Nuance is what Comics calls for when a white guy does something really bad. To begin to form the basis of an opinion about each and every blatant awful act requires deep investigation, consideration, and care. You’ve gotta hear both sides, or so I’m told.
Here is what I know about Chris Sims. Under duress, he confessed to harassing a woman. The woman he harassed, Val D’Orazio, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder; she has described its effects, including financial strain, suicidal ideation, and professional hardship. It was such a blight on her health that it drove her out of comics blogging. These are indisputable facts.
Indisputable, except this narrative has been framed in two ways. A man, Chris Sims, has changed for the better, and there’s the sense that we should focus on that. D’Orazio has changed too, but for the worse. That’s not so uplifting. Not as easy. Not a point to rally behind as we move forward.
Indisputable, except that Comics calls for nuance. Despite Sims’ clear admission of guilt, some want to pry open this cold case and review with their own two eyes ancient blog posts, comments wars, and semi-relevant tweets. Cool, here’s thousands of words on someone’s personal impression of a bygone comics blogging milieu. This is how it always goes, this call for nuance, where even glossing some comics controversy requires sorting through so much ephemera that it quickly begins to sound like a whole lot of nothing. These petty piles of “evidence” begin to elide the unpleasant, indisputable truth: Chris Sims harassed a woman, and he made her very sick. Makes her sick, present tense, today, some five years after the fact.
D’Orazio had a big mouth and Sims had his burgeoning career. Claire Napier described how he built that career on his mistreatment of her, and I’d add that he’s now trying to build his persona as an ally on it too. Sims says all of this explicitly in his apology—offers it up like that’s a thing that makes sense, a thing that I’m supposed to understand. Sims found his voice in comics by harassing a woman, and now that he’s reformed he crows about his own sensitivity, which she helped him find, too. Good for him! (Bad for her.) Hey, thanks for sharing, Val. Your shitty fucking experience helped Sims become the compassionate man he is today.
Real progressives, we’re told, should rally behind Sims 2.0. “Chris is not the man he was when he directed his vitriol at Val D’Orazio,” says ComicsAlliance. Helpfully, Sims has offered a thoughtful analysis of his own campaign of harassment in the guise of two apologies. What a prince. Clearly he has come to realize that harassment is very, very bad. “Chris understands this now, and has understood it for years,” says CA. The point you see is not what Sims did; the point is what he now knows. Now that he understands, now that he’s better, now that he’s made a name for himself, some would-be hooligans, some riffraff, some GamerGate types, want to tear him down. To undo all the progress he’s made for all of us. For Comics!
Instead of an apology, ComicsAlliance went with frantic spin. Taking Sims’ lead, they chose to focus on the narrative of redemption. Along the way, CA invoked a cabal of anonymous haters who seek to sow discontent in the world of Progressive Comics, where all is well, clearly, la-la-la. “Someone was targeting Chris not out of a sense of justice, but because they wanted to destroy his success,” they wrote. Because, let’s face it, that’s the absolute worst crime you can commit in this town: to bring a good man low when he doesn’t deserve it.
Comics calls for nuance when a white guy does something really bad, especially when Comics knows that guy personally. Laura Hudson described factual reports of Sims’ harassment as an “anti-progressive campaign” trying to “actively dismantle progressive voices in comics.” Hudson is someone I admire, and it was uncomfortable to see her describe Val D’Orazio as a “skeleton” from Sims’ past to be wielded as a weapon against him, and against progressive voices. Who are the living breathing beings in that construction? Who isn’t? This is what nuance looks like in comics controversies: choosing to value one person’s humanity over someone else’s. Who dares to wave a bunch of old bones in the face of vital progress? Progressive Comics just wants to move forward. And what reasonable person doesn’t want that?
David Brothers wrote a powerful essay about cowardice in comics, explaining how, to white people, “racist” is an unspeakable slur. Accusations of racism and sexism are always given far more scrutiny and consideration than the offenses themselves. If you want to speak out, you’d better have your ducks in a row, because sure as shit someone will be there calling for “nuance.” Nuance is what Comics calls for when a white guy does something really bad. And that nuance is always and forever in the service of understanding him–the complex, well meaning white dude. To the rest of us it means antipathy, scrutiny, and straight-up hostility. There are consequences for whoever had the gall to speak up. It can ruin your day or your week. It can even make you physically ill. There is always a price.
Nuance dictates who receives the benefit of the doubt. Many, many comics controversies ago, when people accused Jason Karns of being a racist piece of shit, Tom Spurgeon explained he’d have to study Karns’ oeuvre before leveling such a serious accusation. Contrast those measured words with Spurgeon’s emotionally charged, intuitive “snap choice” to change his Twitter avatar to a racist caricature in the wake of Charlie Hebdo. I offer this example, not because Spurgeon is the worst or only offender along these lines by a long shot, but because it so plainly embodies a rampant attitude in Progressive Comics. It delineates what deserves careful consideration and who is most deserving of empathy. It is entirely oblivious to bias. It says, “I will think long and hard before I call someone a racist. And I will think very little, if it all, before I myself commit a racist act.”
Comics controversies have a short half-life. Time enough for everyone to write two or three angry tweets. Everyone cares and they CARE and they care really hard, and there’s very little time to absorb and reflect before another white guy does something really bad and there’s a renewed call for nuance, another pile of tweets to parse before we throw them into the void.
Here’s the thing: I fail to see the nuance in Sims’ story. He was a bad man, and now he’s a good one. Has he reformed, for real, deep in his heart? It’s entirely possible. I confess I don’t care.
Now that he’s one of the good guys, Sims is helping to lead the march forward for Progressive Comics, such as it is. Ever onward! That’s his story. But I’m more interested in the other side of the narrative, the one that belongs to D’Orazio. It’s with her experience—not Sims’ success—that the path to progress starts. Progress is not desperately pushing forward as though you’re running away from something. This is not Jurassic Park or a Cormac McCarthy novel where we’d better keep moving. Real progress sometimes requires standing still and taking stock.
So let’s take stock. A man bullied a woman. She’s still dealing with the ongoing implications of his bad behavior. It makes her sick. Years after the fact, the bully is finally dealing with the fallout. It makes him look bad—the worst thing that can happen to a man in this industry. And guess what? Making a man in this industry look bad is nearly impossible. They have nuance. It’s complicated.
I don’t question why white guys like Sims behave badly. I don’t give a hoot, and even if I did, I doubt I’d understand. Their rationale, if you can call it that, is entirely beside the point. Nuance is what Comics calls for when a white guy does something really bad, and it’s long been used to redirect negative attention. It ignores what is actually at stake.
I’m tired of hearing about Chris Sims. I don’t care about his reputation, or his heart, or his alleged victimization at the hands of some hater cabal. I don’t care about his success or his rehabilitation or his vision for the future. I care least of all about Progressive Comics. They are more than welcome to leave me behind.
I’m writing today because I care about the story of Val D’Orazio. In doing so I feel no sense of forward momentum. I know it won’t be long before I hear this story again.
One thing I’ve been thinking about with this is the way in which there seem to be such limited options for justice in this kind of situation. Sims apologizes, and/or Sims loses his job seem like the only options on the table. And neither of those really does D’Orazio any concrete good.
Daniel Handler’s charitable donation after his remarks at the National Book Awards seemed like a better way to go, especially because he set it up as matching donations, so it became a community effort. As it is, the current dynamic is just further polarizing, which means D’Orazio has gotten even more harassment, including threats frightening enough that she’s had to leave twitter.
A suggestion: “As it is, [online comment remains a wretched hive of scum and misogyny], which means D’Orazio has gotten even more harassment…”
I’m not sure what “the current dynamic is just further polarizing” has to do with anything.
Well…I think there’s truth to that. But I also feel like you could maybe mitigate that if there were a sign that Sims/CA/Marvel were entirely on board with helping D’Orazio. The wiggle room in the various apologies, and the way that the narrative (as Kim says) continues to be about Sims’ pain/goodness/growth ends up casting D’Orazio as the bad guy. I think that fuels abuse directed at her.
Note that Daniel Handler is filthy rich: he could buy mitigation and nuance.
I am willing to accept that Sims is actually penitent and has been for some time, but not sure how to handle that, chose to do nothing until he had to and that was a fuck up that compounded the problem – if for no other reason that he is friends with Rachel Edidin and she doesn’t seem like the type of person to put up with that shit, then again we all have our blindspots. Furthermore, I think people’s perspectives can change, but their relationship to their previous identity is such that they cannot address it without shame or without having to admit to the world (in Sims’ case) that part of his popularity and the career he built for himself was in part due to the asshole persona he had online from his early days.
But of course, he should be ashamed, and if for no other reason than the way people have bent over backwards to give him the benefit of doubt and this “revelation” has been treated by Marvel and comics fans as opposed to how D’Orazio’s was treated (and continues to be treated) by Marvel and male comics fans, he needs to be held accountable. She is not given a benefit of the doubt and her motives are questioned. The backlash points out the more complex issue in the industry and fandom: people care more about “internet personalities” than the causes they claim to support, and the latter are often distorted or conveniently ignored to make room for our image of the former. At the same time there needs to be a space for people to come clean and beg forgiveness and have a chance to remain part of an industry/community – but that space can’t EVER come at the expense of the people originally victimized. I just don’t know if that is possible.
As I frequently say, I am so glad that there was little internet “community” and no blogging when I was in my teens and 20s, because in many ways I don’t want to be reminded of the person I was (or could be) then. . . and to whatever degree I was an asshole was mitigated by complex real life face-to-face interactions and not distorted into one-dimensional weapon to make other people feel like shit about themselves.
The sense we get, I get, to which we have a failure in providing useful help to Val D’Orazio is a helpless feeling.
My understanding was, this had something to do with one of the major mistakes Chris Sims made after the fact. Not wanting to interject himself into D’Orazio’s life, but paradoxically through probably both regret and strategic motivations, he did. Through communication not directly to D’Orazio (her and most people’s prefernce), but through her spouse (setting up an additional insult and sign of insensitivity).
My initial understanding of D’Orazio’s experience came from her own Tweets. Kim, I share and support your over all point. She remains, as far as we can tell, without a path forward, to bring back what she has lost.
It took me a bit to understand how this had happened, my introduction to Sims, was through Rachel Edidin, who’s own words helped some, not excusing, but not banishing him either. They are friends who had discussed this prior to the current discussions. Up until D’Orazio’s Tweets the other day, I had only view of Sims presented in the last year. The full truth is a shock.
It also makes it difficult, for me, not to care for both of these individuals, for reasons you clearly state. Sims position affords him less sympathy (a just reality), but ultimately has provided him or his supporters the ability to create a narrative which retains his elevated cultural status and perhaps unintentionally undermines D’Orazio’s limited options. We don’t have to be her to sense the brutality of these events.
Kim, you say, “I confess I don’t care” in reference to how he feels. This is an important, truthful felling you have. My problem is I do care. Perhaps it is my own experiences and perspective which enable this. I confess it affords me a split personality or nuance in assessing many of the issues you point out. I don’t want to be wrong, confusing or even in defense of Sims. Just prior to this story, I went through an event, where I was put in my place, while I thought I was being a supportive, but inquisitive and was reprimanded for speaking out of turn (probably doing this again here). I also have been close to friends who have been in similar places to D’Orazio and Edidin’s place in these events. Due to my being Jewish and an up tic in anti-semitism I have some more recent reminders, that some view me as less then human. I was thinking about these other events acutely while this event I had no connection to other then as a Comics Community member. Ultimately, I am limited in my ability not to understand, but to feel as you do entirely. I agree on your facts and support your position in defending the unjust aftermath D’Orazio has endured.
I hope it is not that I am another aging Jewish White Male in Comics, which gives me pause here. My background beyond what can be seen or sensed in my name does have some tangible experiences to support why I do empathize with D’Orazio. What I think actually gives me pause and causes me to care less about Sims, but care nonetheless, is how often there is no path forward for both parties and we are expected to pick sides. I am not saying in Sims case, things are okay. They are not. However, in my view, I hope there is a way for us to tangible help D’Orazio and not dismiss Sims from the community as long as he continues to work forward.
Most of these tragic events often enough come down to the communities inability to actually help the principles in justified ways. We see ourselves or our friends in those who are involved. We may try to objectively consider, but our subjective selves make this a challenge. Often with good reason. I would say objectively there is all the good reason above we need. But my subjective self yearns to a tangible productive problem solving path forward for both. I don’t sense either is possible at this moment. If we can’t figure this out, our progress will continue, but it will not resolve our devisions. It will simply supplant perspectives on top of each other. Some will say, I don’t care. They deserve their incarceration. That may well be. It just won’t sit well with me as I care more for the D’Orazio’s of the world. More leaves room for the flawed. It is true, if the flawed don’t get room then I would be out. I am flawed as well.
Rob, being rich certainly helps…but Chris could offer some sort of restitution in line with what he’s able to. Comics Alliance and Marvel could too, you’d think.
I just feel like some effort to buy mitigation and nuance is better than just offering mitigation and nuance for free, without any pretense of trying to help the person injured.
Hi guys, thanks for your comments. Ben, it’s true that I don’t care about whether or not Sims is truly rehabilitated or sorry or whatever. (I think this is a little different than, like, being capable of empathizing with him, which seems more of what you’re talking about?) But the question of Sims’ sincerity seems to be on a lot of people’s minds, as is its corollary: well, if he’s truly sorry, then what on earth are we supposed to do with him?
I can answer this only in part: I know what we *shouldn’t* do with Sims, and that is hold him up as an emblem of progress (as both he and CA did last week). Actually, he is exactly the opposite–a reminder of how entrenched these problems are and how far we have to go.
As for what we *should* do with Sims, that’s a sort of abstract question. Right? We’re not a jury or his employers; realistically, we can’t do much of anything. At the individual level, for those who wish to follow Sims’ work, I think the answer is to see what he does next and how it strikes you. As I’m sure is clear from the above, I’m critical of how he’s comported himself so far. I’m talking about both his long-term hypocrisy (can you imagine if some guy from GamerGate became a prominent voice on a progressive videogames site without disclosing his past?) and his apologies, which struck me as self-serving, among other things. But people are complicated. They can be different shades of sincere, and sorry for more than one thing at a time. My guess is that he’s sorry for what he did to Val, and even sorrier that he’s getting called out on it.
Earlier today I saw a post by Sarah Horrocks on progress as a brand that gets at a lot of where I’m coming from re: CA: http://mercurialblonde.tumblr.com/post/114444149918 I think I disagree with Noah. It’s not that apologizing and/or losing his job were the only options on the table. It’s that the apology should go further than ‘onward we move together’ and more willing to talk about the real issues, which are sticky. And yeah, organizing some material support for Val would be a great start. Clearly it’s something people are interested in doing.
Actually, I think the real issue is not that he got the CA gig without disclosing his past—his past is an open book, all of his various attacks on D’Orazio have been online for years, he’s never taken them down. It’s that no one seems to have cared to make an issue of it. Now, it’s possible that no one in a position to make a difference at CA knew about this particular feud: I read ISB for years and was surprised to discover this had been happening (largely because I read Sims for the celebration of quirky comics stuff and not for the internecine struggles of trash-talking bloggers), so it’s possible that the folks at CA missed it as well. But it’s also possible that they didn’t miss it–which says something else, yes?
I meant disclosing his past to readers (particularly in columns about harassment), not necessarily in a formal statement or something. Anyway here’s an interesting thing I didn’t know: Sims has declared himself on hiatus from CA. He announced it on the podcast, not the site (so far as I can tell). http://www.themarysue.com/sims-comics-alliance-dorazio-twitter/
“To begin to form the basis of an opinion about each and every blatant awful act requires deep investigation, consideration, and care”
FWIW — this reminds me of Anscombe’s famous put-down of utilitarianism (hooded or otherwise):
“But if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent [i.e. punishing someone we know to be innocent, in order to serve “the greater good”] should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind”
Ah, OK, Kim. That makes sense.
I find it disturbing that even in this moment of reckoning, the full backstory of why Sims targeted D’Orazio has gone unmentioned.
In 2006 D’Orazio caused a stir with a 12 part rant titled Goodbye to Comics: a blistering critique of misogyny by an industry insider. It includes a takedown of DC’s Identity Crisis, which many consider peak Women In Refrigerators, which is significant as she was the assistant editor on the book.
For the unfamiliar, Identity Crisis centers on the murder of Sue Dibny, wife of Elognated Man. The bronze age couple were known for being depicted as consistently loving, supportive and lighthearted. In issue 1 Sue Dibny was graphically burned alive. In issue 2 she was explicitly, brutally raped. Her murderer turned out to be the Atom’s ex-wife, literally a crazy bitch. The whole series was full of overwrought pain and suffering and a weird takes on female characters. It was inspired by Watchmen and the Killing Joke (even Moore admits Joke had flaws) but either missed the deconstruction of Moore’s work or discarded it for pure shock value.
Many hated it when it came out, but in 2004 it was easier for fans to handwave or rationalize the content. Some praise is disturbing in hindsight (including Joss Whedon who later hired Metzger to write the Buffy comic with equally creepy results).
Goodbye To Comics is pure rant, a digressive mix of insider dish, critique, personal anecdote (some a bit TMI) and now dusty topical humor. Some who didn’t like her blunt denunciation of misogyny seemed twice provoked by the raw, awkward presentation.
At it’s best, however, it’s very good:
http://occasionalsuperheroine.blogspot.com/2006/11/goodbye-to-comics-7-we-need-rape.html
Such a dramatic and at times scattered call out was bound to attract some scorn and eye-rolling. What’s striking is how aggressive and resentful some became and how little, if any, was initiated by D’Orazio.* Like Anita Sarkeesian, just being a woman making vehement statements was an affront those who disagreed with her.
It was in this context Chris Sims began picking on D’Orazio. As others speculate, it’s likely he was demonizing her to build up his own rep, but this involved knowingly embracing unhinged resentment of “too much” feminist critique and pushing it further.
I knew little about this, but when her Punisher special came out, the irrational hatred of her intense enough that it was visible casual fans.
Even then, it didn’t register just how fucked up it was and I suspect people might not have believed, pre-gamergate.
This is what bothers me about McDonald’s take – what she calls feuds was mostly people snarking at D’Orazio until she responded (or didn’t). It’s telling McDonald mentions Ragnell, whose grudge against D’Orazio is oddly into political correctness myths for a progressive (much like McDonald herself).
Thing is nothing D’Orazio wrote – indeed no comics criticism – merits hostility even Marvel took the death threats seriously. After recent death threats on Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn and others, it’s clear D’Orazio was an unwitting pioneer.
What’s ironic that that Sims has more recently said Identity Crisis is the comic that ruined comics – and his critique sounds a hell of a lot like D’Orazio. To echo the words of the person you tormented yet not apologize until called out is a bit more troubling than I think he realizes.
As McDonald reveals, Chris Sims only apologized after he was called out by gamergate – which he was because he was a precursor to gamergate. He didn’t start the rage against D’Orazio, but he fed on it for cynical reasons. In this context, Sims “are you going to cry, little girl” is far more disturbing. I do think change and genuine apologies are possible, but so far he and his cohort haven’t quite acknowledged how much he’s entwined in the forces which led up to this current wave of zealot trolls. Nor how the gender imbalance in mainstream comics has improved very little since then.
I should add this whole “it was so long ago, things were different in the Golden Age of Blogging” stuff by McDonald is hokum. The essay about Women In Refrigerators was written in 1999. In 2006, the 21st century, online discussions about sexism and racism in comics weren’t new nor obscure, nor was the problem of reactionary backlash. Anne Elizabeth Moore had been writing for years. Parodies of the grim, gritty and sexist nature of comics and fans were old hat. Saying it was a weird time back then as if we were talking about the 50s seems like a shaky rhetorical stance.
The context is indeed crucial — it’s mind-boggling that you could talk about this at all without, like, 75% being about Goodbye to Comics. This wasn’t just some random female writer Sim was attacking (not that that would have been okay, either), it was somebody who spoke out and got exactly what was coming to her.
And all this time, I disliked Sim just for being High-Priest of the Church of Awesome…
Thanks Linke. I knew somewhat about Goodbye to Comics, but didn’t realize how the Sims thing was connected. That’s really depressing.
Kim, you make important distinctions and I believe we struggle with the same questions and limitations from an approximatly similar angle. Thanks you for your response.
Much like I was with your take, I have agreed with Sarah’ Horrocks takes on things in the past only to struggle around the margins. This time though, reading the link you provided, I agree with her 100%. Her description of what friends should do and be commended for doing is an act of courage.
Linke wrote:
” I should add this whole “it was so long ago, things were different in the Golden Age of Blogging” stuff by McDonald is hokum.”
Hmmmm. I guess I have the sense that Twitter and Tumblr have changed how social issues have been discussed, and possibly changed the speed and/ or frequency in which they have been discussed…
Where is Sims giving D’Orazio shit for critiquing Identity Crisis? Not in the link provided.
Or is the point that someone who hates what Identity Crisis did to Sue Dibny (among other characters) should have been smarter about how he was treating D’Orazio?
I took Linke’s point to be — d’Orazio came to comicblogdom’s attention because of her vocal criticism of misogynist comics culture, with Identity Crisis as a special but not exclusive focus. The implication being that she wouldn’t have been considered a worthy target otherwise
Righto.
I 100% agree w/Linke. It’s ridiculous that “Farewell to Comics” isn’t at the center of every effort to put this whole thing in context. My guess is that people don’t want to suggest that Sims was motivated by that aspect of her work, which is probably true. As I recall, and from what I’ve seen more recently, it seems more like Sims was motivated largely by petty jealousy. However, it’s clear to me (and I suspect it was clear to Sims) that he was playing to the worst possible instincts of online comics fandom, and that whatever his attacks did to raise his profile owed not his wit or writing skills, but to the hostility of internet man-babies.
The people who defended Chris sounded like compkete morons when they did.
And yet no one is talking about D’orazio’s own harassment of fellow comics blogger Johanna Carlson where she called the woman “the most hypocritical, pathetic, bitter human beings I have ever had the misfortune to run into in comics, far worse than the mysoginists who are at least honest about what they are.”
People are also ignoring that D’Orazio and Sims worked together to make it clear that his harrassment of her was a joke in 2010. Or that D’Orazio very publically claimed to be suffering from the same PTSD in 2006 – a year before her interaction with Sims began.
If Sims is guilty of saying things that caused others to harass D’Orazio back in 2007-2010, then D’Orazio is equally guilty of directing a mob now.
Is it sad that D’Orazio feels bullied? Yes. But just because she feels that way does not make it so. Her issues that she blames Sims for predate her interaction with Sims. She engaged in much worse abuse herself than her accuser did, and Sims reached out to and worked with D’Orazio five years ago to put the problem behind them – hard to see the truth now, given how many time D’Orazio has deleted her mean-spirited vitriol from her blogs, but enough of the actual truth is available if you research it.
Waffles, your deflection and excuses seem really unimpressive. Sims has admitted that he harassed D’Orazio; people around at the time have also corroborated it. This isn’t he said/she said. He and she agree.
Also, the claim that D’Orazio is directing a mob is really stupid and offensive. She didn’t bring these issues to the fore now, and she has in fact been forced off twitter by people such as yourself who refuse to credit Sims, and think that the thing to do instead is to attack D’Orazio, because the accuser is never to be believed, even when the accused says she’s right.
Nobody claims that D’Orazio was a saint. So evidence that she wasn’t a saint is just blowing smoke (and one intemperate remark is not the same as a coordinated, extended program of harassment, either.)
Here’s a problem with the way we interpret bullying on the Internet. You consider my comment here about D’Orazio’s public claims and public feud as an “attack” on D’Orazio, yet what then are the multiple blog posts and tweets calling for Sims to be fired? You say D’Orazio has been driven off Twitter because of people like me? Funny, I thought that was the rape and death threats others have lobbed at her.
Criticizing someone public behavior when they have chosen to act as a public figures show NOT an attack. Doubting the claims of someone who has a history of publicly accusing others For the same problems over and over again is not an attack. D’Oraziohas created a scenario where there is reasonable doubt.
As for Sims apology: Yeah. He has said he bullied her. Is that bullying the heart of her issues? Obviously it is not, as evidenced by her own words. Did Sims bulging exist in a vacuum? No. Again, evidence points over and over that D’Orazio was a public figure with a predeliction of launching vile public attacks on others.
Sorry, but at some point you make yourself a target, and when that happens the consequences of your own choices are yours to own.
Nate, the dynamic you describe there is in effect with gamergate as well. A lot of people who climb onto the hastag (Milo Yiannopoulos, Mark Kern) aren’t necessarily motivated by hatred of women. Attacking gamergate’s targets is just a convenient way to drum up publicity/advance a career/feel relevant/get people to cheer for you. Though at some point you have to wonder whether even the participants can sort out the prejudice from the opportunism.
To clarify: Sims started the trash talk due to her existing notoriety and clearly didn’t reflect on the ideology behind it – his own or others.
It’s important to note D’Orazio was reviled mostly due to opinions expressed in her own space.
D’orazio did not harass Carlson. She wrote an angry email when Carlson asked for a quote due a grudge over past criticism. Carlson posted the email, and D’orazio responded *on her own blog* with a rant ending:
>>…I dared have different opinions than you did. Then on top of that, I was involved with an organization that you had a long-standing vendetta against. But life is too short to be consumed by hate. I’m sure if we ever run into each other at a comic con, we’ll just laugh and laugh. ‘It’s just comics.’
Sometimes you just gotta go twitch your nose and call it a day.<<
It's petulant, but a rant on one's own blog is not harassment. This was distorted to fit a myth of D’orazio's villainy – that she was asking for it.
The current issue are those who crossed from snark in their own blogs into a wider, aggressive personal vendetta.
When a publisher has to warn a writer about potentially violent fan reactions, a line has been crossed. It's not some generalized dislike but specific anger over a women talking about rape and harassment online.
Sims didn't start or organize this – he joined in and helped keep it going, without worrying about consequences.
One person here says my comments on this site pointing out the context behind the Sims/D’Orazio feud is an “attack” while another person says that sending someone an email filled with angry and extremely hostile bile isn’t.
Okay.
I’m not saying Sims didn’t add fuel to the fire. But intent matters. Reading the dialog at the time, it’s fairly evident that Sims was ignorant of the hornets nest he was stirring in his attempts at provoking an online rivalry, and his bullying at it’s worst was in the form of friendly joking. By D’Orazio’s own admission, it is the people that (she believes) were inspired by Sims that launched the actual attacks.
Conversely, D’Orazio knew exactly what she was doing when she began “outing” Sims.
Waffles, yeah; you’re apologizing for the rape and death threats targeting her. That’s how gamergate works too. Some people make the rape and death threats; others provide cover by character assassinating the target, or saying she brought it on herself, or just filling every available space with bad faith bullshit arguments.
You’ve had your say. You’re not welcome here. If you post again I’ll delete it. Go spread your filth somewhere else.
Edit: And just to be clear, D’Orazio *did not* out Sims. That appears to have been gamergaters. It’s hard for me to believe you don’t know that, especially since it’s already been said on this thread.
Side thought: Is there a practical way to do as Kim’s essay suggests – to focus more on Val than Sims’ story? It’s probably no longer possible now to analyze her essays without inviting furor and gossip – too bad because they seem meant to prompt debate – but maybe a round up of quotes or a set of links might be a good gesture.
Off topic, but thank you for briefly calling out Tom Spurgeon, there.
I’m glad this article calls out(finally) the hypocrisy of McDonald, Hudson and Asselin. That said, I don’t care about Sims any more than I do D’Orazio. It’s odd that people think the internet is supposed to be a tea party at Jane Austen’s house. The internet is mean. 99.999% of the people on it are mean.
People can react however they want to Sims’ actions. Fire him, make him a pariah, boycott his comic, ruin his career. That changes nothing about the internet, the comics community or the make up of people in it. Val is not “owed” anything just as no one owes Sims anything. People are defending Sims and Val. There is no difference between either of those camps. If you think you have a moral high ground, you don’t. If you think you’re fighting against hate or bullying or misogyny, you’re not. You’re all just kids on the playground, taking sides in a school yard fight and, ironically(and hilariously)you are contributing to the internet being a worse place. Which is fine with me because I like it that way. Fuck nice and fuck empathy.
But don’t feel bad that you’re not accomplishing anything useful, there was never a real solution to any of this so don’t bother looking for one. All you can really do is wise up, realize you’re walking through a bad neighborhood and act accordingly.
Brian, you seem to think plain speaking is some sort of virtue. In that vein, you comment is an aggressively idiotic group of paragraphs there, made only moreso by its utterly pedestrian posturing and unthinking capitulation to idiotic received wisdom.
The “internet” is whatever we want it to be. It’s not a force of nature; it’s not some sort of typhoon. There are spaces on the internet where they allow child porn. There are places on the internet which are for the most part perfectly civil. That isn’t some sort of accident; community norms and rules, enforced through technological and social means, make a huge difference as to what people feel comfortable doing and how they feel it’s okay to behave. Human beings have always had the capacity for great unpleasantness and great generosity. The internet hasn’t changed human nature. It’s newness does make some people feel that they can be horrible…but that’s not something we have to accept.
Your moral relativism is similarly thoughtless and really foolish. The harasser and the person harassed are not morally equivalent, just because you want them to be and can’t be bothered to actually think for a minute about right and wrong. All these comic book superhero fans, and no one can bother to take a position on good and evil? That’s just pitiful. Or, rather, as you suggest, it just means that you’re a sadist or (more generously) that you’d like to see yourself as one. And this sort of juvenile pseudo-Nietzschean warmed over idiocy is supposed to make you the adult? Please.
And no, we’re not continuing this conversation. Take this as a sign of the harshness of the internet, and the cruelty and unfairness of life; don’t post here again. I’ll delete it if you do.
Second deletion on this thread…thought police echoes?
Alex, if someone comes into your house and says, “hi, I think robbery is great and pissing on the carpet is the natural way of man,” presumably you’ll show them the door.
edit: But, you know, there are lots of places on the internet where they say, “hey, you want to piss on our floor! That’s awesome!” If you prefer that, there’s no shortage of places that’ll accomodate you.
Hyperbole. That’s hardly at all what those two guys were saying. For what it’s worth, I totally reject their positions — I’m pretty much agreeing with Kim’s take. But dissenting voices are all too easy to silence. Just sayin’.
That is in fact what the 2nd guy said. I don’t think there’s much hyperbole there.
I can’t silence anyone. They have literally hundreds of other venues in which they can say whatever they want. I’m not having this thread turn into a venue for people to smear someone because she had the temerity to be harassed. That’s just not going to happen as long as I’m the editor here.
Fair enough.
Noah, I think that the harassment denialists among superhero fandom take the false and bizarre position that feminist critiques of superhero comics are themselves evil. These denialists follow superhero concept logic and apply overwhelming force to defeat the threat: given this, some individuals commit harassment or worse in pursuit of this goal. When that happens, other like-minded guys defend these harassers as honorable men who fight the never-ending battle against the forces of evil, or for this misogyny, feminists.
Really, denialists like the ones you were forced to ban make clear that many strident superhero comic fans will never accept that their beloved genre has not examined it’s horrible track record with human difference. Those who question comics’ treatment of race and gender minorities face ostracism and worse, and that treatment requires ‘nuance’, as Kim put it, not outright condemnation.
Not to keep ringing the gong, but stuff like this is exactly why I don’t think the rest of us belong in superhero comics.
So I deleted another comment. If you are a random websurfer who has just suddenly discovered this blog, and don’t like my moderation, I would urge you to go comment on many of the unmoderated platforms across the internet.
For the most part, we should stick to discussing Kim’s article, and not my moderation style, please.
Actually, Noah, I’d like to discuss your comment — the one on good and evil — because I think it’s an intriguing point. How is it that so many fans of comicbook superheroes are having this much trouble discerning right and wrong? I get James’s point about the reliance on violence as a solution and his previous points about superheroes being essentially white, male fantasies. But most superhero comics are white male fantasies about fighting for those who can’t fight for themselves. The protagonists’ violence is employed to protect, to counter those who would exploit and abuse. I mean, as Noah has pointed out, there are problems when it’s always a white male coming in saving the day, but even if the message of Captain America is sub-optimal, how does it lead to people acting like Crossbones? If comics encourage violence as a solution, why don’t more comics fan have violent hostility toward the abuser, like Batman would? Why, when we have the opportunity to put on our capes and come to someone’s defense, are so many more likely to play non-costumed bystander? Why do some go the other direction and join the Injustice Gang?
Elliot S! Maggin put the following words in Superman’s mouth: “There is a right and wrong in the universe, and the distinction between the two is not that difficult to make.” I don’t think the second half of that is always true. I think that in morally complex situations, the ability to discern right from wrong indicates advanced, even admirable, moral wisdom. So maybe it just looks easy to Superman, like calculus is intuitive to some people. But these are not morally complex situations. You don’t have to be Superman or Solomon to tell bully from victim. How, with examples like those , did so many of us end up bad guys?
It’s an interesting question…. I was thinking about this with the Batgirl cover, which was a celebration of the Joker and referencing a comic in which Joker was the main character, and Batgirl really was not a point of identification. Long story short, I think comics are not really always set up to have you identify with the good. Often the point seems to be to make a link between the powerful and the good so that you can say whatever is might is right. From that perspective, it becomes hard to identify with victims, since the victimized are (by definition) weak, and therefore (by superhero logic) losers and evil.
In terms of the morality issue I think the other thing is these comics generally only recognize evil that is manifested as physical assault. I think even in a book like X-men which is allegedly about racial prejudice it’s really only physical assault that the bad guys are ultimately trying to do by building giant robots or whatever. So here we have harassing messages sent over the internet, not the sort of thing Superman fights.
There’s actually a kind of great Johnny Ryan comic where Batman is sending Superman harassing messages online. It underlines Pallas’ point I think; superhero tropes look fairly silly when used in that context.
Pallas — “Mental assault” is far trickier to tackle because people are so different. A “disparaging” comment made to one person may have no effect at all, yet to another it may be devastating. In short, the aftereffects of “mental assault” is personality-driven.
In popular culture, the results of most types of physical assault are easier to depict and quickly understood by audiences — and are usually much more dramatic. To almost everyone, a gunshot wound, a knife wound, and a brutal physical attack aren’t ambiguous, non-life-threatening events.
A verbal insult, or even a verbal threat, is much less dramatic to audiences — unless backed up by a very real threat of physical force. That’s why popular culture creators usually set the stage for verbal threats or menacing appearances by first showing a threatening character taking part in some actual physical attack on someone who is not the main protagonist.
For example, by showing the Joker brutally and thoughtlessly killing an innocent bystander before his confrontation with Batman, we know any verbal threat or menacing look the Joker makes to Batman is almost certainly going to be backed up by a brutal physical assault.
However, “mental assaults” are often ambiguous. Some people can be “verbally assaulted” all day, every day, and shrug it off. Others can be deeply hurt by comments or perceived slights that would be meaningless to the average person.
I’m not saying a creator can’t depict “mental assaults” as deeply threatening. All I’m saying is it is a heckuva lot harder to do successfully – which is why it is a rarer phenomenon in popular culture.
R. Maheras, this is maybe a bit off topic but I think the issues with comic morality go beyond physical versus mental assault.
Thing of J. Jonah Jameson, he constantly libels Spider-man, and even is shown to know he’s lying due to a personal grudge, but the books treats him as a sort of wacky uncle, not actually evil or sinful.
Parker’s reaction is “It’s sure fun to work for a guy who libels me!” not “This guy is intentionally deceiving the public and harassing people- that’s wrong.” Even putting aside the issue of whether someone feels harassed it seems what Jameson is doing- intentionally deceiving the public- is really not okay.
I think the real issue is that to fully grasp the nastiness of Sims’s attacks, (which on their own look pretty mild compared to a lot of the stuff you read on line, then and now), you need to understand them in the context of institutional oppression, sexism and so forth. Basically, you need to understand how individual actions contribute to and work within a network of social issues. As the write-ups on superhero comics and race suggest, superhero comics have a poor track record of contextualizing individual actions within social structures. Given this, there’s no reason to assume they’d be a good guide to critical thinking or behavior.
Let’s be careful about going too far down the rabbit hole of psychologizing superhero fans. Sims has a much higher profile than D’Orazio in recent years, so he has more readers willing to do what it takes to defend the guy they follow online. And Gamergate and the cover and costume controversies demonstrate that lots of cis hetero white males are feeling besieged and thus willing to do anything to protect their privilege. You don’t really need to go much further than that to explain the crap D’Orazio is currently taking.
Pallas, my memory of how Jameson was treated in the seventies and eighties was slightly different. He’s more toothless now, but then, as you say, his behavior was shown to be lying. And Jameson, at least in those moments when he was being honest with himself, knew was he was wrong, but it was all a defensive mechanism for his own insecurities. He was, in those one or two issues where it was really dealt with, kind of pathetic.
He’s a good example to explore, though. His actions certainly met the definition of libel, as they damaged Spider-Man’s professional reputation. Moreover, they were public endangerment, as his false propaganda frequently led to confrontations between Spider-Man and the police that hindered Spider-Man’s crime fighting and even directly endangered bystanders. More in line with the topic of this piece, Jameson also publicly bullied and belittled Peter Parker on a regular basis. On occasion, Parker would stand up to him and back him down, or Robbie would point out that Jonah was being even more of an abusive, manipulative jackass than usual, and he would stop. On occasion, Spider-Man would get fed up and threaten Jonah, which Jonah would take as proof that he had been right. But neither Spider-Man nor anyone else ever treated the behavior as something that had to be stopped or even could be stopped for very long. Parker was just supposed to deal with it. He was also supposed to swallow abuse from Flash Thompson back in the Ditko days, for fear of revealing his secret identity and even becoming a bully himself. So that’s a pretty horrible example, but a strong parallel to the kind of behavior toward women we’re talking about in this thread.
Who else gets non-physically abused in comics, to use Russ’s salient distinction? The original Lois Lane treated Clark Kent with open contempt, but somehow that was supposed to make her sexier to us readers. She’s still alternately portrayed as either the strong, smart, brave, capable, supportive, caring heroine-in-her-own right that we would all expect Superman to fall for, or the harridan that feeds into misogynistic stereotypes and has cowed even the Man of Steel with her evil feminine wiles, depending on the writer.
How does Batman treat his loved ones? Well, in the more positive portrayals, he’s driven, uncompromising, and emotionally closed off, but he still loves them, and maddening as he is, he can’t help but show it eventually. In the more negative portrayals, he’s dismissive or abusive.
Iron Man sometimes treats people as means, not ends. This is often played for laughs when he treats women as sex objects, but just as often it’s portrayed as one of his significant character flaws, with detrimental effects against himself and others.
I’ll ignore the classic one-off reprehensible acts that aren’t examples of consistent behavior by a character (e.g., Orion slapping Wonder Woman, the rape of Carol Danvers, and all those women in refrigerators) — not because they don’t have a cumulative effect, but because I think they’ve been better examined by others.
I can also think of many examples more worthy of emulation — characters who treat others with dignity and consistently expect others to do the same. But the fact that there are some very prominent bad examples explains some things. I think I’ve been selecting against these more negative portrayals in my reading choices, so my perception of what’s portrayed as morally acceptable in comics is skewed. And pallas and Noah are right — the moral training in comics isn’t as good as I’d like it to be.
Hi Nate,
I’ve been holding off asking this for days, in part because I come from a position of complete ignorance, but also because the the issue of “what happened” seemed to have been beside the original point. But can you say more about what, generally, Sims said and did?
In this comment thread alone, we have inferred (perhaps stated) that this guy actually sent D’Orazio rape and death threats. We’ve also said that he “just” organized others to attack her on her site — or perhaps passively did so by criticizing her on his site. We’ve also said that he really just added his comments to an ongoing flame war, undirected by him. Sometimes this is criticism presented as relentless and constant, other times a occasional and mostly on his own blog.
(D’Orazio quotes the “CRY little girl” comment and little else [which is not her job], but also says her issue with Sims is “not so much for what he said about me directly, but because he had a popular forum from which to direct harassment to me by many other people.” I’ve tried to track down the examples of Sims’ harassment, but they seem to be gone — I guess erased along with posts from her site.)
It sounds from your opening sentence like you’re familiar with the facts of the case. Unless you think it would be counterproductive or derailing, would you mind sharing them?
Again, I’m skittish about posting this, and I hope, in the end, asking about “what happened” is more than a dark curiosity. After all, she calls it harassment; he calls it harassment (but also “jerky comments” that crossed the line “into personal attacks more than once”). Shouldn’t that settle it?
Perhaps yes. But to the extent that much of the debate still — even here — seems to be about this particular guy and his just desserts, it doesn’t seem out-of-bounds to know more about his crime.
“this guy actually sent D’Orazio rape and death threats”
I’m not sure where you’re getting that…? I haven’t seen anyone say that, here or elsewhere.
Totally agree with Nate and Rob that fandom, sexism, systemic oppression, etc. are the forces at play. Delving deep into how right/wrong is depicted in superhero comics seems a shaky step or two removed from blaming Marilyn Manson for Columbine, no?
Peter, I can see why you’d feel skittish about ignoring the entire thrust of my post and asking a man to elucidate the facts of this case for you. I mean, jeez. But needling aside, I know you’re not alone in wondering what exactly Sims did. I’ve seen other people ask, too, and I’ve waiting for the post that talks about what happened in the broader strokes that Linke and Nate have used here in their excellent comments (which–without snark!–I suggest you read more carefully). The way that comics sites have talked about this story (that is, the ones that have talked about it at all) has been really, really dumb.
I think the harassment denialism shown by some superhero comic fans in this incident and others demonstrates their unhinged defense of an immoral genre. Superhero comics ask readers to identify with the strong over the weak. (Protection of the weak is a cover story.) The target audience — adolescent straight White guys — are encouraged to see themselves as the most powerful actors within these narratives, and dramatic tension builds when other, less powerful entities attempt to wrest power from the heroes, usually through acts that threaten the social order.
When superhero narratives display women in sexually subservient roles (something I’d argue they do literally all the time) I believe that some within the target audience identify that dynamic as natural and just; those who speak against that dynamic appear to these sexists as people willing to upset the natural order to wrest power from heroes. Villains.
And there’s only one reasonable response to villainy in comic books. Overwhelming force.
In contrast, guys like Flash Thompson and J. Jonah Jameson needle the hero, but do not threaten the hero. They bully and lampoon Spider-Man, but never engage actual villainy like Norman Osborn or Otto Octavius; they don’t threaten Manhattan (the social order), they simply unnerve Peter Parker personally. Sure, the actual behavior would cross the line into bulling and worse, were it committed by real people, but no social order is threatened, Manhattan still stands. Actually, Jameson and Thompson support the social order, as the publisher who defends respectability through his editorial pen, or the athlete who shows all teenagers that physical strength matters in high school, if not later.
Plus, to underscore the point, Jameson and Thompson present figures with whom the target audience can readily identify. Their presence does not force human difference into the White male power fantasy. Feminist critiques of superhero comics do, and the response they engender from reactionary status quo defenders online displays, in my opinion, the base immorality of the superhero genre itself.
If we’re unwilling to examine the superhero concept itself, I fear we’re always required to police individual bad actors in the superhero comic industry and fandom, and less inclined to examine the influence of systemic oppression within these groups.
Put another way, I don’t think guys like Chris Sims forget propriety when they respond to critiques by people like Valerie D’Orazio out of happenstance; I think it happens because they get comfortable enough among their group to display behavior they would expect to be condemned normally, like fps players who use headsets to diss others with the most racist and sexist language imaginable. The reason for that comfort level interests me, and I suspect that the comfort with misogyny in the superhero comic industry and fandom mirrors the comfort with misogyny in superhero comics. Industrial metal had literally nothing to do with school shootings; in contrast creators use violence against women in superhero comics for everything from origin stories to cover art. If we refuse to examine this in superhero comics, if we refuse to judge this art’s basic philosophies, we assume that the rejection of human difference found in the pages and in the fans comes from individual bad actors only. It’s a theory, but I’m not persuaded.
I almost added that I don’t think what people read, or even what they profess to believe, are great indicators of how they will act online or IRL. I’ve seen committed Marxists exploit grad students when they think they need to, and ardent feminists turn the other cheek when a colleague says or does something really vile. These are people who know better, but for whatever reason act in ways totally contrary to their beliefs. So yeah, what Kim and Rob said.
As for what Sims wrote, I’m operating from memory mostly so I don’t want to paraphrase. Also, I brought it up precisely because I don’t believe that was he wrote is nearly as important as the context in which he wrote it. Because of D’Orazio’s profile back then, the mildest of criticisms functioned as a dog-whistle to those intent of beating the woman down. Anybody reading at the time knew this, which is probably why his then and current friends are so flummoxed by the current conversation.
But then, I don’t see the reason for the focus on Sims when the issue should be the misogynists who targeted D’Orazio for critiquing Identity Crisis and DC editorial culture. And did this doctor who diagnosed her PTSD say it was for blogging? Identify Chris Sims? This looks like an old feud that’s being dusted off because Sims is in much the same position D’Orazio was at the time in having his big break into comic writing with a minor Marvel book.
Kim,
I asked Nate because he broached the subject of what Sims did and implied that he was familiar with its content (and he wasn’t a troll, male or female).
I did not ask you because it was not pertinent to the case you were making. Nonetheless, the comment thread did repeatedly gravitate in this direction (of “what happened”), so far so that I thought it would no longer be impertinent or de-railing to ask.
(I will review the thread again. If I missed pertinent information from Nate or anyone else, then I apologize. No need to repeat things.)
Noah,
I recalled someone saying something like this. Searching, I found that I was thinking about something you wrote: “you’re apologizing for the rape and death threats targeting her.”
That seemed to me like an implication that Sims’ harassment included the above. There’s nothing in the paragraph that indicates you are talking about anyone else. Clearly, I inferred incorrectly, but it didn’t come out of nowhere.
In ongoing conversations like this, especially on a difficult subject, it is easy for assertions and even accusations to slide, shift, and expand. You can even see this expansive tendency in Nate’s even-handed assertion, above, that what one writes is completely supplanted by the context in which one whites it, with even “mild criticism” (his hypothetical term, not a description of Sims) becoming not just a dog-whistle for violence but effectively equivalent to that violence.
Thanks for letting me explain my inquiry further.
Peter
Peter, ah, I see. No; D’Orazio has apparently gotten serious threats since Simms’ apology, and has therefore decided to leave twitter. Sorry about the lack of clarity there.
“I don’t think guys like Chris Sims forget propriety when they respond to critiques by people like Valerie D’Orazio out of happenstance; I think it happens because they get comfortable enough among their group to display behavior they would expect to be condemned normally.”
J Lamb, that’s so interesting and well put. I take your point. I think the comfort-level phenomenon you describe is very real. But I also think the (ever graying) line between public and private is in play just as much as (or maybe more than) the specific milieu of superhero comics fandom. And Sims’ own apology suggests that he was pandering to that group more than he was a part of it, which adds another layer of complexity.
Another thing is that racist and sexist attitudes are hardly limited to superhero comics. They’re very much part of indie comics’ DNA.
to the other points…I think the relationship between art and life is always complicated and hard to parse. I do think though that the ideologies people base their communities around matter, though it’s sometimes hard to tell how. I mean, both Marxism and feminism have ideological resources to justify abusive behavior, and both have in fact done so historically on more than one occasion, to just touch on the examples Nate mentions.
Kim, I wasn’t trying to make the case that comics caused reprehensible behavior. I was expressing confusion that people would publicly display, or even just tolerate, such behavior when so many of the heroes with which I assume they identify would vehemently reject it. And I do think that the narratives we take in (through comics, reality TV, whatever) inform our concept of acceptable behavior, and either reinforce or degrade it. They’re obviously not the only factor, and probably not the strongest one, but they matter.
James, I agree with your points about comfort level, the need to examine how morality is portrayed in these entertainment narratives, and the frequent portrayal of women in sexually subservient roles. I acknowledge your point about protection of the social order, but because some aspects of the social order are good and necessary (laws against violent crime, for example), that one is complicated for me. Protection of the weak is also complicated. The more I think about it, the more I think you’re right about it as a cover story, but it always had to be a very convincing cover for me to stick with the book. It’s why Nazis make such good villains. They can be used to excuse a lot of outrageous, cathartic violence. But I’m not sure it’s a bad message, overall: “These are the situations in which violence is justified — defense of self and defense of others.”
But since we see violent criminals with Superman tattoos, it’s obvious my reading is not the only reading.
The back-and-forth over superhero texts and feminism recalls, for me, the earlier discussion of race in comics. It seems that if we accept that its a convention of the genre that superheroes exist as though if in the world outside the window. “It’s our world, with superheroes added in.” If we accept this, then we can see the general response to books like D’Orazio’s as producing a doubling of anxiety. By connecting the social order, (in that case, the logics of comic book production and the sexual politics of the industry), to its products (books like “The Killing Joke” and “Identity Crisis”), D’Orazio threatened a privileging social order and a cherished fictional order. D’Orazio’s ascent to minor power within the social order was, for this reason, read by many as the next step in a radical transformation.
Here’s the thing, though, Nate: D’Orazio’s critique of Identity Crisis was in no way a threat to “a cherished fictional order.” If anything, Identity Crisis was widely perceived by the hardcore fans as the threat. I recall a great many online discussions about how much Meltzer and Didio were ruining DC superhero comics–you would have had to move away from the core fandom to find people who were willing to admit to liking Identity Crisis. So I don’t buy that her critique of the book (which she had reluctantly worked on) was at the heart of the animosity toward D’Orazio. To my mind, the negative response to her was more about putting an outspoken woman in her place.
Which is part of my larger reluctance to place blame on the superhero genre as the true villain behind all this. What’s happened to D’Orazio and other women in comics is no different from what I’ve seen happen to women in other sections of fandom and in academia and, more generally, in life. The issue to me seems to be one of women gaining access to previously exclusively male domains–the content consumed in those domains may be a factor but only insofar as all of the content consumed in our racist/sexist/homophobic/ableist/etc. culture is a factor. I mean, I just finished teaching Junot Diaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a book that does certainly critique the sexism and racism of nerd cultures but also recognizes that these forces are at work even in the high culture form of the novel. And Kim’s point about indy comics is also well-taken: look at how people have bent over backwards with the release of the Zap! boxed set to excuse the shit perpetrated by the “Fathers” of Comix.
Obviously we don’t reach this realization and throw up our hands and stop criticizing nerd genres on the basis that “everyone, even high culture, does it.” But I don’t think there’s much to gain by trying to build a psych profile of superhero fans that’s primarily dependent on the content they read instead of the overall culture they inhabit. Maybe this is partially self-defense: my path to comics was through superheroes, and a sizable portion of my comics is still superhero books (but not the bad ones! he says). But I am also looking more broadly at culture and what I’m seeing in the Sims/D’Orazio affair looks an awful lot like what we’re seeing everywhere else. So I want to focus on critiques that connect superhero comics to the larger culture rather than those that pathologize superhero comics and superhero fans in particular.
Yeah…I don’t want to pathologize superhero fans. I agree that the larger culture is sexist too. I do think that different communities organize, or justify, sexism somewhat differently. To each community its own sexism, I guess is the point. Indie comics content both reflects and reifies sexism, I’d argue — a genre built around worshipping Crumb is a genre where women are going to be marginalized, in various ways, I think (though of course many women love Crumb’s work.) Similarly, the content of superhero comics I think reflects sexism and models sexism — not exclusively, or even virulently, compared to other cultures, but still, it seems like the culture of comics matters to the culture of comics, if that makes sense.
You could think of it as a positive thing too…what resources does comics have to ideologically oppose sexism? The idea that the heroes people care about would not behave this way (including of course female heroes) seems like one way you could talk about that, or think about that.
Sims’ model for the “feud” wasn’t superhero comics, it was WWF-styel wrestling, right? Like, ha ha, this is all just a silly little smack-talking beef between two pros, not so much sincere as performative hype-building.
(The comics thing it does remind me of — given what Sims has said about doing it to build his rep — is Grant Morrison’s early-days disses against Alan Moore. It’s like that, only much, much shittier in about every aspect you can think of)
Anyway, to grapple more closely with your piece, Kim — your mockery of “Nuance” is obviously tongue-in-cheek in part, but it also seems like it’s partly genuine. I’m thinking of where you say “blatant awful act” or take a potshot at Spurgeon by contrasting his reponses to Karns and to l’affaire Hebdo…probably other places too.
And this just seems like a terrible idea — what comics needs is not less Nuance, but more of it. Unexamined moral intuition sucks. People’s gut reactions are awful.
To be sure, a charitable reading of your piece would focus on the idea of consistency — that the villain here is the inconsistent application of Nuance and thoughtfulness. But there also seems to be, in this post, some sentiment of rejecting Nuance and thoughtfulness altogether, which is the wrong way to go entirely.
Rob,
I totally agree with you, and I understand why my comment made it seem as though I thought Identity Crisis was at the center of the whole thing. I was really just citing it as one of many of the examples she cited in her book and online. I actually remember her antipathy toward Killing Joke better, and as you said, nobody seemed altogether that enamored with Identity Crisis.
I also agree with the consensus that it would be wrong to psychologize people based on reading habits, or to think that superhero comics are any less misogynist than literary fiction, sci-fi or the French new wave. Like Noah said, pretty much every corner of culture (high/low, mass/pop/sub or whatever) is rife with sexism.
Anyway, I realize why it came off as though I was psychologizing nerd culture, and I probably was (albeit unintentionally). Sorry about that!
Well, Jones, what you call a “charitable reading” of my piece is in fact a pretty large part of my argument. What Comics calls nuance is largely reserved for white men who have done something plainly shitty. It focuses on illuminating that man’s complex humanity, while downplaying the humanity of the person or people he trespassed against. That isn’t nuance, not really–which is not to say that ~~Pure Nuance~~ doesn’t (or shouldn’t) exist in the world.
I can’t judge the success of my own argument, but I can say with confidence that in nothing I’ve written at HU, including this post, is there “some sentiment of rejecting nuance and thoughtfulness altogether.” That is demonstrably not my project. If you truly take me for an extremist taking potshots, keep on grapplin’, I guess.
Kim, I think we agree about the ethics here, which I guess means I’m not part of “Comics” either.
I put Linke’s comment over here, where it’s provoked a not super enlightening comments thread…but folks can check it out if they’re so inclined.
Hi Noah — just curious, I was wondering in what sense you used the term “sadist” in your response to that troll earlier? Do you mean in the pop-cultural sense of “someone who enjoys causing suffering/pain”, or do you mean in the sense of “someone who believes human nature is essentially selfish, and in the primacy of selfish desires as a human motivation”?
I took a college class on deSade (actually it was “Kant, Rousseau and deSade”, the idea was comparing three philosophers with different views of human nature) so I was wondering how you meant “sadist”, and if you meant it the latter way, whether you’re dismissing “Sadean” philosophy.
Umm…I think a bit of both?
I’m not very convinced by the argument that human motivations are primarily selfish. I think human beings are too embedded in language and social relations for there to ever be a clear separation of self and other, anyway.