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Villainy, Thy Name Is Woman (Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #28)

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This is part of a roundtable on Marston/Peter’s Wonder Woman #28. The roundtable index is here.
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I gave my son some Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics…and he looooooves them. He’s especially into Etta Candy, who he thinks is just hysterical. And he’s right!

Anyway, at one point he said, “This must be written by a woman, right? Because all the characters are women.” And so I explained that no, it was written by a guy who just really believed that women were great — that they were better than men, even. Or as Marston said:

Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world. There isn’t love enough in the male organism to run this planet peacefully.

I didn’t bother reading that to my son, though. I just summarized.

In any case, my son wasn’t put out, though he did think Marston was a little confused. “Men and women are equal,” he said. “Neither is better than the other.” Gloria Steinem would’ve been proud.

Anyway, he brought it up again, I think after he read this issue, #28, from the Greatest Wonder Woman stories collection.

“Daddy, the guy who writes Wonder Woman thinks women are better than men, right?”

I said that that was the case.

“So how come all the villains are always women?”

It’s a good question…and one which incidentally seems to have flummoxed Gloria Steinem as well. It flummoxed her so thoroughly, in fact, that in a 1995 introduction to an Abbeville Press collection of Wonder Woman covers, she said:

Looking back at the post-Marston stories…I could see how littler her later writers understood her spirit. She became sexier-looking and more submissive, violent episodes increased, more of her adversaries were female, and Wonder Woman herself required more help from men in order to triumph. [my italics]

It’s true that Marston enjoyed creating the odd stunted male misogynist enemy (such as Dr. Psycho or the Duke of Deception). But I don’t see how you can read this issue and come away thinking that female antagonists, in whatever quantities, are unfaithful to his spirit.

So how do female villains square with the idea that woman are superior — and superior precisely because they are peaceful and loving? What are all these peaceful, loving women doing running around trying to drop rocks on each other?
 

 
or devising bizarre bondage tortures for each other?
 

 
or devising bizarre bondage tortures for each other?
 

 
or, for variety, devising bizarre bondage torture for men?
 

I love that last panel. Clea and Giganta clustered shoulder-to-shoulder at the left merge into a single malevolent four-armed, two-headed feminine deity of castration, their mouths twisted into identical sneers of fury, those awesome Peter eyebrows flexing, and that blade aimed right where it’s aimed, with some adorable little effect lines to make sure we watch the point. And, of course, Steve at the right, with his shirt stripped off, is totally sexualized cheesecake. “Go ahead and heave your fun” indeed.

This is probably the sort of thing Gloria Steinem is talking about when, in an introduction to a 1995 collection of Wonder Woman covers, she gently chides Marston for being too masculinist.

Instead of portraying the goal of full humanity for women and men, which is what feminism has in mind, [Marston] often got stuck in the subject/object, winner/loser paradigm of “masculine” versus “feminine,” and came up with female superiority instead. (p.12)

She’s certainly got him dead to rights here. Marston might as well be saying, “Hey, girls, you can do anything — even have torture/rape fantasies! Just like men!

The thing is…girls and women do in fact have torture/rape fantasies. And not just fantasies of being raped and tortured (as amply documented in Nancy Friday’s *My Secret Garden*), but fantasies of doing the raping and torturing. Tabico’s really extremely, NSFW fable about putting insects into the brains of her family members so she can have her sexual way with them is pretty extreme, but not isolated. Sharon Marcus in Between Women writes that during the Victorian era in England “fantasies of girls punishing dolls and being punished by them appeared regularly in fiction for young readers.” In showing women as sexualized aggressors, Marston was just giving girls the sorts of stories they had long enjoyed.

Of course, there’s no particular shortage of female, castrating villainesses in contemporary culture either. Here’s one:

In the new Wonder Woman, Azzarello and Chiang have their evil woman doing that thing that evil women do — using her sensual wiles to lure men into her clutches so she can cut their bits off. Women; their power is love gone wrong.

You’d think that would be Marston’s take too. After all, women are powerful because they understand love; ergo, if they are evil, shouldn’t they use the evil side of love and compel men with their dreaded Maxim poses?

Marston villainesses — in skin tight outfits and showing lots of skin — are clearly meant to be sexy. And he’s not adverse to having one or the other of them seduce Steve on occasion. But, unlike Azzarello’s Amazons, Marston’s villains are less likely use sex to gain the upper hand, and more likely to simply outgun, outfight, and outthink their male opponents. They don’t need to be shaped by male fantasies in order to be powerful.

Perhaps this helps explain in part why Marston is so fond of cross-dressing villainesses.
 

 
You could see Byrna, Dr. Poison, and Hypnota as a nod to Marston’s misandry; men are evil, therefore women who are evil are manly — “not a sissy in the lot!” as Eviless declares. Still, while they may not be sissies, Zara and the Cheetah certainly can’t be said to be butch. Moreover, Marston goes out of his way to insist that the cross-dressing women are in fact women:
 

 
They may be able to pass, but that doesn’t mean they’ve cast their gender aside. You don’t have to wear certain clothes (or even be clean-shaven) to be a woman.

So why all the cross-dressing? Well, in the first place, Marston — who never met a fetish he didn’t like — probably found it sexy in itself. And of course it’s a metaphor for male to female cross-identification; many of Marston’s readers (like my son!) were boys identifying with a female hero.

But I think the cross-dressing could also be a metaphor for female to male cross-identification. It’s a winking acknowledgment that usually it’s boys who get to be roguishly evil, that usually it’s boys who get to be the mad scientists with their dripping needles or the mad hypnotists with their glowing eyes, controlling others not through seduction, but through force and evilness. Who hasn’t wanted to ditch the boring hero on occasion and be the scheming villain for a change? And if boys can do that, why not girls too?

All of which is to say…being bad. It’s fun. If you’re a kid and you have the choice between being powerful and good like Wonder Woman or powerful and irresponsible like Clea or Giganta, probably you’d choose Clea and Giganta, at least occasionally. Marston certainly believed in peaceful women and loving women. But he also believed in superior women, and if women are superior, then that means they’re not only the best heroes, but the best villains too.

Bound to End: Wonder Woman #28 Index and Introduction

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Index
 
Trina Robbins, Re-Inventing Wonder Woman — Again!

Noah Berlatsky, Villainy, Thy Name Is Woman

Noah Berlatsky and son, There’s Something Besides Fire to Contend With Here!

Jones, One of the Jones Boys, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Diana?

Kelly Thompson, Wonder Woman: It’s In Her DNA

Sina, Goddesses of the Lesbiverse

Vom Marlowe, On Wonder Woman, Bondage, and Princess Leia

William Marston, On Sorority Baby Parties

Sharon Marcus, Wonder Woman vs. Wonder Woman

Ben Saunders, Loving Authority: Some Thoughts on Wonder Woman #28

Ben Saunders, on William Marston and Sex

Vom Marlowe, Wonder Woman and the Space Crocs of Nikszkelion

Richard Cook, A Fanboy Denied

Derik Badman, A Peter That Never Existed

Charles Reece, On Second Thought, I Really Don’t Like Wonder Woman, part 1, part 2.

 
 
Introduction
 
Three years and a month ago I started a series called Bound to Blog in which I blogged my way through the entire Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman. It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally come to the last Marston script — Wonder Woman #28. To celebrate, I’ve asked a bunch of friends and fellow Marston/Peter travelers to contribute to a roundtable focusing on this final issue.

And if that all isn’t enough Wonder Woman reading, you can check out my first ever post on Wonder Woman, which coincidentally focuses on Wonder Woman #28.
 

Utilitarian Review 4/28/12

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On HU
 

Our Featured Archive Post this week was my discussion of Moto Hagio’s Half-Drawn.

I talk about the television show Bones’ stupid take on extreme metal.

Me on the crappy Azzarello/Chiang Wonder Woman.

Jeet Heer on why Watchmen isn’t so great.

I talk about the brutal boy’s love of Let Dai.

A NWOBHM download mix.

That incidentally finished up a week long Metal Apocalypse.

Domingos Isabelinho on John Porcellino.

Lindsey Bahr on Dystopian fashions in Hunger Games and Gattaca.

Kailyn Kent on the relationship between comics and galleries.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere
 
At the Chicago Reader, I sneer at a bunch of crappy DC and Marvel titles.

At Splice Today I argue that we won’t get decent health care until we’re willing to see it as an issue of basic equality.
 
For those of you who haven’t, you might check out my old Gay Utopia project. Contributions by Edie Fake, Lilli Carré, Ursula Le Guin, Matt Thorn, Michael Manning, Johnny Ryan, Eric Berlatsky, Julia Serano…and tons more.

Tucker does his thing, with Abhay and Jog guesting.

Chris Roberson on quitting DC over their treatment of Alan Moore and generally shitty creator’s rights practices. Righteous move by Timothy Hodler in getting the interview.
 

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: NWOBHM

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New Wave of British Heavy Metal mix; Download NWOBHM here.

1. Shot You in the Back — Motorhead
2. Gypsy — Uriah Heep
3. Street (Live) — Eegor
4. After Forever — Black Sabbath
5. Death Penalty — Witchfinder General
6. Sorcerers — Angel Witch
7. 22 Acacia Avenue — Iron Maiden
8. Lady Love — Dark Star
9. Into the Fire — Deep Purple
10. The Prince — Diamond Head
11. Leper Messiah — Metallica

This is the end of a Metal Apocalypse series.

Jeet Heer vs. The Watchmen

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We’ve had a lengthy thread about the relative merits of Watchmen here. Lots of interesting contributions from Eric Berlatsky (my brother and an Alan Moore scholar); Marc-Oliver Frisch; Darryl Ayo Brathwaite (who wrote the original post); Chris Mautner, and just a ton of other people. For me personally, though, the highlight has been Jeet Heer’s negative take. As Ng Suat Tong said recently, Watchmen hasn’t attracted a lot of skeptical criticism. Anyway, I thought I’d reprint his thoughts here. (Noah B.)

Heer’s comments have been extensively rearranged and edited so that they can be read through with a minimum of difficulty. Please see the numbered links for the original comments. (Ng ST)

(1)  The idea that Watchmen, of all things, is the greatest graphic novel ever is so alien to my experience of art that I find it fascinating. I’ve actually read Watchmen a couple of times to figure out why some people love it so. And while I can recognize the craft and intelligence that went into it, I’m still left with a work that lacks any of the humanity, humor, and depth to be found in the works of Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Jaime Hernandez, [and] Gilbert Hernandez.

(2)  [In] brief, the political critique of modern America to be found in Lint or The Death Ray seems to me much sharper than the politics of Watchmen. Both Lint and Andy are recognizable and plausible personality types whose character traits reflect dark aspects of the national psyche. That’s one example of many.

(3) [The] best argument that can be made on behalf of Watchmen [“is that superheroes and pulp narratives are a pretty important way in which we think about our geopolitics and our selves.” (Noah Berlatsky)]

The problem is that politically the book accepts the geopolitical implications of superheroes on their own terms, so the only solution to nuclear Armageddon is the intervention of “the world’s smartest man” and the disappearance of the superhero god. For a professed anarchist, Moore has very little faith in grass-roots political activity. In the real world, the Cold War came to an end because of human agency: Gorbachev and other communists apparatchiks started to see that the regime was untenable, and were pushed for reform by dissidents while in the west Reagan had to start negotiating with the Soviets because of the peace movement. So the real heroes who saved humanity from nuclear war were figures like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Lech Walesa, Gorbachev, E.P.Thompson, Helen Caldicott, etc. and the millons of ordinary people on both sides of the Iron Curtain who refused to accept the Cold War consensus. There are no counterparts to such figures in Watchmen: humanity’s fate is decided by superheroes (one of whom is willing to sacrifice millions of lives for his political agenda, another of whom is indifferent to humanity’s continued existence). There’s a despair for humanity at the heart of Watchmen which I reject both on political grounds but also because it seems callow and unearned. The darkness of Moore’s vision is ultimately closer to Lovecraft than to Kafka (think of the giant tentacled space monster Ozymandias concocts).

(4)  It’s true that both the United States and post-Soviet Russia have many flaws. But fortunately there are people in both countries who are working to make things better and challenging the authorities. This type of resistance is notably absent in Watchmen. V for Vendetta is an interesting book because it does show resistance to the ruling class, but that resistance takes the form of a superhero. We can take control of our destiny but only if the superhero shows us how (and if we’re a woman, he might have to torture us along the way). There is an interesting tension between Moore’s anarchism, his philosophical determinism, and his use of the superhero genre. In my charitable moods I like to think of this tension as fruitful rather than incoherent. It certainly helps make Watchmen a little bit less programmatic than it would otherwise be.

(5)   [If] we take the deaths in Watchmen seriously we should regard Ozymandias as a moral monster, a veritable Eichmann. Yet even after the extent of Ozymandias’ actions are revealed, he’s treated not as a moral monster but rather as a pulp figure, a superhero-who-turns-out-to-be-supervillian. His plot is so outlandish that we can’t treat it seriously and feel the full moral import of his actions. (6)  The thing is, in the context of the book Viedt is cool in the way that Rorschach is cool. Viedt has a secret hide-away, just like Superman! He’s the smartest man in the world and a gifted inventor, just like Lex Luthor! He’s always one step ahead of the game, just like the Kingpin or Dr. Doom! So as you read about his plot, Viedt doesn’t seem like Eichmann or Beria or Pol Pot. He seems like Dr. Doom or Magneto. So it’s hard to take his crime or moral culpability seriously. Or at least I can’t take it seriously. His murders don’t seem real. (By contrast, the killings in The Death Ray are chillingly believable).  (7)  If the squid is supposed to be idiotic and Ozymandias is an idiot and the ending a stupid anticlimax, then doesn’t that undercut the moral horror we should properly feel at the fact that within the narrative Ozymandias has killed millions of people in cold blood? We don’t think of Eichmann as an idiot who came up with an idiotic and anticlimactic scheme.

(8)  It seems to me that Eric, Noah, and Mike (among others) all fall into the same habit of reading Watchmen the way Moore intended the book to be read, as an anarchist critique of superheroes and authoritarianism. But it seems to me that like many other works of art Watchmen is latent with contradictory meanings that undermine the authorial intent. It’s a story where the superheroes act and ordinary people re-act (just [as] in Shakespeare the tragic hero acts while the secondary characters and ordinary people re-act). Because characters like the Comedian, Ozymandias, and Rorschach are the agents of change and action, they are the figures that engage the imagination. It’s no accident that DC is doing “Before Watchmen” about the early life of the heroes rather than “The Early Life of the token black and lesbian characters who die in Watchmen.”

According to Mike Hunter, the fans who love Rorschach and identify with him are “dimwits” who have an “asinine” reaction. But in point of fact I think such readers understand the narrative logic of Watchmen better than the defenders on this site (Eric B., Noah, and Mike among others) do. These Rorschach loving readers understand that he’s presented as sympathetically as Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne — he’s someone who has been wronged and he’s ready to kick-ass. When you read a superhero story, your natural instinct is to identify with such a character, even if he’s a fascist loser. Moore’s authorial intent can’t overcome the logic of the genre, in part because Moore’s skills as a pastichist makes him do all the right genre moves to win over readers.

As for Rorschach being a complex character, the fact is that he takes the law into his own hands and beats people up. Am I [correct] in thinking that he also kills people? So he’s a thug — in real life he’d be horrifying but in the context of the book he’s sympathetic — because the book ultimately accepts the logic of the superhero genre. Also self-pity is a big part of the fascist mindset but Moore does not sufficiently distance us from Rorschach to make us critical of his self-pity — rather we share in it. Again, Clowes handles this better in The Death Ray.

(9)  [I was just looking at Katherine Wirick’s piece on Rorschach as a rape victim.] It’s a very smart piece. This is not meant as a knock on Wirick (who makes a convincing case for how Rorschach should be interpreted) but I’m wary of accounts of fascism that start with the victimization of fascists. To the extent that fascists are victims or losers, its because they’ve benefited from systems of privilege (capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, imperialism, racism) which are being challenged.

 

Mike Hunter: “…there are plenty of examples of humble, noncostumed humans, who are shown as moral, caring, striving to do the right thing, for all their final fate. The cops and psychiatrist who as their last act moved to stop the fight of the lesbian couple. The way the salt-of-the-earth newsstand vendor, as death moved to overwhelm the city of New York, protectively embraced the black kid who’d been hanging out reading this pirate comic. As their bodies merged and dissolved, tears came to my eyes…”

(10)  Non-superheroes in Moore’s universe can try (unsuccessfully) to defend themselves but they can’t make their own history or challenge the power that be. (11) It’s fairly common in movies to spend a few moments with sympathetic figure — say a cop who is about to retire — who is then killed. This is done to establish some moral gravitas or emotional engagement on the cheap. In terms of narrative, these characters are created in order to be killed. That is what Moore is doing — being talented he does it well, but it’s still a relatively cheap effect.

In the real world, thankfully, ordinary people can and do stand up to tyranny, even if they are often defeated. (12)  [In] 1984 Winston Smith and Julia do resist the totalitarian state. They are ultimately defeated and brainwashed (in a horrifying way) but despite the defeat the book hinges on the idea that there will be some internal resistance. There’s no resistance in the world of the Watchmen, only futile attempts to save a few lives in the fallout from the actions of the superheroes — but no attempt to change the system whereby the superheroes dominate or the geopolitics the superheroes are embedded in and support.

(13)  Despite repeated attempts to enter into it sympathetically, I can’t accept the characters in Watchmen as human beings. Moore has them do all sorts of improbably things (like a woman falling in love with her rapist). They seem like puppets to me. There is also sorts of violence in Watchmen — rapes, murders, and even the killing of millions — but none of [this] effects me as I read the book because none of the characters are able to stake out the emotional claims that are necessary in order for us to care about the fate of fictional creations. It’s telling that many readers seem to fantasize about being Rorschach. If the violence Rorschach unleashes had any felt reality, those readers would be terrified of Rorschach and regard him as a psychopath.

(14)  That’s why I brought up Clowes. He has the ability to create characters that you can both empathize with but also see their flaws and limitations — no one wants to be Andy in The Death Ray, although despite how horrible he is he remains recognizably human. The middle-aged Andy is pretty much an asshole, albeit one gifted (as many Clowes characters are) in self-justification. But the young Andy was more sympathetically presented — he’s someone in flux, with good traits and bad. The story is about the process where the young Andy starts on the road that turns him into the middle-aged Andy. And Clowes sense of how characters are shaped and formed by their environment seems much more plausible that Moore, who has a crude pop-Freudian understanding of personality formation (i.e. trauma leads to violence). The same applies to Lint — the process by which Lint becomes who he is, the way he’s shaped by his memories and decisions as well as his lifelong traits, is very finely handled. By contrast, Roscharch is just a high-brow version of The Punisher or Wolverine — a psychopath you can root for!….I just don’t see the Moore of Watchmen as being anywhere near the writer Clowes is.

(15)  [As for] the rape of Sally Jupiter, just in terms of Watchmen itself, it’s a fairly minor lapse but becomes a bit more problematic because of the pervasiveness of sexualized violence towards women in Moore’s work. Again, I think there is a charitable interpretation that can be made: Moore is interested in creating genre-deconstruction and pastiche of genre material. The “damsel in distress” is a key figure in many genres and Moore is simply bringing to the fore the rape subtext that is latent in many narratives. But it’s possible to take a more critical stance towards Moore’s handling of rape as well.

(16)  [My] objection isn’t that Watchmen is a superhero comic. I have a high regard for the superhero comics of Kirby, Ditko, Eisner, Cole, and others. As I noted elsewhere Kirby offers a clue as to what bothers me about Watchmen. In all his comics Kirby created an open universe that could be imaginatively inhabited and colonized. Moore’s genre work, by contrast, seems not just closed by the airtight structures the author has created but even suffocating in the way they don’t allow the characters any freedom from the dictates of the plot and theme. A character like Maggie (in the Locas stories) or Andy (in The Death Ray) has the ability to surprise you even as they remain true to their nature. By contrast, Moore’s characters are merely pawns in the service of his agenda.

It seems to me that the critique [recently] leveled against Jaime Hernandez applies much more to Watchmen. Watchmen really is a giant Easter egg hunt. Moore is quite clever at packing his narrative with lots of little clues that readers can spend endless hours matching up in order to solve the puzzle. But I find this type of cleverness to be an arid and gimmicky exercise because the story is so utterly devoid of humanity, so utterly contrived and constructed.

 

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Okay, I think that’s it. Thanks to Jeet and all who participated. It was a fun discussion. (Noah B.)

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle, You Patriarchal Dipshit

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I wrote a little about the Azzarello Amazons in the latest Wonder Woman series, or at least on the description of the them I heard second-hand. For those not in the know, Azzarello has the Amazons be lying, murdering, borderline rapists. I thought this was a pretty awful desecration of Marston.

There were a couple of interesting comments on the post. John argued:

What you’ve just described as a “misogynist horror fever dream” is about two pages of the arc so far — two pages depicting the Amazons as the source of disappeared ships on the Bermuda Triangle. They have sex — depicted as primarily consensual — with men, then kill them. They sell any male children they bear (to Hesphaestus, who as it turns out is not cruel to them.)

I read it as part of Azzarello’s generally nasty outlook on life and specifically nasty outlook on Greek myths. Because it’s of a piece with reimagining Hades as a creepy child with melted candlewax for a head, and Poseidon as a hideous fish-beast, etc, and portraying every single god shown so far as a monster or a dick, I didn’t read it as specifically anti-woman. It’s just Azzarello’s cynicism.

Charles Reece also weighed in, arguing among other things:

(1) I don’t see it as necessarily suggesting that’s the way things would be in reality (e.g., “a society of women living together must be perverted, violent, evil, and anti-men”), but as a possible way of getting to people to deal with fears that already exist. Such fiction doesn’t have to be Birth of a Nation. (2) It’s also a way of questioning whether the majority power is inherently wrapped up in the qualities of those holding the power, or if there’s something about hegemony that tends to erase the differences in groups once they’ve achieved that status. That is, are these women acting like men, or are they acting like a group with absolute power? I suspect that your reaction to White Man’s Burden would be that the film is a racist vision of blacks, rather than an attempt to get whites and blacks to see things from an inverted viewpoint (I’m not saying the movie is worth a shit, of course).

So now I’ve read a few issues of the series (5, 6, and 7, I believe). I thought I’d go back to this.

Here’s the sequence in question, narrated by Hephaestus, the god of forging things.


 

 

As Charles intimates, if you read through this, you see that Azzarello and Chiang aren’t just making evil Amazons. Rather, they’re using the evil Amazons to flip the history of gender oppression. Throughout history, women have overwhelmingly been the victims of sexual violence…and when men have suffered sexual violence it has also been overwhelmingly (not always, but overwhelmingly) at the hands of men. So here, instead, it is men who are sexually used, and women who do the using. Similarly, throughout history, it has been girl children who have been the victims of infanticide and exposure, and girl children who have been treated as unwanted byproducts. Here, though, in accord I believe with Greek legends, it is boys who are cast off.

Charles argues that this is a means of getting us to think about power dynamics; it’s showing us that the issue is not male/female, but group-in-power/group-out-of-power. If you give people power, they will become exploiters. That’s a universal truth, supposedly Azzarello is knocking the stuffing out of Marston/Peter’s women-veneration (a women-veneration that even Gloria Steinem found troubling, incidentally). Through that stuffing-knocking, he shows that hegemony is not fixed, but fungible.

This is, in short, another example of the ever-popular sci-fi metaphorical approach to issues of discrimination. Rather than looking at how race or class or gender effects the characters, you simply map these effects onto a different set of relationships. This creates new insights (everybody would be oppressors if they could!) while also adding the thrill of novelty (women perpetuating sexual violence! how cool is that?) Powerful messages and cheap thrills; what more could you want from your superhero comics?

I think, in response, it’s worth considering the opening of Shulamith Firestone’s radical feminist classic, The Dialectic of Sex.

Sex class is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the labor force. But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child — “That? Why you can’t change that! You must be out of your mind!” — is the closest to the truth. We are talking about something every bit as deep as that. This gut reaction — the assumption that, even when they don’t know it, feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological condition — is an honest one.

In her conclusion, she says, “Nature produced the fundamental inequality — half the human race must bear and rear the children of all of them — which was later consolidated, institutionalized, in the interests of men.”

Firestone’s point is that the oppression of women is rooted deep in culture, based even upon biology — specifically on differences in relation to children and child-rearing. Firestone looks hopefully to new technologies of reproduction in the hope that they might change the relationship between men and women…and indeed, to some extent birth control has done that. But differences remain, and inequities remain — and those differences and inequities are not simply accidents, or random distributions of power which can be reshaped at a whim. They have long, long years of history behind them, and overturning them has taken equally long years of struggle.

Thus, simply reversing gendered oppression tends to make light of how deeply ingrained these issues of oppression are. The possibility of rape, for example, has a lot (not everything, but a lot) to do with our biological plumbing. Susan Brownmiller argues that “Man’s structural capacity to rape and woman’s corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the primal act of sex itself.”

That’s perhaps extreme…but if you doubt that rape is not easily reversible, look again at those Azzarello/Chiang pages above. Charles would like the pages to show us that hegemony is not attached to particular bodies or histories; that power, rather than gender or past, is the ultimate truth. As I said, Azzarello and Chiang are reversing the tropes…but there are limits to how far they’re willing to go. Most notably, the men are not actually raped, because, presumably, Azzarello and Chiang can’t, or are reluctant to, figure out a way to violate men the way that men have historically and in great numbers violated women. Instead, they just assume that all the men in question would be happy to fuck random women at the drop of an anchor.

Moreover, look at the top two panels of the second page. In the first, we get to be in the position of the happy sailors, staring at some prime cheesecake (do the Amazons subscribe to Maxim, or are we supposed to believe that all women everywhere naturally adopt such poses?) In the second panel, we get a series of stupid jokes…because sexual assault is funny when women do it, get it? And, of course, on the remainder of the page the sex is significantly more explicit than the violence. Azzarello and Chiang are happy to show us women in the act, but the murder/castration is only suggested by some blades, and then by bodies falling into the water at a distance. The reader participates vicariously in the screwing, but gets to back off for the consequences.

Thus, the Amazons, even as they take the male position of oppressor, are still objects of a male narrative, and, indeed, of a male gaze. They are presented as sexual objects, and the bloodthirsty reversal is almost an afterthought…or, perhaps we should say, an excuse. Certainly, I don’t see any real commitment to thinking about power as a pragmatic, overarching truth. There’s no effort, for example, to use the switch to make men participate viscerally or emotionally in oppression, as you get in some rape-revenge narratives. Instead, I see pulp titillation, complete with snickering, coupled with dunderheaded pulp misogyny, which disavows the violence of the male fantasy by the simple expedient of blaming the whole thing on women. It feels fundamentally thoughtless and dishonest.

The rest of the context only tends to confirm this impression. Wonder Woman, who has newly discovered that Zeus is her father, wanders around obsessed with her patriarchal lineage. Other characters are constantly telling her how well she’ll fit in with the rest of the Gods — she’s her father’s daughter. She concocts an elaborate plan (with the unwitting help of her uncles) to humiliate her father’s wife, Hera — so much for Marston’s themes of feminist sisterhood. Admittedly, Wonder Woman does have a close female friendship…but it seems to be largely based on the fact that her friend is carrying a baby which is related to WW — again, the motivations seem to be all about patriarchs and their bloodlines.

I think all of this rather undercuts John’s claim that we’re just dealing with Azzarello’s cynicism. Azzarello is cynical…but it’s a cynicism of violence and male prerogative. What’s real in Azzarello’s world is power and patriarchy. Contra John, that’s an ideological position, not a neutral one; contra Charles, it has little to do with upending hegemony. Instead, it’s just the usual male genre bullshit, executed with just enough skill to be considered competent by the standards of contemporary mainstream comics. If it wasn’t about Wonder Woman, nobody would give a crap. As it is, Azzarello and Chiang are working on a character that someone else once actually invested some genius in, and so they get to bask in the wan glow of banal desecration. Good for them. No doubt Azzarello’s Comedian will be similarly daring. It’s a career, I guess.

Metal in Your Bones

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This was first published on Madeloud. It’s part of an ongoing Metal Apocalypse.
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Anti-semitism is very much frowned upon these days, so I don’t often get to see the mass media reduce me to an invidious exploitative stereotype for the amusement and titillation of my peers.

In that sense, the 2009 episode of the TV show Bones titled, “Mayhem on the Cross” was a stimulating novelty. Not that it was anti-semitic — of course not. It was anti-metalhead.

Admittedly, I’m not a pure metalhead — I don’t attend concerts very often, and I listen to lots of non-metallish music, from Mariah Carey to Donovan. Still, I identify sufficiently to have found the Bones episode alternately hysterical and irritating.

Let’s cut to the tape:
The opening Norwegian black metal band doesn’t sound remotely like Scandinavian black metal — the vocals are crappy Eddie Vedder via nu-metal, not black metal’s demonic screech, and the music is lumberingly catchy rather than atmospheric. There’s even a stadium rock adrenaline chorus, for pity’s sake. One of the performers is shown using a chainsaw…an amateurish, anything-goes move that could certainly occur at a punk show, but which just is not black metal at all. The band who played the song is in real life named “Tondra Soul” — and, yeah, black metal bands don’t use “soul” to mean “soulful” and if they want a made-up-language word for “thunder”, they take it from Tolkein, not from fucking Esperanto.

Psychiatrist Lance Sweets more or less correctly characterizes the difference between death and black metal when he explains that, “Death metal is about brutal technical proficiency while black metal is about emotion.” So points for that. But then Sweets goes on to insist that both death and black metal “exploit adolescent feelings of alienation, depression… “ The problem here being that extreme metal isn’t especially aimed at adolescents — at least not by pop music standards. You go to a metal show, you see folks in their twenties and thirties and older — and that’s in the audience, not just on the stage. You want to see young people’s emotions being exploited, you need to go see Beyonce or Lil’ Wayne or Vampire Weekend live. While there are no doubt some teens who love the head-banging, for the most part the alienation and depression in metal are aimed at the adult and the comfortably middle-aged.

One of the characters declares, as if she’s reading from an encyclopedia: “Death metal enthusiasts prefer morbid horror-centric venues for performance.” What? Since when? They’re not theatrical troupes! They’re not combining metal and performance art! They book shows in clubs, for crying out loud!

Expanding on the point above — death metal bands? They don’t wear make-up. That’s black metal bands. Get it straight, people.

Of course, the main point of confusion here is the idea that metal is overall a dangerous, violent subculture. Certainly, Scandinavian metal in the ’90s did involve murder and assault and church burning — but to the best I can tell, that’s largely over. Some performers are still interested in Satanism, but that just makes them irritating blowhards, not a menace to society. As for American extreme metal — I doubt the guys in Cannibal Corpse even trash their hotel rooms, y’know?

But if it knew what it was talking about, it wouldn’t be television. I do wish they’d done enough research to have actual metal on the soundtrack, though. “Tondra Soul” — yeesh.