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And before people rush to tell me Millar also "raped" Apollo and another Baddie it all basically happened off-camera and pretty implicately. Plus, they were gay anyway, so that was Okay. How many straight men have you ever seen raped in a comic?
But how many women have been raped in comics, really? I ask because outside that Authority storyline, I can't really think of any. I think you are spot on in suggesting that rape in comics echoes depiction of rape in other media (ie: that male rape is rarely a subject of comment). I'm not going to defend Millar (largely because I don't think he's any good), but neither do I think his shock treatment of women is representative of modern comics.
In my opinion, the writers who pointed out to Gail that male characters suffer too were half right. I think most comics characters are made to suffer at some point. The difference is in the manner of the suffering. Apollo notwithstanding, it tends to be female characters who are given sexual (or reproductive) suffering, while male characters just tend to get the snot beat out of them.
But the topic abstract is specifically misogyny, and whether comics in specific are misogynistic. I find it difficult to accept acknowledgements of sexuality or sexual situations in fiction as inherently misogynistic, even in something as questionably handled as Millar's Authority or Ultimates. I think there's a tendency for that word to be thrown around by people opposed to any presentation of sexuality that doesn't turn them on (ie: if I like it it's erotica/if you like it it's porn). Are any of us in any doubt that the perpetrators of abuse in these books are not meant to be seen as Bad Guys, who will eventually get their come-uppance. I don't think many female characters in modern comics are given sexual suffering, if only because most publishers shy from that material. If we focus on reproductive suffering in metaphor, it A) doesn't necessarily follow that this is misogynistic, and B) makes a considerable amount of sense considering that men do not have wombs, with all the literary, spiritual and cultural baggage that entails.
But at the same time, it was _always_ the women who were getting trapped in their bikinis against an entire mystic wall of fleshy arms that groped them up and so on.
But I would have to disagree that a sexualized sequence such as this is necessarily misogynistic. It seems we're getting into very sketchy territory, where deliberate fantasy sequences such as the one you describe (and fiction is, if nothing else, outlet for fantasy) are automatically given negative valuation if the object of sensualization is a woman. I don't think slash fiction, much of which deals with power differentials and/or fantasy/bondage sequences is necessarily anti-male. It would be one thing if a pattern was established, but in the case of Claremont I'm not sure you can do this.
Claremont was an equal-opportunity 'offender' in this regard - witness the overt sexualization of Nightcrawler under his pen or the numerous fantasy illustrations of a bare-chested Colossus ripping tree stumps from the ground with his bare hands. The male X-Men seemed to wind up in loincloths as often as the women found themselves in bikinis. For every wall of arms moment, there's a half-naked Magneto bound in the Savage Land, or a loinclothed Wolverine tied to a cross, or a Havok wandering the beach in a tiny Speedo.
As the X-Men under Claremont was, among other things, an obvious and fairly overt homosexual metaphor, I don't think this is entirely surprising. But as you admit, the female characters were all more powerful than the male characters, both in terms of physical power but also mental ability. It's very difficult to make a misogynist reading of Claremont's X-Men stick for these reasons.
Would comics really be enhanced by showing more male rape?
If it's going to be treated on the level of Millar's spousal abuse plot or Winnick's gay bashing, then no.
But more to the point, what mainstream comics would Barbelithers consider misogynist, and why? |
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