Lazy Comic Writing or Lazy Criticism?

This is a response to a response to something I wrote. Both my original post and the response that I am responding to were linked to at Journalista. I think Karen Peltier wrote a reasoned and levelheaded essay, but I think she was off the mark on a couple things. The least of which was here:

Leading off with some of the flaws of the aforementioned article, it is accompanied by a list of 67 female comic book characters who were known to be raped. To counter this, there's a list of 335 (yes, the number is bolded in the article because it's just SO MANY) female characters who weren't raped.

No. I bolded 335 for the same reason I bolded 67, so the numbers could be spotted easily. I bolded 67 before thinking about bolding 335. I’d had trouble with numbering lists on blog posts before where the numbers were cut off, so I thought I’d counter that potential inconvenience with convenient bolding.  I’m always thinking of you, gentle readers. (Of course, I’m usually thinking of you naked, but that’s beside the point.)

And not that I have an extensive knowledge of female superheros, but the percentage of relevance seems way higher in the rape list than in the not raped, where it seems like there are probably literally hundreds of throw-away obscure references.

That could be; however, I would also point out that some of the 67 “rapes” were not in fact rapes and several of them were only “implied,” and we know that at least in one case, the implication was only in the mind of reader, so there may not have been an implication of rape intended by the writer in the other cases either. Also, my list of not raped women didn’t include any characters who were primarily villains, but the raped list did. I could have added plenty of famous female villains to my list. Further, while there are plenty of women on the not raped list that might be considered throw-away characters, I looked that the original list of raped characters as my guide and asked myself, “If this character had been raped, would she have been included on the raped list?” Further still, I left off many, many female characters who had as many or more appearances as the some of the obscure characters on the raped list. If I had included every female character who had as many appearances as Calliope or Cora, the list would have gone into the thousands.

A sort of good point is made in a really stupid way in saying, "If we are to take Stuff Geeks Love at face value, we’d have to say that the blogger thinks that none of the women on the non-raped list are empowered role-models or that none are strong women" which is totally bullshit because of course that's not what they meant,

 She is correct that, of course. they didn’t mean that, which is why I used the conditional “if” phrasing and assumed readers would be smart enough to understand that what I meant by that statement is that the premise of the SGL blogger was built on a false assumption. We know that the blogger must think that some of those female characters are empowered role models, so the assumption that they are also usually raped is wrong and should have been obvious to that SGL blogger if that blogger had taken even a moment to think about the female characters in comics.

but it's important to notice that rape as a means for female ascension to superhero ranks is just the easiest traumatic origin story that most writers can come up with for women.

It may be the easiest traumatic origin story, but it isn’t the most common. Below is the list of women who had rape in their origin stories or retroactive fit into their early lives before they became heroes:

1. Black Canary
2. Black Cat
3. Catwoman
4. Dazzler
5. Hawkeye II
6. Karma
7. Oracle
8. Psylock
9. Red Sonja
10. Starfire
11. Storm

Of these women, maybe 3 or 4 actually had a rape play a significant role in causing the character to

Hawkeye II

take up a heroic identity. We could say that in the cases of the Black Cat (if we count being a costumed thief who helps out sometimes as a heroic identity), Red Sonja (if we count her as being in the “superhero ranks”), and Hawkeye II, their rapes were the motivating factors in the creation of the heroic personas. For the rest of the characters, the link between their rapes and their heroic personas is tenuous. For instance, in the cases of Dazzler, Karma, and Storm, their rapes didn’t cause them to become superheroes. Years passed after their rapes without them donning spandex. All of them became superheroes only after being recruited by the X-Men.

And is rape really the easiest traumatic origin story for women? Why wouldn’t the same traumatic origin story used for Batman, Spider-Man, Ant Man, etc. be the easiest? Below is a list of 28 female characters who had their heroic lives motivated by the deaths of someone close to them (who was usually male.)

1. Aqua Girl (Lorena Marquez)
2. Arwyn from Sojourn
3. Black Canary
4. Black Widow
5. Cameron Chase
6. Cinnamon
7. Dara Brighton (The Sword)
8. Elektra
9. Engineer
10. Huntress
11. Jubilee
12. Karolina Dean
13. Katana
14. Kid Quantum II
15. Liberty Belle
16. Manitou Dawn
17. Molly Hayes
18. Moondragon
19. Namora
20. Nico Minoru
21. Nightshade
22. Onyx
23. Skyrocket
24. Spider-Woman I
25. Tigra (a.k.a. the Cat)
26. Vindicator
27. Vixen
28. Wasp

And of course, there are all sorts of female characters who became heroes for other reasons, usually just because they got super powers, and it seemed like the right thing to do, e.g. the Invisible Woman, She-Hulk, & Wonder Woman. So the idea that comic writers are relying on rape as the “means for female ascension to superhero ranks” is, I think, being rather dramatically overstated. The use of rape is probably the least common. Hawkeye II appears to be the only true superhero for which we can say rape was the means for her ascension to the superhero ranks.

At least most women that are raped in comics make the better of the situation, and while it's still not totally cool, I think the cause of the frequency of rape lies in poor writing rather than intentionally misogynistic intentions.

So if we can toss out all this rape debate as being part of insensitive, unimaginative writing, ...

I’ve seen this theory that writers who use rape are lazy, unimaginative writers before, and I just don’t buy it for two major reasons.

Satana

First, if you look at the rape stories that are told, there is an enormous diversity of stories. Usually when one thinks of a rape story, one is thinking of a story like the rape of Sue Dibny. However, the rape of Sue was a very different story than the statutory rape of Terra, which was a very different story than the forced royal marriage story of Starfire, which is very different than the consent created partially by luck powers story of Dazzler, which is very different than the married Satan without knowing he was Satan story of Victoria Wingate, which is practically the opposite story of the Satana intentionally luring a rapist into attacking her so that she could consume his life force and kill him story. The “rape is unimaginative” theory would suggest that Terra’s story was a cliché and that Dan Slott's She-Hulk story was derivative because he wrote a story that suggested there was something immoral about Starfox using his powers to manipulate people. Man, if I read one more story about a godling from Saturn’s moon using his pleasure creating powers to get a superhero/lawyer to fall in love with an astronaut/werewolf, I’m gonna hurl.

Second, let’s say that Marvel and DC each publish about 15 titles a week, and there are 52 weeks in a year, and each comic averages about 3 acts of violence committed against superheroes per issue, and we were to count up all the acts of violence over the last 25 years (which doesn’t go back in time as far as some of those rapes do), we’d find that there were about 117,000 violent acts in those comics. Of those, about 67 were rapes. That means that about 0.06% of the violence in comics comes from rapes. Of course, I’m just estimating on these numbers, but no matter how you crunch them, rape is not the go-to crime in comics. And of those 67 rapes, few writers have written more than 1 of the stories, so that means that if a writer includes even 1 rape in the hundreds (or even thousands) of acts of violence in the dozens (or even hundreds) of stories he or she writes, that writer runs the risk of being called an unimaginative, poor writer. I do not see how that can be a valid criticism.

Plenty of feminist criticism is fair, correct, and important. However, if we are going to use feminist criticism on comics, we should look at the reality of comics and not the assumed reality of comics. While I have seen plenty of discussion on how lazy comic writers are who use rape in comics, I see little discussion on how lazy critics of comics frequently are when analyzing rape in comics.