TALES FROM THE WOMB PT. 1

At the conclusion of PRIDE OF PREJUDICE 2 I said:

Sensationalism, with its ability to grab the audience by the lapels and make them want to see "the Parliament of Monsters" (to invoke old Wordsworth again), remains the chief foe of anyone attempting to sell something that is allegedly more elevated, more incisive, more devoted to telling the real truth (whatever that truth-framework may be). The hunger for the Big Important Themes is a genuine intersubjective experience, true enough. But it does not define the boundaries of art.

In that two-part essay-series I largely confined my argument to disputing the priorities of those who privilege an alleged rationality over all forms of sensationalism.  However, there are also ontological dimensions to the argument.

Back in my essay-series THE GATE OF THE GODS I pointed out that Northrop Frye, who eventually became a moderate defender of pop fiction, penned an amazingly scathing putdown of "sub-literary" narratives in one of his early writings:

All of us, even the most highbrow, spend much time in the sub-literary world; all of us derive many surreptitious pleasures from it; but this world is, from the point of view of actual literature, mainly a babbling chaos, waiting for the creative word to brood over it and bring it to literary life.

At the same time, in the same essay I pointed out that Frye was not being as utilitarian as many of those who advance similar arguments, many of which come down to, "If the sensationalistic story isn't part of the solution, it's part of the problem."  Still, Frye's early metaphor for sub-literary works, that of a "babbling chaos," touches on a misconception common to the ratiocentrists.  For them, any work that might be termed "pulpish" or "sensationalistic" is just such a chaos, unredeemed by any discursive meanings-- which for the ratiocentrist, are the only possible meanings.  Since the rise of modernist literature, elitists of all stripes tend to regard the world of pure sensation as no more than epiphenomena.

In PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, Jung theorizes a possible ontogenesis for meaning within the chaos of sensation as said chaos is experienced by the infant in the womb.  I'll be examining Jung's theories more thoroughly in future essays, but with the upfront admission that Jung had no credentials as an expert on child development.  As this site clarifies: 

A developmental model that begins not only at birth, but with conception and the experience of the child in the womb, can be constructed that reflects and extends the psychological concepts of Carl Jung, based on his theories of the four psychological functions and on his theory of the transcendent function. This model would include not only the beginning of ego development, but the development of the soul complex and its origin in human consciousness.

Jung did not construct a developmental model defining the origins of human consciousness. A model that defines and reflects his concepts in a developmental theory that begins with the beginning of life would contribute to the understanding of the Self. There is presently no developmental psychology that provides a model based on Jung's description of psychological functions that begin in the womb. The Jungian analyst Michael Fordham does discuss issues relating to the child in the womb, and early ego development. His model uses Jungian concepts that describe the process of individuation in childhood.

More to come.

THE SAD STORY OF SUPERHERO SADISM

In my previous essay I wrote:

This isn't to say that the "sensuous frenzy" of sadism doesn't have some relation to the world of the "combative" form of conflict. But clearly, contra Legman and Wertham, violence takes a radically different form in the idiom of the adventure-hero.

The factor that underlies this "radically different form" is that of the struggle between two or more superior forces, a form of conflict that has (to my knowledge) no occurence in the works of the Marquis de Sade himself, nor of most works that could be fairly labeled "sadistic," whether the sadism was of a syndromic or a casual nature.

Now the nature of what can be considered a "superior force" must be analyzed, as with most other qualities mentioned on this theory-blog, in terms of narrative function.  Batman, a costumed human being who uses a few unusual gimmicks during his first ten years of existence, is clearly a superior specimen.  Fans remember best his bizarre criminals-- from the favorites (do I need to invoke the names of the Big Three?) to one-offs like the Red Devils and the Duc D'Orterre.  However, in that initial ten-year period most of Batman's foes were not costumed or super-gimmicked villains, but common crooks.  Can common crooks qualify as "superior forces?"

Narratively they can, of course.  Though Batman can frequently fight his way through four or five plug-uglies without raising a sweat, the plug-uglies represent what would prove a superior force to most ordinary citizens.  This is reinforced by the fact that on occasion this or that story finds it necessary for the crooks to get the upper hand, as if to remind the reader that these aren't pushovers just because they're often treated that way.  I presented an example of this narrarive necessity in this essay.

However, what about the heroes whose power-level is like that of gods to men?  If one surveys the first ten years of heroes like Superman and the Spectre-- both creations of wunderkind Jerry Siegel-- one will find those heroes most frequently battling ordinary thugs rather than aliens, mad scientists, occult menaces, etc.  Going by the Legman-Wertham hypothesis, would this not mean that features with godlike heroes, who can rarely if ever be menaced by most of their opponents, are just stand-ins for sadistic abusers of innocent criminals?

Not quite, and again, the analysis of narrative trends holds more relevance than the simple power discrepancy.

Consider Superman.  It's true that within his first decade, he hardly ever encounters a foe who can shake him up. Does this mean that his stories are, as the two psycho-babblers claimed, just excuses for the pleasures of inflicting pain?  Hardly, for while the original concept of Superman depended on his being superlative in power, the hero usually had a different form of conflict.  Because his creators and/or editors didn't want him simply beating up crooks unless he was doing so to put them in jail-- in keeping with societal priorities of the period-- Superman had to make some use of his brain.  Not infrequently the Man of Steel had to play detective in order to figure out not just who to hit, but also how to find evidence that would put the malefactors away.  Thus, as I've pointed out elsewhere, Superman had to be as much a trickster as a warrior.

The Spectre presents a more involved case, for this hero's origin story implies that God Above has given the Spectre limitless power to fight crime and to execute whomever the hero may care to execute.  And to be sure, some of the fates the Spectre visits upon his early victims might be cited as cases of sadistic pleasure, as noted in the quote above.

What I find significant, though, is that even with this scenario-- in which the Spectre never (or hardly ever) had to answer for his actions-- Siegel's scripts still had to find ways to throw in conflict, so that even the omnipotent Spectre had to struggle somewhat.  Thus, in the midst of the hero hunting some blackmailers, Siegel would throw in some cosmic mishap that would temporarily flummox the hero, so that he had to go the extra mile to save a damsel from her distress.

Thus it would seem that even the most powerful heroes within the "combative adventure" mythos are more limited than the protagonists of the Marquis de Sade, who exist to do anything they please.

MIGHT MAKES FIGHTS, AND STORIES TOO PT. 2

Though I'd been reading Kant off and on over the past twenty years, I'll readily admit I didn't invoke him often in the early years of this blog, aside from drawing on his logic to come up with my term "metaphenomenal." I didn't make comparisons between Old Immanuel and any of the scholars who had provided primary influences on my theories, such as Frye, Jung, and Cassirer-- for all that Cassirer himself was a loyal post-Kantian, and Jung probably owes more than a small debt to Kant's categories.  I didn't start assiduously studying the possible benefits of Kant until 2011.  For that I have to thank in part the wrongheaded misapplications of Kant by one Douglas Wolk, for having spurred me to delve more deeply into Kantian philosophy.  Still, even without Wolk,  I think I would have forged pretty much the same link between "sublimity" and "sense of wonder," given my considerable interest in that aspect of literature.

Now, of course, a great deal of my current theory incorporates Kant's commentary on art and sublimity, as well as parallel thoughts by authors like Burke and Schopenhauer, and a reader can't swing a cyber-stick around here lately without encountering discourse on "might" and "dominance", etc.  However, though I wasn't invoking Kant much back in 2008, I find it of archetypal relevance that I touched on elements very like the Kantian concepts above in a series of essays whose purpose was to refute the Wertham-Legman theory of literary sadism.

I began in THEORY OF SADISM by disputing the validity of the Freudian paradigm of sadism, which clearly influenced both Wertham and Legman, as well as the much more sophisticated but still erroneous take of Gilles Deleuze.

Though I agree with Deleuze in his distinctions between sadism and masochism, I think that both Freud and Deleuze are guilty of over-intellectualizing the somatic aspects of these sexual syndromes. "Disavowal" is just another intellectual construct devised to emphasize "absence" rather than "presence," thus putting both thinkers in line with similar types like Sartre and Lacan. I would emphasize more the aspect of bodies clashing against bodies, which IMO is the main reason that either activity summons up associations of sexual excitement. With this caveat in mind one can schematize the respective attitudes so: the pure sadist wants to actively inflict his power/strength upon others without opposition; the pure masochist wants to have the power/strength of others inflicted upon him, albeit under controlled conditions. I prefer the term "strength" to the now-dated term "phallic power" employed by Freud and Deleuze, since the former term does not limit itself to the phallically-endowed gender.

As a side-point I would later reference the fascination of "clashing bodies" within the framework of Georges Bataille's concept of "sensuous frenzy," a metaphor that could subsume both sex and violence.

Within the essay called POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY, it seems that I anticipated Kant's formula of "might" as applied to a literary context, described in MIGHT MAKES FIGHTS PT 1 as the type of fiction that unleashes a superior force upon inferior forces-- though of course I didn't say anything in 2008 about finding this form of narrative to be statistically dominant.

... most current analysts of genre would tend to see "crime" as a distinct genre, almost entirely focused on the depradations of 20th or 21st-century gangsters, usually in an urban environment. Wertham and Legman have a good rhetorical reason to emphasize "crime" as applying across the board, for the specific crime genre usually does emphasize the criminal rather than his law-abiding opponents, and could be, with some small fairness, accused of lining up with the paradigm of the Marquis deSade. Admittedly, Sade's stories are usually about victimizers who capture and then torture victims for pleasure, rather than gunning down little old ladies in the street as did the comic-book gangsters during the heyday of crime comics. Still, one may grant that the essential Freudian paradigm seems common to both: the aggressor vents his aggression on the helpless, and in theory the reader of crime comics enjoys and internalizes the spectacle, "unless he is a complete masochist," as Legman helplfully tells us.

A paragraph later, I disputed Legman and Wertham's oversimple identification of this one-sided contest with the triumphant combat-scenarios of heroic adventure.

Now, while the jury may remain out on the question as to whether the adventure-genre can inspire any sort of sadistic vibe in their audiences-- a question I'll address more fully in a future piece-- it seems obvious to me that when heroes fight villains in adventure-tales, the narrative action could not be less like a lynching, much less a Sadean sadist torturing helpless victims or a gangster shooting down old ladies in the street. Wertham and Legman dance around the difference by trying to make it sound as if the villains are merely stand-ins for despised minorities and the like, which argument remains a linchpin of Marxist oppositional thought, both in modern comics-criticism and elsewhere. But neither author can totally expunge this difference of narrative action: in the adventure-genre, *the villain can defend himself.* He may be fated to lose the struggle-- indeed, until recently he always did-- but the struggle itself is essential to the adventure-genre, as it manifestly is not with the crime genre. As Wertham and Legman both point out, the crime-genre books usually ended with a last-minute destruction of the rampaging crook as a "sop" to morality. But the struggles of hero and villain in the adventure-genres-- best represented in comic books by the superhero-- are not thrown in at the last minute. Narratively, structurally, such physical struggles are the selling-points of the genres, and so cannot be conflated with either the crime genre or the Sadean paradigm by any truly rational approach.
 

I feel sure that when I pointed this elementary difficulty in the reasoning of the two anti-comics authors, I had no idea of invoking the Kantian categories of sublime force.  Now, given my current line of thought-- that the formula "superior force is arrayed against inferior forces" is the one that most dominates popular storytelling-- does that mean that the dominant form of popular fiction is of a sadistic nature?

On that matter, deponent saith not-- except to say that if it's probably no less true of canonical lit-fiction than pop-fiction.  Camille Paglia devoted her book SEXUAL PERSONAE to that argument, and whereas one could quarrel with some of her terms, her findings would suggest that sadism can manifest quite as well in a world where no "might" manifests-- say, the works of Henry James or Honore de Balzac-- as in worlds with a very definite "mighty" presence, which we see in ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA and MOBY DICK.

So where does that leave the concept of "dominance?"  I stated above it's a given that the victory in most "combative" stories will go to the character who embodies the force of life-- or who at least comes closer to it than his opponent.  But even allowing for this pre-ordained victory, it's clear that the readers desire to see the hero *earn* his dominant status following a struggle of powerful equals-- a struggle goes against the grain of the sadistic concept.  This isn't to say that the "sensuous frenzy" of sadism doesn't have some place the world of the "combative" form of conflict.  But clearly, contra Legman and Wertham, violence takes a radically different form in the idiom of the adventure-hero.  It's because stupidities like those of Legman and Wertham remain pervasive that there remains a need to suss out the many complexities of conflict and combat, even if the sussing-out is likely to fail, in keeping with the old adage:

"Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain."

MIGHT MAKES FIGHTS, AND STORIES TOO

In STRENGTH, IN NUMBERS  I made this generalization about the corpus of stories within the famous folktale-collection Grimms' Fairy Tales:

I would generalize that most of the Grimms' folktales fall into one of these two categories [i.e., having the plot-dynamicity labeled "basic strength" or the one labeled "might"].

In contrast, I only pegged one Grimms' tale which displayed the plot-pattern of "dominance," focused on two contending superior forces.

But that's just one story-collection.  How do these three deductively-extrapolated patterns disperse over the whole of literature?

I suppose my view may be influenced by a lifetime of genre-reading.  Nevertheless, genre-- and I consider folk literature to be a close relation to genre literature-- has been the dominant type of narrative (both in written and oral forms) favored by the majority of human beings in historical time.  And basing my view on everything I've read of what other people generally read, the "middle type"-- the one that Goldilocks pronounced as "just right" in another context-- is the one that I believe would rack up the highest statistics, were any kind of statistical evaluation feasible.

I hinted at the predominance of the "might" pattern in my QUICK SCHOPENHAUER POST: 

As I've mentioned elsewhere I find Cioffi's term "anomaly" useful to describe the element or elements that provide the motive force of the narrative, so it would seem that the anomaly expresses the narrative's need for conflict/transgression.

To make my meaning more explicit, I'm saying that the dominant type of story within genre narrative-- which narrative is the dominant narrative experience of historical mankind-- is one in which the characters who inhabit a normal, "typical" continuum-- characters usually possessed of no more than "basic strength"-- is confronted with an atypical anomaly-- be it a natural force or a character-- which impinges its "might" upon the continuum's static equilibrium. The anomaly may be any number of things within the scope of the Num Formula: a ruthless criminal (naturalistic), a bizarre psycho-killer (uncanny), or a blood-hungry vampire (marvelous).  As different as these three examples are in terms of phenomenality-- with one appealing to what I've called the "odd-sublime," the other two to the "strange-sublime"-- they are identical in terms of function in terms of how the plot-dynamicity works out.

If the "might" pattern is, as I assert, the dominant pattern in genre-literature-- thus supervening the patterns of non-genre literature as well-- then this would support H.P. Lovecraft's belief as expressed at the start of his critical history of the terror-tale, SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE:

THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Of course no one can be sure as to which emotion was the first to be kindled in the breast of nascent humanity.  But it's possible that the confrontation of mundane "basic strength" with the power of sublime "might" is the dominant pattern because it has the greatest appeal across all genre-types.

More on these matters in a forthcoming Part 2.

PRIDE OF PREJUDICE PT 2

In the previous essay I wrote:

At base, the two have in common a particular kind of "pride": a pride in one's own ability to discern what aspects of literature are best-- aspects which are almost always oriented upon some intellect-based comprehension of some given subject matter. It could be argued that in so doing those guilty of this form of "pride" are guilty of Kant's pronouncement upon Leibniz, that of "intellectualizing phenomena."

I want to make clear, however, that this species of "pride" is not a mere personal quality in the persons so characterized.  This attitude of ratiocentrism in the attitudes of particular critics is merely a proximate cause.  The real cause transcends any single person, having been passed down throughout so many cultures and era that it might well labeled "intersubjective" as defined here.

One of the two manifestations of this ratiocentrism, at least in the United States, can be attributed to the exigencies of the educational system, as I observed in TRUISM LIES PT 1.

[Students] must learn how to recount, in a coherent and discursive manner, the underlying themes of THE SCARLET LETTER or MOBY DICK or whatever, in order to prove their ability to master the appropriate level of reasoning. For elementary and even secondary-school levels, it would be too demanding to speak of the expressive depths of any sort of literature, be it high or low.

 

This manifestation takes in the type of ratiocentrism I observed in both Gary Groth and Synsidar in the previous section.

Also in the essay cited, I quoted Northrop Frye  as having demonstrated, in his ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, the naivete of this idea of getting out of literature just what the author put there for readers to find.  In the same chapter where he makes this observation, he also excoriates a critical tendency that I deem a different species of ratiocentrism, and which Frye terms "determinism:"

The notion that the poet necessarily is or could be the definitive interpreter of himself or of the theory of literature belongs to the conception of the critic as a parasite or jackal. Once we admit that the critic has his own field of activity, and that he has autonomy within that field, we have to concede that criticism deals with literature in terms of a specific conceptual framework. The framework is not that of literature itself, for this is the parasite theory again, but neither is it something outside literature, for in that case the autonomy of criticism would again disappear, and the whole subject would be assimilated to something else.

This latter gives us, in criticism, the fallacy of what in history is called determinism, where a scholar with a special interest in geography or economics expresses that interest by the rhetorical device of putting his favorite study into a causal relationship with whatever interests him less. Such a method gives one the illusion of explaining one's subject while studying it, thus wasting no time. It would be easy to compile a long list of such determinisms in criticism, all of them, whether Marxist, Thomist, liberal-humanist, neo-Classical, Freudian, Jungian, or existentialist, substituting a critical attitude for criticism, all proposing, not to find a conceptual framework for criticism within literature, but to attach criticism to one of a miscellany of frameworks outside it. The axioms and postulates of criticism, however, have to grow out of the art it deals with. The first thing the literary critic has to do is to read literature, to make an inductive survey of his own field and let his critical principles shape themselves solely out of his knowledge of that field. Critical principles cannot be taken over ready-made from theology, philosophy, politics, science, or any combination of these.

It might be easiest to think of one species as "underthinking" (regarding as significant only what an artist has stated in outright, near-allegorical terms) and the other as "overthinking" (superimposing some cognitive framework over the outlines of the poetic work).  I've devoted four essays to refuting the species of "deterministic ratiocentricism" in the OVERTHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT series, beginning here.  In the essays so refuted, author Charles Reece seeks to fit WONDER WOMAN comics to a Procrustean bed by-way-of-Karl-Marx.  This is a different approach than that of Synsidar, who has said that superhero comics could be good (or at least better) if they were infused with greater maturity, thus gaining appeal for adults.  Though Reece is no less addicted to the Pedagogical Paradigm than Synsidar, in that Reece refers to his subject matter as "these crappy children's comics" here, Reece takes an inductive approach: juvenile comics can be useful as examples of his chosen cognitive framework as in, say, Marxist ideas on the etiology of fascism.

I believe that both types of ratiocentrism take different routes but arrive at the same place: the calcification of plurisignative meaning into dead fossils of rational exegesis.  Said calcification I alluded to at the end of UNDERTHOUGHT series:

Everything I've written about the potential mythic content that arises from sense-experience depends on this idea of "diffuse meaning," which later becomes concentrated (or calcified) into ideological forms. To me the power of myth is the true expression of free will, while ideology always threatens to trap and bind even the people who most think they have control of its intricacies.

 

If I've not made it clear, I feel that all the protests against "the superhero as a juvenile construct"-- whether from Synsidar or Groth or Reece or Dirk Deppey-- signigy little more than a blind.  What is resented is not the aspect of juvenility, but the aspect of sensationalism which is for many characterizes children's entertainment (see Synsidar in particular), a sensationalism away from which adults supposedly mature.

(Except that they really don't; hence my assorted writings on adult pulp, which see.)

Sensationalism, with its ability to grab the audience by the lapels and make them want to see "the Parliament of Monsters" (to invoke old Wordsworth again), remains the chief foe of anyone attempting to sell something that is allegedly more elevated, more incisive, more devoted to telling the real truth (whatever that truth-framework may be).  The hunger for the Big Important Themes is a genuine intersubjective experience, true enough.  But it does not define the boundaries of art.

PRIDE OF PREJUDICE

          All moveables of wonder, from all parts,
          Are here--Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,
          The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,
          The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,
          Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,          
          The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,
          The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft
          Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,
          All out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,
          All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts
          Of man, his dulness, madness, and their feats
          All jumbled up together, to compose
          A Parliament of Monsters. Tents and Booths
          Meanwhile, as if the whole were one vast mill,
          Are vomiting, receiving on all sides,                
          Men, Women, three-years' Children, Babes in arms.
         ---William Wordsworth, THE PRELUDE, Book 7.


What Wordsworth scathingly calls a "Parliament of Monsters" (including an "Invisible Girl" who apparently appeared long before H.G. Wells' "Invisible Man") was nothing more than the many attractions of the St. Bartholomew Fair in London.  Yet clearly to Wordsworth these "freaks of nature" signify something more. He's greatly affronted by the base appeal to the sensation-loving audience, to their love of "far-fetched, perverted things."  Although the archaic myth-figure of Prometheus often carried favorable connotations in Wordsworth's era, this poet is surely conferring no approval in speaking of such sights as "Promethean thoughts."  I would hazard that his invocation of the famous Titan is meant to suggest rebellion against the proper order of things, as also seen in the subtitle of a more famous work from the same era: FRANKENSTEIN, OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS.

Wordsworth was by no means original in decrying base appeals to sensationalism.  Socrates, insofar as he spoke through Plato's REPUBLIC, endorsed the state control of poetry, because it could set bad examples for youth.  Much of the history of literary criticism has been the history of validating "good literature" over "bad literature," with the implication that bad literature wasn't just formally bad, but existed as a snare and a trap for the unwary.

I am reminded of this salient fact by a particular excerpt from the post of comics-fan Synsidar, which I previously reprinted in OFF THE BEAT AGAIN:

There’s little effort made to write superheroes as people in stories for children, because the children don’t need the realistic details.

This is yet another permutation of that comics-fandom phenomenon I've called the Pedagogical Paradigm.  I coined the term with Gary Groth in mind in this essay.

Groth said of Will Eisner (among other things):

Eisner refused to take the [superhero] genre trappings seriously -- which was about the only intelligent way to approach a strip that was designed to imitate the look of comic books, which were at best semi-literate, yet appeal to the adult readership of newspapers.

I replied in part:

The Grothian superiority dance here also evokes the adult/juvenile distinction. Groth makes the assumption that Eisner's SPIRIT feature was superior because it (unlike all or most superhero strips in the juvenile-oriented comic books) chose to appeal to adults.
 

Of course not every individual who subscribes to the Pedagogical Paradigm follows it in the same manner.  Groth has said on many occasions that he regards the superhero genre as inherently for kids; that's why he approved of Eisner treating the genre in semi-serious fashion.  In contrast, as I understand Synsidar's frequently-repeated arguments on THE BEAT, he's convinced that by writing "superheroes as people"-- that is, with "realistic details"-- could garner an adult audience beyond the one that exists today.

On this issue, given that I've repeatedly expressed my view that the DM audience already comprises such an audience for "adult pulp" in the form of sueprheroes, I'm closer to Synsidar than to Groth, though both of them seem to be on a similar page as far as unilaterally condemning what's currently produced for the DM. Yet while the two writers are far apart on the Matter of the Superhero, they are alike in thinking that there's some intellectual "upgrade" that can be made to superheroes to make them intellectually respectable-- "realistic details" for Synsidar, an "unserious" approach to "genre trappings" for Groth.

At base, the two have in common a particular kind of "pride": a pride in one's own ability to discern what aspects of literature are best-- aspects which are almost always oriented upon some intellect-based comprehension of some given subject matter.  It could be argued that in so doing those guilty of this form of "pride" are guilty of Kant's pronouncement upon Leibniz, that of "intellectualizing phenomena."

I understand the appeal of this pride; I've felt it myself.  But I also take pride in my ability to see the many-faceted appeals of sensationalism in both genre-fiction and canonical literature.  The best writers do not, in my opinion, simply turn up their noses at sensation as do Groth and the poet Wordsworth.  They harness the power of the "Parliament of Monsters," without prejudice against the role it plays in their work.

OFF THE BEAT AGAIN

Well, I thought my next essay would be a follow-up to STRENGTH, IN NUMBERS, but instead it's a reprint of an argument from this BEAT post. I reprint it here in case I choose to develop any of the points later.
___________________________

"People commission and collect drawings of superheroines. How many people have ever commissioned text stories of any length about one?"


I can't offer you any stats, but I have heard that prose commissions have been purchased with respect to people writing sex-stories about superheroes and various other pop-icons.  Perhaps it could be demonstrated that that more comic-art commissions are turned out each year than prose commissions.  But even if such a generalization was confirmed over the space of (say) ten years, that in itself would not prove that prose intrinsically is less useful for purposes of raunchy stimulation.  It would only prove that there existed more customers for one thing than the other.


"Graphic child pornography gets a person in trouble immediately, while even ambiguous images raise suspicions. Pornographic text, conversely, is prosecuted very rarely."


This proves only that legal authorities feel more comfortable in prosecuting images rather than words.  This suggests that the law places an implicit faith that the image, more than the word, can inspire the fabled "monkey see monkey do" reflex.  But that's all it proves.


"It’s hard to imagine someone having the same reaction to a text description of a heroine that he would to a picture of her, especially after repeated exposures."


There are a lot of sites online focused on sexy pictures.  Also a lot of them focused on sexy prose stories.  Are there more of the former or the latter?  I would say the latter, but YMMV.


"There’s little effort made to write superheroes as people in stories for children, because the children don’t need the realistic details. "


Anything I could say to refute this opinion has already been better said by CS Lewis in refuting the notion of the inherent juvenility of fairy stories.