This is the sixth installment of a series about sexual assault and comics. You can find the previous posts here:
Introduction
Rape in the Gutters
Writing Sexual Violence, Part 1
Writing Sexual Violence, Part 2
The Widowmaker
Is It Too Much to Ask?
For the last few weeks, I’ve focused on the most commonand most commonly portrayedsort of rape: heterosexual assault, with a male assailant and a female victim. And while the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults do fit that profile, there are still a fair number in both real life and comics that don’t.
The exception I’m going to focus on in this column is one seldom acknowledged in or out of comics: male rape victims. As before, I’m going to start with an overview of some of the cultural assumptions that inform our portrayals of and reactions to men as the victims of sexual assault, then examine a specific trend in comics that I find particularly alarming. I’m also going to discussand contrastthe cases of two specific male survivors in the DCU: Jack Knight (Starman) and Oliver Queen (Green Arrow).
To look in any depth at the issue of men as assault survivors, it’s important to first examine some of our culture’s assumptions regarding the nature of masculinity.
We see men as active rather than passive; this is extended into the assumption that aggressiveness and even violence are inherently masculine traits, and, in turn, that they’re traits inherent to all ‘real’ (often read as ‘heterosexual’) men.
Sexually, this stereotype is magnified even further. Men fuck; they are not fucked. They take the active role; they penetrate; they act upon others. At the same time, women are assumed to take the passive role; they are penetrated; they are acted upon.
Furthermore, men are sexually insatiable. Their sex drives are so powerful that they are nearly entities in their own rights. They are constantly or near-constantly aroused, and only in exceptional circumstances will they turn down an opportunity for intercourse.
So, we’re culturally predisposed to assume that ‘real’ men cannot be victims of sexual assault, just as ‘real’ women cannot perpetrate it. Which is bullshit.
In the United States, one in thirty-three men is a survivor of rape or attempted rape. That’s a very conservative estimate, because it’s based on law enforcement records: only one in five women who is raped reports her assault to the police (and that’s a high estimateothers range as low as one in twenty), and the rate of reporting among male victims is far lower.
Here are some popular myths about male survivors of sexual assault:
Men only get raped in prison.
Actually, 83% of sexual assaults perpetrated against men occur outside of prisons.
The only males who are raped are children or weak adults.
Like female assault survivors, male assault survivors don’t fit into any one profile. They are all ages, all races, and all levels of physical fitness.
If a man is raped by / rapes another man, he must be gay.
50% of male rape survivors identify as exclusively heterosexual, as do an even higher percentage of their attackers.
And as a corollary:
If a man experiences an erection or ejaculates during an assault, it is proof that he wanted / enjoyed it.
Erection and ejaculation are involuntary physiological responses not only to sexual arousal, but also to pain, fear, and anxiety. If a man experiences an erection or ejaculates while he’s being assaulted, it makes the assault no less traumatic or valid.
Women cannot rape men.
While only a slim two percent of sexual assailants are female, women can and do rape men.
This last stereotype tends to be particularly insidious. While we assume the innocence of female assailants, we also deny and invalidate the experiences of men who are assaulted by women, many of whom are themselves so culturally conditioned to believe that men cannot be raped by women that they are reluctant to acknowledge their own experiences as sexual assault, regardless the personal or physical impact those assaults may have had.
Because we tend to perceive the male libido as an overwhelmingly powerful entityone which can be neither stopped nor stemmed, and which is in fact so powerful that it can literally force men to act in ways that they would never otherwise considerwe assume that no situation in which a man is offered sexual release can occur entirely without his implicit consent. For a woman to initiate sexual intercourse with a man who is unconscious, delirious, or otherwise impaired is therefore implicitly ethicalor at least not overtly unethical to the same extent that a man taking the same liberties would be.
That assumption carries over into comics perhaps more forcefully than any other false stereotype of sexual violence. A surprising number of male characters in mainstream comics are survivors of sexual assault; of those, the overwhelming majority have been assaulted by women, and most of those assaults were never acknowledged as more than mildly inappropriate behavior on the parts of the perpetrators.
I find this trend deeply upsetting for several reasons. First of all, it ignores the reality that the vast majority of men who are assaulted are assaulted by other men, which also reinforces the obsessively heteronormative attitudes of most mainstreamand nearly all superherocomics: writers and editors (and readerssee the letter I quoted regarding Conan #12 in ‘Sexual Assault (in comics) Awareness Month: The Widowmaker’) assume that to portray a male superhero as the victim of same-sex sexual assault would undercut his otherwise unimpeachable heterosexuality.
At the same time, the treatment of female perpetrator / male victim assaults in comics is alarming because of the rarity with which the assaults are recognized as such. The comparatively ‘gentle’ nature of most or all of those rapesovert physical force or threats of violence almost never come into playcreates a spurious distinction between non-consensual sex and sexual assault and downplays the violation of the victim and the culpability of the perpetrator in the former.
I chose Jack Knight and Oliver Queen as the two survivors whose cases I wanted to examine because of the ostensible similarities between their situations. Both are second-string DCU superheroes. Both were assaulted by women who functioned primarily as their opponents but with whom they had substantially more complex relationships than the standard hero / villain rivalry. Neither was conscious of capable of either consent or struggle during his assaultJack was unconscious, and Ollie was delirious from a fever. Finally, both were raped by women whose main goal was procreative.
Despite their ostensible similarities, the two rapes were portrayed very, very differently; likewise, both primary and secondary survivors reacted very differently to the assaults and their long-term effects (both men have sons as a result of the assaults).
The first caseand the one that I think was the far better of the twois that of Jack Knight. Early in Starman, Jack was kidnapped and drugged by his self-styled arch-nemesis, the Mist. It was not until over a year later that it was revealed that Mist had raped Jack while he was unconscious and nine months later had given birth to ‘their’ baby. She informs Jack of all of this in a letter (ellipses indicate dialogue outside of the text of the letter):
My Dearest Jackie. My love.
…
I’m sure by now you’ve questioned why I haven’t returned to Opal and struck again. The fact is I won’t. Not for a while longer, anyway. The reason for this? I’ll get straight to the point.
I’ve had a baby boy. Our child. You’re a father, Jack. Doesn’t that make you feel good to know?
…
When I had you at the toy factory. When you were unconscious. I lay with you. We conceived the child then, with you in my arms so peaceful and still. That really was quite a day, all in all, wasn’t it?
I’ve named the boy Kyle. That was my dear brother’s name, as you know, but what you might not know is that it is also my father’s real name.
The boy’s middle name is Theo. I was keen that he have a little of both our fathers in him.
…
I will teach our son to hate you, Jack. He will be my brother and father boy. Does that make you feel good, knowing you’ve sired such venom?
I’m enjoying our son at present. We’ve been traveling through Europe, enjoying the sights and the sun.
But I will return soon. More will die, and you’ll be unable to prevent it.
Love as always, Mist.
P.S. Our son’s eyes are blue.
Although Mist couches the terms of their coupling in language of romance and consent, it’s obviously mocking: both she and Jack are clearly aware of the violation she has perpetrated. Our first glimpse of Jack’s reaction is from his father’s perspective, as Jack sits on the porch of the elder Knight’s observatory, clutching the letter, tears streaming down his face.
The term ‘rape’ is never used to describe Jack’s assault, but it is clearly implied, and the impact that learning of both the assault and its consequencesthe birth of a childhave on Jack are inarguable. Both before and after the rape, Mist goes out of her way to use terms of endearment when talking to Jacki.e. calling him ‘my love’precisely because she knows the insinuation of intimacy upsets him; she is generally characterized as an aggressor and as the perpetrator of both sexual assault and ongoing harassment.
The first person to learn about Jack’s rape and the birth of his son is Ted Knight, Jack’s father. As I mentioned above, we first learn about those events when Ted finds Jack crying on the porch of Ted’s observatory. Jack gives the letter to Ted, who reads it aloud, with occasional comments. He doesn’t question the validity of Jack’s reaction; once the letter is read, Ted simply sits down beside his son and puts an arm around him. The scene ends there.
Like Jack, Oliver Queen was assaulted by a womanostensibly a villain at the timewhile he was delirious. However, neither the comic nor the fan community acknowledged what happened as sexual assault. Dinah Lance, Ollie’s then-partner, blamed Ollie for the rape, treating it as a conscious act of infidelity. ShadoOllie’s rapistattempted to defend him by telling Dinah that he had called Shado by Dinah’s name during the rape, pseudo-exonerating Ollie but still failing to take responsibility for her own actions, which she blames on Dinah’s refusal to ‘give’ Ollie a child. And a few years later, we even get to see Ollie’s son Connor Hawke on the cover of his very own titleas Karen Healy so succinctly put it‘kissing daddy’s rapist.’
The fan community is likewise largely unwilling to accept Shado’s actions as rape. The Wikipedia entry on Green Arrow describes Ollie and Shadow as having become ‘on one occasion when Oliver was injured and delirious, lovers.’ ‘Cause, y’know, it’s so romantic to shoot the guy you like in the chest and then fuck him while he’s delirious from the infected wound. Good God. The DC Database Project isn’t much better, describing the incident as follows: ‘When Ollie was injured and being cared for by Shado, she proceeded to ‘rape’ him while he was unconscious, conceiving a son.’ She didn’t ‘rape’ him, folks. She raped him. It’s. Really. That. Simple. On the Broken Fronteir message board, a poster grudgingly acknowledges, ‘if you want to get technical is [sic] was pretty close to rape.’ Y’know, even if you’re not technical, it’s pretty close to rape, especially if you define ‘pretty close to’ as ‘the same thing as.’
Compare those with the Wikipedia entry on Jack Knight, which plainly states that Mist ‘drugs and rapes Jack’; Jack Knight is also listed in the Wikipedia category ‘Fictional Rape Victims.’ Comics blogger Postmodernbarney comments that ‘the only sexual assault against a male character I can think of that even comes close to being treated seriously as a sexual assault is the Mist’s rape of Jack Knight. She assaults him for the sole purpose of becoming pregnant. It’s a clear incident of an individual being robbed of their consent by another person.’ From what I’ve read, that reaction is fairly typical. Is it because Starman tends to attract a more sensitive and erudite audience than does Green Arrow? Maybe. But it’s also because fans and critics take interpretive cues from the tone of the comics they read. The simple truth of the matter is that Jack’s rape in Starman was presented as rape, and Ollie’s rape in Green Arrow wasn’t.
A final trend in commentary that I want to touch on is the tendency to respond to the rape of a male characteror an actual manby trying to compare it to a similar assault with a female victim. You can’t.
While it’s possible to compare the superficial details of two assaults, it’s both impossible and inappropriate to draw an accurate analogy between them in order to gauge their relative impact or severity. Rapelike any assaultis a deeply personal crime, and to try to place an assault on a linear scale does a grave disservice to the individual experience of each survivor.
Finally, a heads-up: Because it’s nearly the end of April and I got a bit behind last week, the next several posts are going to come in very quick succession. The next one will address with same-sex assaults in comics; I’m hoping to get it up later today, or tomorrow at the latest.
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