On Sexual Violence

On reading Grace’s article over at Heroine Content concerning 300 and the opposition she has faced regarding her opinions on Gorgo’s rape by Theron, I was shocked too by the idea that there are still people who cling, at least morally, to notions of rape based in the fight or flight, in overt force. A lack of understanding about the subtle violences of coercion in relation to sex is always an alarming wake up call for me about just how people are kidding themselves in their emotional lives, and the arguments levelled at Grace’ definition expose to me this huge area of grey that still seems to need ironing out. I fully agree with Grace’s definitions of rape, and here’s why.

When I was back in school, a sociology teacher asked all of the class a series of questions to be answered only in our heads. She asked if we'd ever had sex to keep someone happy. If we'd had sex to keep someone with us. If we'd had sex because we didn't want to make someone mad, or because we feared the consequences if we didn’t do it. If we’d had sex not really knowing what we were about to do. If we’d changed our minds about wanting to have sex during the act, but carried on because we thought we had no option. If we’d had sex when we simply weren’t in the mood for it, but our partner was. And most importantly, she asked, in any of those instances, if our partner’s had suggested even a modicum of pressure, of persuasion against our unwillingness, had made us feel a negative consequence might arise from our non-conformity.

Then she asked us whether we could really justify those occasions as being consensual acts of sex, in the full meaning of consent; in the notion that both partners were willing, ready, fully informed and wanting to. We all went a little bit quiet at the indication she was making, at the idea that these cases, in what we viewed as inconsequential moments, rape, in a moral sense, was subtly present.

Its easy to hide behind the notion of rape as a) being a dramatically big event based in overt violence committed by a stranger and b) more likely male on female, in order to protect oneself from the grey areas of our own sex lives, where we may have been victims, or where we may have been perpetrators in the pressures we may exert. A more comprehensive, yet simple understanding of rape in relation to consent forces us to examine ourselves more closely, and perhaps the opposition that Grace’s opinions may get is rooted in personal discomfort. Yet I for one am not ungrateful for the personal discomfort exploring these issues evokes. If we aren’t prepared to examine the psychological violences of coercion in relation to sex, we render ourselves open to becoming victims, and more importantly perpetrators of a form, however small, of sexual violence. To underestimate the importance of fully informed consent in sex is to undermine the act itself, as well as the basic freedom of our sexual partners to make an informed and willing decision.

Any thoughts?

She's like SO whatever....

Just caught the preview pages of Supergirl's appearance in March's issue of The Brave and the Bold at Newsarama. Seems like Waid has caught on to our new Kara... have a look at these two pages....

I couldn't help but laugh. Perez is a great artist, and makes it damned clear that this isn't his projection of sexual fantasy on the page, this is a (17?, I thought she was 16, did I miss a birthday?) teenaged girl who thinks she's a male fantasy. Rather than have Kara situated in a variety of sexual poses, Perez' art works off of Waid's text beautifully, having Kara's flirtaciousness come off as childish as it sounds. Here Kara seems pretty vacuous, audacious, and I have to say pretty amusing in her lack of subtlty. Waid even manages to poke fun at Kara's skimpy costume, and her attempts to use it to get closer to GL. Its a shame that the appearance of Kara outside her own comic is one of a slightly bimbette, almost stupid girl, but then we do have the rest of the issue to have her redeemed. Also interesting is that the following pages (which you can access via the link) have Kara impulsively inserting herself into a crisis, trying to save the day. The naivety of her rescue acts as a nice accompaniment to the rest of her naivety, concerning GL's secret identity, her relationship with Kal, her romantic advances... Its almost a subtle balance between innocence and an attempt at being 'innocence lost'. Kara wants to be sexy and heroic, yet her rather blunderous attempts at both simply suggest her age, and the possibility that one day she'll find more secure ways of doing both.

any thoughts?

alex x

On dying Amazons

With Amazons Attack! just around the corner, I can’t help but find myself thinking back across their Post Crisis history, specifically in terms of their interactions with the rest of the DCU, but also in terms of their more significant storylines within the Wonder Woman title. Wherever the Amazons have appeared in significant numbers in the past, it has been in the context of war, of suffering, of tragedy, and predictably with a high body count. I don’t mean that to sound flippant, in fact I find it disturbing just how often in the past we have been treated to images of hundreds of dignified, strong, intelligent and noble women being slaughtered either by each other or at the hands of the villains of the day. When I see this, it is compounded by the nameless way they have are treated, and also by the way the story of their tragedy has been extended to include yet another degradation. It begs me to ponder; do the Amazons have to die to be interesting? Do they have to die in order to appear outside of the Wonder Woman title, and what does that say for their comparative relationship with ‘Man’s World’? What does this all indicate for representations of women in comic books (when whole nations of them have to die frequently, gratuitously, and sometimes without any particular reason in order to be included in a major storyline)? And perhaps most importantly, will Amazons Attack! carry on that trend? Back when I was a frequent poster on the DC Message Boards there was always frequent discussion on just how many times you can massacre a race of women that has never numbered over more than a few thousand, and still justify that it isn’t gratuitous. Lets have a bit of a history lesson to assess why that discussion has occurred.

Back in War of the Gods, one of the few company crossovers to feature the Amazons to any significant degree, Hippolyta takes a delegation of Amazons on a world tour; their first exchange with the outside world in centuries. During the storyline Circe manages to manipulate their rivals, the Bana Mighdall Amazons into framing the Themyscirans for murder, and also turns Hippolyta into Shim’Tar. During the crossover, a few Amazons die during the conflict, and their relationship with the outside world is damaged by the incident. At the time I remember being irked by the whole thing, most particularly because of the tragic resonance it achieved in the context of their historical suffering at the hands of Herakles. Were I to know it would only be the beginning of a trend, I may have despaired even more.

Before appearing outside of the Wonder Woman title again, the Amazons went through a number of internal conflicts, struggles and invasions, in the space of only a few years at a time. In one of them, Circe yet again decided to manipulate the Bana Mighdall Amazons by sending them to Themyscira to claim the island as their own and then transporting all of the Amazons to a demon dimension where they were forced to band together in their struggle to survive.

It intrigues me here that not only are the Amazons subject to more suffering, but that Circe becomes the symbol of that suffering. I wonder to what extent this trend of tragedy might have been more noticeable had she been a male villain. In fact, during their tenure, other significant Amazon storylines involve them being manipulated by female powers, including Eris and Ariadne. Does the fact that the villains are women make the Amazons’ gratuitous miseries any less so? And do so many really have to die to get panel time?

In their next significant appearance, the Amazons are invaded by Darkseid who invades them purely as an aside in his quest for Godly power. Even the resolution of the conflict revolves around Diana’s persuading him to leave. This is another unfortunate aside in the situation of the Amazons; that they fail to appear in a context outside of Diana, and act as a blank slate for her suffering as well as their own. The body count at the end of this event is incredible, if we’re to go by the art.

Contextually, this particular event is quintessential for what makes me uncomfortable about the kinds of stories the Amazons are included in. It is John Byrne’s introductory arc, and so anything that plays out here is marred by the fact that it is important for him to make a big impression. Indeed, what makes a bigger impression than killing lots of Amazons in a conflict that has nothing to do with them? It’s gratuitous, and what’s more, it’s an event that bears no relevance to future storytelling until Jimenez uses it years later to provide his own massacre of the Amazons with resonance. More infuriating, from what I can remember, the Amazons during Byrne’s story are relatively nameless, identical and in the end ultimately void of anything composing personality, in terms of art as well as writing. The event reeks of shock-value, and provides further material to indicate the Amazons as nothing but cannon fodder in a war fought between Diana and her foes.

The penchant for big Amazonian battles gets picked up again much later with Jimenez’ run on the title, where he manages to massacre them once, and then kill off a few more later. Firstly, we have the Civil War during which the two Amazonian tribes come to blows over tensions exaggerated by Ariadne’s manipulation. A hell of a lot of Amazons die here, and their conflict is resolved with Hippolyta’s abdication and abolition of their monarchy. What matters more with this story, other than the now familiar body count, is that President Lex Luthor uses it to undermine their standing as a peaceful nation in the face of the UN, and Diana’s mission in general. It is a very well written yet horribly annoying plot point that helps to redraw that line between the Amazons and the outside world.


Jimenez follows this up by having the Amazons fight on the side of mankind against Imperiex during Our Worlds At War. In order for the Amazons to appear in this company crossover, they apparently had to barter quite a lot. Not only does Hippolyta die, but she is the only one to do so during the storyline who isn’t given a resurrection at a later date. To add insult to injury, Themyscira is completely decimated during the event, the Amazons are forced to fight alongside Darkseid, and then their sacrifices achieve little panel time other than in the Wonder Woman title anyway. And if you thought that at least this would cement their future relationships with the outside world, you would be sadly wrong. In fact you could, at this point, be forgiven for thinking DC editorial sees it’s Amazons as nothing more than an apparently exponential nation of corpses.


To overcome this, Jimenez makes an important move to representing the Amazons in a context that a) isn’t about war, death or suffering, and b) places them firmly in the DCU in a context which is cooperative, rather than one of necessary difference. He reintroduced them after OWAW with a newly replenished, futuristic, blessed, floating Themyscira (lovingly and patronisingly referred to on the message boards at the time as ‘My Little Pony island’, or the Themysciran Archipelago). This new island paradise was opened to the world as a University for cultural exchange, not just with Man’s World, but across dimensions and worlds. The rebuilding had bonded together the Themysciran and Bana Mighdall Amazons into one nation, represented by Artemis’ and Phillipus’ relatively (if not officially) joint standing as their representatives to the outside world. It was a good move in trying to provide a situation where the Amazons could appear in other comic books without having Wonder Woman attached to them, or marching in line ready for war. Had this particular progression been taken seriously, and applied in the DCU, the theme of tragedy might have been laid to rest, and provided for more varied stories concerning the Amazons, and their place in the world of Man.

But alas, not everyone agreed with that idea, and the Amazons failed to be included outside the Wonder Woman title, and quickly became subject to more massacring.

As soon as Jimenez left, Simonson decided to kill more Amazons in a confusing conflict with something called ‘The Shattered God’ and a Roman Goddess. Again, the Amazons actually play little part in the story other than as targets for a conflict that actually has nothing to do with them, and is certainly not resolved by them. Loeb does the same in his Superman/Batman arc, where the reintroduced Supergirl’s arrival is commemorated by having an army of Doomsday clones attack Themyscira, and the death of Harbinger.


Most recently, Rucka came on board and, despite being one of my favourite Wonder Woman runs, made decisions that further cemented the ‘dead-Amazon’ syndrome. Firstly, he kicked them out of the sky and into US territorial waters. The event put a quick stop to their status as a university of cultural exchange, as they became embroiled in political stalemate with the military surrounding the island. Any concessions concerning previous battles fought together, and any progress supposedly achieved by being a university was undermined by the suspicion they were still treated to by the outside world. Before resolving this, it appears constrictions of the Infinite Crisis company crossover took precedent. Diana’s killing of Max Lord rendered the Amazons the subject of scrutiny and distrust, as well as attack by the OMAC army who went about slaughtering them not just in the pages of Wonder Woman, but Infinite Crisis too. Though well-written, by now I have to say I had grown quite despairing at the sight of yet more Amazons brandishing arms at the sight of invasion, and dying in each others arms. It is only more of a testament to the trend that this conflict was not ended in triumph, but in retreat from the world altogether.

What is promising about Amazons Attack! is that, while it provides a continuation of the above storyline, it also already breaks some of the conventions of prior Amazon appearances. Firstly, it is a storyline that actually centres on them. It is a story that incorporates Diana in a central role, even crosses into the Wonder Woman title. But it is not about her, its about them. Secondly, they have become the invaders, they are going out to meet the outside world, rather than have it trample up the beach or over their philosophical space. Thirdly, it is a storyline touted as having a big impact on the DCU. The idea that the Amazons will be a part of that is a huge change from where they have been before.


Yet the question remains. Do the Amazons have to die to be interesting? Thus far the evidence from DC seems to be an unequivocal yes, and the ‘Lord of the Rings’ scale of the upcoming storyline lends itself to the idea that we may yet see more Amazons dying in each others arms. And I can’t help but wonder what message that conveys.

And I really wish they hadn’t been referred to as ‘sexy aliens’ in Pfeifer’s interview. For crying out loud…

any thoughts?

alex x


go here for an interview with series writer Will Pfeifer

and here for an interview with the series artist Pete Woods, as well as a look at some of the gorgeous art involved.

Katching Up with Kara Part Two: A Matter of Sex Appeal?

Part Two: a matter of Sex appeal?

If I dare to make this point strongly enough, I’d like to hazard a guess that one key issue in the controversy surrounding this Supergirl isn’t just the fact that she’s immature, flippant, arrogant, or has such a seemingly horrendous dark past. Its because since her reintroduction, we haven’t been able to get away from the character’s sexuality.

Initially, I think this was primarily an artistic problem, one that both Turner and Churchill shared. Both portray Kara as unrealistically, perhaps abnormally thin, yet incredibly tall, with doe eyes, full lips, pert breasts, and dressed in a mini skirt that rides as high as the waistband does low. Her poses, more with Turner than with Churchill, were constantly sexualised, and her vacant expressions suggested more porn than heroism. With Churchill the problem has been the adoption of the theme, the cheeky alluring looks, the wafer thin leg poses with hips cocked and skirt flaring to suggest what the fanboys want revealed (pardon the cliché). Its unrealistic, and its concerning considering the age of the character, who started out as only 15, and even now at 16 expresses the kind of emotional immaturity that should lead to a raising of her own specific age of consent until we can be convinced she could take sex seriously. Yet with all that said, if the problem were simply artistic, it would be a clear-cut answer to protest for an art change to something more acceptable, though whether we’d get one I couldn’t guarantee.

The problem now is that it’s not just artistic any more. It’s in the writing. More than that, it’s seemingly in character. In line with the party-girl we’ve got now, Kara now takes to making frequent jokes about her sexuality; teasing Boomer about their suggestive relationship, curving over a pool table and drawing attention to her ‘nice s’, if only for the purpose of warning him its not open for him to joke about. In issue 11, during her audition with the Outsiders, Kara’s doe-eyed expression at being chastised by Nightwing seems to not just be wishful projection on the artists behalf, but an in-character reaction from a girl who has been doodling about her crush on Nightwing and his ‘cute tushie’ since she met him. The faux-innocent sexuality is becoming a part of her persona as we’re meant to accept it. When she cracks the line to Boomer ‘I’m a girl in a tight t-shirt, I can go anywhere I want’, or she tries to argue with him about ‘semi-lucid suspended animation’ making her more than a sixteen-year-old, the optimist in me would like to accept she is displaying a rye sense of humour about human sexuality, but the realist in me recognises the attempt at making Kara sexually viable, or at least present the idea that she thinks she is (as I’m sure many young teens do). As a result it becomes more and more convincing that Kara isn’t being dressed and styled by her artists into wearing skimpy outfits and pouting; she’s dressing and styling herself.

Its this train of thought that makes me worry so completely about the extent to which the ‘fanboyishness’ of the industry filters down onto the page. This isn’t just artists drawing unrealistic women or sexualised images into comics, this is the male fantasy getting written into the text. Its harder to fight for a more realistic, or at least less provocative Kara when the justification for it is becoming a part of the text, when it is seemingly ‘in-character’ for Kara to stand around pouting and posing in knee-high boots and a mini-skirt that shows us her underwear and provoking her older-male cast with innuendo. There’s a transference going on here it seems from writer to character, and the more convinced or interested in the character I become, the harder it becomes to object. To say it another way, to have Kara suddenly (and thankfully) cover up her midriff and start wearing a costume that doesn’t show us her underwear, while a wonderfully and necessary move in the effort to reduce objectified images of women in comics, would now seem out of character for a Kara who apparently seems not to care.
Its at this point I become torn between buying into this Kara and challenging the possible fanboy-service her character has become. I would also like to question my own discomfort. I am fine with a Kara with a dark past. I’m fine with her being obnoxious and flippant and complex, because I want to see where it’s going, and because I find it intriguing. But I am not fine with the sexual element being played up on the page. Why? Maybe I do have my own parameters about what is and isn’t acceptable ‘Supergirl’ behaviour, or maybe I simply don’t trust that this is happening in the spirit of complexity, and is more about writers and artists getting away with creating a male fantasy.

Phew, that’s about as far as I can get at the moment without my mind spinning some more, and
I hope my confusion isn’t too, well, confusing. As ever, any thoughts?

alex x

Katching Up with Kara Part One: Expectation vs Experimentation

Ok. I’m going to start what may promise to be a bit of a long entry with a moment of internet silence, while we all gulp back those initial gut reactions to seeing yet another blog thread with ‘Kara’ in the title. Yes, this shall be another discussion of the current Kara Zor El, otherwise known as Supergirl, and yes, I gather that we (the comic-blog-reading folk among us) are probably quite sick of these by now. And no, I can’t promise you originality. All I can do is give you my honesty on a subject that has bugged me since the revamp, and continued to as its been argued so heatedly about it across the net. (For those of you wanting to read up on what’s gone before, hop on over to ‘When Fangirls Attack’, you’ll find more than your pleasure.)

Phew, and so after my premise, I guess I want to get right stuck in there, though I fear my ideas might be a bit disparate, and I’m also about two or three issues behind (my most recent Supergirl issue was 12 due to a seriously uncooperative comic shop here in Palmerston North), so bear with me and feel free to give me some info on what I’m missing.


Part One: Experimentation vs Expectation

I can’t help feeling a whole lot of what seems to be the problem with latest incarnation of Supergirl is this massive disjuncture between expectations of what the Supergirl title should invoke (sweetness, honour, heroism, a female readership(?) being among the many debated points recently across the net) and the experimentation that seems to be going on with Kara as a character by her writers (roughly and concisely described in a number of places as ‘Paris Hilton in a cape’).

So far, or at least in the past few months, the Kara we have been presented with has been a ridiculously complicated character; a sixteen year old female alien who has arrived on Earth after a period of semi-lucid suspended animation in order to carry out her destiny of killing her younger (and now older) cousin Kal-El only to find that she a) doesn’t really want to, b) he just happens to be the greatest super-ist hero on the planet and c) she is expected to inexplicably become a part of that legacy with her newfound awesome power.

As a result of these intricacies the Kara we have is petulant, avoidant, often sullen yet with a wicked sense of humour, considerably flippant and yet continuously curious, and tortured over what her life should be about. She’s not sure if she wants to be a hero, and for the past few months at least has tried her hand at a number of different projects trying to figure out what she wants. What differentiates hers from any other super-hero coming-of-age seems to be a) the length of time she is taking to ‘find herself’, and b) just how unattractive a person she often becomes along her journey. Lets face it, this girl isn’t the poster girl for good, or even cool. She swears like a fiend in front of her elders, seemingly to impress them, flaunts her sexuality as ‘jailbait’, picks fights with seemingly every other hero she meets, avoids her older heroic cousin, complains, moans, and generally bumbles through life with no tact and little finesse. This isn’t the Supergirl of your childhood folks, and I’m not even sure she’s meant to be, or if she’ll ever get there.

The thing is, as a character I find Kara fascinating. I don’t like her, in fact I would find her obnoxious arrogance grating on a real-life person or friend. But I am intrigued by her, and I am interested in where she’s going. What’s more, I enjoy reading her, because the creative vision behind her does seem to be consistent in its difference. It would be simple to say she’s just a complicated teenager. She’s not, she’s the horribly contested site of multiple identities, she’s from an entirely different planet, one she remembers, she is time and age displaced, in a body that may possibly be too young for the foreign intellect of her mind, yet hopelessly emotionally inexperienced. She’s got two completely different legacies placing demands on her, a past that seems riddled with murder, bullying and darkness, and a possible future at the side of one of the greatest heroes of all time. She is neither child nor adult in the conventional sense, yet she straddles too many borders to be simply be a teenager, or even simply a teenage superhero. Is it any wonder that as a result she is impulsive and demanding, at times hedonistic and at others self-involved with melancholy? I don’t know, all of this makes sense in context to me, as much as it can anyway. The literary license here is that the writers are in a lovely position of being able to write however they wish; the only convention for an alien character like Supergirl comes from the girls we’ve been familiar with in the past, and those have quickly been rendered irrelevant to the girl we’re meeting now.

And therein lies the problem; that she’s Supergirl, and this isn’t the Supergirl we’ve been expecting, or been used to. Supergirl, in her many incarnations, has tended to be incredibly heroic, sometimes vulnerable, but strong-willed and minded, even Post Crisis. Even Matrix and Linda, with all their individual complexities (Protoplasmic shape-shifter and Earth-Angel) seemed more solid Supergirls, and shared in common with their Pre-Crisis predecessor this iconic sense of goodness it seems. And here we have the current Kara who isn’t sure if she’s coming or going, and sure doesn’t care much what we think about it. There is an expectation here, and I stand to be corrected if anyone disagrees, that whoever wears the Supergirl title, the cousin of Kale-El, should be good, should be optimistic. Not necessarily uncomplicated, but in no uncertain sense, a likeable character. And this Kara is seriously undermining that.

The question becomes whether or not the Supergirl moniker should be one that is allowed such radical reinterpretation as, say, the Green Lantern moniker, which survives because it is allowed the idiosyncrasies of its different title bearers. It is written into that mythos that there will be many (in the corporation at least) and not simply one (and while fan divisions over the ‘true lantern’ can be strong, it is a division that is catered for by the writing). Whereas Supergirl doesn’t seem to be intended as a legacy. If it were, we wouldn’t keep erasing previous Supergirls from continuity. And it therefore becomes more important to establish, apparently (and I’m going mostly on the seeming contempt people are having for the changes so far) what the parameters for the character should be. Should Supergirl always be heroic? Should she be likeable? Should she be a character girls want to read, and how on Earth do you define that quality anyway? The feeling I get here is that fans are saying there are or should be limits to what the Supergirl identity is constituted by, and that arrogant flippant party-girls like the current Kara are unacceptable.

The disjuncture between expectation and the experiment that seems to be going on here, and I do believe it is a character experiment, gets a fair nod within the text of the book, no more so than in the recent Terra guest-issue, where Terra and Kara clash over what Supergirl ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ be. In an earlier issue, a young girl turns to Kara and says ‘Supergirl shouldn’t wear black. Too dark’, another self-referential nod to the dark direction the character has taken with regards to her past, and also her flippant skirting of the no-killing rule. Its nods like these that lend me a certain faith in the creative team, an awareness that what’s going on here isn’t your usual Supergirl, and that maybe that might be ok. As Kara says herself in issue 10 ‘Be yourself. It makes life a hell of a lot easier.’ This Supergirl is on a journey, and at some point she will find herself, and her purpose, and her place, and I will be intrigued to see where that is. What matters is whether enough fans are invested in this Kara to see where she ends up, and whether or not there is going to be some fusion of horizons in terms of the girl we have now, and the Supergirl that we want to see. Inevitably, that fusion is never going to satisfy everyone, but I am intrigued to see how you get from the vitriolic dislike I can see fans are having with the current Kara, to something that is broadly less controversial, and still keep that a natural progression of the character we have at the moment. And are we willing to wait the length of time that might require to happen? Is there really enough agreement on what the ‘Supergirl parameters’ are to produce that kind of result, and should we be revising those parameters or not? While I would like to suggest that we should be, I understand that has more to do with the fact that I am less invested in an idea of what Supergirl should be, than finding out where the writers will take this one.