Superhero porn

Comix
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February 2008 Playboy cover, featuring Tiffany Fallon bodypainted as Wonder Woman

Sometimes you wonder why certain search terms bring people to your site, until you realise that having a blog that’s old enough means that almost every possible combination of words in the English language will occur in it at least once. (Also, that doing a post on weird search engine terms is very easy and brings more attention to those terms hence luring more people here. Profit guaranteed. (I learned that from Splintered Sunrise.)) So no wonder even such an unlikely combination of words like superhero porn gets results here. Unfortunately for whoever was looking to get their rocks off to some hot ‘n sweaty superaction, you won’t find it here. Apart from the image on the left, of course.

If you don’t know what’s going on, that’s next month’s Playboy, featuring one Tiffany Fallon bodypainted as Wonder Woman, which has become the latest crisis in the comics blogosphere. It’s supposedly sexist and demeaning and not worthy of a great female superhero like Wonder Woman blah blah blah. It’s all a bit silly, considering Wonder Woman is easily the most purposely kinky superhero title of all time, created by a man with a serious interest in bondage games. (William Moulton Marston; look him up.) Having a model painted as Wonder Woman is only as troubling as you find Playboy to be in general. Which to me is not very. I don’t believe porn is inherently demeaning to the people who appear in it, Wonder Woman has long been a fetish object to all kinds of people and this cover is a lot more respectable than some of the stuff Wonder Woman and other heroines have been subjected to in the comics themselves. I mean, at least it’s not Greg “all my characters look like they’re in the throws of orgasm” Land.

Meanwhile, to the hapless seeker for the forbidden superhero flesh, remember this nugget of wisdom from Evan Dorkin’s Eltingville Comic-Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Role-Playing Club: “it ain’t no good without the costume”.

Gaza, Israel and the news

Israel/Palestine, Manufacturing Consent
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One of the things that has me depressed on blue monday, allegedly the most depressing date of the year is the realisation that nothing ever changes in how the media reports on Israel and its treatment of Palestinians. There were quite a few reports on the forced shutdown of an important powerplant in Gaza this weekend. Most reports explained correctly how this shutdown was due to lack of fuel and how this was due to Israel stopping fuel getting into Gaza, as retaliation for increased rocket attacks from Gaza. Some reports went even so far as to gently condemn Israel for this, or at least allow some Palestinian spokeperson to do so.

Missing from most, if not all reports however, was the real context of this story. Israel withdrew its settlements and army from Gaza in 2005, but it has never given up control over it. All border crossings, including the sea and along Gaza’s borders with Egypt, are controlled by Israel; Gaza doesn’t have control of its own airspace, and much of its infrastructure, e.g. the electricity network is dependent on Israel. As one look at a map of its territory shows, the Gaza Strip has no hope of ever being self sufficient in most products. The Gaza Strip depends on being able to exports the few things it can (e.g. cut flowers and citrus fruit) to pay for the import of everything it lacks; therefore when the Israelis close the border Gaza starts to starve. And the Israelis have been playing this game at least since the Oslo Accords, when the Occupied Territories gained a nominal autonomy, trying to starve the Palestinians in submission, with added airstrikes when necessary. In a sense, far from being an independent territory, Gaza is Israel’s largest, open air prison.

But if you depend on the mainstream media to tell you about Gaza, you’d think the problems only started last week, when those thankless Palestinians started launching rockets at Israel, for no apparant reason. The blockade, even when condemned, is only described as a reaction to these bombardments, with all context carefully removed. That these rocket attacks happened in response to earlier Israeli airstrikes, is never explained. Instead every cycle of violence is presented as started by the Palestinians, with a collective amnesia for anything that happened earlier than whatever the latest outrage Israel said was the reason for their actions.

What Jonah wants

US politics, wingnuts
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Earlier I said that Jonah is just another kind of Holocaust denier, the way he distorts the true history and politics of fascism, but the big question is what he tries to achieve with this distortion. You can do worse than to read John Emerson’s explanation, who argues it’s done partially to slime the left, partially to inoculate the Republicans against the charge of fascism and partially, perhaps unconsciously as a dominance game within the media: “no matter how stupid we make our arguments, you will take them seriously”. All fine points, but there’s still something missing. There’s more going on and it’s best expressed through that stupid backcover quote:

The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

What Goldberg is saying with that, and with so many other examples, is that all traditional, stereotypical liberal dogoodery is fascist. That it doesn’t matter whether state power is used benignly or malignantly, the fact that it’s state power is enough to make it fascist. A public school system, a national health service, all fascist. Ridiculous of course, but it is an extreme version of what a lot of rightwingers half believe already. Which makes Jonah’s book so dangerous, as it strengthens the paranoid beliefs of an already radicial and powerful group. Worse, because it’s so extreme it helps legitamise less extreme versions of this idea. The American media is already saturated with reports and stories that push the idea all state interference is bad, all social programmes are evil and pushing the idea that it’s not just wrong but fascist to have welfare can only help in further eroding public support.

What’s to be done? Debating Jonah on the merits of his book is pointless, as that only strengthens the perception of legitamicy, though just straightforward education in what fascism is should be done. Making fun of him and his book is better, but in itself is not enough. What we want is to make sure the sheer stupidity of these beliefs is exposed, which I think is best done by dragging these half hidden ideas I outlined above into the spotlights and then ridiculing them. Fortunately, most people are still not stupid enough to think a female school teacher is really the modern equivalent of a concentration camp guard.

Can litfic ever measure up to fantasy or sf?

"Literature", fantasy, science fiction
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Fantasy and science fiction writer and fan Jo Walton had an interesting post up today about whether mainstream, literary fiction can ever be as good as the best science fiction and fantasy novels:

In one section, she states that some well-regarded people think Middlemarch the best novel in the world, ever. I stopped and looked suspiciously at this, turned the idea around a few times, and cautiously considered that in fact perhaps Middlemarch did deserve to be considered in the same company as Lord of the Rings, Cyteen, A Fire Upon the Deep, The Disposessed and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. (That grinding sound you hear? F.R. Leavis turning in his grave?) But you know, not really. Because it’s just an awful lot easier if you get the world ready made for you. That’s my main objection to people who say mainstream and fanfic can be as good as original SF. People can juggle two balls awfully well, and Middlemarch and Dark Reflections both do that, in their different ways, about as well as it can be done. But that still can’t really compare to people who are juggling four.

Please do not think this is the usual reverse snobbery of a certain kind of science fiction fan denying that traditional literary values are worthless; what Jo is saying is much more interesting than that. She argues that all other things being equal, writing a good literay novel is easier than writing a sf/fantasy novel, because in the second case the writer has not just to invent the plot and characters and such, but the entire world in which their story takes place and make this world accesible to their readers. Mainstream authors on the other hand do not need to do so, as they can confidently assume their readers has a certain familiarity with the world in which their novels take place.

It’s an interesting, almost seductive theory, but I don’t think it’s right. For I start I think that Jo both underestimates the work mainstream authors have to do to make their settings convincing and overestimates how much science fiction writers need to do. Just like a mainstream author does not need to explain what a car or horse is, neither does a sf writer need to explain how a hyperdrive works or what a positronic brain is. We know already, because we’ve seen these concepts in movies and television series, in cartoons even, not to mention some eighty odd years of science fiction stories. Meanwhile any mainstream author who doesn’t set their story in a setting that is right here and right now will have readers to whom this setting is new, who may not stumble over things like horses and cars, but who will stumble over say the position of women in society.

Take Jane Austen for example, writing in a society in which women almost literally had no rights at all, where women had to marry or face starvation. This is a setting that is almost unimaginable to a modern audience, yet the genius of Austen lies in making clear this essential horror even to us, without writing for us. That is a feat few science fiction authors can emulate.

Mainstream writers also have another set of balls to juggle that sf/fantasy authors need not bother with: making sure that the settings they create “feel real” to their readers. Asimov could imagine Trantor anyway he wanted it to look, because Trantor is not real. But Ian Rankin needs to make sure the Edinburgh of his novels is simular enough to the real one to convince those readers who know it….

So no, I don’t think sf writers juggle more balls than mainstream writers. Just different balls, at times.

If pigs could fly…

Policing
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Scotland Yard would be London’s biggest airport, as the old joke goes. Here’s some video showing the friendliness of the traditional British Bobby in action — by beating up Brian Haw as well as the protesters he was filming:

See also the story on Prog Gold yesterday. If the name sounds familiar, Brian Haw is the guy whose anti-war protests so stuck in Blair’s craw he pushed through a law forbidding any unlicenced protests near Parliament, only to find that it didn’t apply retro-actively so Haw could stay on his lonely vigil. Later on some “artist” berk copied his protest as an artwork and won forty grand for it, hence the title of the Prog Gold story.