Barbelith, the onetime-Grant Morrison-centric message board, considers sexual violence in comics:
“My brain keeps dredging up a line from ‘Nextwave’ about girls having ’soft bits’ and men having, y’know, ‘hard bits’. Are anglophone comics all made by Dirk Anger? …Is it all a reaction of creators grown old, become alone and depressed? Terrified and jealous of the young hot kids running around doing unspeakable things for laughs and cash? Or is it all just fiction and we shouldn’t worry ourselves at all?”
“People can write about from different points of view and attitudes and have different opinions than those expressed, all of that, but assrape jokes don’t seem like ‘a different opinion,’ they just seem boring and in poor taste. They’re stupid; I feel like saying to Ennis or Millar or whoever, ‘Why are you wasting my time on this?’ A piece of art can have a different opinion and I can still recognize the quality in it but most of the time the quality isn’t even living up to it… It’s the attitude toward the sex. Sex seems equated with violence and death on such a regular basis that any interesting or genuinely offensive (and therefore open to discussion and examination of attitudes) elements are overwhelmed by a sea of ‘Meh’ and I just can’t be bothered because it’s boring and/or irritating and I don’t want to support that.”
“It seems like a lot of people don’t understand the different between making an ‘adult’ comic book and making a trashy, sensationalized, sorta dirty comicbook. I think that it was handled… better, in a more adult way in Watchman, but I can see where you are coming from, there are better shocks and awes and ews that you can grab the audience with. A big part of it has to do with this crazy misconception that we fans want comics to be more ‘realistic.’ What the hell does that mean? How realistic is a book about people who have poorly defined super powers and wear goofy costumes going to be? It’s apperently not enough that Wonder Woman has to worry about saving the world from… uh…I dunno, egg-fu? (wonderwomen has terrible enemies), she also has to worry about some guy tying her up with her own lasso and brutally sodomizing her. And what about the apperent anti-gay editorial mandate going on at Marvel right now? I don’t read any of those books anymore, but I just read on a comics blog that they’d manage to either kill or capture all the gay sooperheros. What’s up with that?”
“It’s more helpful within this discussion to possibly look at what exactly is being said by DC’s attempt to ‘up the ante’ with their villains, and Doctor Light in particular, and how it relates to the overall issue? Sure, the easy answer is that their trying to ‘grow up’ but fail utterly not just because, you know, they invoke the ‘fate worse than…’ misogyny, but also because they marry it to a convoluted plotline with questionable attention to how people’s actual feelings work - they take a Silver Age style mystery and bloody it up with the deathdildo, as Daytripper puts it, thinking that’s how you grow up… The Marvel Mandate - I’m not sure what it’s current status is, but the example I can think of is the Young Avengers and Runaways crossover - a significant grouping of character is taken into ‘custody’ (read: scary bondage & probable torture), all of them either being gay, lesbian, or multi-gendered (Skrull shapeshifter primarily identifying as male but in a lesbian relationship) - however, they’re also the most powerful characters in the two groups, so it might be worth unpacking what all of that means.”
“What I thought was really stupid about Doctor Light having to be a rapist to be considered a really bad guy, was that it kind of makes a hash of the idea of bad guys as murderers being terrible - the whole ethos of Batman and Superman and their like not wanting to kill because it makes them as bad as the people they fight against. Are they suggesting that the mind wipe thing was only brought out to use because Elongated Man was a bit upset, but, you know the all the murdering was fine, and we’ll get to them folks and punch them in the face in a little while? Bad writers trying to show that they can do a ‘Moore’ by having their scary bad guys rape folk, it’s the comic equivalent of young, new film makers having their cool hitmen talk about hamburgers post Tarantino.”
“[S]adly, I do think the act of rape has become shorthand for ‘this guy will do worse than kill you’. Except for male rape where it’s ‘okay’ to use it as a comedy bit, too.”
Lots more at the link. It’s well worth a read.
