Ever since the grim and gritty era of comics, publishers have been using more extreme subject matter to attract readers. This has led to them covering more real world woes such as drug addiction, homophobia, and of course sexual assault. Normally I’d applaud it, but usually it’s written and portrayed so insultingly bad that I can’t help but get angry.
It seems to have been ramped up recently during a time when mainstream publishers are more desperate than ever for readers. A big one is the Justice League story “Identity Crisis”, where the whole plot is instigated by Doctor Light (a former goofy Teen Titans villain) raping Sue Dibny, wife of Elongated Man.
Here we have a major DC story kicked off by the villain of what was INTENDED to be a light-hearted superhero series raping the wife of another hero. And in the end the resolution of the plot comes when it’s discovered the wife of ANOTHER HERO (in this case Jean Loring, wife of The Atom) was in fact responsible because she wanted her husband back after he left her. What a positive portrayal of average women in a fantastical setting, eh?
And then there’s “Spider Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do” (written by Kevin Smith), where it shows Black Cat was motivated to commit her first burglary when she couldn’t get revenge on her rapist. Somehow I can’t follow the train of logic of a girl unable to get justice for her rape, so she dons a leather catsuit, steals jewelry, and flirts with Spiderman. To me this forms a weird parallel to Frank Miller making Catwoman a former prostitute in his “Batman: Year One” story (more on Frank Miller and his obsession with whores in a bit).
This of course isn’t Kevin Smith’s first foray into controversial sexual subject matter. He’s long been chastised for killing Karen Page from “Daredevil” after she was told she had HIV from her years as a drug-addicted porn star, later revealed to be a lie by the villain Mysterio. Now granted much of the drug addicted porn star action happened BEFORE Kevin Smith became a writer for the series, but lying to her about being HIV positive and her eventual death are both his plot elements.
So one must ask: why all the rape? Why take such a sensitive topic and throw it into mainstream superhero stories? And more than that, why handle it in the worst way possible? A good moving story COULD come from this (a good story can come from anything, if handled the right way).
Like I said, this is really a hold over from the grim and gritty era of comics, when writers started putting darker subject matters into their stories. A lot of this was kicked off by Alan Moore’s “Watchmen”, which at the time was a revelation to superhero fans because of how dark it was. For a while I was ready to blame Alan Moore, because while he’s a fantastic writer a lot of violence against women DOES tend to show up in his work. In “Watchmen” the first Silk Spectre is sexually assaulted by The Comedian. In “V for Vendetta” one of the first scenes is Evey Hammond being saved from being raped by government thugs when she tries to prostitute herself, not to mention Rosemary Almond being abused by her husband and forced to become a showgirl when he’s killed. “From Hell” goes into sickening graphic detail about Jack the Ripper’s murders of London prostitutes. Even his recent work “Lost Girls” (illustrated by his wife Melinda Gibbie) sexualizes the lives of female protagonists from classic children’s literature (Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, etc).
I want to blame Alan Moore, but here’s the thing future writers would
miss: everything I just described was crucial to the stories of their
respective books.
What’s more, they happened to fully
formed three dimensional characters inhabiting a three dimensional
world. The Comedian is a murdering raping bastard, but he’s a three
dimensional bastard who has some humanity rather than being a faceless
monster. And whether you agree or disagree with the first Silk
Spectre’s reactions and feelings years later on his attempted rape of
her, her reactions and the reactions from everyone around her to the
crime at least felt natural.
I’ll even go out on a limb and
say that Evey Hammond from “V for Vendetta” is one of the strongest
female protagonists ever in comics, and goes through one of the best
character arcs. She starts out helpless but in the end the day cannot
be saved without her effort. Rosemary Almond also deserves special
mention (one of the reasons I’m sad she was cut from the film) for her
arc, and the resolution of it makes sense: a woman betrayed the most by
the men running her government ends up being pushed far enough to be
the only one who can take it down.
“From Hell” also used Jack
the Ripper’s crimes to comment on Victorian sexism, and goes as far to
portray the villain Edward Gull as an insane misogynist who claims his
murders are part of an elaborate masonic ritual to ensure male
dominance in the future. The story also comments on the rich
patriarchal upper class of the British royalty committing horrible
crimes against the poor female working class, who have to prostitute
themselves in order to make ends meet. As many have pointed out, women
have been working for as long as men have. The idea of a wealthy woman
of class holding the same power as a man is a relatively new idea.
My point is all of these stories were well written and well thought
out. What thought goes into Sue Dibny or Black Cat getting raped? I’d
be very surprised if it went beyond “It’ll sell more books”. Character
development comes in a very distant second.
People have been
writing that comics aren’t for kids anymore, but that’s merely because
people are now writing comics for adults AS WELL as for kids. Comics
are a medium; they have no less potential for good stories as a movie
or even a prose novel do. Bearing this in mind, harsh real world
subject matter like rape and sexual abuse CAN be tackled well. But the
way mainstream superhero books have been handling it is not it, either
out of a crass desire to generate controversy and thus sell more books
or the simple fact that the writers aren’t up to portraying the subject
matter correctly.
Sadly these writers seem more in line with
Frank Miller’s way of portraying women and sex crimes. Miller’s
primary inspiration comes from noir; you can see this in his best known
solo work “Sin City”. In Miller’s world women aren’t women, women are
“dames” or “broads”. I can think of scant few adult female characters
Miller has written that weren’t strippers or prostitutes. I say
“adult” because his pre-adolescent female characters seem to get a
fairer shake, like Carrie Kelly did in “The Dark Knight Returns”. Look
at the contrast of “Sin City”‘s Nancy Callahan from when she’s a little
girl to when she’s an adult. As a little kid, she’s crass, tough, and
resourceful. The instant she grows up and becomes sexually mature?
She’s working as a stripper.
It’s more than a little goofy,
but Miller symbolizes the dominant attitude in mainstream comics: men
indulging in pre-adolescent power fantasies subconsciously cowering in
their fear of enlightened, independent females. Is it any wonder rape
is handled so crassly if THESE GUYS are at the helm?
I truly
believe a good story can be told involving rape, in comics in
particular. But not in superhero books, and not by the guys writing
them.
8 Comments
Honestly,I think the issue of women’s story lines so often revolving around rape and sexual violence comes from the fact that comic books are a male dominated industry. So you have men writing women’s characters,who have no input from female coworkers, and whom have no clue how to make them realistic. So they fall back on what they think is the most traumatic.
This has long felt like the problem with rape-based storylines. I don’t think it’s always or almost always a case of male writers “cowering in fear” of an enlightened female lead; Kevin Smith, for example, is hardly somebody who strikes me as any kind of misogynist. But if a male writer has an idea for a character who reacts to some kind of trauma in her life, they need a basis for that trauma, and they want it to be something that works distinctly with a female character, rape is sitting there like a huge neon sign.
I’m not sure, actually, how much life rape has left as a viable basis for a story, at least in the sense of pushing a character to become whatever she is. It’s become almost cliche- people see that the character’s motivation is having been raped, and they often will sketch right past that because it’s something they’ve seen before. If you craft a good enough story around it, yes, it can still work, but you can say that about anything.
What’s being described in the OP is a sign that writers are starting to run out of ways to tell that tale. In that light, I think that probably the most effective way to insert rape into a story now is to make it part of a more complex background, and not try to make the rape carry the story on its own. After all, adding that sort of darkness to comics (and other media) was a nod toward reality; treating rape as something important to the character, but also as part of an entire life and a too-common thing overall, would be a further move in that direction.
I very much like your sentiments towards this – I’m a big comic book fan, and I love Alan Moore’s work. I agree his stories involving rape don’t seem to use it as something exploitative, or just have it there because it’s a “woman crime”, it’s always used to forward the plotline. I’m hoping more people will move towards his comics now that Watchmen was such a box office success, of late the only cool comics to say that you love are anything Frank Miller and Sin City, and I can’t stand either one! They may be very very pretty (the artwork isn’t in question), and one could even say sex positive as the prostitutes and strippers aren’t all shown as being horrible people, but the fact that all the women ARE prostitutes and strippers makes it very hard for me to read. A wider variety of female characters is what we need. A good blog to check out if you like comics and feminism is this one:
http://www.paipicks.blogspot.com/
It was set up by one of the contributors to The F-Word (a UK feminist site) and has some really decent reviews with a feminist slant.
Exactly. As TV Tropes says, rape is the new dead parents. Want to give a female character a traumatic past but don’t want to think about it too much? Put a rape in there. (That page is actually a subtype of the even more common Rape as Backstory, which can in theory be done well.)
Sam Keith did a graphic novel called Four Women, about well, 4 women of varying ages on a road trip. Out in the middle of the desert they’re forced off the road by a couple of men who try to assault them. It didn’t strike me as exploitative, the rape scene wasn’t even the least bit titillating (and *ugh* I’ve read comics where you can tell they wouldn’t say they were trying to turn you on but you think that they kind of were (spew!))
It was a very good psychological story and it felt like he did at least understands that rape is a violent act.
That’s an extremely good point! And again, it’s why the assault on the first Silk Spectre works so well. The act as portrayed in the book is brutal, but not glamorized. And it’s portrayed matter-of-factly. And years later she’s just trying to move on when her daughter keeps trying to bring it up, because while it was awful it wasn’t the defining moment of her life.
Meanwhile, Black Cat? She was raped, that’s why she became a superhero! Why did Doctor Light go crazy? We wiped his mind after he raped Sue! This isn’t character development, it’s a freaking plot device. I think that’s what got me so angry.
I also agree with you about Kevin Smith not coming off as a misogynist. The whole “Black Cat being raped” thing wasn’t misogynist. But it WAS hackneyed writing. He went the plot device route rather than actually give the character some depth.
Women in Refrigerators
“Not every woman in comics has been killed, raped, depowered, crippled, turned evil, maimed, tortured, contracted a disease or had other life-derailing tragedies befall her, but given the following list, it’s hard to think up exceptions”
The fates of female comic book characters. Spoiler-heavy (um, duh) and depressing
True as this is, at this point, how many male characters have avoided major tragedy in their lives? I’m not that big of a comic fan, but I’m pretty sure they’ve killed Superman, Batman, other big names, done pretty wretched things to others, etc.
The bigger difference, I think, is how characters are treated after these awful things happen. The link shows a list of dead or depowered heroines that stay dead or depowered; Superman eats it, but comes back better than ever. Writers could craft a similar comeback story around these female characters if they wanted to- the fact they don’t is where attention should be placed.