MYTHCOMICS: "THE CASE OF THE BLACK TALON" (CAPT. AMERICA #9, 1941)

Though the Golden Age Captain America was conceived as a protest against the advance of the Axis Powers, creators Simon and Kirby never confined the hero's adventures to wartime struggles. In part they might have been reluctant to deal with the war in more than vague generalities, given that real-life events might outstrip any imaginary exploits. Yet the same rules applied to most superheroes of the period, and many of the other masked adventurers contented themselves with simply fighting mundane crooks and Fifth Columnists.

The Golden Age CAPTAIN AMERICA, though, was full of a love of the grotesque, pitting the Captain and his young partner Bucky against mummies, vampires, artificial monsters, and almost every other horrific figure who'd ever been the subject of an American fright-flick. Most of these encounters with weirdness were thoroughly derivative, though still enjoyable on those terms. But one of the few that actually shows a touch of original thought-- written by Otto Binder and drawn by the Captain's co-creator Kirby-- is also strongly implicated in the racial myths of the time.

The adventure begins with an artistic foreshadowing of the thrills to come. The heroes, in their military attire as Private Steve Rogers and camp mascot Bucky Barnes, attend an art gallery and see a portrait of a "black hand," and Bucky observes that "it's a weird subject, but fine artwork." One panel later, as the two return to their barracks, Steve apparently help repeating the same opposition of "goodness" and "weirdness," with the statement, "A black hand! What a subject for a good painter!"

The two then hear a real murder being committed, so they change into their crimefighting outfits and ascend to an apartment. They find a strangled artist, and while they search the area, Bucky is attacked and almost strangled by an extraordinarily strong black hand. When the Captain rushes to his partner's aid, the strangler flees and escapes. The heroes then realize that the murdered man is an artist of some fame, and that the killer also slashed the artist's paintings as well as killing the man.

After a bit of comic byplay, the reader is introduced to a mad-looking Caucsian painter with one black hand and one white hand, who is now painting the agonies of his victim. With the help of two hired thugs, the unnamed villain ambushes yet another artist in his gallery and takes sadistic pleasure in personally knifing the man to death.

Captain America and Bucky once more manage to show up, but though they defeat the thugs, both heroes are defeated when the man uses his black hand to strangle them into unconsciousness. Only the arrival of the police keeps the two crusaders from being killed. The heroes then resign themselves to tedious "detective work," and it leads them to the studio of an artist named Pascal Horta-- whom the reader knows to be the murderous painter. Again the so-called "Black Talon" manages to knock out the crusaders, and while preparing to kill them he reveals how he came to possess one black hand and why he's been killing other artists and painting their agonies.

However, in the tradition of heroes over the ages, Captain America manages to free himself while the evildoer runs his mouth. Again hero and villain clash, and this time the Talon is hurled from a high window. However, the story ends atypically by showing that the Talon has not only survived, he begins making plans for his next vengeful plot-- which, as the final panel helpfully tells us, will appear in an upcoming issue of the YOUNG ALLIES comic book.

I return now to my distinction of "racial" and "racist" myths. Within my critical system, not every negative portrait of a member of a particular race is automatically racist. If there is some tenable logic in attributing negative elements to a character, then this is no more racist than attributing positive elements to another character of the same race.

Now, in the case of the donor of Horta's super-powerful hand, the reader sees little that would render "Strangler Burns" as even a two-dimensional character. One caption that calls him an "African," but if he is such then he's apparently taken an English-language name. He never speaks and the reader doesn't know why he committed whatever murders he committed. The doctor who proposes the operation claims that Burns volunteered the use of his hand claims that he's done so "as a final decent gesture," but this probably isn't anything more than a nod to American jurisprudence, whose legalities would make such consent necessary.

Now, let us consider Horta (whose surname bears an interesting relationship to the titular monster of Guy de Maupassant's short story "The Horla," also a story about an insidious influence possessing a formerly sane man). Horta is, to say the least, rather intense about his desire to paint no matter what, and though he's initially horrified at the thought of sporting a black man's hand, his passion to paint overcomes all resistance. "Black hand-- white hand-- what does it matter? I can paint again!" However, as soon as Horta tries to use his transplant-hand for painting, he finds himself rendering only portraits of horror. Further, he's inspired to become a strangler himself by killing off his rivals in the art-world, the better to render their deaths in oils.

Is there a possibility that Horta is merely imagining that the hand is forcing him to paint horror? The original 1920 novel about a deadly transplant-hand, Renard's LES MAINS D'ORLAC, was ambiguous as to whether any spirit-possession took place, as was the earlier De Maupassant story. The same was the case with the 1924 Austrian adaptation and 1935's MAD LOVE, the last being the most likely influence on collaborators Otto Binder and Jack Kirby. In contrast, "Black Talon" doesn't spend any time weighing the psychological considerations of Horta's plight.

Given that only Horta's artistic intensity might seem in any way unbalanced, it seems likely that Binder and Kirby meant the reader to accept the pseudo-science explanation for the hand's effects. One might question Horta's scientific acumen when he claims that "the corpuscles from the dead killer's hand invaded my bloodstream," but even the surgeon who performs the transplant tells Horta that "there is wild, new blood coursing through your veins." The doctor doesn't make a strict equivalence between this "wild blood" and Strangler's race, but it's likely that most readers of the period would have made that mental leap.

At the same time, toward the story's end Horta boasts to the heroes that "my black, taloned hand will have made me the world's greatest living artist," implicitly because all of his rivals will be dead. So though the murderer's corpuscles are pushing Horta to madness, the specific method of his madness has to do with becoming a great artist-- something one imagines that the Strangler cared nothing about. And the way that he accomplishes this mad aim is by becoming a hybrid between a white man, with his supposed propensity for "fine art," and a black man, whose brutish influence drives Horta to create horror instead of beauty-- though some of the sadism may be Horta's own. It's amusing to imagine that Kirby, a civilized commercial artist who apparently enjoyed drawing grotesquerie to some extent, may have taken some pleasure in humiliating a "fine artist" by subjecting him to sadism and madness.

So is "Black Talon" a racial or racist myth? I find that it recapitulates elements from both "benign chauvinism" and "malign chauvinism," much as I found when considering the Spirit's character Ebony, who was "racist" in his physical appearance but merely "racial" in other elements, such as his distinctive patois. The idea of a Negro having "wild blood" because he's a savage at heart qualifies as a "racist myth." However, there's a compensatory, merely racial fantasy in which a white artist attains superior strength by obtaining the the hand of a Hulking Black Guy. While early comics most often depicted black men as minstrel-show goofballs, one also comes across depictions of black men as hulking muscle-men. I deem such depictions to be racial myths because they are rooted in the observation of certain real racial body-types, as opposed to made-up caricatures like bulging eyes and liver-lips. Not that Strangler Burns is on the same level of formidability as MANDRAKE's Lothar-- but I'd speculate that the former is drawn from the same archetypal well as the latter.

QUICK NON-POLITICS POST

Posted this on a recent comics-forum about politics and superheroes:

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Before one says that everything is of a political nature, I think one must say, "Is politics the fundamental root of human society, or is it a secondary manifestation of that society?"

Maybe you can guess from my phrasing my own take, but I'd say that any political system comes about in order to manage human conflicts relating to what Americans generally call "life, liberty & pursuit of happiness." I'd simplify that to "Life." So politics is about the proper governance of life. There's a nice line in GAME OF THRONES in which one noble tells another that the "smallfolk" don't really care that much about who's on the throne; they just want a good crop and freedom from disease, and whatever ruler helps them to that end is the one they like.

Now, one can believe that, in the real world, nothing is free from political associations. However, in fiction that freedom does exist, even if it's only a freedom of the imagination. One poster brought up the famous example of GREEN LANTERN #76, in which Green Lantern's countless world-saving endeavors are viewed as nugatory next to his failure to address a particular social issue.

I've certainly encountered over-ideological critics who've made the claim that saving the universe doesn't amount to any positive political act; that it amounts, incredibly, to preserving the status quo. I view this as an absurd overstatement of the function of political rectitude; the equivalent of saying, in Judeo-Christian terms, that Man really is made for the Sabbath, not the other way round.

Whether it's saving the universe or catching a serial killer, the hero's deed is meant to signify the continuance, rather than the frustration, of life as it is lived. For some readers, "political life" takes the place of actual life, and so purely most political interpretations of heroic acts come off not as genuine inquiry but as "sentence first, evidence afterwards."

REDEFINING THE RACIAL OTHER PT. 2

Now that I've investigated some of the basic components of Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of "the Other," I can speak more fully as to how I choose to redefine the term.

I've stated that the concept of "the Other," when applied to a human being of a different race than that of the subject, is a nominal one when compared to the near-total lack of congruity between human being and animal. 

I'll further specify that a given subject-- let's say the usual culprit, a White Male-- *may* be more estranged from the culture of a Black Male than he would from the culture of another White Male. Obviously anyone can think of real-world exceptions to this proposition, but for sake of argument I'll assert that this is a dominant tendency, brought on by the White Male's conscious or subconscious responses to persons who do or do not share the overt physical markers that he possesses.

The usual ideological extrapolation from this sort of set-up is to *presume* that because the subject is "shamed" or "repulsed" by the Other, that subject sets up a defensive perimeter around himself and tries to deny the Other any selfhood. The commonest result of this denial is usually termed "projection," and reams have been written about how White Males have projected their various fears upon other ethnicities, often though not always People of Color.

But there's a crucial element omitted by Sartre and all who follow in his wake: the possibility that the subject sees something in the Other that is literally there-- particularly some evil or at least undesirable trait-- because such traits common to both representatives of humanity.

I am not saying that no projection takes place. Though it's become de rigueur to view the character of Fu Manchu as nothing but a projection of British fears of "the Yellow Peril," I certainly wouldn't deny that such projection is an element of Sax Rohmer's creation, particularly since according to his biography, Rohmer didn't really know much about Chinese culture when he created the character. At the same time, that doesn't mean that every observation Rohmer was automatically incorrect, even if he lacked in-depth knowledge. What might it mean if a relatively modern Chinese citizen were to advance the same notion toward some members of his own culture that Rohmer does of Fu Manchu? Director Chang Cheh critiques one of his feudal-period characters for having the same torture-happy attitudes we see in Fu Manchu, as seen in my review of FIVE DEADLY VENOMS here-- and one certainly cannot suspect the Hong Kong director of "Yellow Peril" fears. This comparison raises the question as to whether Rohmer's creation was entirely rooted in facile "projection." 

As I said in Part 1, Sartre's concept of the Other is informed by a desire to rein in the forces of authority represented by European colonialism and capitalism. I suggest, however, that because of this ideological orientation, he could not see the same forms of evil as being either real or potential within the culture of the Other. To rewrite the injunction from the Gospel of Matthew, Sartre could see the beam in a Frenchman's eye, but none in the eye of an Algerian.

I've already discoursed here on what I consider the important difference between "a racial image" and "a racist image," and these distinctions can in turn be glossed by my meditations on "benign chauvinism" and "malign chauvinism," here. And with these distinctions in mind, I will proceed to cite an example of a "racial mythcomic" that would certainly never be honored by Black History Month.

REDEFINING THE RACIAL OTHER PT. 1

In the first essay I wrote for "Racial Other Mythcomics Month," I said of one Don McGregor Black Panther story:

In the McGregor mythos of the Panther, while the slaying of animals is necessary for survival, the beasts constitute an "other" beside which all human-centered "others" are nominal by comparison. 

This basic ethos-- that the cosmos that revolves around humankind still shows more internal congruity than is possible for humans and any other living creature-- would have been either anathema or an irrelevance to the man who most popularized the phrase of "the other," which now turns up with tedious regularity in hundreds of scholarly papers.  I'm not about to critique even a small part of BEING AND NOTHINGNESS on a blogpost, but as it happens Jean-Paul Sartre delivered a more succinct version of his opinions on his "other" concept, when talking about the famous-- and according to him, generally misunderstood-- quotation of a line from NO EXIT rendered as "Hell is other people."

. . .“hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because. . . when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, . . . we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters. . . . But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.

Even if I were not a Jungian, I would find it hard to credence Sartre's statement that "when we try to know ourselves, we use the knowledge of us which other people already have." In my experience few people would count it a great gift, as per Robert Burns, to "know ourselves as others know us." If I am seeking knowledge of myself, I may indeed make some use of "the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves," by which I assume Sartre means one's cultural code of ethics. I will, in addition, seek validation from other human beings in the hope that they will support my findings and/or my path. Yet at the same time there exists, even in children, an individual will that rejects the summary judgments of all those outside it, a will that thunders a Carlyle-esque "NO" to "the Other." The singer Britney recently co-opted the phrase "you don't know what it's like to be me," but the sentiment has existed since the infancy of humanity, and no matter how banal the phrase might sound, it has more to do with the establishment of an individual's identity than some overly dialectical mirroring process. To use the metaphor of the alchemists, the human self is constantly in a process of "breaking down" old patterns and "building up" new ones. The new patterns may turn out to be recapitulations of the old, but that possibility does not invalidate the self as simply being the product of cultural factors-- a point of view Sartre shared with Karl Marx.

 Yet to speak of this rich and variegated process of human interaction in such clumsy and moralistic dialectical terms shows the fundamental poverty of Sartre's intellect. Even Freud, with his image of the human psyche split between a raging id of desire and two spectres of egoistic control, came closer to the mark.

Sartre, like most ideological thinkers, has an agenda in reading human response in this manner. NO EXIT may be the story of a trio of petite-bourgeoisie malcontents who simply can't relate to one another as Sartre thinks that they should. However, when in the above section Sartre speaks of relationships that are "twisted" and "vitiated," he's assuredly thinking not just of individual people but also of cultural constructs that encourage such twisted relationships: colonialism, Mammonism, and all the other usual Marxist suspects. Thus it's not surprising that the term "racial other" has become a routine way of characterizing encounters between disparate cultures, even where they may not technically belong to different races. "Ethnicities" seems to have become a preferred term, since it can take things like the relationship of Europeanized Jews to European-descended WASPS, but I suspect "ethnic other" will not displace the older term any time soon.

More in Part 2.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE GOD KILLER" (JUNGLE ACTION #13, 1975)

It would almost impossible to consider the question of racial myths in the comics medium without mentioning its "first black superhero," the Black Panther, a.ka. King T'Challa of Wakanda.

As I'm dealing only one specific story. I'm obliged to pass quickly over the character's genesis, except in one context. When the Panther appears in his two-part introductory story in FANTASTIC FOUR #52-53, authors Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are thoroughly upbeat about the African lord's success in importing Western technology into his kingdom of Wakanda. I would guess that Lee and Kirby envisioned Wakanda's advancement to be indicative of the potential of all human races to reach the level of attainment seen in the United States.

Don McGregor, writing his "Panther's Rage" saga" in the post-Vietnam era, took a different point of view. McGregor's initial arc began with T'Challa returning to his "Wakanda wonderland" and finding that an old enemy, calling himself Erik Killmonger, has organized a revolutionary force to usurp the Panther's kingship. For the first time the Wakandan ruler sees that during his absence from his homeland-- during which he devoted himself to the role of superhero amid the Avengers-- his kingdom has fallen into chaos. Although during this series Wakanda remains a fantasy-world, sporting prehistoric monsters and meteors able to change humans into super-menaces, McGregor and his artistic collaborators Billy Graham and Rich Buckler revealed that many of the natives were still traditional tribal Africans, ill at ease with the intrusions of Western devices and culture.

"Panther's Rage" is rambling and episodic, and though it's never boring, its myth-themes are not integrated enough to make me list the entire arc here, as I did with the Pini's ELFQUEST and Jack Kirby's NEW GODS. Instead I've chosen one story, McGregor and Graham's "The God Killer," to represent the saga at its best.

"God Killer" follows an episode in which Killmonger stranded T'Challa in a wintry wasteland, hoping that the Panther would be killed by a pack of wolves. Having overcome the wolf-pack-- and I should note here that most episodes dealt with the Panther proving his mastery over animals by reluctantly slaying a particular beast-- T'Challa trails Killmonger and his retinue. But the hero is blocked by one of the villain's bizarre henchmen-- Sombre, who wears what resembles a traditional African mask over his features, and dresses in priest's robes. Sombre is one of a handful of men whom Killmonger exposed to the aforementioned "super-power meteor," and he's been cultivating a relationship with a band of titanic white gorillas whose very existence T'Challa never suspected. Specificially, Sombre has been feeding the corpses of men who died of meteor-radiation to the gorillas, with the result that he's able to command them to go after a live victim, the Black Panther. The Panther manages to stay clear of the regular-sized gorillas, who stand a mere twelve feet tall, but is forced to fight the largest white ape, who looks to be about twenty feet in height. The Panther manages to kick the giant creature off a ledge, where it's fortuitously impaled by the sharp rib-bone of some long-dead prehistoric creature. The story ends with the Panther meditating on the consequences of his act, though by the next issue he's hot on the trail of Sombre and Killmonger once more.

This bare-bones account leaves out a couple of "B-stories"involving the Panther's support-cast, but though these also delve into the trope of "traditional ways threatened by modernity," they're largely unimportant to the "A-story." Though this was the first story in which the white gorillas were shown to be a reality, their image had appeared before in a 1969 AVENGERS story. In this tale writer Roy Thomas posited that the Black Panther's crusade to modernize Wakanda was opposed by another Wakandan, the Man-Ape, whose people worshiped the implicitly imaginary white gorilla and advocated a Wakandan version of an "anarcho-primitivist" stance. Thomas followed Lee and Kirby by unilaterally advocating progress over tradition.

In contrast, McGregor emphasizes that the cult of the white gorilla is as much of a valid religion as T'Challa's veneration of his sacred black panther totem. On one level, the white-gorilla tribe is a continuation of the 20th century boogeyman of the "carnivorous ape" that is best exemplified by the 1933 film KING KONG, and thus it's fitting that T'Challa squares off against one giant ape rather than the whole tribe, even if the king-ape isn't quite as big as Kong. However, McGregor also sees them as figurative gods, simply by virtue of having been the subject of human adulation:

It would be a terrible agony for a man to meet his gods-- especially gods that he never believed in!

Though in a diegetic sense the gorillas are just animals, not gods, the fact that they have been worshiped by human beings-- just as the original Kong was as well-- lifts them above the sphere of the mundane. The death of the king-ape is thus a tragic outcome in the eyes of both McGregor and his viewpoint character:

The Panther is consumed by a sense of his own mortality. He has killed a myth... and his life is lessened by the act. He has lost a part of his past without anything to replace it in the future. It would be a terrible agony for a man to meet his gods. It would be hell if that man had to slay those gods.

McGregor has been criticized, sometimes fairly, for his florid prose, but these lines rate as some of the most cogent sentiments written for a Marvel comic. The writer occasionally evinced a rather touchy-feely attitude toward human relationships, something that might seem at odds with the animal-slaying motif throughout "Panther's Rage." In most jungle-hero narratives-- a tiny number of which concern non-white heroes-- the hero's slaying of jungle-beasts indicates his immediate dominion over his terrain, as well as the more general dominion of humankind-- or alternately, of white humankind-- over the beasts.

In contrast, we have the Black Panther. who is not the first nonwhite jungle hero, but is ineluctably the most mythically significant one, partly but not exclusively because of his race. In the McGregor mythos of the Panther, while the slaying of animals is necessary for survival, the beasts constitute an "other" beside which all human-centered "others" are nominal by comparison. Indeed, in a later episode McGregor describes the Panther's encounter with a particular animal-- one that's not even a literal menace-- as "profoundly alien." Ergo, even though no real gods appear here, the white gorillas incarnate a true "metaphysical myth."

NOTE: I'm aware that apes can and do eat meat, but I wouldn't consider them carnivores since meat-eating is generally an occasional deviation from their vegetarian tendencies.

"RACIAL OTHER" MYTHCOMICS MONTH

Noticing that Black History Month has begun once more, I wondered if I had enough material to do my own very loose version thereof. The short two-part answer is (a) I have plenty of "racial myth" material to do mythcomics on this theme for this week as well as the next three, and (b) I don't think I have nearly enough corresponding material for null-myths on the same theme.

Dealing with (b) first:

There have been a lot of mediocre and/or offensive racial images throughout the history of comic strips and books, but I'm not interested in following the lead of knee-jerk ideological criticism. The mythcomics project  is focused upon studying the many ways in which comics narratives use symbolic discourse, both in consummate and inconsummate ways. I've called to mind many bad stories that use racial images of one kind or another, but they're usually bad in a way that doesn't involve any complex symbolic discourse. The one major exception is the PLASTIC MAN story analyzed here. Building on my knowledge of what little political content manifests in Jack Cole's published work, I think that the "Great Warrior" story shows Cole conflicted about the marginalization of Native Americans while seeking to validate the U.S. power structure, and that mixed message led me to classify it as inconsummate.

But most racial images in the comics are too simplistic to bear analyzing. I couldn't even find any complex racial images in my review of the SUPER GREEN BERET comics; these stories were inconsummate largely because of the creators' misguided attempt to meld the wacky whimsy of Golden Age Captain Marvel with a homage to a Green Beret who went around fighting not only modern wars but also wars in other eras. So I will either (a) not bother to analyze any null-myths this month, or (b) choose to expatiate on themes having nothing to do with racial myths.

On to (a):

There are a fair number of consummate myth-comics on this topic that would fill the four weeks. Yet I rather like the idea of being more general in my approach, by dealing with an assortment of "racial others" as they have been defined by contrast to Caucasian Americans. And no, not just Caucasian American males: the considerable quantity of women who venerated Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND ought to be enough to implicate white women as having participated in all manifestations of racial myth in American culture. I would say that in many cases American Jews have been subsumed within the sphere of American Christians and have responded to the "racial other" in largely covalent ways.

Since I'm writing about art rather than history here, I'm primarily interested in the way that creative minds have chosen to play with the images of race. This means that even some images may have a mythic complexity even if they are not viewed as empowering by real-world members of various ingroups. But offending people has never stopped me before.

ROYSTERING IN THE CLOISTER

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary-- John Milton, AREOPAGITICA (1644)

Back in November I wrote Noah Berlatsky that as long as he and his fellow travelers continued to be "addicted to victimage," they would continue to provide grist for my critical mill.

I was perhaps giving the HUddites too much credit, since for the past couple of months I've found whatever posts I've scanned to be both timorous and tedious. Ng Suat Tong's essay on Frazetta, which brought about my ban from the HU comment-threads, was poorly researched and badly reasoned. But at least the essay's intemperate foolishness grabbed my attention. Unlike a lot of the HU dreck, it afforded me a "trial by what is contrary."

The other week I scanned through the last two months. I had avoided two of the posts that had a lot of comments, one relating to the coming BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN movie, and one on James Bond,because I felt that I could pretty much predict all the ultraliberal, over-ideological sentiments that I would find there. The fact that the superheroes still attract the most energy at HU, as opposed to lofty noodlings about artistic perspective, speaks volumes.

So I was bored with the current cant, but I wanted to deliver on my earlier promise. I wandered through HU's topic list and checked out the "Batman TV Show" topic that has afforded me some good material ion past. Somehow this led me to a 2014 post by Chris Gavaler, TV SUPERHEROINES OF MY LOVELORN YOUTH.

The essay's trip down memory lane is unremarkable enough, and I wouldn't have called attention to it-- particularly not with the high-faluting Milton quote in mind-- had I not chanced upon a couple of remarks by Gavaler in the comment-thread. I'll preface my remarks by noting that I've no particular animus toward Gavaler as I have toward some HUddites. It's his lack of philosophical acuity I'm criticizing; not his personal life.

The first one once more sings that old familiar song of victimage. Imagine Ronstadt warbling "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" as you read:

A part of me flinches though at my own categorizing of women as sexy, non-sexy, etc. Although I experience myself as inevitably straight, I do wonder what would have happened if my culture hadn’t been through images of scantily-clad women at me as a child. 

In this song we hear the strains of the staunch Adornite. One's sexuality is not under one's own aegis; it's yet another aspect of the soul being ruled by that horrible Culture Industry (my words, obviously). By my lights this attitude is comparable to Milton's metaphor of "slinking out of the race." The implication seems to be that "TV and Hollywood," linked by Gavaler in the preceding sentence, are doing something morally culpable by playing up to male heterosexual desire. There's not even the usual demand for balance-- that it would be OK to depict hetero desire as long as there's total equity (whatever that might look like) for whatever marginalized sexual orientations the ideologue may choose to validate. Based on what Gavaler writes here, TV's portrayal of sexy women is A Bad Thing in itself.

But what amazes me about this passage is that Gavaler feels guilty about having indulged in the "categorizing of women as sexy, non-sexy, etc." This isn't just slinking out of a particular race; it's opting out of the human race.

One may argue that adolescents, flush with fresh hormones, can become consumed with sexual fantasies, which may or may not have unpleasant consequences. But there's no sentient human being who doesn't practice some form of "categorizing." For that matter, a sizable quantity of nonhuman creatures practice a form of categorization called "sexual selection." Humans cannot know if the aesthetic priorities of the female fiddler crab, and why she chooses one male crab over another. But even if nonhuman creatures *may* be thinking more about survival potential than pure sexiness-- though of course no one can know that either-- the result is the same. Crab A gets his ashes hauled and Crab B does not.

Suppose that somehow Evil Hollywood had never managed to sink its hooks into the American psyche as it did. Suppose that some Marxist regime enforced the standards that the HUddites claim to desire, so that at the very least there was equity in all representations of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and whatever else gets the inside track. This still would not mean (pause for change to shouting all caps)--

THIS STILL WOULD NOT MEAN THAT THE CATEGORIES OF "SEXY" AND "NON-SEXY" WOULD CEASE TO EXIST!

Not having been a homosexual, I cannot speak for that marginalized faction. However, I strongly suspect that they too prefer to sleep with bedmates that they find to be sexy, and that they avoid the "non-sexy" except when they're (so to speak) hard up.

But I suspect that Gavaler doesn't really want to place all sexual desire in question: only male hetero desire, as is indicated by a question he addresses to a poster who fails to respond further:

Are all these women just items of exchange in superheroes’ homosocial universe? 

So what Gavaler is really distancing himself from is not the whole of sexual selection, but from being implicated in the "homosocial universe" of Hollywood, which is just academic-speak for "the old boys' club."

Nothing I could write would alter the writer's notion that this is a virtuous stance. I can argue, though, that it is a "fugitive and cloistered virtue," Milton's essay was concerned with a somewhat different form of censorious attitude, but he keenly saw that the censor harbored the deluded idea that he might promote a beneficial "innocence," but that said censor would instead bring about "impurity." This brings to mind my earlier comment that the ideologues' dominant attitude is pre-lapsarian in nature. They look back at the abuses of history-- though always with one eye closed-- and want to wish them away, rather than considering that there is something in humankind that can only be brought out only through contention. Milton spoke of "purity," while Nietzsche, in many ways Milton's opposite, spoke of the virtue of "courage over fear."  Yet both of them were at base protesting against people who tried to opt out of struggle because of a mistaken desire for safety and innocence. In the terms I've adopted from Fukuyama, this is characteristic of the *isothymic* attitude:

*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.

Nietzsche feared the rise of the "Ultimate Men," defined by mediocrity. "Men without chests" was his metaphor. I, having been born in a more graphic era, tend to think of the Ultimate Men as being without something else-- and given the subject, I shouldn't even need to say what the "something" is.