AGAIN, DANGEROUS EQUITY PT. 3

Just a quick follow-up to this quote from John W. Campbell Jr. in the last essay--

A bum of Italian ancestry is a W; a bum of Jewish ancestry is a K, and a bum of Negro ancestry is a N.

In that essay I observed that this statement, by itself, is not an indicator of true racism. It suggests that the speaker is aware of the basic truth that every ingroup- be it racial, religious, ethnic or political-- has its share of "good apples" and "bad apples." This is such a commonplace to verge on truism, though it's still better than the sort of identity politics that extends the grace of great suffering even upon the rottenest apples in the barrel.

In that essay, I defended that one statement, though I concurred with Alex Nevala-Lee that other Campbell statements were indefensible. But now I'll point out that even though I believe that Campbell's statement as it stands has a basic logical truth, it's utterly useless in a societal sense.

Obviously, Chris Rock can get away with telling a largely black audience that some black people really are "niggahs," because of the way they act. And one can find no small quantity of other examples in which a member of an ingroup uses a slur to apply to himself, but would not accept hearing the same slur from a member of an outgroup.

It's all but impossible for a member of an outgroup-- as WASP Campbell would have been to the three groups he references-- to use any given slur to apply only to the rotten apples of a particular ingroup. The assumption will always be that the slur is being used across the board, and this applies as much to people who claim marginalized status as to anyone else. To cite a personal example, I once happened to provoke the ire of a black panhandler by simply looking in his direction. His precise motives for calling me a nigger I'll never know, but I would guess that-- aside from hoping I'd throw money at him to get rid of his odious presence-- he felt he was getting even with flinging at me an epithet used against his people. Further, I don't think he was using the epithet purely against me; he almost certainly would have used the insult against any white person who ticked him off.

So Campbell's rationale, while consistent logically on its own, has no use-value within culture as a whole. Obviously the only real societal solution of the problem of ingroup epithets is that no one, even without the ingroup, ought to use them. However, making a taboo of any word insures that its power will become even stronger, so neither general nor specific taboos have any use-value either.

AGAIN, DANGEROUS EQUITY PT. 2

Following up directly on PT. 1--

As I said, Nevala-Lee's evidence from the final chapter of ASTOUNDING leaves no doubt in my mind that John W. Campbell Jr. was more than a casual racist. However, there's one citation Nevala-Lee tosses out as if it proved the case for racism as much as, say, the editor stating that "the Negro does not learn from example."

In a mid-1960s letter (page 360), Campbell justifies the use of racial epithets to describe specific individuals within a given ethnicity who are what Campbell calls "bums." And while I don't think I have any overly sensitive readers of this blog (mostly because I don't usually have any), I will palliate the editor's offensive language with the use of initials in place of words:

A bum of Italian ancestry is a W; a bum of Jewish ancestry is a K, and a bum of Negro ancestry is a N.

As I said, Nevala-Lee presents this bit of evidence as if it supported his case as well as the one about Negroid learning capacity.

In truth, it does not, and it coincidentally bears a strong resemblance to the train of comedic logic used by Chris Rock in stand-up routines like this one.

Now, since Nevala-Lee presents other evidence that Campbell did not confine his application of racial epithets only to persons who sinned against probity in some way, one may decide to consider the "bums only" argument moot, since it was being made by a racist. I don't consider it so, although I will cheerfully agree that Campbell probably only used the argument as a justification of his general racism.

However, Nevala-Lee's uncritical citation of this passage indicates to me that he's not capable of sussing out the difference between the statements "Everyone of Race X is a N" and "Only rotten people in Race X are Ns."

And that, without belaboring the point any further, constitutes negative equity: the use of accusations of unfairness to perpetuate unfairness.

Case closed.

AGAIN, DANGEROUS EQUITY PT. 1

To preface this essay, I'll quote myself once more on the topic of negative and positive equity:

'In finance the word "equity" transmuted from connoting a principle of social fairness to something closer to a properly modulated exchange of capital.  The financial term has also begotten the offspring "positive equity" and "negative equity." On this site I found a felicitously simple definition of these secondary terms: from the point of view of a bank, "positive equity adds value to the bank, while negative equity takes value away"... In short, "positive equity" is achieved when someone points out a genuine abuse of fairness, while "negative equity" is achieved when someone uses the concept of fairness incorrectly, to be unfair to someone else.'

In Part 2 of January's essay-series EMANICIPATION VS. FREEDOM,  I commented on the opening chapters of Alex Nevala-Lee's ASTOUNDING. I commented upon the promising nature of a book on the "neglected topic" of the effect of John W. Campbell's editorial reign at ASTOUNDING SCI-FI, but I also found fault with the author's need to "virtue signal" on what Campbell should or should not have done in his heyday with respect to racial matters.

As I've now finished the book, my early anticipations of the work's quality as a cultural biography of the men profiled was fully justified. Further, though I do not retract anything I wrote about Nevala-Lee's opening remarks, I should note that he does not "virtue signal" throughout the text, which would certainly have damaged the credibility of the work. Only in the last chapter (not counting an epilogue) does Nevala-Lee substantially return to the topic of "race in modern America" that he raised in the first sections.

In my remarks, I made this statement:

Campbell may have been racist in specific ways-- and this is something Nevala-Lee may well be able to demonstrate in future chapters-- but he certainly was not racist because he didn't have some visionary apprehension of another generation's concept of equity.

In that last chapter-- titled "Twilight" after one of Campbell's most famous short stories, and referencing the editor's declining years and death-- Nevala-Lee does indeed demonstrate that John W. Campbell was more than a casual racist. To be sure, I had heard the accusation once or twice from other sources, though I personally would not have been able to weigh in with any informed opinion. I had read a fair number of Campbell's reactionary editorials from the last decade of his life, when ASTOUNDING had been remolded into ANALOG. Said editorials usually stayed away from the topic of race, though I do remember one essay in which Campbell inveighed against the "burn baby burn" politics of Stokely Carmichael and gave his approval to the accomodationist approach of Martin Luther King Jr. And Nevala-Lee does not reference Campbell's editorials either, finding more than circumstantial evidence both in Campbell's letters and in anecdotes from people who knew the editor. There is, for instance, more than enough evidence to state that Campbell nurtured an animus against the Negro race, and that even some of his favorable judgments-- as when he told Jewish writer William Tenn that he Campbell considers the Jews "homo superior"-- were also couched in racist diatribes. In my earlier essay I scoffed at Nevala-Lee for suggesting that Campbell could have made any difference to American racial politics in the 1940s with his little SF-magazine, and I still scoff at that. However, I also argued:

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were marginal changes that went against the cultural grain, such as Sidney Poitier movies and the presence of non-white heroes in ensembles like those of I SPY, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and Marvel Comics's THE AVENGERS. During this period, perhaps one might fairly fault a given editor or writer for keeping things too WASPy

And, mirable dictu, one anecdote attests to Campbell's having resisted the currents of the new cultural paradigm, in that he reportedly refused to publish Samuel R. Delany's NOVA because it had a non-white protagonist.

So, it would appear, from everything I've summarized about Nevala-Lee's disclosures, that the balance of his complaints against Campbell should constitute "positive equity." And for the most part, this holds true. Except---

See Part 2.

EMANCIPATION VS. FREEDOM PT. 2

At the end of Part 1 I said:

In Part 2 I'll address some of the ways current popular fiction devotes itself to universal recognition /equity without showing any insight as to the "quality" of said emancipatory representations.

I decided to put off the examples I had in mind at the time in favor of a quick look at an example of what I've called "negative equity" not in popular fiction, but in a non-fictional work about popular fiction.

I've just started reading Alec Nevala-Lee's 2018 book ASTOUNDING, which purports to chart the historical development of American science fiction through the medium of the magazine ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION. The book's subtitle specifies that Nevala-Lee concentrates on the intersections of three major figures of science fiction-- writers Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, and ASTOUNDING editor John W. Campbell Jr.-- and one figure of cultish notoriety, L. Ron Hubbard. Having finished only the prologue and first chapter, I have no doubt that he's put a huge amount of research into the lives of these four intersecting figures, and as of this reading, it seems like this is going to be a very good read into a very neglected topic.

In the prologue, however, Nevala-Lee feels the need to "virtue signal," by attacking early science fiction for being too WASPy:

Campbell's writers and their characters were almost exclusively white, and he bears part of the blame for limiting the genre's diversity. At best, this was a huge missed opportunity. ASTOUNDING, which questioned so many other orthodoxies and systems of power, rarely looked at racial inequality, and its lack of historically underrepresented voices severely constrained the stories that it could tell.

This is, in a word, garbage. I might qualify it as well-intentioned garbage, but it's still garbage.

That all or most of Campbell's writers were white is a half-truth. Some writers, like Isaac Asimov, were descendants of European Jews, so they did look "white," though by virtue of their descent they were not necessarily deemed "white" by the time's more conservative standards. One can certainly argue that even Jewish writers still created characters who were dominantly WASPs, which may be an overstatement, though not by much.

But Nevala-Lee's attempt to place blame bears no relation to any truth, save that of ideologues who mouth truisms like, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." To such ideologues, it's always easy to tell someone else to sacrifice their livelihoods on the altar of social justice. If John W. Campbell bears "part of the blame," then it's a blame shared by not only popular culture of the thirties and forties but also the majority of so-called "high culture." During these two decades, and most of the next two as well, there was essentially no mass market for non-white characters. If one wants to indict as racist the whole of American culture for the first half of the 20th century, one can certainly do so. But John W. Campbell's share of blame for that cultural racism is so  infinitesimally small that it's hardly worth mentioning-- unless one wishes to show off one's own virtuousness.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were marginal changes that went against the cultural grain, such as Sidney Poitier movies and the presence of non-white heroes in ensembles like those of I SPY, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and Marvel Comics's THE AVENGERS. During this period, perhaps one might fairly fault a given editor or writer for keeping things too WASPy. But in the 1930s and 1940s, no one could have fought against the current of white privilege without drowning-- certainly not the editor of a science-fiction magazine, back in the days when the genre was deemed little more than "Buck Rogers stuff." It's really not a "missed opportunity" if the opportunity wasn't there at all.

Particularly egregious is the cant about "historically underrepresented voices." Nobody in the 1930s or 1940s would have even understood what that meant, for those were the days of the diametrically opposed cultural concept of "the melting pot." Campbell may have been racist in specific ways-- and this is something Nevala-Lee may well be able to demonstrate in future chapters-- but Campbell certainly was not racist because he didn't have some visionary apprehension of another generation's concept of equity.

Nevala-Lee's prologue also sings some sad songs about the marginalization of female voices. There may be a little more evidence for women being kept out of science-fiction's "boys' clubs," though even then, most of the evidence comes from women of Caucasian heritage who managed to write professionally under ambivalent cognomens like Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore. I've seen no evidence to suggest that persons of color, of either gender, had that much interest in breaking into the science-fiction magazines. Often it takes a cultural revolution before any marginalized outgroup starts thinking seriously about crashing the gates of the favored ingroup.

I also object to the politicized thinking that asserts, even indirectly, that a given genre's worth can be measured in terms of how many "underrepresented voices" it champions. But I'd need a whole nother essay to do justice to that topic.

EMANCIPATION VS. FREEDOM PT. 1

In this blogpost, responding to one of THE BEAT's superficial attacks on so-called female objectification, I wrote:

The whole "who's exposed more" question should never have been one of pure equity.  Equity is something to be observed in the workplace or the boardroom, but not in fiction.  Fiction is a place where fantasy reigns, and as I said in the essay, it's simply a lot harder to sell hyper-sexualized fantasies to women than to men.  I tend to think that this is because in general men are hornier bastards than women, but others' mileage may vary.

Equity should never have been the question because equity of this sort is not feasible.   There will probably always be more sexualized female characters in pop fiction than sexualized male characters-- but that doesn't mean that the latter don't occur at all, or that one can slough off all the chiseled chins and buff bodies as manifestations of "idealization."

I've not written much about "equity," but now I want to see it in a continuum that relates to a wider concept I will term "the ethic of emancipation." Equity, the theoretical fair treatment of everyone in a society, is a modern concept that has come about in democratic societies largely because these tend to subscribe, at least overtly, to the ideal of emancipating those who are enslaved, disenfranchised, and so on. The ethic extends back through human history, but in modern times the United States has become the country most intimately associated with emancipation, beginning with the country emancipating itself from England. Radical ultraliberals ceaselessly cavil about the false ideals purportedly put forth in the Declaration of Independence, in which "all men are created equal" is said to have connoted "white men only" (which argument Stephen Douglas made explicit in 1858). However, the nation's commitment to emancipation still exceeds that of many if not all other nations since the States' formation, and one of the many liberations that made far more progress here than elsewhere than in other countries is that of women's suffrage.

The problem, however, is that often those who rise do so by making someone else fall. Ultraliberals in recent years have gone beyond the sensible demands of early liberals, and have chosen to stigmatize what they are pleased to call "straight white males" (and occasionally "straight white females" as well) in order to carve out new terrain for the non-meek who shall usurp the earth. The less vitriolic ultraliberals take the position that dull straight white people will be much improved by this exposure to diversity, so it's all good.

However, in THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, Francis Fukuyama explored, among other things, some of the problems with the idea of "universal recognition"-- Fukuyama's Hegelian term for the idea of a emancipation from all hierarchies that bar the goal of total equity.

For Nietzsche, there was little difference between Hegel and Marx, because their goal was the same, a society embodying universal recognition. He, in effect, raised the question: Is recognition that can be universalized worth having in the first place? Is not the quality of recognition far more important than its universality? And does not the goal of universalizing recognition inevitably trivialize and devalue it?


In Part 2 I'll address some of the ways current popular fiction devotes itself to universal recognition/equity without showing any insight as to the "quality" of said emancipatory representations.

JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 2

To the best of my ability to remember a stray thought from a year and half ago, here's what I've come up with regarding the following:

I have some thoughts as to how these categories of goal-affect might relate to Frank Fukuyama's categories of "thymos:" *megalothymia* and *isothymia.*  But these will be elaborated in a separate essay.

Since the goal-affects I've formulated are "glory," which I usually associate with competition, and "persistence," which I usually associate with cooperative existence, I may have been on the verge of making the comparisons of "glory= megalothymia" and "persistence=isothymia." It should go without saying that I always apply such formulas primarily to art and literature, though that's not to say that they lack any parallels to "real life."

But I'm glad I didn't make such a one-on-one comparison, because the categories are too complex for such parallelism.

Fukuyama introduces his terms as an analysis of the broad motivations behind human actions, pointing out that *thymos,* "spiritedness," can arise in comparable ways from the attempt of an individual to exceed others or from the attempt of an individual to promote others to obtain rights, privileges, etc., that others enjoy.  Fukuyama, as I've stipulated before, says nothing about applying these motivations to the creators of art and literature; all of these extrapolations are mine.

In contrast, while I grounded my concepts of the goal-affects "glory" and "persistence" in philosophical observations about "real life" as formulated by Hobbes and Schopenhauer, I formulated these categories for the purpose of analyzing literary constructs.  Such constructs have a logic that is often extrapolated from real experience but has its roots in the freedom of the mind from reality, as I asserted in LET FREEDOM RIDE PT. 4:

...art is fundamentally about play, even when that play is turned to the purpose of utilitarian work.

Fukuyama, though he's oriented upon the realities of political life, shows an admirable understanding of the many-faceted nature of his categories.  *Megalothymia* can manifest both in the concert pianist seeking to be "the best" through competition with his equals, but it can also manifest in a tyrant like Stalin or Pol Pot, whose ideas of "excellence" are confined to slaughtering hordes of defenseless peoples to intimidate the living. *Isothymia* can manifest as Nelson Mandela going to jail for years to promote equal standards for Black Africans, but it can also manifest in "men without chests," endlessly prating about "equity" regardless of any other considerations.

Now, literary constructs must and will reflect all these facets, but their behavior is an extension of their authors' will; they reflect what they consider good or bad. In a strange way, literary characters are "un-free" so that their audiences may obtain a wider understanding of the nature of freedom (also discussed in the previous citation).

Thus audiences can admire how well a given character, even if he or she is evil, incarnates a particular goal-affect. I devoted this essay to specifying the different ways in which the villainous Fu Manchu and the monstrous Victor Frankenstein incarnate the affects of "glory" or of "persistence" respectively. The same essay also references differing goal-affects in characters who are meant to be dominantly sympathetic: the respective ensembles of the TV shows LOST IN SPACE ("persistence") and THE LOST WORLD ("glory.")  An overly politicized critic could foolishly align both of the negative figures with the negative aspect of *megalothymia,* because they kill or tyrannize, and the teleseries-heroes with the positive aspect of *isothymia,* because these heroes are sometimes seen protecting the weak or innocent. However, that would be a correlation informed too much with the very sort of "either-or" utilitarianism to which my system is opposed.

Having shown some ways in which Fukuyama and the goal-affect theory do not correlate, the next essay will consider a Bataillean approach to the goal-affects.

POSITIVE EQUITY, NEGATIVE RESULTS?

I watched the 10-29 broadcast of Anita Sarkeesian's appearance on the Colbert show twice, trying to see if this newest media critic had anything pertinent to say. But first, I'll jot down today's Beat post, responding to another poster who disputed Sarkeesian's claim that no one but female critics of gamer culture had received threats and harassment.

Thanks for listing the names [of male critics who suffered harassment], Johnny.  I'm not into games and had no acquaintance with any of these cases.  I've seen some pro and con on the gentlemen listed, particularly Cernovich. But even if none of the three might be deemed a poster boy for Equal Harassment by Feminist Frequency, even one is enough to put the lie to Sarkeesian's claim.
It would appear that in Sarkeesian's haste to construct a "poor pitiful me" narrative, she allowed herself to forget the rich heritage of harassment of males, by males.  Has everyone forgotten the sixties (insert predictable pot joke here), when a guy with long hair was like a red flag, waved in front of the noses of buzzcut Minotaurs?
This is not to say that women don't practice their own brand of harassment.  It's just more subtle-- like Sarkeesian's misinformation.

I don't game and don't personally care about gamer culture.  But as I listened to Sarkeesian's interview, I thought that she had one good point: that *maybe* gamer culture could benefit from fewer "damsels in distress" and more female characters with "agency."

I hasten to add that it's only a good point if it's true.  On Reddit I uncovered this comment responding to one of Sarkeesian's attacks:

It's nice that Sarkeesian attacked Dragon Age Origins (DAO) for being sexists because:

1. DAO allows you to be a male or female lead character
2. DAO allows you to pick whatever sexuality you want to pursue
3. DAO put in dedicated gay, bi and transgender chacters (Shale though he was a guy but he was actually a girl)
4. DAO develop female NPC's are villains, heroes, martyrs, leaders, rule breakers

But let's say, for sake of argument, that Sarkeesian is right in broad (heh) terms: that there aren't enough "empowered" female characters in current games.  The simple plea that there should be more is entirely legitimate, and unless one believes that the entire game-making industry is blinkered by Zizekian "ideology," the game-makers might be willing to take more chances on such characters, simply because of this sort of protest.

In my essay LITERARY EQUITY, POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE, I ventured this comment upon the different effects of attempts to promote an equality of status in art and literature:

... "positive equity" is achieved when someone points out a genuine abuse of fairness, while "negative equity" is achieved when someone uses the concept of fairness incorrectly, to be unfair to someone else.

Since I've started with the assumption that Sarkeesian's analysis is correct, that there aren't enough empowered female game-characters, then I'm advancing the assumption that she has achieved positive equity by that statement.  It's not quite as pro-active as actually creating such heroines, a la William Moulton Marston and Trina Robbins, but it could, in theory, have positive results, encouraging a game-maker to take a chance on something that proved to be noteworthy.

And yet, in the Colbert interview Sarkeesian tainted even the good points in her narrative.  Colbert lightly satirized his own gender by talking about how he enjoyed seeing big-busted women wearing armor that barely covers their nipples. But, going solely by that interview, Sarkeesian flatly believes that all such depictions are "objectification." I'll have to investigate Feminist Frequency to see if she's ever advanced any more nuanced arguments. But even Kelly Thompson, much as I abhor her one-sided ideology, admits that it's entirely logical for exhibitionistic characters, such as the White Queen, to exhibit themselves all over the place.

Thus, Sarkeesian giveth only to take away.  Let's have more female characters, but only the types that Anita Sarkeesian deems worthwhile. I continue to insist, as with the essay-series beginning here, that feminine exhibitionism is not inherently disempowering. If, as the interview suggests, Sarkeesian can only see it negatively, then that means that even when she encourages one form of equity, she discourages another form, the artist's right to show whatever he wants to show-- whether his motives are those of Robert Crumb or those of Roger Corman.

LITERARY EQUITY, POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE

As I've noted before, because I've made calculated defenses of the literary usages of sex and violence, some of my opponents in various arguments have tried to paint me as indifferent to the principle of equity, of fairness in-- for instance-- the depiction of women in popular fiction. I've argued here that "pure equity" of the type desired by many pundits is not feasible. That does not mean that one should never strive for equity in particular circumstances, though.

In finance the word "equity" transmuted from connoting a principle of social fairness to something closer to a properly modulated exchange of capital.  The financial term has also begotten the offspring "positive equity" and "negative equity." On this site I found a felicitously simple definition of these secondary terms: from the point of view of a bank, "positive equity adds value to the bank, while negative equity takes value away."  

If one attempts to transfer these basic concepts to the domain of literary studies-- which patently I intend to do here-- then "positive equity" would add value to the "bank"-- essentially, a particular culture or subculture-- by instilling it with greater value, while "negative equity" would take that value away. But here the 'value" of which I speak is not financial, but one that goes back to the principle of social fairness. 

In short, "positive equity" is achieved when someone points out a genuine abuse of fairness, while "negative equity" is achieved when someone uses the concept of fairness incorrectly, to be unfair to someone else.

As stated here I consider the controversy about Milo Manara's SPIDER-WOMAN cover to be a false one, grounded in unrealistic expectations and bad logic. One of the most egregious displays of poor logic appears on the site known as THE MARY SUE, from which I take this side-by-side comparison.

It would be a legitimate observation, to assert that an artist had recycled some of the elements of an explicitly erotic drawing into one whose erotic content was, at the very least, far more subdued.

It is not a legitimate observation to place two such illustrations side-by-side, ignoring the strong differences in the visual elements and the overall context, and to claim-- fallaciously-- that "this [Spider-Woman's butt] is what our 'hero' is showing the city."

This, therefore, is "negative equity:" the author has started out claiming to call attention to Milo Manara's alleged inequity in his drawing of a female superhero-- presumably as against whatever male superheroes he has drawn-- and does Manara a far greater injustice than anything Manara *might* have done.

In contrast, a far more thorough logical attack on male privilege was made way back in 1980, in the fanzine LOC #1. The cover asserts that I myself have something in the issue as well, but I'm damned if I can remember what it was. And though I'm as egocentric as the next fan-writer, I feel it's demonstrable that Carol A. Strickland's essay "The Rape of Ms. Marvel" is the standout for this magazine.

Fortunately, one need not comb through dusty stacks of zines to reread the essay: for some years Ms. Strickland has kept the original essay online, here.

In Strickland's opening statements, she makes the sort of statement that I've frequently called into question on this blog:

I realize that females are only a small part of comics readers and fandom, but it should not just be the women who raise the roof over such a story. It should be everyone. Isn't everyone entitled to respect as a human being? Shouldn't they be against something that so self-consciously seeks to destroy that respect and degrade women in general by destroying the symbol of womankind?

I've often maintained that fictional characters are not inherently deserving of "respect." I may like or dislike what a given author perpetrates upon a particular fictional character, but I've maintained that "a character rooted in sensationalistic adventures [is] also vulnerable to receiving a sensationalistic demise."  But I also maintain that each author's rendition of a particular character, or set of characters, should display its own internal logic, apart from any other renditions.

Strickland's essay shows relentless good logic in explaining all the myriad ways in which AVENGERS #200, written by David Micheline and edited by Jim Shooter, violates the probity of the Ms. Marvel character. She asserts that Jim Shooter-- who wrote the series prior to Micheline-- allowed Ms. Marvel to develop "a pushy, intimidating quirk." Though in contrast to Strickland I have more positive memories of Jim Shooter's treatment of female characters in his early LEGION stories, I have no compunction about stating that his Marvel work of this period was indeed marked by the imposition of illogical "quirks" upon various characters, both male and female. (I really ought to reprint my own barn-burning review of Jim Shooter's SECRET WARS on this blog someday.)

Strickland does not comment on the fact that the original concept-- that Ms. Marvel would be impregnated by the Supreme Intelligence of the Kree-- was at least in line with the basic concept of the character, once it was established in Roy Thomas' "Kree-Skrull War" narrative that the Kree had a need to tap the essence of the younger, more vital human race.  Shooter's veto of this concept thus forced writer Micheline to attempt a patch-job in order to save the storyline. This is something any professional writer might do, and thus Micheline cannot be faulted for the attempt, only for the execution.

Strickland points out the psychological avoidance-rituals in the culmination of Ms. Marvel's unwanted pregnancy, a key example of violating internal logic:

In a male-fairytale version of birth, Ms. Marvel delivers in a non-birthing sort of way (I don't understand it either. Let's look at the physical processes involved--!) There is no pain, no labor, no logic... All the while Ms. Marvel is exposed to the other Avengers without shred number one of privacy during the non-birth birth.

And finally, we have the improbable reactions of the other Avengers to the entire situation. Their blase acceptance of a bizarre situation, their lack of empathy to their fellow hero, and their weak-willed consent to a dubious solution-- all of these are hallmarks of a writer attempting to force a foregone conclusion, rather than making it cohere properly on its own terms.

Now, can one prove that Shooter and Micheline concocted the "Ms. Marvel rape" out of hostility to women generally? Not really, especially since both of them can be shown to have depicted certain female characters in an empowering manner at given times during their respective professional histories.  But it's entirely appropriate to state that their handling of the character was clumsy and counter-productive to good storytelling.

Now, given my quasi-defense of "fake-rape" in this series of essays, it should be clear that I'm not asserting anything along the lines of, "Ms. Marvel should never be raped because it's disempowering."  I still believe, as I said, that "a great part of fiction's appeal is its ability to conjure forth fantasies of supremacy, with or without sexual content."

At the same time, the best fantasies are usually-- though not invariably-- the ones that create their own sense of internal logic, be it the logic of J.R.R. Tolkien or of Mickey Spillane.

And that's how the Strickland essay took a bad story, held up a light to it, and created the value of "positive equity" by so doing, enriching in a small way the subculture of comics fandom.

FTR: QUICKIE BEAT-RESPONSE

To Heidi McDonald's question: "so three Sub-Mariner covers equal the entire Bad Girl era?", I said:

The whole "who's exposed more" question should never have been one of pure equity.  Equity is something to be observed in the workplace or the boardroom, but not in fiction.  Fiction is a place where fantasy reigns, and as I said in the essay, it's simply a lot harder to sell hyper-sexualized fantasies to women than to men.  I tend to think that this is because in general men are hornier bastards than women, but others' mileage may vary.

Equity should never have been the question because equity of this sort is not feasible.   There will probably always be more sexualized female characters in pop fiction than sexualized male characters-- but that doesn't mean that the latter don't occur at all, or that one can sluff off all the chiseled chins and buff bodies as manifestations of "idealization."

Also, one of the three covers is actually neutral on Subby's hottitude, which goes to my point about how certain artists just may not be tuned to produce this form of sexualization.