Hey lean in, we don’t live in a post gender society so we should review books that are targeting one gender, particularly the genders underrepresented.

Let me begin by saying a lot of people are arguing in favor of and against what is being called bookshelf segregation/desegregation. First let’s talk about the language being used and then the issued. I’m very uncomfortable with calling this desegregation of any kind. This language is usually associated with race and I’m not sure that invoking it for inanimate objects is such a good idea. I feels like those who use it are making light of the serious implications of apartheid states like Israel and formerly South Africa and the United States segregation policy

The Independent announced they will not review books that are specifically marketed to one gender (they articulate this with the binary). They also discuss the use of gender-neutral books for children. On Role Reboot, Soraya Chemaly makes a compelling argument in support of this. Additionally, to publishing houses (Paragon and Usborne) have said they will not publish books with titles “for boys” or “for girls” Groovy.

But as Chemaly points out we’re looking at 100 years of gender basis in books for children that is a long damn time. Chemaly then discusses the social constructs that are race and gender, but also that these constructs are used on meta filters. We gender and race everything, usually with the preferred gender and race being male and white. However, these constructs being used as a filter we filter everything through results in the policing of race and gender. Are you presenting the social constructs that are prescribed to you to the standards set forth by society? If not, someone will let you know.

Chemaly argues that this move opens up the way to have conversations like this that are perceived as non-threatening. She also notes that parents who try to raise their children gender neutral have to deal with cultures that are less understanding. She also notes the damage done to children because of what gendered books teach them, for example the peak age of political ambition for girls is 9; boys continue to be confident to the extreme. Chemaly also discusses the pushback she has encountered when trying to advocate for the post-gendered. Chemaly seems to be making the argument to move to a gender neutral society, at least a gender neutral book publishing society.

So what is my problem? Well, women, girls, and transgender people are underrepresented in books, and as Chemaly notes the argument that gets through around a lot is “boys won’t read books if the protagonist isn’t a boy.” I give zero fucks.

Let me explain. We will never live in a post-gender or a post-racial world. I know some smart women who discuss what a world without gender would look like, and it isn’t possible unless we burn everything down, erase everyone’s mind, and start again, but even then in order to not fall into the same old gender roles we would have to devise a new system, which means our gender constructs would influence a new gender or neutral gender division, which would become the new gender structure. Take a minute to pull the pieces of your mind back together.

Personally, I think we should aim to raise our children in a more gender neutral way. That said because we can’t escape gender we can’t be gender blind and assume everyone else will be. What do I mean, well, more men are going to be published than women, more protagonists are going to be men, the male perspective will continue to be the stand in for the human experience. Because of all this and more, we need books that focus on gender, subvert gender, and just play with gender roles (and race, and sexual orientation). We can’t sit by passively and let the status quo continue to be unquestioned and pretend it is fine because the words “for girls” isn’t in the title. Books (and everything else) will continue to be gendered. The boy characters are going to have more active roles on children’s television shows unless we choose to part from that trope regardless if he wears blue or pink. Strong women leads will continue to be smart and problem causing support characters like Jessie (Saved by the Bell), Andrea (90210), Hermione (Harry Potter), and Princess Leia (Star Wars), or just the dead girlfriend (women in refrigerators) and yeah, I’m look at John Green’s Looking to Alaska (excellent book about the expectations we assign to other people and specifically our inability to see others as complete individuals) and Faulkner. Those are the roles women play you can add mother/lover in there too, and when including racial discussion break out the Jezebel, Sapphire, and Mammy. Unless of course the story is about women then they get to be more like real people or in some cases a cautionary tale…DON’T EVER be a woman and HAVE SEX IS ONE OF THESE NARRATIVES! It’s like the horror movie rule.

Harry Potter was supposed to be a girl, but Rowling was told boys wouldn’t read the book. The Hunger Games is wildly popular with a woman protagonist. So it is possible to engage readers of all races, ages, and genders, but we have to decide (as Collins did) that we want women to be represented. That women can lack the traditional qualities assigned by gender and instead hold qualities assigned to other genders.

So I’m down for more gender neutral books, but I think there should be more responsibility of the publishers to publish books that focus on the genders, races, sexual orientations, etc. that are underrepresented. In turn, those books need to be reviewed, and then read by the masses.

Rape as motivation for our heroes.

 

Personally, I think this is lazy writing because it is completely baseless. Sexual assaults result in trauma and PTSD with years of ramifications. Most survivors need therapy and those who don’t seek help often have long reaching scars. So rape in a comic book where it is a big deal for one story arch, but then the girlfriend is killed so the story is over or if she is one of the few to survive then the trauma is over in the next arch. Nope, just not the way it works.

There are two rape tropes commonly employed in media. One trope is called “gratuitous rape” because it doesn’t really progress the plot because we’re not working through sexual assaults depictions in media, how survivors navigate the healing process, etc. Rape for the sake of rape. The other is rape of girlfriend/mother/some woman close to the usually male hero. This has such an impact on our hero because how dare someone do this to him (wait, what?) because that is what this is about our male hero and his property. This only works because these women are seen as property of the male character essentially they are props.  Anita Sarkeesian does some videos on video game tropes; this is the one on women and violence in video games. Often, if the woman survives the trauma, it doesn’t impact her down the road because she doesn’t have feelings except those that impact the hero. She is a nothing but a foil for the hero so her thoughts and feelings come and go like the wind.

So why are we talking about this, again? Because comicbeat.com ran an interview by Heidi MacDonald with John Romita Jr. Romita was approached by Mark Miller (kind of known for his sexual depictions of and violent against women in his comics) to draw Kick-Ass. Romita is well known and has worked for the major companies. His contract with Marvel just ended. The interview included a discussion of the toning down of the violence for the second film. The reviews I’ve read for the second movie have been pretty positive noting that the film passes the Bechdel test. I’m under the impression that it is Hit Girl’s story about navigating adolescence and being a superhero.

Below is the question and answer that has caused some controversy:

The Beat: As you may know, there’s been a huge uproar recently about something Mark [Miller] said. There were some concerns about how in the comic there is a rape scene and in the movie they did tone it down and—

John Romita, Jr: Wait a minute, there was no rape scene in the book. There was an intimidation of what could happen and what happened but you never saw a rape scene. It was foul language and it was violence to a lady, she gets hit. But there was no rape scene. I get a kick out of having been sent emails that said I can’t believe you depicted a rape scene in your book [because] it never happened. So I need to clarify that, yes we touched on it, and we came close to it. But we didn’t show it and we would never show that. Yet we did show children getting attacked and that’s rough. I can only qualify this, by first of all, I haven’t seen what Mark has said or written, I don’t know what the controversy is. I just know Mark is a sweetheart and a good man, a good father and a good husband. So I don’t know what he said. If it was taken wrong, so be it. If he said something wrong I’m sure he will correct it. I don’t know what was said. I do know this, I felt uncomfortable about doing scenes about children getting hurt. I felt uncomfortable about the thought of a woman getting attacked. None of which I haven’t seen on television, soap operas, in magazines, and I don’t think that we put anything that was so shocking but again, I had nightmares the first time I saw a rape scene in a movie, I had nightmares the first time I saw a kid get hurt. That’s me on a personal basis. I can close my eyes and imagine my son or wife getting hurt and it makes me come to tears. So that goes without saying.

But there’s nothing that we did that was so outrageous and I again, if I had a choice of not showing the children getting shot, maybe I [would do] the scene differently. Mark didn’t ask me to show them getting blown apart like that, I choose that way and again maybe I would do it differently, I don’t know. Second guessing is the worst thing I could possibly do, and I appreciated all of the input into it but again we did not show a woman getting raped, nor would we.

The Beat: Fair enough.

John Romita, Jr: I don’t begrudge people’s opinions, again you can watch something on TNT or Spike TV or especially on HBO or any cable network or any DVD that would shock anybody in any circumstances. Look at The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I can’t watch that scene.

The Beat: Very unpleasant, yes.

John Romita Jr: So people have to keep things in context and keep things relative. What did Mark say that was so shocking?

The Beat: He said that he felt that rape was a means of showing how bad the villain was and he compared it to decapitation, but as it was pointed out, rape is not the same as decapitation. People don’t say, oh what was she wearing when she got decapitated? I think it’s partly a very valid criticism. I think you need to address aspects of rape culture, but Mark says things and a line in an interview should not be the sum total of how he is judged. I think he should be judged on his body of work and his work is sometimes very difficult and [problematic]. It has been very much in the news recently, and I appreciated you taking on all questions here about it.

John Romita, Jr: Not a problem. I am involved in it as he is. I did the artwork for it. But again there was no rape scene. It needs to be hit on that there was no graphic rape scene.

Ok, so a few things. The images above are the scenes in question. Sure, we don’t see what happened to Katie (yes, the character has a name, which no one seems to know). But the assumed scene not shown is the gang rape of Katie by the big bads. But let’s go over this briefly. Miller claimed the non-shown rape scene demonstrated the level of badness of the villain, and The Beat does well in articulating the critique of Miller’s response. Miller has a history of work that does women poorly and is hella homophobic.

However, I’d like to talk about Romita’s response. I think first we should look at the language. Nothing pisses me off more than using language the places the responsibility on the victims such as “getting”. Getting implies action. So when the subject is the victim then the victim is given the role of actor. For example, “Katie getting raped by a gang of villains” has Katie in the actor role and the bad guys as the object. Now, “Katie was being raped by a gang of villains” puts the sentence in the passive which makes Katie passive and it doesn’t read as if she is responsible for her own rape. Just saying it is hard to take men seriously who want to talk about how rape isn’t a big deal like it is the same as a little girl who happens to be a superhero getting punched in the face.

Which brings me to the next issue. Stop. Just stop equating sexual violence with other kinds of violence especially in a medium where women are routinely victimized as a means for the male hero to develop. If rape is going to be used as a motivating factor, why not rape the male hero? Why wasn’t Kick-Ass or one of his male BFFs raped? Some of the bad guys were in prison. Is it impossible to imagine they might participate in the rape or sexual degradation of other males? No, Katie was picked because women get raped (intentional language).

Additionally, saying someone else did it first isn’t an excuse. If anything, shouldn’t as a creator you be striving to do something different? But yeah, rape is regularly used as a plot device. You know who did it well? General Hospital. I know a lot of men read this blog, but hold on it is a good point. GH is a soap opera, and my mom’s favorite. She loved Luke and Laura, whose wedding was the most watched show for like years, people still talk about it. However, Luke raped Laura, and then they fell in love over time. That’s pretty problematic because men can’t just rape women and then women fall in love with them. That is an awful and dangerous plot. It wasn’t immediate, but regardless, that isn’t the story arch that does rape well. Luke and Laura have a son, Lucky, and he falls in love with Liz (so many L names). Liz is raped by a stranger (statistically low probability), and through this Lucky learns about his father raping his mother. The fallout from this went on for years. It was one of the most complex and well done stories I’ve ever seen. Why? Because it focused on the victims and the perpetrator, all of them including their families, because the rape wasn’t just one episode, the impacts of it continued for decades. Because that is how trauma works. Years would pass and no one mention it, then all of a sudden Liz would be working in the hospital and triggered. So to Miller and Romita, I say, if you’re going to do it you better do it well.

Romita also references The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There is a graphic and horrific gang rape scene in the book. I imagine they toned it down for the film, but I haven’t seen it. The novel was written by Stieg Larsson who witnessed the gang rape of an acquaintance where he did nothing to help her. Days later feeling so guilty he found Lisbeth and begged her for forgiveness, which she refused. That is why he wrote the book. He wanted to write a character that was empowered to absolve him of his own guilt. Again, Miller and Romita, what did the rape of Katie provide?

The last thing that may have pissed me off the most in Romita’s response was about his son and wife. You see it hurts him so much to think someone might rape his wife or hurt his son. Take a moment to pull yourself together, tears and pearl clutching. *Sarcasm* This is the same shit the women hear from the menfolk all the time in reproductive health and violence against women debates. As a man you may one day know a woman who something awful has happened to so best protect and infantilize them as a monolith. Fuck you very much. There is this wacky theory where women are people. Essentially, this argument that “I have a wife/mother/daughter/third grade teacher who was a woman” makes women props see the beginning of this post. Women only matter as much as they matter to the men in their lives. The scenes above also show Kick-Ass blaming himself because you know Katie experiencing sexual assault is all about him.

I am by no means rejecting the just of rape in media. It can be very effective, but tread lightly. If you’re going to employ this then make sure you do it well and complete. You will need a few things: complex and completely developed female characters (if you’re going to rape a woman in your media), an understanding of sexual violence, and basic understandings of human interactions. Miller and Romita’s use of rape is lazy and pretty offensive once they start talking about it.