lifeonqueen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lifeonqueen) wrote2007-08-23 01:21 pm
lifeonqueen) wrote2007-08-23 01:21 pm
What the FUCK?!
Okay, Flist, I guess I know why you didn't tell me about this one back in the day - you would have been able to see the mushroom cloud as my outrage went Nuclear from Saskatoon. Fortunately for Southern Ontario, I'm Bright. And. Shiny. now and I can manage my outrage in a much more constructive fashion by vowing never to spend another cent on a Todd McFarlane product ever again.
I honestly don't know what to say about male creators who seem to think that sticking an "intended for an adult audience" disclaimer on sexist, objectifying and demeaning presentations of women (or girls, in this case) makes it okay.
There's a swirl of partially connected ideas in my head about art and privilege and freedom of expression. The short version is that I believe that free expression and responsible expression are reciprocal responsibilities, that the right to one must include the exercise of the other: if for no other reason than the best defence of free expression is to use it responsibly. Fandom, as demonstrated by the recent strikethrough nonsense for example, is remarkably vociferous about its right to the former and piss-poor about practicing the latter - or even admitting that such an obligation might exist - and, in the long-run, it is the entire community that suffers.
I find McFarlane's "bondage Dorothy" so entirely objectionable that I'm not even going to bother enumerating the vast list of reasons why except for this one: it is, as a piece of art, totally devoid of any objective merit - it is neither particularly subversive nor illuminating. It has no subtext, no codified meaning - it is, in fact, so far removed from it's original context that the viewer only knows it's meant to be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz by reading the label. And while it probably has some subjective value for horror fans with a bondage kink, that doesn't strike me as a particularly strong argument for its existence, particularly when weighted against the offensiveness of recasting Dorothy as half-naked, bound and gagged by warthog-riding trolls.
At the other end of the spectrum from McFarlane's bondage Dorothy is Alan Moore's Lost Girls, a three-volume hardcover pornographic comic about a meeting between Wendy, Alice and Dorothy (again) in a hotel on the eve of World War I. I haven't read it because the cost is prohibitive - even steeply discounted on Amazon, the three volume set still retails for a stiff $50 - but those who have rave about Moore's insightful and transgressive storytelling - how Lost Girls addresses directly the issues of sexuality and sexual awakening subtextually implicit in most 'fairy tales'. Where McFarlane's toy is all tits and no text, Moore says of Lost Girls: "We wanted something that would work as pornography in that it would get people aroused, which is the basic job of pornography... it would also work as people might expect any work of art or literature to workâthat it would have all the same things that you can reasonably expect [from] a mature work of fiction. Something that would have things you don't find in pornography... like characters, and a plot. Let alone all of those fancy French things like metaphors and motifs". Moore's frank about writing pornography and he's clearly aware of both the intent and the implications of writing porn (albeit porn in service - possibly - to a higher purpose).
I'm coming perilously close here to implying that meaning legitimizes subversive modes of expression like pornography, which is not what I want to do because I generally believe that porn for porn's sake or entertainment for entertainment's sake are not without merit. But the way Moore both owns to and insists on the use of the term pornography in relation to Lost Girls is a good example of what I think of when I use the term 'responsible expression' - awareness and ownership of the implications of what you produce rather than flinging it willynilly into the world and falling back on your "right" to expression when someone objects.
FWIW...
I honestly don't know what to say about male creators who seem to think that sticking an "intended for an adult audience" disclaimer on sexist, objectifying and demeaning presentations of women (or girls, in this case) makes it okay.
There's a swirl of partially connected ideas in my head about art and privilege and freedom of expression. The short version is that I believe that free expression and responsible expression are reciprocal responsibilities, that the right to one must include the exercise of the other: if for no other reason than the best defence of free expression is to use it responsibly. Fandom, as demonstrated by the recent strikethrough nonsense for example, is remarkably vociferous about its right to the former and piss-poor about practicing the latter - or even admitting that such an obligation might exist - and, in the long-run, it is the entire community that suffers.
I find McFarlane's "bondage Dorothy" so entirely objectionable that I'm not even going to bother enumerating the vast list of reasons why except for this one: it is, as a piece of art, totally devoid of any objective merit - it is neither particularly subversive nor illuminating. It has no subtext, no codified meaning - it is, in fact, so far removed from it's original context that the viewer only knows it's meant to be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz by reading the label. And while it probably has some subjective value for horror fans with a bondage kink, that doesn't strike me as a particularly strong argument for its existence, particularly when weighted against the offensiveness of recasting Dorothy as half-naked, bound and gagged by warthog-riding trolls.
At the other end of the spectrum from McFarlane's bondage Dorothy is Alan Moore's Lost Girls, a three-volume hardcover pornographic comic about a meeting between Wendy, Alice and Dorothy (again) in a hotel on the eve of World War I. I haven't read it because the cost is prohibitive - even steeply discounted on Amazon, the three volume set still retails for a stiff $50 - but those who have rave about Moore's insightful and transgressive storytelling - how Lost Girls addresses directly the issues of sexuality and sexual awakening subtextually implicit in most 'fairy tales'. Where McFarlane's toy is all tits and no text, Moore says of Lost Girls: "We wanted something that would work as pornography in that it would get people aroused, which is the basic job of pornography... it would also work as people might expect any work of art or literature to workâthat it would have all the same things that you can reasonably expect [from] a mature work of fiction. Something that would have things you don't find in pornography... like characters, and a plot. Let alone all of those fancy French things like metaphors and motifs". Moore's frank about writing pornography and he's clearly aware of both the intent and the implications of writing porn (albeit porn in service - possibly - to a higher purpose).
I'm coming perilously close here to implying that meaning legitimizes subversive modes of expression like pornography, which is not what I want to do because I generally believe that porn for porn's sake or entertainment for entertainment's sake are not without merit. But the way Moore both owns to and insists on the use of the term pornography in relation to Lost Girls is a good example of what I think of when I use the term 'responsible expression' - awareness and ownership of the implications of what you produce rather than flinging it willynilly into the world and falling back on your "right" to expression when someone objects.
FWIW...