So I took some time and read an article that's been floating around the internet for a while. It's called Goodbye to Comics, by a rather sharp lady named Valerie D'Orazio. She's got a history in the comics biz and she's working on a new Cloak and Dagger series for Marvel as we speak. I'll warn you, her article is not for the faint of heart because it's damn brutal in its honesty, but it's worth reading a hundred times over.

She makes some interesting points in here, and she also brings up something that made me stop and think a bit. You have to read between the lines a bit because she makes a point of not naming names, but it seems she was part of the team involved with the production of DC's Identity Crisis from a few years back. At the time, I thought this was a really good book, and in a lot of ways (even upon reflection) it still is. With one little glaring issue that just stared me in the face tonight.

The issue? The rape of Sue Dibny.

In the context of the book, what happens is this: Sue Dibny is the normal, non-powered wife of long time "Justice Leaguer" The Elongated Man. Ralph and Sue Dibny were long portrayed as a great couple, the envy of the superhero community . . . a long, stable, loving relationship that every other cape wished they had.

In the course of the miniseries it's revealed that one of the League's old enemies, the original Dr. Light, managed to make it up to the Watchtower while Sue was there alone and raped her. What follows is a bunch of controversy, up to and including Zatanna magically scrambling Dr. Light's brains so he ends up with a mystic lobotomy out of the whole deal. And the story goes on from there into a murder mystery, etc, etc.

But here's my thing, about the rape of Sue, and something that just never clicked in my head until now . . . why her?

Why a rape? Because it was unforgivable? Something that would play on the heartstrings? I could almost buy that, save for the fact that it's shown in a hideously graphic detail. It's something depicted in such a manner that'd give even the most hardcore among us pause. I remember seeing it at the time and uttering a quick "Jesus Christ" under my breath. At the time, I took it in the stride of the book because the damn thing's really unrelenting in just how harsh it can be. But looking back right now, having read Valerie's recounting of her time at DC, I just have to think, "Did they have to go there?"

So why a rape? Because it was dark, gritty? Because it was just that hard? Okay, fine. You wanna market the thing. You want to turn in the meanest of the mean in an age of falling, flailing innocence. All right, if that's the case, my question is this: why did it have to be the rape of a woman?

Just stop and think about that one for a second. It happens so often in fiction these days, we barely seem to notice it. We accept it. Woman gets raped. It's part of the story. It's an awful, awful thing, yeah . . . but we just seem to accept it as something that happens to women. Yet I rarely if ever see it pointed toward the men. And I thought about it from that perspective, how powerless it would make a man feel, how humiliated, how angry, how wounded . . . and somehow, deep as I try to be, it occurs to me I just never really thought about that before. How for some reason fiction had tuned me to the point that the rape of a woman was somehow commonplace in fiction and therefore something that could almost be expected to happen, but the same horrible thing happening to a man was unthinkable, because . . . well, I can't even say.

I wonder about that, right now. Men just can't be shown to be victims. It's almost not allowed. Right now, part of me is balking at it, because it just doesn't work that way. It's icky, right? It's out of bounds. It's something to make the reader uneasy.

Edit: Needed to expand on this one because I didn't think I made my point clearly the first time, and it's this: it's not that it would somehow be better for a man to be raped in a story, or that it's "equal time" or something, it's that it's something that just would not be allowed. The unspoken rule is that you're not supposed to leave a man powerless and victimized in a story, but a woman? Fair game. That's what's making me irritated here.

I feel like while I understood the position of Gail Simone when she undertook the Women in Refrigerators website a long while back, I didn't really get it. I thought I did. Even now, even reflecting on what Valerie wrote and all that and thinking I've had a revelation, I know somehow I still don't get it because there's that horrible little shred of me that's more willing to accept the rape of a woman in the course of a fiction that the same fate befalling a man.

She seems to be on to something. Maybe somewhere we accept it because it's salacious, and on some twisted level we consider it bordering on the erotic. Just even typing that makes me a little sick to my stomach, honestly. You know, in the course of reading Identity Crisis, I thought it was something of a revelation, a line being crossed and a daring story being told. But it didn't give me half the revelation that reading Valerie's article gave me. It's made me consider the stories I read in a new light.

Yeah, stories involving rape are important in fiction. They honestly are. Shit happens in life, and sometimes the stories reflect that. But writers and the audience really need to consider why such a hard and unforgiving element is included in a story. Some things aren't toys. You're never going to see a groundbreaking story involving Holocaust slapstick, you know? There's never going to be a happy whimsical romp though war torn Rwanda that's going to represent anything but the worst of us. So when you pick up a story element like rape, understand you're dealing with something that's pretty damn radioactive in a fictional sense: handle it with the respect it deserves, or you're just spraying something poisonous all over the place.

Maybe I need to reassess what I read from now on. I'm thinking back to stuff like Wanted and old time Swamp Thing and such, and putting it into perspective. I dunno. What we take in when it comes to our stories, it says a lot about who we are, and who we want to be.

Something I need to think about, I guess. Oh Superman . . . where are you now?

Current Mood: contemplative