee's real whopper is that he doesn't even get that without the Moore-Bolland KILLING JOKE, there is no BIRDS OF PREY, at least in the historical sense.

Sure, it's *theoretically* possible that, had DC never published any story in which Barbara Gordon or anyone else was shot and paralyzed, the company could have published its first all-female team-book without such a character: without "Barbara Gordon in her new identity as Oracle." Such a book would still have to employ any number of narrative contortions to satisfy Ennbee's political purity test, of course. But from what Ennbee wrote in the Guardian essay, one would never know that BIRDS OF PREY was in any way dependent on the events of the Moore-Bolland work. He makes it sound like BOP was totally untainted by the events of the very graphic novel that, quite unintentionally, determined a new direction for the then-moribund adventures of Barbara Gordon.

To sum up briefly: Moore asked DC for permission to have Batgirl be crippled by the Joker in KILLING JOKE. Later he stated that he never expected the character to remain a paraplegic, given the many miracle-cures abounding in the DC Universe, and indeed DC did toy with the idea of reviving Batgirl via one such cure, "the Lazarus Pit" of Ra's Al Ghul. This idea was dropped, and credit for a better direction is usually given to writers Kim Yale and John Ostrander, who spearheaded the idea of reconfiguring Gordon as a mysterious dispenser of information to the superhero community. Thus Oracle made her debut roughly a year after her fate in KILLING JOKE, in Ostrander's SUICIDE SQUAD #23.

Once the character was revealed to be the now-paraplegic Barbara Gordon, she became a more prominent player in the DC Universe, particularly in the Bat-corner of that cosmos. This new role-- which gave Gordon greater prominence than she had enjoyed as Batgirl in the late 1980s-- engendered a one-shot team-up with Black Canary in 1996, which in its turn led to the regular BOP title.

To be sure, the first fifty-plus issues of the regular series, largely scripted by Chuck Dixon, were basically no more than decent formulaic action-stories. Gail Simone, debuting on BOP #56 in 2003, distinguished herself on the title and made both the character of Oracle and the feature's "girl power" theme more appealing to fans. 

Now, though I consider Simone's contribution to the BOP concept to be vital in a creative sense, there's no question in my mind that from first to last, BIRDS OF PREY is intimately tied to the supposedly sexist injuries inflicted on Barbara Gordon by Moore and Bolland. I have no idea whether Ennbee thinks well of the comic book itself, though he certainly seems to be stumping for an adaptation, if only one produced by female creators. 

In earlier years Simone apparently agreed to some extent with Ennbee's characterization of KILLING JOKE as sexist, for she listed Batgirl's paralysis as one of the casualties of dastardly male creators on her WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS site.  In this essay I expressed my disapproval of Simone for ham-handedly listing characters regardless of the context of their suffering in each given narrative, and over the years I've become (in contrast to Ennbee) even less sympathetic to the "WIR" complaint. But Simone's protest against female marginalization becomes even more ironic, when one realizes that BOP was her first major success in the comic-book field, and that her success stemmed in large part from the fact that DC readers were invested in the fate of Paraplegic Barbara Gordon. That Simone wrote some really good stories with PBG-- quite possibly better than anything Alleged Misogynist Alan Moore could have rendered, given the same subject-- does not obviate Simone's indebtedness to Moore's 1988 ambition desire to shock his complacent audience with an event of arresting violence. That indebtedness also does not "go away" even if Modern Moore recants his 1988 ambitions. BIRDS OF PREY, DC Comics' first all-female team-title, owes its existence to the Big Event of a heroine being sliced, diced, and stuck in a Frigidaire-- though it appears that even before Simone, Yale or Ostrander became involved, there was always the possibility of a Resurrection from the Refrigerator.

To explain the other part of the title now: this complaint comes down to mere "shadow boxing" with the ranks of ideological critics in general. From experience I know that, should I post my analysis of Ennbee's faulty logic on HU, Ennbee would not be capable of arguing any of my points. He has established a persona whereby everything he writes is for the betterment of marginalized people, so if you challenge him on logic or anything else, you must be a low-down defender of the status quo. I would be curious to know if Gail Simone perceived herself in any way indebted to Moore, but from what little I know of her during her Comic Book Resources, she has never really forsworn WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS, so that may not be a likely scenario either.

At the end of NEGATIVE I.D. I said that "one must distinguish between the artistic potential of a controversial trope like girlfriend-killing, and any particular negative example of same." Even if I agreed with Ennbee that the gut-shooting of Barbara Gordon marked Moore, Bolland and DC Comics as unregenerate masculinists-- which I don't-- I would still contend that what didn't kill Barbara Gordon made her stronger, rather than reducing her to a victim. Simone herself pursued that theme in BIRDS OF PREY more than once, and any animated adaptation of the property that didn't allow Barbara Gordon to suffer for a good narrative reason would surely end up as far worse than the 2016 KILLING JOKE.

SHOOTING THE SHIRT

Well, I would not have thought that in just a little over a month, the comics biz could generate another silly sex-controversy equal to that of "Spiderbuttgate." But I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The original image, from JUSTICE LEAGUE #12, was a pretty uncontroversial cover showing Superman and Wonder Woman making out in mid-air.

At some point, a T-shirt company used the image thusly:

This probably seemed only mildly provocative to the shirt-makers, whose business is come up with weird shit that people are willing to wear on their shirt-fronts.  Unfortunately, the idea that a male hero might want to shout "score" when he's gettin' some incited various netheads to view the shirt as yet another marginalization of femininity.  It also spurred artist Bill Siekiewicz to do his own version.

I'm indebted to this column on Robot 6 for reproducing the Siekiewicz image; it also features a particularly lively discussion of the moral issues regarding both the original shirt and Siekiewicz's response.  It's a better than average discussion, though I don't imagine that any of the "victimologists" convinced any of the "mansplainers," or vice versa.  The final poster as of today notes that contrary to Siekiewicz's interpretation, the original illustration isn't showing Wonder Woman closing her hand into a fist with the intention of belting the Man of Steel; it's because she's holding her magic lasso.

The selective reading of the image is on a par with the deliberate misreadings of the Manara Spider-butt, comparing it with another image in which a Manara female was "presenting" her butt for a sexual encounter. However, the shirt doesn't just present an image, but also text, and it's certainly the text that got some knickers twisted.

So what are the objectionable features of that text? If it had only featured the word "Score!," then I hypothesize that it would have been viewed as tacky, but not a marginalization of all things feminine. It seems likely that the other phrase, "Superman does it again," is what twisted the panties. The shirt might have even escaped condemnation had it left off the word "again," for with the addition of that word, the shirt as a whole implies to some minds that Wonder Woman has been reduced to a notch on Superman's bedpost.  And according to Siekiewicz, being a Lothario merits a punch in the face.

Obviously, there are creepy Lotharios out there, even when they don't resort to illegal actions like using date-drugs, etc. But the image doesn't show Superman either forcing himself on the Amazing Amazon or even using any sort of psychological tactics to get into her pants. Even with the text, all it says is that Superman is successfully seducing an entirely willing Wonder Woman. If this is a crime, then it's one of which a great many men are guilty, ranging from actors like Errol Flynn and Warren Beatty to sports figures like Wilt Chamberlain.

Ironically, the "victimology" side, in claiming that Wonder Woman has been reduced to an "object"-- e.g, that "notch on the bedpost"-- they actually subtract from her character the ability to choose. In sports, to "score" means to meet a challenge and overcome opposition, not to take something forcefully or, conversely, to take it without effort. And it's arguable that the countless women who "surrendered" to male celebrities did so because the men had gained the reputation for being satisfying on a number of levels.  Since the T-shirt image does not show Superman imposing any force on Wonder Woman, Siekiewicz's response is tantamount to his saying, "A woman has the right to assault a man for making sexual overtures, particularly when that man has gained a reputation for bedding other women."

To be sure, one can see this conceit used for comedy throughout dozens of Japanese manga-series. Whether or not the male star of a comedy-manga is a real Lothario or merely succeeds in attracting a harem of women into his orbit, it's customary for that male to be continually beaten up by at least one woman.

Here's RANMA 1/2:

Here's LOVE HINA:

And finally, CITY HUNTER:

But in these comic circumstances, the beating may be deemed a symbolic displacement for the sex-act, since the female is almost always hot for the male. On the terms of comedy, then, these assaults are amusing and thus stand as positive forces. To the best of my knowledge, there's no political content to these displays-- which is fortunate, since, as Sienkiewicz has aptly shown, applying this sort of sex-and-sadism mix to the real world is the worst kind of bad politics.

ABJECTION APOLOGIA, PT. 1

In a recently closed thread on THE BEAT, Heidi offered some photos depicting her opinion of "what it actually looks like when men are sexualized."

Not surprisingly, I find this a very problematic definition of sexualization-- even more problematic than that of Kelly Thompson.  This visual definition certainly leaves no room for viewing sexual display as something positive, as A. Sherman Barros writes in this essay:

Female body and female power are not and need not be separate realms, something that has not yet been realized by infantile feminists that keep crying out not only for total de-eroticization of art (including its modern popular expression in comics and films), but for its de-sexualization by the erasure of representation of all secondary sexual characteristics. When sex is viewed as a threat, mental disturbance is not very far away.  


I suggest that Heidi's principal rhetorical point in displaying these NSFW photos is not properly an illustration of sexualization in all its multifarious forms, but to portray a particular state of sexual abjection. This state is more or less identical with Ms. McDonald's estimation of the status of all or most sexualization for female comics-characters, who are not infrequently the victims of "boob-windows, brokebacks, etc."  Abjection is, I submit, just one aspect of sexualization as it has been depicted in art and literature.

There are many dimensions to the matter of sexual abjection which I'll address in a future essay. In this post, however, I only want to throw out a few examples of cover-featured male abjection, sometimes in relation to female characters, sometimes not. As I've written before on the subject of equity, I am not asserting that there are necessarily more depictions of male abjection than female abjection. But I do assert that if one does not take into account how this visual trope is used for both genders, one cannot come to any meaningful conclusions on the subject.

I've already cited the first example with respect to the rather jejune assertion that any sort of "assault with a long object" should be automatically viewed as a form of rape.

Then there's the time that the Flash went the bondage-guy one better, and hired himself out to the foot-fetish community.

As a young fan, I remember writing DC Comics, claiming that I was tired of seeing Superman "dead, dying, or scared to death." Here's "dead:"

Here's "dying:"

And finally, "scared to death."

One may argue that not all of these depict sexual abjection. I have little doubt that I could find other covers more in line with the GREEN LANTERN "rape" cover. Yet it's a given that no matter how many such illustrations of male abjection I might display, the answer of those who advocate total and unstinting equity would always be, "But there's MORE covers showing Wonder Woman about to have a missile slam her in the lady parts!"  And this MAY be true, though I submit that it may not mean as much as some critics think it does.

More on the topic of abjection later. For now, I must address one of the responses made to my comments on the aforementioned closed thread.