Feminism and Perversion or
How Not To Feel Guilty About Hot Girl-on-Monster Action
edit: I feel I should mention, based on a comment made on this essay without reading the comic, that nothing I'm referring to involves rape. It may be possible that a scene which I see as a sort of over the top "dog humps leg" gag can be interpreted as having more in common with actual abuse if you read the essay without seeing the comic. Of course, that would also assume that I find rape "funny, sexy, and exciting", which is sort of a horrible thing to assume about someone, even a pervert.It has always been a challenge for me to reconcile my firm belief in the equality of the sexes with the delight I take in narrative scenes depicting pretty girls being molested by monsters. How does one be both a feminist and a horrible, disgusting pervert? My first action toward resolving this question was to directly attack sexist portrayals of awesomness found in anime and mainstream comics with my sexy action comic Side Passage.
The character Emily, for example, wears a hilariously skimpy outfit that could not possibly protect her from attacks of any kind except those made by soft objects aimed directly at her hips or the under part of her breasts. She doesn’t pose for the viewer, nor does she make inexplicably out of context comments alluding to her sexuality, two primary symptoms of the mainstream comics heroine sex dolls she parodies, but do these deviations pull the depiction back from the boundaries of sexist exploitation? Perhaps I should ask this question again when the chronically naked barbarian dude joins the group later.
More implicit to my goals is the scene where her naked body is groped by greasy tentacles, which is completely awesome. Here Emily contradicts the pathological helplessness of the typical victim of such scenes, becoming more angry and more fierce the further in danger she sinks. Additionally, the narrative focus is on her struggle, not on the interplay of flesh and monstrous appendage, nor on how hard she blushes. The scene is meant to be funny and sexy and exciting. But do I succeed in my attempt to depict feminist perversion? The guideline I follow is simple: is the character diminished by the portrayal of her in situation x? (Followup: how freaky cool is situation x?)
It’s possible that I am failing, in which case it may seem as though my explanations are nothing but excuses to justify drawing kick ass perverted monster sex. But I’m striving for something I find genuinely important: kick ass perverted monster sex that does not contribute to the widespread conception that our girls are nothing more than objects to be molested by freaky monsters, but instead reinforces the reality that they are people, with feelings and independence and sometimes they can cast spells, they look awesome with their clothes off, and monsters totally want to get on that, and sometimes those monsters get a little action, and in the right context it’s super hot.
