The fault, dear blogosphere, lies not in Bendis...

So I'm a little late to the game weighing in on this whole Tigra thing. And by "Tigra thing," I mean the recent incident in New Avengers #35 where she was brutally beaten within an inch of her life while her cleavage fell out of her tiny bikini, and the entire incident was videotaped and broadcast to a room of cheering men.

It's taken me a while because I needed to think about this--I didn't want to go off half-cocked with a knee-jerk reaction, although I certainly had one. Apparently, a lot of people did. Ultimately, I will say this: I believe that reasonable people can disagree about the intentions behind this, or the ultimate meaning of it, but let's not pretend that this isn't trafficking in highly inflammatory and disconcerting imagery.

There have been a lot of charges of misogyny leveled at writer Brian Bendis, and as much as I've enjoyed seeing Matt Brady get roundly mocked for his sycophant-o-rama with Bendis in the aftermath, the fact remains that I'm not willing to condemn Bendis as a misogynistic. At least, not according to the evidence in front of me. I don't believe he hates women or particularly enjoys seeing them harmed, and I don't believe he orchestrated the scene with Tigra to sexually excite the audience by abusing a woman.

The fault, dear blogosphere, lies not in Bendis, but in superhero comics generally. The fact is that this particular genre has evolved dramatically over the last several decades, and it has done so partly because the medium as a whole is evolving, and more relevantly because we, the superhero audience, have grown up. And to serve our grown up sensibilities and needs, comics have adapted. Unfortunately, this usually means that comics have "become mature" in the only most selective and titillating ways: sex and violence. And as a culture with a pretty unhealthy attitude towards both of those things, in a genre not known for its awesome sense of maturity, it's not surprising that things have gone awry.

That's not to say that the trend of heightened realism (including elements of violence and sex) is necessarily a bad one; in fact, it's precisely what renewed my love of superhero comics in the first place. It was the early run of Brian Bendis' Powers, actually, that pulled me back into the fold after an extended hiatus. What captivated me was the way Bendis was able to combine everything beautiful and fantastic about superheroes with the gritty, unpleasant realities of life. It helped transform a world I barely imagine into one that suddenly seemed a lot more possible. It's why I loved Gotham Central and Alias too--there was violence and sex, but they served not to glamorize those elements, but to ground the characters in a more complicated and sometimes unforgiving reality.

For others on the opposite end of the spectrum, what they want from comics as adults is not more realism but more fantasy--particularly sexual fantasy. Bigger boobs, more revealing costumes, more compromising and borderline pornographic situations. It's not that this is an invalid desire, on its own. Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose is there for a reason, people. If you want to see people's clothes fall off every three pages, then by all means! But remember, soft-core is all fun and games until someone gets cold-cocked with a pistol and publicly humiliated, and then it becomes something else entirely.

Let's take a slightly different but related example from another blogosphere explosion that centered around issues of feminism and sexuality. Did the infamous Mary Jane laundry statue bother me? Nope! Did the fact that that the character involved was also being marketed to teen girls bother me? Yeah, a little bit! The problem is not with either one independently, but rather that they act at cross purposes. The genre is out there trying to be all things to all people, and while the schizophrenic juxtapositions that result are occasionally hilarious or brilliant, a lot of the time, they're just fucked up.

There's nothing wrong with sex, and there's nothing wrong, for example, with a highly unrealistic erotic film designed to cater to sexual fantasy. There's also nothing wrong with a dramatic film that graphically depicts the reality of violence and rape with an unblinking eye. Do I think it would be a good idea to combine the two? Hells no.

For me, what is problematic is that superhero comics end up trying to heighten both sexual fantasy and violent reality simultaneously, which is particularly disturbing when the art is realistic (as with Leinil Yu in New Avengers, as opposed to the more cartoony art of Michael Oeming in Powers), and particularly when the situations in question mirror the all-too-common real life situations where sex and violence get combined. Such as rape.

And I know there are a lot of guys that probably don't think about it that way--probably because they've never had to--but for a lot of women, what happens to Tigra is worst nightmare time, and it is inextricably linked to the concept of rape. Being attacked, being powerless, being humiliated by and for a group of men in a dark alley is one of those scenarios that makes my blood run cold, because it's not just a fantastically nefarious act perpetrated by a supervillain, it's something far more plausible than I really want to think about. Things like this happen to women, and they happen all the time, albeit it with fewer costumes and codenames. And there's something even more demoralizing about the fact that it happens to a superheroine, to someone is supposed to be able to hold her own in a fistfight, but ends up utterly powerless.

And I get that a lot of fans--including Bendis and Brady--don't get it; for them, this is simply another scene where a superhero gets beaten by a bad guy. I'm sure for many fans, they're probably so used to seeing women in scantily-clad costumes that it doesn't even scan anymore. It's very easy to get accustomed to the over-sexualized fantasy of it all until it's no longer notable for a busty superwoman to be falling out of a spandex costume in the middle of the street. And then, when Bendis comes along and decides to transform an eroticized scenario into one of sudden, blinding, deeply disturbing violence, I'm sure the unsavory combination of sex and brutality actually makes a lot of sense.

And maybe that should be a lot more worrying.