The X-Men: Establishment Lackeys

Posted on December 19, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Earlier this week Orion Martin wrote a post in which he argued that the X-Men essentially appropriate the experience of the marginalized for the white and middle-class. The X-Men consistently presents itself as a comic about the excluded and discriminated against, but under the guise of preaching tolerance, it actually (as as Neil Shyminsky argues) erases difference. The only marginalization that matters is being a mutant, and every adolescent white boy is a mutant; ergo, adolescent white boys are as oppressed (hell, more oppressed) than anybody. Let us, then, pay attention to their angst exclusively.

Anyway, I thought I’d test Orion and Shyminsky’s arguments against the original X-Men comic; that’s X-Men #1 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby from way, way back in 1963. I’d remembered it as being an awful comic, and it is that; one of those Lee/Kirby efforts where proponents of Kirby would be well served by attributing as much of the writing to Stan as possible (and as much of the art too, for that matter; this is not within a mortar shot of being Kirby’s best work.)

Part of why the comic is so crappy is that it matches up with Orion’s thesis so perfectly that it’s painful. We first see the X-Men (Cyclops, Beast, Ice-Man, and Angel) in a palatial, exclusive private school. The first few pages are all cheerful boys’ school high jinks, enlivened only by the student’s obsequious deference to, and competition for the approval of, Xavier. It’s an unbroken collage of fusty preppiness and ostentatious privilege — underlined when Angel mentions off-hand that he’s a representative of “Homo Superior.” Is he referring to his wings or his class status? It’s not clear.

Be that as it may, the plot grinds on, and we hear that a new student is coming: “a most attractive young lady!” as Xavier tells his all-male students, before even communicating her name. Said male students then cluster around the window looking out, making various lewd observations (“A Redhead! Look at that face…and the rest of her!”) We are, in short, insistently positioned with the guys; we and they sexualize her before we even see her. When the X-Men do finally meet the new recruit, they spit out various stale and uncomfortable pick up lines, culminating in Beast trying to kiss her. Thus the first effort at portraying difference in the X-Men comic, the first introduction of someone who is not like the others, results in objectification followed quickly by sexual harassment. (Jean does use her telekinesis to put Beast in his place…but then refers to him sympathetically as “poor dear,” just so we know she’s not really angry or freaked out at having her fellow students trying to fondle her within ten minutes of arriving at her new school.)

>Yet more leering at Jean.

Somewhere in the middle of this edifying display of gender politics, Xavier gives with a quick speech about how normal humans fear mutants (“the human race is not yet ready to accept those with extra powers!”) and so he’s set up his luxurious refuge, where X-boys can leer at X-girls undisturbed by outside interference. He adds, though, that they have a mission to “protect mankind…from the evil mutants!”

ProfessorX_3

Shyminsky points out that the X-Men basically spend all their time attacking other mutants who aren’t sufficiently assimilated; their work is to further marginalize their brothers in the name of a justice of the privileged which is never questioned. That certainly fits this story, where Magneto’s plot involves attacking a US military base and disabling armaments and missiles. Again, the year here is 1963, deep in the cold war. Actual marginalized people at the time and earlier (like, say Paul Robeson or Woody Guthrie) were able to figure out that U.S. military power was used in less than noble ways around the globe, from Cuba to Indonesia to Africa. You’d think that a self-declared Homo Superior with experience of oppression like Magneto might be able to articulate that. But, of course, he doesn’t; he’s just an evil villain whose evilness serves deliberately to emphasize the justness and general awesomeness of the U.S. military.

As for the X-Men’s marginalization…it seems easily doffed. The military guys aren’t scared of them, but welcome their help. The most uncomfortable scene of difference we get is a three panel sequence in which Angel changes out of his street clothes, revealing that he trusses his wings up behind him to keep them out of sight. “After a while they feel like I’m wearing a straight jacket!” he says. But no one ever questions why he has to bother to tie up his wings, or make himself so uncomfortable for the convenience of people who (supposedly) hate him. In fact, the sequence seem much less interested in Angel’s discomfort than in the ingenuity of the disguise.

Shyminsky notes that this fascination with, and eager embrace of, assimilation can be linked to the biography of Stanley Lieber and Jacob Kurtzberg, who changed their named to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in order to be taken, like Angel, for normal humans. There’s a poignance there, perhaps, in Angel’s discomfort — Lieber and Kurtzberg’s new names may have pinched them a little at times too. But they nonetheless persevered in tightening that truss, which, in this comic at least, consisted not merely of new names, but of what can only be called a servile, deeply dishonorable acquiescence in hierarchical norms, casual misogyny, and imperialist fantasies. I hated this comic already, but as a Jew reading it as a parable of Jewish assimilation, it makes me actually nauseous. James Baldwin says that black people hate Jews (when they do hate Jews) not because they’re Jews, but because they’re white, and this seems like a fairly withering illustration of what he was talking about; a sad account of how my people (not all my people always, of course, but some of my people too often) kick those further down the food chain in a craven effort to look like, act like, and be the ones in charge. Xavier isn’t Martin Luther King; he’s a neo-con, and/or Michael Bloomberg, so charmed by whiteness that he devotes his existence to telepathic racial profiling.

So, yeah; this is not just a badly written comic, but an actively evil one. Other X-Men stories may be better — and indeed, they’d almost have to be. But at its inception, the title was a stupid, craven, explicitly sexist and implicitly racist piece of shit.

One Out of Ten: Taking Issue With Glyn Dillon’s The Nao of Brown

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Emily Thomas

Glyn Dillon’s The Nao of Brown was released on the prestige-comic circuit last year to largely positive reviews. While most critics took issue with the work’s overly pat ending, the comic still made best-of-year lists and garnered breathless praise. Pitched as a capital-G Graphic Novel, the work aims for a sweet spot between a visceral, tear-jerking narrative and a thoughtful, complicated representation of a debilitating and misunderstood disease, with an art and writing style lousy with direct symbolism, careful repetition, and high drama. The work and its critical response function almost as a case study in the problems presented by these types of prestige narratives, especially in comic-book form, but in ways that can easily be mapped onto film, literature, and the other narrative arts. This is especially obvious when it comes to narratives about mental illness, which, with a few exceptions, are lacking or notably inadequate in mainstream and even independent media. Nonetheless, the critical response to these works, especially on the internet, tends toward a rapturous acknowledgement of the work’s affective dimension and its potential to raise awareness. The Nao of Brown is not the first or the worst offender, but it illuminates the problems with the prestige-narrative market, and the inability of those who suffer from mental illness to find just representation rather than well-intentioned but deeply misguided spectacularization. The Nao of Brown is a perfect example of this spectacularization, a work that, despite its best intentions, perpetuates deeply entrenched myths about mental illness and gender and uses its glossy surface to dissimulate a lack of faith in graphic narrative and a deep misunderstanding of what it means to have OCD.

Heartfelt Nao

Given all of this, the stakes are a lot higher than me explaining what Dillon gets wrong about OCD, and a lot higher than me hating this book. They extend to the possibilities of comics narrative, the problems of the current critical environment, and deeply entrenched myths about mental illness and gender. I think, most importantly, they extend to the responsibility that comes with writing about mental illness, given sufferers’ continued inability to find just representation in mainstream media, independent media and academic thought. I myself have struggled with primarily-obsessive OCD, and I had high hopes that this comic might correct some misconceptions about the disease, as Dillon says he intended. However, given the long history of misrepresentations of mental illness across all media, I felt frustrated, but not at all surprised, when the work didn’t measure up.

The Nao of Brown is the story of a young woman who is half-Japanese and half-British, lives in England, and works in a designer toy store for adults while being very, very cute. She also suffers from a very typical form of OCD in which she imagines committing violent acts in everyday scenarios, then is compelled to complete a series of mental rituals to banish the intrusive thought (this is known as primarily-obsessive OCD or sometimes less accurately called pure-obsessive OCD, I’ll call it PO OCD for the remainder of this article). The content of the intrusive thought and the corresponding compulsion varies widely from person to person, but Nao’s particular concerns are very common ones.

The book begins as a portrait of Nao’s day-to-day life, then chronicles her attempts to woo Gregory, a washing machine repairman who looks like her favorite anime character. He dispenses trite wisdom and generally acts like a terrible person. He’s also an alcoholic who has been sexually abused, because Glyn Dillon had a handwritten list of serious issues he wanted to work into his important story for adults. Their turbulent relationship is observed by Nao’s best friend Steve, who has, of course, been in love with her the whole time. The book reaches its climax when Nao and Gregory have a screaming match after Gregory criticizes Nao, and then he suffers a stroke. Nao is hit by a car in the immediate aftermath of the stroke, because that is also serious and important. In that moment she is able to perceive and accept the world, and we cut to a few years later. By then, Buddhist meditation has all but cured Nao of her debilitating OCD and she has become a mother (background details suggest that the child is Steve’s, but Dillon insists that it should be read as uncertain which of the two men is the father). Gregory writes a book about his experiences in which he gets to speak for himself in a way Nao is never permitted to. The End.

The Nao of Men

The whole book is interspersed with a fairy-tale sequence from Nao’s favorite anime, which would seem to add another level to the narrative but in fact comes across as entirely unrelated. The author suggests in a TCJ interview that it’s meant to be a merging of French and Japanese art as a sort of oblique way to talk about race. But the sci-fi fairy-tale itself is a conventional narrative with heavy-handed racial metaphors, and seems totally out of touch with the rest of the story, which barely touches on Nao’s Asian background.

This sequence is indicative of a problem that cuts to the core of Dillon’s writing. Nao is more of a coat rack on which to hang various “interesting” problems and big issues than a real person. Any challenges that Nao does face regarding her racial identity or her mental illness are presented in a very cursory fashion, and the overall effect is a shallow one, as if Nao were simply a compendium of character traits ranging from a quirky outlook and a preference for Amélie-inspired fashion to a biracial identity and a serious case of PO OCD. Every part of Nao’s existence seems to be of equal weight; OCD is just another thing that makes Nao “unique” and “interesting,” not a debilitating condition that can make her life unlivable. Gregory suffers from this “coat rack “problem, too, although not in such an exaggerated way. Nao is a manic pixie dream girl, straightforwardly. Gregory Pope (get it?) is also a blank slate for serious issues like alcoholism and sexual abuse, yet these are afforded the status of real, fundamental pain, with a concrete cause (the absence of a father), and thus are considered more foundational to his being and given more legitimacy by the narrative. And then we have Steve Meek (get it????), whose personality is limited strictly to his ability to name a few bands from the 80s. As a fellow namer of 80s bands, I can say that doing so doesn’t really make you interesting, nor does it obligate people to sleep with you. But Steve, along with Gregory, is the narrative’s victim, and Nao is a source of male unhappiness, presented as too absorbed in herself to take note of others. This is one of many gross misunderstandings of the nature of OCD that dovetail with a sexist portrayal of rational men and hysterical women. This isn’t Nao’s story. It’s the story of the men surrounding her and it’s by and for men.

The way the narrative places the emphasis on men is subtle, but insistent. Nao’s wisp of a roommate barely brings anything to the narrative, while the two men, especially Gregory, do the heavy lifting. Nao is the star of the novel, but only inasmuch as she has the capacity to interact with Gregory and bear Steve’s child; breaking out of her own head by being available to men sexually and emotionally. The sexism and the irresponsibility of Dillon’s narrative aren’t Dillon’s invention, nor do they seem in any way intentional. The particular brands of sexism and misunderstanding that he employs are so pervasive in media (and conversation, and criticism), that his narrative is more symptomatic than unique in any way, and the problems with his perspective and his narrative style so deep-seated that they’re easy to miss. The permissive critical environment in which comics (especially the “serious” ones) exist allows them to fester and mutate far beyond the scope of the already hurtful story Nao tells.

Professional and casual reviews of the work have repeated and refashioned misconceptions about OCD endlessly since the release of the book, allowing either reddit-style “rational” dismissal or breathless reification (“this story about OCD will make you cry ACTUAL TEARS”) to set the tone. The reviews follow the book’s lead by demanding that women take responsibility for male sexuality and male problems, admonishing mental illness sufferers to “get over it,” and establishing a sharp contrast between “real” physical pain and “false” mental pain, which just so happen to be gendered male and female in the book, respectively. The most high-profile example is certainly Rob Clough’s review at TCJ, which does a fine job of examining the strengths and weaknesses of the book overall, but makes a series of very uncomfortable generalizations about OCD, self-absorption, and mental illness. Perhaps the most egregious is his statement on Nao’s inability to perceive the problems of others:

[Nao] assumed that everyone’s behavior and attitudes had something to do with her at all times, instead of realizing that everyone else had their own set of issues. She’s incapable of seeing that Steve is in love with her and always has been, believing that he thought of her as a sister. She’s unable to see that Gregory has deep-seated pain of his own that he’s dealing with by using alcohol. While she tries various techniques to work on her issues (including “homework” that involves writing down her bad thoughts), she’s too ashamed to actually discuss them. At the same time, she’s charmingly odd in other ways.

I can’t blame Clough for making these generalizations; he’s learned them from the book itself, just as he’s learned that “real physical pain” can erase the constant, self-perpetuating suffering of mental illness without the need for therapy. The fact that so many reviewers, not just Clough, latched onto this idea is a testament to the irresponsibility of Dillon’s much-lauded decision not to overexplain OCD.

The narrative also paints Nao as a hysterical woman, unable to take responsibility for herself or others. And because she’s a woman, it is assumed that she should be taking responsibility for others and be an understanding caretaker. The work ignores the ways in which societal narratives of what women or men should do can form the very foundation of OCD, either through a scrupulous adherence to the role, a debilitating self-loathing fueled by the inability to complete the role, or more often both. At the same time, the narrative punishes Nao for thinking about herself, for putting in headphones and “blocking out the world,” for very understandably not noticing Gregory’s invisible problems or his stroke, for thinking that Steve is not in love with her. In short, for failing to perceive reality and for failing to make herself happy. She is the cause of her own unhappiness, we are told over and over.

This might be a soothing pop-Buddhist trope for most people, but imagine how painful it is for someone whose deep torment already seems divorced from his or her personality, and who already feels, from the outset, that she should be able to get over it. The knowledge of one’s own irrationality and supposed ability to overcome are simply two more pieces of OCD’s complex, self-perpetuating machinery. Dillon occasionally hints at this when he says that Nao feels guilty about her inability to meditate or to hold Steve’s hand at a kite festival, but the narrative downplays the crippling nature of this guilt for an OCD sufferer and quickly moves on to blaming Nao for her “self-absorption” again. (If only she had listened to the old woman at the Buddhist center who told her not to wear headphones while riding her bike!)

The crucial foils for Nao’s “self-absorbed” tendencies are Steve Meek, her bland but caring friend, and Gregory, who seems to be in the position of Man Who Reads Books and Should be Taken Seriously despite the almost preposterously offensive way he behaves toward Nao and her condition. Nao is punished for her failure to perceive Gregory’s problems as he forces her into the role of nagging housewife, but his failure to understand her difficulties seems to be simply “understandable” and forgivable. Both of them suffer from invisible but debilitating problems. So why does the woman come off, to my eyes, as hysterical and self-absorbed, and the man as a sage, detached survivor of ‘real’ suffering? The narrative inches up to acknowledging that Gregory is not a good person, but quickly brings us back to his perspective, seeming to suggest that his arrogance and mean-spiritedness are both wise and forgivable. Of course, people who have suffered abuse and people who have mental illness can come across as cruel and standoffish to those who don’t know what they are going through. But in my mind, the narrative justifies Gregory as the one with “real problems” and dismisses Nao.

Nao’s irrationality also means, naturally, that she’s a powder keg just waiting for someone to scream at. In real life OCD is, by and large, a quiet and isolating disease that sufferers don’t want to talk about. I don’t want to generalize the experience of OCD, but an inability to discuss the disease and a deep sense of shame are very characteristic. Furthermore, because of the lack of media representations of OCD that go beyond superficial symptoms, many PO OCD sufferers are unlikely to know what they have, or even that their condition has a name and is shared by others. Far more common, sadly, is the sense that they are losing their minds and their self-control entirely, or that the intrusive thought is indicative of psychopathic tendencies. To assume that OCD will eventually reach a point in which it is unbearable and will be revealed in a noisy, massive fit of crying and screaming is a huge narrative mistake; OCD sufferers, in general, will do anything to avoid acting as Nao does toward Gregory when they get in a fight.

In essence, the book assumes that mental illness can be placed into the simple framework of beginning, middle, end; that something has to happen to break the cycle when all too frequently, nothing happens at all. At the end of the story Nao tells us her OCD is still with her, but this isn’t demonstrated in any way. Her intrusive thoughts appear at narratively convenient moments throughout the work anyway, but the ending, in which Nao’s OCD is literally knocked out of her, and she realizes that there is no good without evil (or whatever other self-helpy platitude Gregory cares to dispense), makes the work unconscionable in a whole new way. The narrative just isn’t up to the task of explaining how and why mental illness operates; it becomes increasingly clear that Nao’s OCD is just an easy characterization or a plot motor, not a real condition, and it feels shoehorned into the conventional narrative structure of the work.

The ending of the comic brings its victim-blaming tendencies out in full relief. Nao isn’t all better, she says, but she understands that she just needs to shift her perception and be in the moment. She realizes that she is the problem. As with so many other narratives about mental illness, chemical imbalance and physiological causes are an impossibility. It’s just a matter of training yourself. For some people, this is true, and it’s also true that many methods of cognitive behavioral therapy rely on Buddhist-inspired techniques like radical acceptance. But Nao’s affirmation that “getting hit by a car was the best thing that ever happened to me,” like Gregory’s explanation of the ecstasy of a stroke, not only comes off as callous in and of itself, but leads us to the statement that really clinches the work for me: “For the first time ever, I knew something that I had absolutely no doubt about. I knew right from that cold, clear moment that that truth would never change. I am my hell, it comes from me, it’s my responsibility and it’s all my fault. But that’s fine…My problems were not problems at all, but for how I related to them.”

If this understanding helps Nao or anyone like her or me, then that’s great. But to say that the problems of mental illness “are not problems at all” is unbelievably callous. I know what Dillon means when he says this. I know he wants it to be empowering. But when the unreality of mental illness is already an incredibly common discourse used to disempower sufferers, Dillon needs to do a lot more work to justify his use of this language. The narrative hasn’t earned its ability to make that phrase empowering, nor does Dillon himself seem to understand just how paralyzing the realization that “it comes from me” can be.

Narrative and Representation

This narrative failure extends more broadly to the problems of identity that the book wants to foreground. Understanding ourselves is, I think we can all agree, an open-ended process. However, with both Nao’s OCD and Pictor the tree-man’s self-assertion in the interspersed fable, Dillon posits a self that can be untangled from its surroundings and contradictions. Pictor the tree-man, a stand-in for biracial people like Nao, ends up burning off the tree part of himself and living happily ever after. He also chops down his family tree, because he lives in a very literal world. In this particular case, context doesn’t matter at all. The self is total and is pretty much extricable from everything that surrounds it (good to know; this will save me a lot of work in grad school). Context doesn’t matter; the pure self and the pure work of art are released into the world but always stand apart from it. While avoiding the trap that suggests that mental illness is a fundamental part of identity or integral to some kind of creative vision, this interpretation veers a little too far in the other direction. Mental illness isn’t exactly a tree that you can chop down, and neither is race. Dillon fails to acknowledge this, and he also fails to acknowledge the ways in which his own art might exist in the world once it’s been separated from his good intentions.

The inadequacy of the narrative extends to many of Dillon’s artistic decisions, especially as regards pacing. Nao’s intrusive thoughts are presented in such a slow, artful, and fabulously detailed manner that it’s as if she spent time on them, imagining them in lush and decadent ways. This is a fatal misunderstanding of what it means to be obsessive. At times the intrusive thought plays out in the mind visually. At others it is imagined only conceptually or textually. But in both cases, there is no artful slow-motion unfolding. It’s an immediate thought and an immediate response, an exercise in how little time you can give to something, (which of course is triggering and causes the cycle to repeat). The slow, dramatic unfolding of Nao’s thoughts gives the wrong impression, as if they were fantasies on which she dwelled, not intrusive thoughts that she has to drive away as quickly as possible — faster than the speed of thought, and if possible even before they occur.

The representation also reads as exploitative: look at how twisted and beautiful this is, says Dillon’s art. Look at how it blurs the line between imagination and reality, look at the dramatic tension, find yourself wondering if Nao’s really snapped this time because mentally ill people have to snap eventually. The misrepresentation at work here is so pronounced that it’s easy to think that Nao indulges these thoughts as fantasies—as I’ve seen them termed repeatedly in some reviews—or even as desires. The New York Times’ blurb review buys into Dillon’s representation in an amazingly offensive way, explaining that Nao has “spent her life suppressing her obsessive-compulsive violent fantasies, and engaging with geekier sorts of fantasies,” as if these processes were in any way comparable. This might seem like splitting hairs, but it’s essential to distinguish between intrusive thought and fantasy given their dramatically different paces, temporalities, and effects on the thinker, and given the very real consequences of assuming that people with OCD are violent or want to enact their intrusive thoughts.

The representation of Nao’s intrusive thoughts as fantasies, rather than fears, extends to moments in the narrative in which she is able to think about them lucidly and critically, applying Cognitive Behavioral and Jungian therapeutic techniques despite apparently not ever having been in therapy and ostensibly experiencing her OCD at its full intensity. Her “rating system,” which ranks her level of discomfort with an intrusive thought on a scale from 1 to 10 is indeed a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) technique. However, someone who is not regularly in therapy would have great difficulty applying it with any kind of regularity; any distance from or critical perspective on the intrusive thought is impossible from the perspective of the sufferer without serious intervention. The kind of reflection needed to rank the thought on a scale from 1 to 10 will cause the obsessive thought to recur without massive changes to the thought process of the OCD sufferer.

Dillon draws Nao’s thoughts as occurring only once, after which time she is able to reflect on them, and he seems to think that OCD occurs only during spikes rather than being omnipresent. When Nao stays home all day at the end of work, waiting for Gregory to arrive, he comes closer to approximating what OCD is really like: paralyzing. If Dillon wanted to portray Nao as in treatment or even on medication, her intermittent spikes of OCD would make more sense, as would spikes brought on by stress in other areas of her life. If he’s intending to show the disease in full, as he claims to be, then his misunderstanding is beyond belief.

An integral part of Dillon’s narrative is built around Nao drawing out her intrusive thoughts after having them (described as “homework,” the idea for this de facto art therapy is attributed to her nurse roommate). This serves a dual purpose: it lets Dillon hint at some kind of therapy without actually broaching the subject, and it lets him get away with a visual meta-narrative, suggesting that his character acknowledges the twisted beauty of her violent fantasies just like he does. The idea of an OCD sufferer, especially one not under any kind of treatment, being able to draw out their intrusive thoughts in any way is simply unthinkable, and it highlights the depth of Dillon’s misunderstanding of how PO OCD manifests itself. Intrusive thoughts don’t go away after a single, intense episode. Any reminder, no matter how small, of a past thought will cause the sufferer to repeat the cycle. Consequently, any act that makes the thought more real, including writing, drawing, or even speaking about it, is avoided by the sufferer in almost all cases.

Binky Brown and the Nao of Brown
Despite the implausibility of an OCD sufferer drawing out her intrusive thoughts, Dillon’s attraction to visually depicting OCD makes sense. Comics are uniquely positioned to talk about PO OCD, I think, given their ability to move very freely between the mental and physical worlds and the fact that the intrusive thoughts and the accompanying rituals often take on hybrid visual, conceptual, and verbal components. Comics also have the distinction of being the medium of choice for the only two thorough pop-culture representations of PO OCD of which I am aware: The Nao of Brown and Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (if you know of any others, please let me know; my research on this only led to depictions of other forms of OCD).

Binky Brown does a fairly good job of depicting PO OCD, and the struggles of its sufferers to identify their disease, in that it’s an agonizing book to read (and one that, I confess, I could not read in full). However, it’s also very limited by its cultural moment. It’s one of the founding documents of underground comix, so it’s natural that it should feel so underground, and to say that it’s limited by its moment doesn’t mean that I think it’s derivative, or that it’s lacking. Rather, I think it’s circumscribed by the kinky sensibility of underground comix, which always places the reader at a voyeuristic distance from Binky Brown (he acknowledges as much on the first page, even as he also calls out to others who share his condition to empathize). In many ways, this is preferable to the all-access pass that The Nao of Brown purports to offer the reader; it acknowledges the specificity of Binky’s condition and the difficulty of understanding. But in the wrong hands, it can come off as exploitative and stigmatizing. It’s also limited by a deeply psychoanalytic sensibility that attempts to trace Binky’s OCD to certain moments of his life, especially early encounters with the idea of sex. These follow very conventional narratives on insanity and neurosis, and it is common to recur to these kinds of narratives as a coping device. The sufferer often feels better about her condition if she can say “It all started when…” This means that Binky’s illness, like Nao’s, is presented through a beginning, middle, and end structure in which he finally overcomes the disease. In this case I’m more forgiving, rightly or not, because it is Justin Green’s perspective on a personal experience, and the process of constructing a narrative may be very healing for him. I prefer Binky Brown’s openly visible limitations to Nao’s feel-good universality, even if Green’s limitations are fairly serious in terms of the story they tell about OCD.

Nao attempts, and fails, to pick up on the tradition of comics about PO OCD by referencing Binky Brown on its first page. But it also backs down on the possibilities of comics storytelling by including an excerpt from Gregory’s infuriatingly-titled memoir, How Now Brown Cow. To me, this comes across as a lack of faith in comics. When really important things need to be said (by men), text steps in to pick up the slack, and the visual is relegated to a plain brown background and a little bit of shading on the pages of the book. In the end, the one who gets to speak for himself is Gregory, the “real” victim, in a rational, text-based way that gives little to no credence to Nao’s (heavily visual) experience. The text has already done some awkward heavy lifting—the book was written in the style of a screenplay—but here visual narrative is discarded for a full two pages.

This could be striking and interesting if it felt more like an artistic choice and not a compensatory move, a real lack of faith in what can and should be told by graphic narrative. It links Nao and the feminine to the visual and the unspeakable. On the next page, she has a vision of herself as a flower and is warned against becoming self-important as a result of the experience. Meanwhile, Gregory is somehow allowed to assert, via text, that he has been able to free himself from attachment, and also make such (profound!) statements as “the ego is the price we pay for poetry.” The extent of his engagement with Nao’s disease is his acknowledgement that she was being “very agitated and unpleasant,” and that this probably stemmed from some kind of unhappiness. The final word on Nao’s life also comes heavily filtered through Gregory via a long quote about Abraxas, apparently lifted from Jung. Nao and her son might get the last image, but Gregory gets the last word, and given the way the text has worked with word and image, Gregory’s verbal contribution is infinitely more serious and important than anything Nao herself can bring to the table.

Explanation and Feeling

I’m not asking for a perfect narrative, and there’s no ethical line in the sand that can be reasonably drawn when it comes to representing mental illness. But I do think it’s reasonable to ask for more than Nao gives us in terms of responsibility to both its audience and to sufferers of the disease it depicts. This is especially important because Nao, as the protagonist of one of only a few narratives about PO OCD, is inevitably going to stand in for PO OCD sufferers.

Dillon’s much-lauded decision to not “overexplain” Nao’s disorder would make sense in a world where PO OCD is widely known and understood. But in our world, where OCD is still synonymous with “neurotic,” “eccentric,” or “organized,” where it is often depicted as the key to personality and intelligence, and where it is frequently assumed that “we’re all a little bit OCD,” it’s irresponsible for Dillon to allow himself that luxury. To do so further propagates hurt, misunderstanding, and stigma, and it’s a shame because it’s a waste of both a good opportunity and excellent intentions. Dillon set out to write this work specifically due to a gap in media about PO OCD, and it is my sincere hope that people who read it and have been struggling with similar issues will find by reading the work that their condition has a name and is shared by many people.

That said, I hope that they won’t take the pop-psychology, the lack of any mention of professional help, and the victim-blaming at the core of The Nao of Brown to heart. Dillon doesn’t seem to have done his research on OCD or on the methods of treatment; he decides not to “overexplain,” but it’s hard not to feel that if pressed, he would be unable to explain the mechanisms of PO OCD and the pattern of intrusive thought and compulsion that characterizes it. In the aforementioned TCJ interview, Dillon explains that the narrative was initially about Gregory, because he was interested in the idea that washing machines might have some otherworldly connection. Once he decided that Nao, originally a minor love interest, would have OCD, he became more interested in telling her story as a reflection on quiet and unquiet minds.

This explains quite a lot. While he notes in an interview with OCD UK (unfortunately not available online) that he discussed the disease with his wife, who has struggled with it, and that he read several books and some online forums about OCD, he simply doesn’t understand what it’s like to have OCD. He also seems to have trouble differentiating the average person’s struggle with meditation and stress from the experience an OCD person might have. A host of other misunderstandings grow out of this initial one; reviewers like Seth Hahne of Good OK Bad pick up on the societal narrative that we’re all a little bit OCD, saying things like “it’s easy to see why few people realize that [Nao is] troubled any more than the next person on this sad, strange globe. In fact, she comes off at a glance better than a great number of us regular citizens,” or, “I think the questions that fuel Nao’s dreams and fears are the questions that haunt and help whole populations of this earth.” Dillon says that he wrote this work specifically for people with OCD and not for others. This is a well-meaning attitude that also happens to be dangerously arrogant; of course the book won’t only be read by OCD sufferers and of course it will be misinterpreted if you refuse to offer any tools for interpretation or understanding.

This feeds into a larger problem with the ways in which these kinds of SERIOUS narratives are received: in terms of affect, or in terms of increased awareness, both of which tend to foreclose real engagement and understanding. Both popular and professional criticism, especially in comics, tend to accord prestige to these types of narratives simply for going through the affective motions. “Low” internet culture calls this “feels,” and those with pretensions to “high” internet culture, like Seth Hahne, call it “a delicate admixture of sobriety and humour,” but the end result is the same, and both are entirely inadequate to address the narrative and the nature of real-life mental illness.

Affect is an important part of reading, and the ways in which we respond to works are valid. However, that doesn’t mean that criticism should just involve telling everyone how much something made you feel. Feeling is a complement to, not a substitute for, critical thought. Even the reviews I read that had literary pretensions, comparing Nao to the great(ish) works of contemporary lit, fell back on this affective dimension to explain why the narrative was IMPORTANT and INTERESTING (and not too depressing!), rather than on any kind of critical analysis. When we as critics participate in this kind of conversation, or when we share that Upworthy post (You Won’t Believe What This Woman Has To Say About Depression)! we’re positioning ourselves as people who observe mental illness for our amusement/catharsis.

It’s a tricky situation, because there is a sense in which just raising awareness can be helpful; Nao and that one episode of Girls, whatever their other merits, do seem to have gotten people talking about OCD. However, awareness is only a tentative preliminary step on the path to real engagement with other people. The rise of the awareness-industrial complex has foreclosed the possibility of understanding even further. Awareness is important, but it’s hardly sufficient. When you’re talking about an illness like OCD, which just about everyone is aware of but few people understand, the problems of awareness come into sharp relief.

This is a second problem for all readers: and it’s a tough one. Where do we draw the line in telling authors and corporations that the minimal acknowledgement of our existence isn’t enough, and that it’s not necessarily good? While the arrival of the first [insert identity category] character in any mainstream media often sets of a wave of interesting discussions about identity and representation, the post that goes viral is almost always a wildly enthusiastic response, no matter how stereotyped, tokenistic, or coy the representation in question. While there is value in seeing someone who looks like you or thinks like you or desires like you on the big screen or in a major book, I no longer want to give anyone the message that any representation, no matter how mistaken, is acceptable. I will no longer tell anyone, from small-time authors to major corporations, that they can not only get away with tokenism, but that they will be greatly rewarded for it. I no longer want to give anyone points for recognizing that various groups of people exist, and if that recognition involves speaking for me, I’m even less interested.

Some people with OCD have responded enthusiastically to The Nao of Brown, and I am not, in any way, here to take that away from them. I am glad that the experience was a positive one for them. However, we as critics and readers need to stop assuming that the bare fact of representation and minimal awareness is always a positive one. Just as affect isn’t sufficient for a critical and understanding engagement with another person, awareness isn’t enough. And we need to think long and hard about where these messages of awareness are coming from, and to whom they are addressed. I’m glad to see PO OCD getting more attention. But I would like to see it getting the kind of attention Fletcher Wortmann, Mara Wilson or Olivia Loving have been giving it, or in the world of graphic narrative, the kind of attention that Epileptic gave to mental and physical illness. (Seth Hahne compares Nao favorably to Epileptic because it’s not so “mopey,” wrapping it up with an always-timely lighthearted reference to suicide. To his credit, he also invites ”heated discussion” about the work, so, here I am!) To really talk about mental illness, we need to invent new ways to talk about it that don’t follow the same old narratives, if Nao can send us down that path, all the better. But we’re not there yet.

Nao’s intentions are positive, and I want to give Glyn Dillon credit for addressing the issue of PO OCD. It has the potential to do some good, and for many OCD sufferers, it already has. By the same token, I do not think that his intents were sexist or otherwise discriminatory. I am aware that he is telling the story of one person’s OCD, and not mine or anyone else’s. But that doesn’t address the fundamental problem: the narrative is feeding off of a larger context of sexism and the stigmatization of mental illness, and it’s reinforcing them because it steadfastly refuses to explain the condition or challenge many deep-seated notions about mental health. Out of context, perhaps in a parallel universe, Nao isn’t so bad. But in a world where seeking out mental health care is likely to get you told that you’re either crazy or one of the conformist sheeple masses, Nao becomes untenable really quickly. I know what Dillon means when he says that Nao’s problems “are not real problems.” I know that his intentions are good. But when he says those words, they’re riding on the wave of thousands of stigmatizing, generalizing, hurtful statements that have been made about mental illness’ unreality. And when he makes a work like Nao, he is feeding into a long tradition of prestigious narratives about serious issues the make a visual and emotional spectacle of their subjects and promote awareness, but never engagement.

Thanks to Jacob Canfield and Noah Berlatsky for helping me complete this article and for being very patient with the long process of writing it.
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Update: Quotes around one phrase were removed so it was clear they were not meant to be attributed to Seth Hahne (see comments below for fuller discussion.)

Superheroine Dress Code

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

“We just happen to show a little more skin when we get to the ladies,” says Image Comics artist Todd McFarlane, explaining that the portrayal of women as sex objects in comics is a natural byproduct of the genre’s generally exaggerated style. “As much as we stereotype the women, we also do it with the guys. They are all beautiful. So we actually stereotype both sexes.”

McFarlane was trying to plug the PBS documentary Superheroes: The Never Ending Battle (it starts October 8), but his comments, and those of Kick-Ass writer Mark Millar trivializing rape (“I don’t really think it matters. It’s the same as, like, a decapitation. It’s just a horrible act to show that somebody’s a bad guy”), pissed off plenty of fans. Garth Ennis combines the two approaches—rape and lady skin—in The Boys when his Superman stand-in Homelander compels newcomer Starlight to give him and his teammates blowjobs before taking a Sharpie to her costume and drawing in navel-deep cleavage: “New costume concept for you. They want something a bit more photogenic.”

McFarlane co-founded Image in the 90s, The Boys premiered in 2006, Kick-Ass in 2008, so that might be the problem. These Cro-Magnons are behind the times. Todd thinks he’s just obeying the testosterone-driven norms that give him no choice but to draw scantily clad, super-breasted, Barbie-legged uber-women. But if that’s true, why is the comic book population of anatomically impossible porn gals in decline?

A friend of mine, Carolyn Cocca, spent her summer staring at T&A. She studied 14,599 comic book panels, adding a checkmark to her tallies only if a particular tit or ass cheek “was just about to fall out.” She didn’t count mere cleavage or skintight curves unless they included a panel-dominating breast “larger than a woman’s head.” The results? “Female characters,” she reports, “were portrayed in more panels and less likely to be objectified in the early 2010s than they were in the mid-2000s or mid-1990s in the same titles.” Carolyn is also chair of Politics, Economics & Law at SUNY’s Old Westbury College, so her expertise in quantitative analysis is larger than Todd, Mark, and Garth’s breast-sized heads combined.

Professor Cocca’s not alone in critiquing the absurd poses male artist inflict on their female subjects. The internet is busting out with parodies of McFarland inhabitants:

Alexander Salazar asks what if male superheroes were drawn like female superheroes with some very bare-chested and shorts-bulging results.

Kelly Turnbull refashions the entire Justice League in Wonder Woman style.

Steve Niles has similar fun with the Avengers.

Multiple artists take aim at Hawkeye.

Michael Lee Lunsford dares the impossible by drawing superheroines fully clothed.

John Raptor’s “reality”-based superheroine includes “practical underwear” and “legs like tree trunks.”

Ami Angelwings’s Escher Girls documents a disturbing range of anatomical impossibilities.

The list goes on, and for good reason. Though Carolyn’s sample shows a decrease in objectification, practically all of the comics she looked at show at least some. “Had I counted each depiction of cleavage or of extraordinary shapeliness in spandex or of focus on clothed curves,” she explains, “this number would have been almost exactly the same as the number of panels depicting women.”

If you’re wondering how things got so far out of proportion, you need to travel back to the Dark Age of the late 80s. This was a primitive time, when the dictates of the Comics Code still ruled the multiverse. As far as “Costume,” it decreed “Females shall be drawn realistically without undue emphasis on any physical quality.” That’s what the Comics Authority had been saying since 1954, only with the phrase “undue emphasis on” swapping out “exaggeration of” in 1971. It wasn’t much of a reboot, which might explain why the 1989 revision stripped off so much more. Under the new heading “ATTIRE AND SEXUALITY,” the update declared: “Costumes in a comic book will be considered to be acceptable if they fall within the scope of contemporary styles and fashions.”

Doesn’t sound very revolutionary till you see Wonder Woman in a 1994 thong. In his defense, artist Mike Deodato Jr. said he preferred drawing monsters anyway.

The superheroine bikini cut deepened again in the 2000s as the Code teetered toward collapse. Marvel dropped it in 2001. Image never had it. Either way, we’re looking at plenty of T&A for Carolyn’s tally sheets during the two decade range. Arguably, this was the multiverse before the cleavage-confining Code trussed up the free market. Breast abounded in the early 50s, enough to alarm the U.S. Senate into holding hearings and the industry to impose self-censorship.

But lest you think this is a plug for big government regulation, the current superheroine fashion trend suggests the post-Code market could be growing out of its prurient adolescence all on its own. The new changes aren’t being imposed from above but grown from below. Welcome to 21^st century grassroots feminism.

Though there’s still reason to show a little skin. “Reality”-based runner Camille Herron was the first female finisher in an Oklahoma marathon last year—a feat all the more impressive since she was wearing a full-body Spider-Man suit at the time. She also beat the previous Guinness Book record holder for a women’s marathon run in a superhero costume by twenty minutes. Imagine how fast she’d be in shorts.

My daughter’s running role model, 23-year-old Alexi Pappas, wins races in a Spider-Man singlet. And yet she, like any professional female runner, just happens to wear the equivalent of a bikini bottom below it.

Why? I have no idea. But I don’t see male runners at my daughter’s meets in anything as revealing. You can call them all beautiful, but the female-half of her high school track team races in skintight short shorts. They’re apparently regulation-sized and yet also a violation of the school’s dress code—which means her half of the team can’t practice in the uniforms they compete in.

I bought her a Flash t-shirt for her sixteenth birthday, “fitted” because she stopped wearing baggy tops in middle school. Except now wishes she hadn’t given them all to Goodwill. Forget fashion, she says, they’re perfect for running.

Retreat from the Citadel: Confessions of an Ex-Comic Book Reader

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Robert Jones, Jr.

It took me a very long time to realize that mainstream comic book industry isn’t at all interested in me, isn’t at all talking to me; that it is, in fact, talking over my shoulder to the straight white man-boy (and people who identify with the straight white man-boy) reading his comic book behind me.

Every time I imagine that I’m just being hyperbolic, seeing problems where none exist, and return to the beloved hobby of my childhood, I am unceremoniously reminded of just how hostile that environment is to a conscious mind. I made the regrettable mistake of reading the current issue of a comic book that I had long abandoned: Wonder Woman. The book’s current course, and current success, can be traced, I believe, to its decidedly macho-friendly, anti-feminist tone.

It wasn’t enough that this new iteration of the character jettisoned her previous origin of a child being formed from clay by a desperate Queen Hippolyta and blessed with powers by loving set goddesses (and one god) from the Greek pantheon. To add insult to injury, we were told that not only was Wonder Woman now the product of a tryst between Hippolyta and Zeus, the womanizing king of the Olympian gods, but that she also belongs to a tribe of man-hating women that periodically creep away from their island hideout to have sex with unsuspecting men, murder them, and would murder the male offspring from those unions too if not for the kindness of another god. If it sounds like ancient Greek misogynist propaganda with a modern twist, it’s because it is. And it is, in my opinion, all for the benefit of making Wonder Woman relatable to a bunch of men in the industry and in the audience, who simply can’t relate to a character designed to attack patriarchal notions and empower women in revolutionary ways.

In the latest issue of Wonder Woman, another character, a new god named Orion, slaps Wonder Woman on the ass in a fit of sexist entitlement. Wonder Woman is denied the ability to respond to the assault because of other matters that take precedence in the story. The story seems to be saying that there are some things more important that getting upset over some harmless slap and tickle. You can almost hear chants of “Let a man be a man! Stop trying to emasculate us!” in the subtext. The wonder, for me, is in how this scene was deemed acceptable and harmless to begin with.

I’m sure that to Brian Azzarello (the writer of the story) and most guys in general, it was all very innocent, designed to show us, through action, just what kind of rapscallion Orion is. No one asks, however, if there are other, less rape-y ways to convey the same point. I imagine most men don’t see the harm because men rarely have to be on the receiving end of these sorts of violations, which are products of rape culture. Largely, men don’t have to walk through creation tense and braced for anything in nature to leap out on them and sexually violate their bodies and spaces. One out of every six men aren’t raped. Ninety percent of rape victims aren’t men. Men’s bodies aren’t under the constant policing and legislation of other men. Don’t let the members of the “men’s rights” movement (yes, that’s an actual thing) hear you say this, though. Ruling every major institution on Earth apparently isn’t enough; men have to be considered innocent and absolved of every crime, too. Patriarchy is a helluva drug.

When you have the luxury and privilege of wielding massive amounts of institutional power, Wonder Woman getting slapped on the ass in a comic books seems like a silly thing to get worked up about. It doesn’t matter that this act is just the latest in a string of very clear hostilities toward the idea of female and feminine self-government and self-determination—hostilities that aren’t limited to comic books. I propose that this action isn’t harmless, not even when it happens in the funny pages. I believe depictions like these reinforce the idea that there are no limits on men’s behavior, particularly in relation to women’s bodies. If the most powerful woman in the universe can get slapped on the ass and all she gets to do in response is get angry and, generally, live with the violation, men’s power is reaffirmed and all is right with the universe.

Except that it isn’t right.

I made another crucial error: I posted my feelings on a comic book message board. Not known for their cultural or political sensitivities, many comic book message boards are merely echo chambers in which people who are, by and large, sycophants gather to reinforce each other’s narrow-mindedness and reflect each other’s images at twice their actual size (to paraphrase Virginia Woolf). The audience, at least by way of message boards and comments sections, is remarkably repetitive when faced with sociopolitical criticism about the stuff they love: first defense, then denial, then a hyper “rational” analysis of why there couldn’t possibly be any misogyny/racism/sexism/homophobia in their beloved art form. They insist that the problem lies with the observer not with the object being observed. Dwayne McDuffie, rest his soul, had this audience pegged.

My comments were met, mostly, with simmering rage or the aforementioned cognitive dissonance: “Let me explain this to you rationally: I’m not a bigot and I like this book. So this book couldn’t possibly be bigoted in any way.” Anyone who agreed with my commentary was summarily dismissed, talked over, or explained away.

And, of course, there’s the tried-and-true option of dragging out the token members of the audience, the few blacks or women or queer people in the ranks who support the status quo. Nothing says “conversation ender” like, “Well, I have a female friend who said it was okay. So it’s not misogynist.” As though institutional pathologies like misogyny, racism, or homophobia require that every member of the oppressed class sign off on its identification; as though members of oppressed classes don’t succumb to the psychological warfare that is bigotry and participate in and perpetuate ideologies that are harmful to them and others in their social group; as though the oppressed don’t sometimes identify with the oppressors. Stockholm syndrome is very real.

I’ll agree that the problem lies within the observer (only not the observer the aforementioned audience believes), but the problem also lies within the object being observed. The reason why this audience doesn’t perceive any harm, intentional or otherwise, is because the creators, institutions, and this audience are literally speaking the same language. White supremacy isn’t white supremacy amongst white supremacists; it’s reality. Misogyny isn’t misogyny amongst misogynists; it’s normalcy. Homophobia isn’t homophobia to homophobes; it’s just the way God intended things. It’s very difficult for anyone inside a giant circle to have the necessary perspective to perceive its full shape.

There’s a reason relatively few women, black people, or openly queer people are employed in the mainstream comic book industry or hold relatively few positions of power within the institutions that distribute them. There’s a reason why those who are employed there have to do much to tamp down any perceived differences in opinion or worldview and get on board with the straight white male status quo. It has nothing to do with women, black people, or queer people not being talented enough to compete or there not being enough them present in the potential talent pool. It has everything to do with already being friends with an influential straight white guy at the company. It has everything to do with a group of frightened individuals setting up shop in their citadel, trying desperately to fortify their tower of straight white male hegemony in a world where that hegemony is becoming decidedly less tenable.

And you don’t only see this happening in the comic book industry. You see it in mainstream politics as well with organizations like the GOP trying to decide if they should jettison some of their more outrageous, overt bigotries in order to court enough Latinos, women, and gays to win elections. It reads to me as a sort of panic, a sort of regrouping of the straight white guard as they try to figure out what it means to be straight, white, and male in a world where queer people are demanding civil rights, a black man is the leader of democracy, and women are asserting control over their own bodies.

One of the ways in which they think they can reclaim the power they believe they’ve lost is through media propaganda. Since Obama’s re-election in 2008, for example, we’ve seen the incredible return of overt racist paradigms like the white savior and black pathology, as well as the puzzling return of 1950s values in relation to feminism post-Sarah Palin—not just in the real world, but in entertainment media as well: Did you miss World’s Finest #7, where Power Girl decided she knew everything she needed to know about African nations and their child soldiers because she watched KONY 2012? Or what about Miles Morales in Ultimate Spider-Man, who was not only at odds with his criminal uncle, but has to hide his identity from his ex-con father, too? Because, you know, nothing says “black” like criminal pathology. And don’t get me started on Bunker in Teen Titans, the gay Mexican character whose power is, wait for it: creating purple energy bricks. Purple. Bricks. I couldn’t create that big of a stereotype even if I tried really hard. But for some folks, it’s apparently rather easy.

We’ve seen these corporations pay lip service to diversity, but it’s always diversity for diversity’s sake—that is, diversity because they think it makes them look cool and hip in multicultural spaces. But bigots don’t understand the difference between diversity and tokenism, nor do they recognize diversity as something beneficial to themselves. They don’t see it as something that can open them and their organizations up to new ideas, new audiences, and new ways of being. They always regard the concept of diversity suspiciously, as something forced upon them, a notion that tries to coerce them into being politically correct, a practice the makes them, against their will, admit into their ranks “unqualified” people who didn’t “earn” their spot (because, you know, being a popular writer’s friend is considered earning a spot).

When called out on their nonsense, these corporations blame the bigotry on their audience: “Well, we tried to get this product featuring X Minority Figure off the ground, but the audience just wasn’t ready for it.” Bigots, unfortunately, have a collusive and mutually beneficial relationship that allows blame to be passed around (but never landing where it should), while keeping us distracted from the fact the structural impediments remain unmoved. And that’s all according to plan.

I’ve concluded that it’s useless to have these discussions with people whose fantasies rest on the fact that none of the social conventions upon which comic books stories are built can be seriously challenged or interrogated. It’s pointless to have these debates in this “post-racial” age where you’re only a racist if you use the n-word, you’re only a misogynist if you beat up women, and you’re not a homophobe, you’re just beholden to religious principles. Bigots—even passive, rational ones—are incredibly similar in their reaction to criticism: “My feelings are more important than your struggles.”

The only option left to individuals like myself who have had enough of the microaggressions and the chorus of defenders and deniers—who have had enough of the grating, tone-deaf depictions of women, people of color, and queer people in these often poorly written, poorly drawn, increasingly expensive books—is to opt out. And that decision is made evermore clear when you consider that the industry has been bigoted since its inception and you simply weren’t conscious enough to detect it when you were a kid. While the country has taken strides toward being a more perfect union, the mainstream comic book industry has, for the most part, dug its heels in and refused to move.

So I admit defeat. I am, ironically, waving the white flag. The bigots win. I’m plum tuckered out. I don’t have the energy to fight anymore. I say if they like the comic book industry and its product just the way they are, faults and all, let them have it. As long as I don’t ever have to read a misogynist Wonder Woman story or a racist Spider-Man story or a Superman story told by a homophobic extremist ever again, it’s all good. There are better products to spend my money on. That the mainstream comic book industry doesn’t want my money for fear of alienating their core audience of bubble blowers is the fault of their bad business model, not mine. In the meantime, I’ll be over here reading novels digitally on my iPad. These works, at least, reflect the world as it is, as it could be, as it should be, rather than as some defective, reductive supremacist fantasy.
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Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer/editor from Brooklyn, New York and creator of the Son of Baldwin blog. He is currently working on his first novel.

My Son, The Cultural Critic

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

So this is a self-indulgent, proud father kind of thing, but what the hey.

Two anecdotes about my nine-year-old son’s critical acumen.

— My son was talking to a friend about the movie “Brave.” My son hadn’t seen it yet, so he asked his friend how it was. “It’s okay,” the friend said, “but it’s got a girl hero.”

My son paused for a moment. Then he said, with a fair bit of outrage, “You don’t like it because a girl’s the hero? That’s sexist!

—I mentioned Django Unchained for some reason, and my son said, “what’s that?” I explained that it’s a movie about slavery, and about how slavery was bad. I added, “The funny thing about that is that there really aren’t very many movies about how slavery is bad.”

My son narrowed his eyes and said, “Is that because most movies are made by white people?”

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Skeptics and Believers United

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

On Slate’s Double XX blog, Rebecca Watson yesterday put up a deeply depressing post about the sexism she’s faced in the skepticism/atheism community. At a skepticism conference some guy had asked her in an elevator to come back to his room for “coffee”. She later mentioned offhand in a public address that skeevy sexual pick-up lines are not necessarily best-practice for men who want to not be assholes. She was then, inevitably, deluged with hate mail from men telling her she was a bitch and that they didn’t need to be lectured about sexism by no bitch, duh, ’cause we’re smart and skeptical, yeah? (And if you think I’m being unfair to her interlocutors, just read the comments on her post.)

Anyway, Richard Dawkins weighed in with a post on a blog about the controversy. As you’d expect, he was thoughtful, even-handed, and eminently rational.

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and … yawn … don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so …

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

So Richard Dawkins is a giant flaming asshole. No one is especially surprised, I’d guess.

But what’s interesting I think is the way his assholish-ness is framed. Specifically, his misogyny — his sneering at women for acting as if harassment matters — is framed through and by his explicit antipathy towards the Muslim world. Violence against women abroad doesn’t raise his consciousness about violence against women at home. Rather, misogyny abroad (the fault of some other culture) becomes an excuse to dismiss misogyny at home (which may be less virulent, but is certainly something that is more his responsibility.)

Dawkins’ knee-jerk rhetorical recourse to the evil of Muslims to wipe clean his own sins reminded me again of the main reason that the new atheists creep me out. That reason being that the new atheism is an imperialist ideology. It’s marinated in US-Islam tension, weaponized by 9/11, and generally used as a justification for variously sneering at, bombing, and conquering peoples who it is convenient for us to view as irrational barbarians.

Dawkins’ comment also shows, with unusual clarity, why imperial adventures abroad are horrible for civil liberties at home. In an imperial power, the evil of your enemies is always infinitely more important than the evil at home. The injustice committed by those benighted religious backwards subhumans always trumps any possible injustice committed by you or me. Moral outrage is kept safely for the other, the opposition to whom guarantees one’s own immaculate virtue. Anyone who disagrees is a pampered whiner, who doesn’t realize how good (s)he has it. After all, are our rational bombs not the scourge of evil bearded menfolk everywhere? (And perhaps of the occasional woman in hijab as well, who is probably better off dead anyway?)

Of course, it’s not just atheists who are imperialists or anything. The Christian right, not to mention the Jewish right, have thrown their all behind our ongoing crusade of blood and self-righteousness. Dawkins likes to think those believing blowhards are his enemies – but his oleaginous condescension and brazen hypocrisy tells a different story. A bully who hits you on the orders of the hairy thunderer isn’t much different, after all, from a bully who hits you at the dictates of his own immaculate reason.

I, Reboot

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Joy DeLyria

Most of us can generally agree that the treatment of women in fiction of the 1960s or earlier was by no means sublime. Consider Lieutenant Uhura, of Star Trek, The Original Series, a Communications Officer aboard the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Traipsing about the bridge in a short, short skirt, she contributed to the exploration of space by answering the phone and relaying messages. Consider Barbara Gordon of the Batman comics, a part-time librarian in a skin-tight costume, who carried most of her arsenal in a handy batpurse.

It would be a mistake to consider these narratives, however, without the context of their time period. While they might be offensive to some today, these female characters are progressive for their time in terms of what roles women play. Uhura was hugely significant, because she was an officer who had a job that involved more technology and know-how than making coffee; Barbara Gordon was one of the first female action heroes who acted on her own.

It’s relatively easy to compare social values of the sixties and of the current decade, and conclude that the position of women has significantly changed. What remains unclear is whether current treatment of women in fiction has improved proportionately. Reboots, meanwhile, provide the unique opportunity to directly compare the treatment of those values in narrative while taking into account the context of changed social environment. By taking the same story and telling it in two different time periods, one can easily juxtapose the treatment of values against said time periods.

Obviously, reboots often neglect to take advantage of these opportunities, recapitulating the social environment of the past instead of offering commentary on it, or updating it to reflect modern times. Perhaps this is one reason why the recent boom in reboots, reimaginings, sequels, etc, is seen as stale and unimaginative. In these reboots, the position of women relative to “current” society is exactly the same as it was fifty years ago.

However, there are some reboots in which the changed role of women in the narrative is not merely a recapitulation, but actually seems to be a regression. That is, not only has the treatment of women in narrative not improved proportionately to the changed role of women in society; some of these reboots would seem significantly behind their source texts even in the sixties. Christopher Nolan’s Batman reboot, J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, and to some extent Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who sequels and Sherlock Holmes re-imaging in some respects make female characters of the sixties sometimes look damn good.

Certainly, it is questionable to suit up hot girls in latex and show off their bodies as they fight crime, and certainly it is objectionable that a gal in a short skirt is a glorified secretary on a show about the future. The reboots in question remove all that pseudo-feminism by portraying ladies as love interests and lawyers, while men retain their careers of kicking ass and fighting crime with superpowers. The reboots remove those icky questions of motivation—in which girls only act because they’re daughters/mothers/lovers or because some guy tells them to—by simply removing female agency altogether. In some of them—instead of females being somewhat questionable representations of the feminist progressive movement—females barely exist at all.

Nolan’s Batman reboot is perhaps the most radical repositioning of the female in narrative relative to its source text. Although Batman’s early forms can be read as male-centric, there is no denying the place of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl in the overall Batman narrative. Plenty of iterations of Batman, however, do not include Barbara, just as several do not include Robin. Barbara’s exclusion in these iterations can be seen less as a commentary on her position in the narrative, and rather as subjection to the extreme complexity of the overall Batman story. There are enough supplemental characters that it is difficult to include them all in any single retelling.

However, Nolan’s rendition is particularly interesting due to the heavy emphasis on men, particularly the relationships between fathers and sons. Martha Wayne, Bruce Wayne’s mother, appears in several scenes, but has no lines. Her impact on Bruce (and the film) is negligible in comparison to Thomas Wayne, Bruce’s father. While the role is small, Thomas Wayne colors Batman Begins, establishing the father figure trope and demanding that it be filled in that character’s absence. Thomas is of course replaced by R’as al Ghul, and when Bruce returns to Gotham, father figures are filled by Alfred, Jim Gordon, and Lucius Fox, with varying degrees of reproof and complicity. Never is there the suggestion that any of R’as al Ghul’s daughters could possibly show up to ruin the neat pattern-making of prodigal sons and disapproving fathers, because the one significant woman in these films is Rachel Dawes.

As a feisty lawyer-type, Rachel Dawes not only suggests that women can have careers, but that they may have an active position in the plot, able to help Batman put away the criminals he catches. While some might argue that this is progressive, this statement is little different than what Superman suggested even in the 1940s. In short, Dawes is a rehash of characters such as Lois Lane, Vicky Vale, or oh, even say April O’Neil. The only new social commentary is in Dawes’ profession as a lawyer, rather than a reporter, which suggests that women can take on still more varied careers, but still, this hardly seems as progressive as Barbara Gordon insofar as the role of women in today’s society. After all, Barbara Gordon became a vigilante independent of Batman; there is no suggestion whatsoever that Dawes could possibly sustain her own narrative.

Nolan’s reboot more directly fails in regard to feminism in The Dark Knight, when Dawes dies. This is Dawes’ most significant action; it is the crux that instigates all further action. Her death causes Two-Face to emerge, and Batman to realize that his hopes of legitimate justice are inherently flawed.

The idea that a woman’s single greatest strength is self-sacrifice is a common trope in narrative. It seems to fit in nicely with the idea that a woman’s only strength lies in the help, support, and nurturing of menfolk. Giving of self is a strength many women do have, and take pleasure in actively offering; however, this is not their only possible form of action. Self-sacrifice is often portrayed as the ultimate nurturing action (see The Giving Tree) and thus the ultimate strength (see Sucker Punch); a female sacrifices all of her agency so that others may have it.

The Dark Knight, however, presents a much less active role; in The Dark Knight, it is not active self-sacrifice but rather passive death that forms the crux of all the rest of the action. In fact, it is the very passivity of the death that motivates Harvey Dent. She didn’t have a choice; it was all due to chance: the death of a perfect innocent. Her earlier fumblings towards agency are thus redeemed; any specters of latex or objectified ass-kicking are thus removed. In the context of the film, of course, it is a perfect tragedy. In the context of this male-centric universe, juxtaposed the Batman narrative of the 1960s, however, it is—well. Still a tragedy.

The complete eradication of Barbara Gordon occurs during the climax of the arc of Jim Gordon, police commissioner and traditionally, the father of Barbara Gordon. Towards the end of The Dark Knight, Two-Face threatens the person Jim “loves most.” Jim says, “Don’t hurt my family,” and Two-Face reiterates he will only harm the person Jim, “loves most.” Two-Face chooses not Jim’s wife or daughter, but Jim’s son. In spotlighting Gordon’s son—however briefly—at the expense of wife or daughter, the film narrowly avoids reference to any possible suggestion of Barbara Gordon and that whole feminist problem that she presents.

Canonically, Jim Gordon does have a son (or two), but his daughter Barbara has always been far more important to the Batman narrative. It’s true that this scene attempts to parallel Rachel Dawes and James Gordon Jr, thus demonstrating that not only females, but children also, may passively die to instigate action. However, I really admire the manly resistance to even throw fans a bone in this scene by refusing to allow Jim’s daughter—who is present—a name or any lines. Doing so makes it impossible for fans to draw parallels between Barbara Gordon and Rachel Dawes, which might have resulted in the disastrous suggestion that girls are not bright shining forces of integrity, but may be morally questionable also.

Abrams’ recent Star Trek does not manage to avoid these issues quite so neatly. The role of Uhura is significantly expanded in the reboot, as opposed to The Original Series, which gives us more time to question the treatment of female identity. Disappointingly, said expansion is due not to an expansion of Uhura’s role on the Enterprise, but rather to her new position as a love interest. Furthermore, in the source text, Captain Kirk’s various relationships with women showcases the show’s unwillingness to consummate the homoerotic overtones, and yet Kirk’s relationships never seem as serious or integral as the friendship between Kirk and Spock. By providing the apparently sustained relationship between Uhura and Spock, the reboot further paints over the problematic issue of homosexuality. The position of women aside, the reboot certainly reads as more heteronormative than The Original Series.

Uhura in The Original Series is never really treated as a love interest. In one episode she falls for a man, in several, she has somewhat flirtatious conversations with Spock. In another, Kirk kisses her, but the scene is appropriately problematized, because “aliens made them do it.” Perhaps Uhura is never treated as a love interest due to her race, or perhaps she was never deemed important enough to “deserve” a romantic relationship. However, she was a regular, important part of the crew and the show not because of any relationships she had, but because of her career, and that was significant at the time the show aired.

In some ways, it’s understandable that Uhura in the reboot is a love interest. There are very few mainstream action and adventure narratives that don’t involve the central protagonists in some sort of romantic plot—though it is interesting to note that the ones that manage to avoid it tend to center around two male protagonists, complete with homoerotic overtones (see House, BBC’s Sherlock, Supernatural, and oh, anything without girls). So maybe we can blame mainstream culture for its insistence on sexual overtones, without directly citing lack of feminist concern or insight for Uhura’s position.

After all, Uhura may not get to fight Nero, pilot a ship into a black hole, or participate in the climax of the film at all, but she does get to translate a Romulan message, which is somewhat pivotal to earlier action. We also get to see a portrayal of determination, strength, and ambition when she demands that Spock change the roster so that she can go aboard the Enterprise. The strength of this scene is somewhat negated by the fact that she uses her relationship with Spock in order to get ahead; however, it is possible that Spock did not initially place her on the Enterprise in order to protect her. Thus Uhura’s demand is an insistence on not being treated like a delicate flower.

Overall, whether the role of the reboot Uhura is an improvement in terms of feminism on original Uhura is somewhat murky, both objectively and considering the context of the time periods. Her position would be more clear if they had sacrificed her in a passive manner, as Nolan did with Rachel Dawes, and as Abrams does with Spock’s mother. The death of Amanda Grayson, Spock’s mother, motivates Spock’s actions and furthers the plot; while it is a small point, the passive death of Nero’s wife also furthers the plot. Nero, the villain, is a Romulan whose wife died when the star of Romulus went supernova; he is out to kill Spock for revenge. Thus the central antagonist and one of the central protagonists act in response to women who were not seen to act themselves.

Kirk, meanwhile, is motivated by the death of his father. His father, moreover, actively sacrificed himself to save his wife and child. We have no idea what happened to Kirk’s mother, because after giving birth to him, she is no longer important to the narrative. We also have no idea what happened to Number One, the woman who is canonically (according to The Original Series) second in command to Captain Pike. She does not exist in the reboot. One may assume that the alternate universe created by Nero’s intrusion on the timeline resulted not only in Kirk’s blue eyes, but the eradication of Number One. This deletion conveniently removes concerns we may have had in The Original Series about her lack of a first name or Pike’s somewhat dismissive treatment of her in canon. Without her existence, we need not be concerned with women in positions of leadership in Starfleet at all; there is nothing to cause us to question it or wonder.

Instead, there is Gaila: the green girl Kirk sleeps with in order to get codes to reprogram the Kobayshi Maru. Considering her skin color, she is most likely an Orion, which—according to canon—is a kind of sex slave. That she is in Starfleet at all is both progressive and problematic, similar to the original Uhura—or Tasha Yar, in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Tasha Yar is the Chief Security Officer who spent her youth on the streets, avoiding “rape gangs.” She is the 1990s commentary on the treatment of women, perhaps a reproach to The Original Series, which rarely showed women who could fight or wear pants. Yar’s troubled past may have been an attempt to highlight her strengths as a warrior and survivor, but it fed into an unfortunate trope that women must overcome slavery, rape, or similar to be as tough as men.

Fortunately for the show, The Next Generation managed to eliminate the problem of portraying a warrior female with an icky past when the actress who played Yar demanded a larger part. The show was left with females who portrayed their strengths through more nurturing functions (counseling and doctoring)—again, an important form of action, but not the only one of which a female is capable. But because it was the main form of action for women on the show, The Next Generation in some ways seems a lot less progressive than its counterpart, The Orginal Series.

Gaila’s own history, however, is never addressed, as opposed to Tasha Yar’s. Furthermore Kirk has sex with her in order to use her, thereby bringing all those issues that never achieved their full ick-capacity with Tasha Yar right up to the fore with Gaila. The new Uhura receives a first name, which is more than the original Uhura or Number One ever got, though there is some question too as to whether those characters lacking a first name was somewhat progressive in its own way. Gaila doesn’t have a name at all in the reboot; “Gaila” comes from a deleted scene.

Many other reboots besides these seem to not only lack progressive statements in comparison to modern times, but also in comparison to their previous iterations. The new Doctor Who is not quite a reboot, since it takes previous canon into account, but it does provide the same sort of reflection on the previous series.

The central companions to the Doctor—all female—in the new Who kick a whole lot of ass, but I cannot help but notice that the first two, Rose and Martha, are both in love with the Doctor and seem to believe he can do little wrong. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with being in love, the distinct power imbalance between the Doctor and, well, everyone else of his acquaintance, suggests that these infatuations are somewhat problematic. The show, however, doesn’t problematize the power imbalance, only the fact that the Doctor apparently has feelings for Rose, but cannot be with her, and apparently doesn’t really have romantic feelings for Martha.

The next companion, Donna, is not in love with the Doctor, and seems positioned to critique his hubris and many, many questionable actions. However, by the end of her arc she trusts the Doctor without reservation, and seems behind even his morally ambiguous behavior. This, too, seems to highlight the power imbalance without asking any questions about it.

Donna’s arc ends powerfully; she essentially saves the world—but this she can only do by becoming the Doctor himself. Because even the Doctor realizes the danger there being two of him prevents, he erases Donna’s memory completely, returning her to her former life as though he had never entered it. This is particularly disturbing because Donna had very little motivation or agency before she met the Doctor; through her adventures with him, she found her strengths and gained some measure of power, even if it was only by means of the Doctor. By leaving her with no memory of her experiences, Donna once again lacks confidence, and possibly continues the existence she later herself saw as shiftless and meaningless.

The Doctor’s most recent companion also begins in a similarly male-influenced, passive manner: as a little girl, Amy Pond meets the Doctor, and she’s obsessed with him ever since. For two seasons, there is little to no reflection on the fact that Amy’s early beliefs and desires are influenced, even manipulated by a very powerful male authority; her later actions are all predicated upon the Doctor creating a strong impression on her as a child.

However, the most recent season expands the role of another female character, River Song, who—while somewhat problematic in her own right—is at last a female who at last can challenge the Doctor in terms of knowledge and power. The recent season also problematizes Amy’s early relationship with the Doctor—which, for the sake of girls prevailed upon at an early age by male authority figures, is well. Nice.

Hopefully Moffat’s next installment on BBC’s Sherlock will progress similarly. Sherlock, unlike Doctor Who or Star Trek, is not a reboot of a 1960s narrative, but a reimagining of a late nineteeth century narrative; thus it is no surprise that women do not play large or progressive roles in the stories. It’s that very lack that makes me wonder at the sudden boom in reboots, reimaginings, and retellings—after all, historical accuracy is not only a convenient, but sometimes a perfectly valid excuse for sexism.

Sherlock, however, is a modernized reinvention of Doyle’s stories. Admittedly, the space for females in the structure of the narrative itself, not just the Victorian time period, is somewhat confining; there has never been a large cast in these stories. We know characters like Moriarty, Mycroft, and Irene Adler well because so many variations on the stories exist, but canonically, they do not appear very often. Irene Adler appears only once—though we may applaud reboots for her use and reuse as an attempt to bring a strong female into the narrative. But if one remains close to canon, there are only two central heroes, John Watson and Sherlock Holmes, and sometimes a third, somewhat lesser protagonist, Inspector Lestrade.

However, there is absolutely no reason the issue could not have been addressed in a modern adaptation by merely changing the sex of one of the characters. Lestrade could have been a girl; there is no reason, canonically or thematically, that Lestrade has to be a man. One might argue that Moriarity and Mycroft must remain men, as they serve as mirrors to Sherlock, though there seems very little reason why—in a modern context—a woman can’t serve as a parallel character to a man. Lastly, there is no reason Sherlock cannot be a girl.

Sherlock Holmes is a quintessentially male character, but it is not due to sexuality, or physical strength, or other qualities that society tell us are overtly masculine. Instead, he is masculine due to his phenomenal intelligence and social ineptitude with other people. There is absolutely no evidence or rationale behind the idea that these traits are inherently masculine, and yet there are few, if any, characters in most of literary or media western canon which are as overwhelmingly intelligent and cerebrally inaccessible as Sherlock Holmes, who are also women.

The one reboot I will mention in conclusion is, of course, Battlestar Galactica, which does change the sex of one of the original characters, and reimagines other roles with females to fulfill them. The reimagined Starbuck is singular not only because she is played by a woman, but because she retains many of the “masculine” characteristics so central to the original character. She smokes, she gambles, she gets in brawls. She is not, however, merely a male character with breasts, some of her plots and concerns are considered by society feminine, and other plots and concerns could only happen to a woman.

That is not to say that the entirety of Starbuck’s arcs are shining examples of everything a female character should be in narrative. On the contrary, some of her characterization—like latex and batpurses in the sixties—is a reflection of the deficiencies of our modern times: the not yet perfectly equal role of women in today’s society. And yet, like Batgirl and the original Uhura were in the sixties, I would say the reboot Starbuck is progressive for her time. Her role is to ask the questions; we provide the answers.

I’m actually not a huge fan of Batgirl. And I really, really enjoy Nolan’s reboot of Batman, as problematic as it is. When considering these narratives, however, it’s important to look beyond the diegesis to the context of the time period, and ask questions regarding the situation of social values within the world of the story. It’s important to do so in the case of reboots and reimaginings in particular, because it is so easy to neglect context not only in favor of the diegesis, but in favor of a context that is valid only to the source text, not the reimagining. If these retellings do not themselves push boundaries, we are in danger not only of said boundaries remaining in place, but actually backsliding into the positions they so comfortably held decades ago.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: sexism