Batman, in the cartoon, becomes protective when the villain sexually threatens Batgirl – and not just protective, since the villain’s lewd comments lead, not very indirectly, to Batgirl and Batman having sex. The Joker violates Barbara to humiliate her father. Sexualization makes violence against women exciting, important – and motivating. As a result, their physical confrontations are suffused with sexual threat – a threat almost never present when male heroes like Batman fight villains. In the cartoon version, the main male antagonist of the first half hour keeps up a steady stream of sexual remarks directed at Batgirl. The Joker doesn’t just shoot Barbara he strips her and takes nude, voyeuristic photos, transforming the violence into a symbolic rape. When women are targeted for violence, that violence is overwhelmingly sexual. But – as The Killing Joke demonstrates – that doesn’t mean that the violence is the same. Violence against men and violence against women are both common in genre entertainment. In the shark attack film The Shallows, numerous men are bloodily devoured. A 38-minute supercut of all of James Bond’s murders shows him slaughtering his way through bad guy after bad guy, punning cheerily all the while. Batman and Superman spend most of Batman v Superman beating the crap out of each other. It’s certainly true that The Killing Joke, and pulp entertainments in general, are replete with instances of violence against men. It doesn’t have anything to do with gender. The brutal violence against Barbara Gordon is, therefore, simply par for the course in a brutal comic book world. He strips Gordon naked and forces him to view pictures of his nude daughter with a gaping wound in her stomach. The Joker casually kills numerous men over the course of the story, as the Joker is wont to do. After all, Barbara is not the only person killed or humiliated in the original comic. Inevitably, some folks leaped to defend gut-shooting as egalitarian entertainment. Sexualized violence against women as a way to motivate men is a wearisome misogynist trope – only compounded in the recently released Bruce Timm cartoon version by further “character development”, which presents Batgirl as emotionally unstable and incompetent. Barbara Gordon, AKA Batgirl, in the original 1988 comic by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, is gut shot, stripped naked, and photographed by the Joker as part of his plot to terrorize her father. So goes the argument.Įarlier this week, I pointed out that the treatment of Batgirl in The Killing Joke is sexist. As long as everyone is being treated with equal violence, gender is irrelevant, and we can go back to enjoying murder and mayhem untroubled by conscience, or, indeed, thought. Whenever you mention that a piece of art shows violence against women, you can be sure that the comments section will reply, with confused gusto, “What about the men?!” Men get shot in movies too, after all why doesn’t anyone complain about that? Hurting men, the argument goes, should negate hurting women.
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