THE LITTLE NEOPURITANS

Though I've said as much as I need to for the time being on the function of "beautiful people" in narrative, I find that this line of thought returns me to the discussion of "adult pulp," last discussed in detail here.

As I noted here, I was fairly bullish on the concept of "adult pulp" in 2012.  Even though critics as politically diverse as Bill Willingham and Dirk Deppey sneered at "superhero decadence" for very different reasons, I felt that the continued success of decadent superhero comics-- regardless of whether I liked them all or not-- validated my interpretation as to the necessity of the sensational in art, be it of the canonical or popular variety:

...art is built upon a sensational foundation, though with the caveat that everything in art is a "gesture" in the Langerian sense-- an attempt to capture experience which is necessarily less immediate than experience.

I was aware, of course, that there were people who still took opposing positions-- again, for politically diverse reasons.  In Chicken Colin's attack-essay on Sequart, CC took issue with my calling them "anti-pulpsters."  His objection was of course thick-witted, since he had made up his mind from the start not to represent my conceptions accurately.  His sole tactic was to read "sensationalism" as a cover for the "sexism" to which his ultraliberal sentiments were welded, and his strategy was your basic "get thee from me, Sexist Satan" admonition, which seems to have worked pretty well on the majority of Sequart readers.

I will admit, though, that "anti-pulpster" was a clumsy term for those opposing the validity of sensationalism.  It required far too much explanation to be useful.

Now I prefer to call them "Neopuritans," though they still divide up along lines similar to those that separate Willingham and Deppey.

On one hand, we have Elitist Neopuritans like Gary Groth and Dirk Deppey.  Their base conviction is that superhero comics should not include adult levels of sensational material because superhero comics are for kids.  Extreme usages of sex and violence should be for the sort of reading material aimed at actual adults, though to be sure the usage of such sensationalisms in "trash fiction" aimed at adults, such as Mickey Spillane, will usually reap the same contempt shown to the "kiddie" superhero stories.

On the other, we have the Populist Neopuritans.  I haven't read enough of Willingham to describe him in this fashion, but Kelly Thompson is probably an adequate substitute in this respect.  The Populists are on the whole still emotionally engaged with superheroes, as opposed to the elitists' conviction that the superhero genre ideally should be set aside in favor of "better things."  However, the Populists follow the Elitists in subscribing to the idea that extreme sensationalism is no more than pandering, and so many of them would prefer to return comics to the status of "all ages" entertainment.

Though I've said before that I think the days of "comics as juvenile pulp" are a thing of the past, I won't rule out the possibility that someone might conceive of a new marketing approach that could lure back a lot of younger buyers.  That market would probably never again reach the heights of sales in the Golden Age of Comics, but some paradigm shift is still possble.

However, I feel revolted by the base Werthamism that crops on some comics-fan boards when those fans choose to rail against any and all use of pulpish sensationalism.  It doesn't matter if it's as well done as Frank Miller's DARK KNIGHT or as badly done as Mark Millar's WANTED; anything that keeps funnybooks out of the hands of kids is part of the vast evil conspiracy of nasty pandering comics-companies, usually though not invariably "the Big Two."

I remarked on one of these threads that I had little confidence in the kid-market:

Getting kids to buy Batman coloring books and Wonder Woman underoos doesn't mean that the kids will go out and try to buy Batman and Wonder Woman comic books. That's the point: historically a lot of kids wandered away from pamphlet comic books long before the effects of the DM had fully manifested. You say that the Eisners include a lot of children's comics; are any of them in pamphlet form? I suspect most of them are in book-form, which means that those works have successfully moved in on the market of prose-oriented children's books.

In response to a poster who claimed that other countries' comics didn't pander to "the male gaze:"

 Japan for one country has exactly the same kind of attitude I've endorsed here: sexy comics for men and sexy comics for women, as well as other types. The point is, if you're endorsing Japan as a superior example of a comics-producing country, then you can't claim that all the US has to do is clean up its act. To be more like Japan, the US needs equal opportunity dirt.

One idea I repeatedly encountered was that superhero stories weren't "meant to be" sexy in nature, and that all of the recent "adult pulp" endeavors were, in the same fashion Dirk Deppey claimed, perversions of kid's entertainment.  To this I replied (and got no answer):

 But I've also said that superhero comics in their earliest days often had sexual aspects to them that one doesn't find so readily in comics for younger kids, so in that respect they did have their wankery-aspects. They weren't ONLY that, but they were never as squeaky-clean as some people like to think. Thus to have "adulterated" versions is no different than reading a Tijuana Bible where Betty Boop gets it on with Popeye.

 So far I have yet to encounter any rejection of my "bedrock of sensationalism" theme that does not draw upon a Puritanical tendency to cast out anything that smacks of sensual appeal.  I suppose that those who do so have managed the sort of mental separation I argued for in this essay, in which I stated (among other things) that not all violence had a sexual component, as George Bataille had argued.  However, the Neopuritans have taken that separation much farther than I ever would have, claiming that there's a vast divide between "non-erotic violence" and "erotic violence" when in truth the separation between the two is more like a membrane.

As I commented in PRIDE OF PREJUDICE, the affect informing these elementary mistakes is that of pride: the desire to feel that the medium with which you have associated yourself is something in which you can take pride. But what sort of pride is it, that requires validation from those parts of the community who would never consider picking up a comic book at all?  Especially since those readers have their own avenues of sensationalism, ranging from PLAYBOY magazine to FIFTY SHADES OF GREY.

QUICK THOUGHT ON IMAGINATION

Kelly Thompson's incorrect use of the term "imagination," examined here, leads me to another line of thought: is "not showing" a given phenomenon inherently put more demands on the audience's imagination than "showing?"

Over the years I've seen innumerable comments in the affirmative.  Here's a book-length study addressing, at least in part, the role of radio serials in promoting the imagination of their audience, since those who listened to radio programs had to conjure up the physical appearance of the perils faced by the Shadow, or the comic appearances of Lum and Abner.

With the horror-genre in movies, some critics have a particular preference for "indirect horror," even though the cinema is inherently a visual medium.  The 1942 CAT PEOPLE frequently receives praise for not showing "the monster," and allowing the audience to make up its own mind as to whether there was a "cat monster" at all.

The absence of a "boogieman" figure, however, does not automatically mean that a given work is more "imaginative" than one that has such a figure.  CAT PEOPLE, though it has its virtues, is not especially complex beyond its basic "is-she-or-isn't-she-a-cat-monster" schtick.

For example, though the 1941 WOLF MAN flirts with a similar "wolf-or-not-wolf" plot, for whatever reason the film does commit itself, making clear that Larry Talbot does indeed transform.

Despite discarding this particular ambivalence, however, I find WOLF MAN to be far more imaginative, far more symbolically complex than anything in the repertoire of CAT PEOPLE's producer, the somewhat overrated, Val Lewton.

However, at this time I don't choose to provide a proof of this opinion, since it is merely a "quick thought."  I don't imagine that any regular reader of this blog would doubt my ability to produce such a proof, though.
 

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE ALWAYS WIN PT 3

I have to wind up this essay mini-series by tackling in greater depth this Kelly Thompson quote:

I am shocked by the lack of imagination some of you have when it comes to superhero costumes. Not EVERY costume has to look the same – standard issue spandex and garish colors. There’s a lot of innovation to be found in more fluid designs that embrace current fashion and modern trends rather than pumping out the same old thing. Specific to Meredith’s designs, some of her more sport/athletic looks make far more sense than anything else we regularly see. Professional athletes are the closest things we have to superheroes, and none of them run around in spandex, but any of them might be seen in Meredith’s Powergirl or Phantom Lady designs.

Thompson does not in this column enlarge on what she means by "imagination."  Since all of the outfits she endorses picture superheroes wearing ordinary, generally body-concealing street clothes, one interpretation might be, "You people don't have the imagination to see that these are appealing heroines even if you can't see their figures or their bare flesh."  I imagine Thompson would deny that this is her meaning, but even if she were to do so, her argument doesn't stand up to logical scrutiny.

What, precisely, is "imaginative" about having superheroines:

(1) "Embrace current fashion and modern trends,"

            Or

(2) Wear the same things that "professional athletes" wear?


Just as Thompson hopelessly confused the terms "hyper-sexualization" and "objectification" as I noted here,
here she's invoking "imagination" when what she has truly endorsed is "mimetic fidelity." 

Now, it's certainly not impossible to design a superheroine costume that is based on "current fashions" but which is imaginative enough to have its own identity.  It may be that Thompson thinks that all of the costumes she endorses possess that quality, though she did not state her opinion in those terms.  Mimetic fidelity is all that she uses as her baseline.

I return once more to one of the comments from the column that I found instructive:

'the Power Girl, Phantom Lady, and Cheshire costumes leave me scratching my head — they’re good drawings, but there’s nothing superheroic (or supervillanous) about them.'

This fan, one Rob S (who incidentally did like the "Raven" redesign) hits upon one of the main characteristics of superhero costumes, be they male or female, revealing or non-revealing.  They are meant to invoke the imagination, to make it seem possible that human beings could assume godlike status by their donning of vivid and often impractical outfits.

We hear much from Thompson about the impracticality of Phantom Lady wearing a costume that threatens to "bust out all over."

But not so much about Batman sporting a mile-long cape that ought to trip him up on a regular basis:

Or the Hulk managing to wade throughout innumerable battles without ever having his pants ripped off by death-rays.

Just to clarify the matter of taste this implies, however, let it be known that I'm not critiquing Thompson for liking realistic costumes.

But, except in the sense I mentioned above, there's nothing "imaginative" about it.

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE ALWAYS WIN PT 2

 

Kelly Thompson's April attack on the male gaze inspired this mini-satire, but here I'll go into my specific problems with her definition of the "beauty factor" in superhero comics.

On one hand, her most famous essay, "No, It's Not Equal," acknowledges that there is some appeal, even for female readers, in identifying with characters who are damn good looking.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want or expect all characters to be unattractive. I understand that we all want to lose ourselves to a degree in fantasy. That fictional worlds provide an escape that we all want. Hell, I grew up wanting to be these heroines because they were powerful and beautiful, I’m not immune to it.

So far, so good.  Where Thompson and I part company is that she sees this tendency toward inequality as purely a consequence of "social conditioning."

We’re all socially conditioned to want youth and beauty, and we’re all conditioned to think specific things are beautiful, but that doesn’t make it right, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to educate ourselves against it. And it doesn’t make it equal between the sexes. It’s much more frequently true that women are required to be beautiful no matter what, while men have much more flexibility.

This education apparently comes down to harping on the inequality of (1) the prevalence of beautiful people in superhero comics, as opposed to ordinary looking people, and, to a lesser extent, (2) the tendency to allow male villains to be ugly but not female villains.

From anti-heroes to superheroines, and from femme fatales to full blown supervillains it’s rare to find a female character that isn’t drop dead gorgeous.

It's true that there is no statistical "equality" in this situation, as was apparently claimed by some defensive fans.  What Thompson and some of the more monomaniacal Sequart readers chose to overlook is the question as to whether it's ethical to impose equality upon the depictions of fictional characters within a corpus of works dominantly aimed at an audience of a particular gender orientation.

As I did in Part 1, I advocate whatever narratives devices work for the type of fiction the author is attempting.  If one is attempting a work in the vein of "thematic realism," as with the LOVE AND ROCKETS works of the Brothers Hernandez, then great variation in body types such as Thompson advocates is to the good of the narrative.  However, if one is attempting "thematic escapism"-- as I would categorize the Stan Lee-Don Heck IRON MAN continuity I cited-- then a more standardized approach to questions of physical beauty may be necessary.  In the IRON MAN stories cited, the physical upgrades of Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan exist to further the admittedly simplistic aims of the superhero/soap opera narrative.  I speculate, then, that Thompson would characterize Stan Lee's standardization of these two not-too-glamorous characters as a capitulation to social conditioning, rather than a reflection of the influence of beauty (be it socially conditioned or something more complex) in the real social order, on which the narrative is partly modeled.

This seems to me a fair extrapolation, since by that last-quoted statement above, Thompson defines the tendency toward "drop dead gorgeous" characters as just such a capitulation, particularly since a lot of male villains are "allowed" to be ugly while female villains are not.

What this blinkered view overlooks is that while some female villains' beauty *may* be gratuitous, in many cases it's a narrative necessity.  Take the Enchantress-- a character introduced in the original "Thor" feature in JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #103, and one of those Thompson includes in her gallery of gorgeous evildoers.

I'm sure that Thompson would be aware that the Enchantress' raison d'etre depends on her being gorgeous far more than, say, Moonstone.  What she probably would not appreciate is that even though extra-diegetic fans may well have ogled the curvaceous conjurer, the main purpose of Enchantress' beauty is its use in tempting the hero of the story.

This scene is one of two in which the villainess tries and fails to seduce Thor.  As with my IRON MAN examples, the purpose of utilizing glamor is to encourage the reader's identification with the soap-opera travails of the main character and his girfriend.  Because the dominant reader is so invested, the only possible threat to that relationship must come from some character whom the reader can believe would be capable of making Thor's hammer stand up straight (as it seems to be doing in the scene above).

I'm not saying that "thematically escapist" works don't include any situations in which a less-than-attractive female makes up to an attractive one.  Changing media for convenience, here's a scene from a 1967 WILD WILD WEST episode in which the hero (Robert Conrad) is being vamped somewhat by the villainess of the story, essayed by 67-year-old Agnes Moorhead.

While the late Ms. Moorehead looked pretty good for her years in this episode, almost no one viewing the show is likely to believe that Moorehead's character has any chance to seduce the hero, which indeed she does not.  And if one replaces the factor of age with any of the "realistic" attributes I mentioned in my satire-- having a bald spot, a harelip, a needle-nose, etc.-- then once again the reader is unlikely to believe that the villainess can seduce the hero.  And so if an author WANTS the reader to believe that the hero can be tempted-- even if his ultimate aim is to have him resist temptation in the name of true love-- then narrative logic demands that the represenative of "vice" be as attractive, or more so, than "virtue," as we also see in this medieval image of Hercules choosing between the two.

With these examples in mind, it should be evident that comic-book artists and writers, like almost every other toiler in the vales of thematic escapism, may have good narrative reasons for emphasizing beauty in their villains: as a constant temptation to the hero or heroes.  In contrast, despite all the silly-ass cant by critics who find deep homosexual patterns in superhero comics, the depiction of male villains as statistically less-than-lovely indicates the fact that they are not constructed to be sexually appealing to the heroes.  Perhaps these critics are revealing their own atypical attractions by their getting boners from male-vs.-male battles.

Not that there's anything wrong with that--

Except when it leads to really bad logical conclusions.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING DYNAMICALLY DIFFERENT. PART II

Though the earlier "DIFFERENT" essay was just a quick satire of Kelly Thompson's enthusiasm for certain superheroine costume redesigns, I would be remiss not to mention that she returned to the subject within a little less than a month.  The results were interesting, to say the least.  While some of the fan-reaction for the first set of redesigns-- either redesigns executed by the companies or proposed by artists whom Thompson liked-- seemed split over which designs were good or bad, the bulk of the response on the May essay was negative toward the redesigns by artists Kris Anka and Meredith McClaren.  There were a few scattered positive responses toward this or that costume, but remarks such as this were numerically representative:


'The simple problem with your redesigns is that they’re amazingly butt-ugly and boring. “Covered flesh” doesn’t always equal good, and “exposed flesh” doesn’t always equal bad.'

'Meredith McClaren’s “redesigns” are just her drawing the characters in street clothes'

'the Power Girl, Phantom Lady, and Cheshire costumes leave me scratching my head — they’re good drawings, but there’s nothing superheroic (or supervillanous) about them.'

Thompson received so much negative response that she first railed at her detractors for their "lack of respect," which in her opinion justified the "basement dwelling socially inept comic book fan stereotype."  She also criticized the respondents for "lack of imagination," which is certainly the pot calling the kettle black.  I would concur with the verdict that McClaren's costumes in particular look like nothing but modified "street clothes," and most of Anka's redesigns are no better.  Thompson made a lame apology for losing her temper and later closed the comments on this essay.

Most revealing is that though in "No, It's Not Fair" Thompson advocated an aesthetic in which women would be more athletic rather than have "pornstar" bodies, it's clear that even if Marvel and DC followed that aesthetic, they'd have to restrict themselves to burka-like coverings to fit her aesthetic, because athletic superheroines should wear exactly what real athletes wear:


'Professional athletes are the closest things we have to superheroes, and none of them run around in spandex, but any of them might be seen in Meredith’s Powergirl or Phantom Lady designs.'

This means that all of Thompson's blather about athletic bodies becomes meaningless.  If they're going to be covered up anyway, why can't all heroines have pornstar bodies?

The agenda is clear: the male gaze must be frustrated and defeated at all costs

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE ALWAYS WIN PT 1

My title for this essay-series is meant not as a statement of unalloyed fact, but an indicator of a tendency that I feel to be grounded in the fundamentals of narrative communication. In this, I think it's a little more philosophically sound than a famous, and equally attention-seeking, assertion by Dave Sim; i.e., "No one wants to be a woman."

In one of my earliest blog-essays here I wrote:

For most genre-fiction-- particularly those media which, unlike prose, hinge on depicting the appearance of the characters-- the standardization of sexual attractiveness is a useful narrative tool. In romances, for instance, it's almost de rigeur to depict both hero and heroine as meeting a bland standard for attractiveness. This is not because the narrative is trying to convince anyone that homely people don't mate in real life, but because it's advantageous to the narrative's smooth progression to depict only good-looking people becoming romantically entwined. As long as the hero and heroine meet a basic standard of attractiveness, an audience-member is less likely to be thrown out of his/her participation in the story to think, "How can Character A possibly be attracted to Character B?"

Though my essay touches on some of the disadvantages of this standardization, other critiques by such low-wattage luminaries as Julian Darius and Kelly Thompson show little or no awareness of how this standardization-- or objectification, as some prefer to call it without exception-- serves a consistent narrative purpose. This purpose remains constant regardless of the intensity utilized in a given work, be it one of GLAMOR, TITILLATION or PORNIFICATION.

By way of demonstrating this consistency, I cite an excerpt from this post by fan-blogger Barry Pearl.  In this essay Pearl quotes from an interview with Silver Age IRON MAN artist Don Heck:

“I used to think of Pepper Potts as Schluzie from Bob Cummings’ “Love That Bob” (TV Show). She was always interested in the boss and never could go out with him, and she’s thinking of all these dumb broads Stark is going out with. Happy Hogan was just a pug type, like Joe Palooka.” “Stan called and said he wanted Pepper to be prettier,”Heck laments. “That wasn’t my idea. As far as I was concerned, that killed it. If she’s homely and she winds up going out, then it’s a big deal. If she’s prettier, who cares? “Then, Stan said, ‘Make Happy handsomer.’ I liked him with his banged-up ears and crooked nose. He was fun to do at that point. When suddenly everybody had to be pretty, then I didn’t like him.”

Here we have what many fan-writers would automatically assume to be an appeal to the male reader's groinal region.  Don Heck wanted to depict support-character Pepper Potts as a slightly homely young girl, modeled on, but not quite as homely as, the actress who played the part of "Schultzie" on TV's "Love That Bob."  Under editor Stan Lee's direction, Pepper soon became as "model-gorgeous" as any of the jet-setting babes with whom Tony Stark cavorted.  I believe that writer Archie Goodwin finally tossed in a note about how Pepper had transformed herself, but clearly Heck was justified in feeling that his conception had been put aside.

However, note that Lee also wanted Heck to make the pug-ugly character of Happy Hogan handsomer.  Why would an editor require that if he's just trying to appeal to horny young boys?

The truth may lie in the fact that Lee was less concerned with giving Heck the latitude for more naturalistic-looking characters-- with which I do think Heck did a fine job-- and more concerned with developing the characters in the soap-operatic style that he Lee had started developing for the Marvel superhero titles. 

Soap opera, of course, is all about romantic torment.  Rarely on real soap operas does one see a homely girl catch a handsome guy, or a homely guy nab a real looker.  Why?  Because, even though such things do happen in real life, they seem unlikely to the audience, which expects that "beautiful people always win," particularly with respect to the prize of "other beautiful people."  It's a pecking-order that most if not all human cultures internalize, and even when one sees exceptions, many rationalize the deviation by saying something like, "X married Y for Y's money."

Stan Lee's scripts for IRON MAN show Tony Stark going out with various models and rich bitches, but as far as romance goes, only Pepper Potts resonates as a real romantic interest.  I surmise, though, that Lee thought his readers would find it incredible had the playboy started dating his homely secretary.  Hence "homely" must change to "hottie."

At the same time, Lee surely wanted to promote the "triangle" aspect of the Tony-Pepper-Happy relationship.  In the original Heck version, most readers could imagine Happy and Pepper together, but not Pepper with Tony, nor Happy providing any competition for Tony if the playboy decided to date his homely secretary.  Therefore I surmise that Happy gets a makeover so that he will appear as a credible romantic rival.

Such were the demands of beauty in the innocent Silver Age.  In Part 2, I'll examine some modern permutations.

AT LAST LOST BOYS

Just as I read THE CORSICAN BROTHERS (covered in my previous post) in order to understand the origins of the later "uncanny" films made from it, I recently re-read J.M. Barrie's 1911 PETER PAN in order to justify the comment I made in a review of the 2011 telefilm NEVERLAND:

NEVERLAND, though it was financed by the Syfy Channel as was the two-part ALICE, shows Willing warming to his material to better effect. Possibly this was because J.M. Barrie's PETER PAN has stronger adventure-currents than the source material of either Alice or Oz. To be sure, were I classifying the Barrie novel, I'd tend to consider it a "combative comedy," in that I think the comic tones of the book overpower the adventurous tones. Likewise the Disney version of PETER PAN. However, Nick Willing's version falls more completely into the category of the pure adventure-work.

I never saw PETER PAN performed as a play.  This was the medium in which Barrie premiered his most famous creation in its best known form, though a somewhat non-continuous version of Peter appeared first in Barrie's 1902 novel THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD.  I knew only the Disney film, which didn't impress me all that much.  I don't know when I read the novel except that it was not as a child: it could have been ten or twenty years ago. 

Without question in my mind, the book PETER PAN qualifies not only as a "combative comedy" but as a "combative comedy-adventure" after the fashion mentioned in this essay. However, the example I used in that essay, DC's INFERIOR FIVE, represents a very different form of "comedy" than the one evoked by James Barrie.

In my essay FUNNY BONERS I contrasted Freud's "relief theory of humor" with that of Schopenhauer's "incongruity theory."  However, to be honest I have not read anything but excerpts from Freud's JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS.  When I recently came across a reference to Freud's having made a distinction between two types of humor-- one "tendentious" and the other "non-tendentious"-- I realized that I had not give Freud his due, having depended too much on secondary sources.  Though I still believe that Schopenhauer's theory encompasses more psychic territory than does Freud's, this Wikipedia entry establishes that Freud was aware of the type of humor that Heinlein called "the gentle smile:"

Freud made a key distinction between tendentious and non-tendentious humor. Tendentious humor involves a “victim,” someone at whose expense we laugh. Non-tendentious humor does not require a victim. This innocuous humor typically depends on wordplay, and Freud believed it has only modest power to evoke amusement. Tendentious humor, then, is the only kind that can evoke big laughs. However, Freud believed a mixture of both tendentious and non-tendentious humor is required to keep the tendentious humor from becoming too offensive or demeaning to its victim. The innocent jokework of the innocuous humor would mask the otherwise hostile joke and therefore “bribe” our senses, allowing us to laugh at what would otherwise be socially unacceptable. Therefore, we often think we are laughing at innocuous jokes, but what really makes them funny is their socially unacceptable nature hidden below the surface.

While I can't say that INFERIOR FIVE ever produced "big laughs," it was intended to do so, in that the feature was meant to "victimize" the standard straight version of the superhero with parodies of clumsy superheroes, dumb superheroes, etc. 

In contrast, Barrie's PETER PAN seems more focused on a low-key, homey type of comedy, tinged with a modest irony.  The opening chapters set the tone with their emphasis on what I've called "the small-scale world of home and neighborhood," and even the Darling children's voyage into a land of unbridled adventure never completely escapes that tone.  The same tone undercuts much of the potential nastiness of the conflict between Peter and his allies vs. Hook and his pirates.  There can be no doubt that the play and the book are combative works (though THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD does not seem to be), but the excitement is subordinate to the tone of incongruity.

Barrie's sense of irony rarely if ever translates to later film or television adaptations.  I can think of none that have communicated the frank but knowing estimation of children Barrie repeats throughout the book, one that most if not all children will instantly recognize:

and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.