Amorous Skunks And Giant Rapacious Maggots

Take a look at the image above.

It’s a fictoid.

In particular, a fictoid of the modified image model as opposed to the fictoid of the short-short fiction model more often posted here.

To paraphrase a quote from one of the Pythons:
“Vikings acting like Vikings aren’t funny, and accountants acting like accountants aren’t funny, but Vikings acting like accountants are funny, and accountants acting like Vikings are funnier still.”

When I do my modified image fictoids, I typically try to play against the actual image.  A horrific scene gets an innocuous caption, a wholesome one is loaded with dread.

In the example above, I take the overly used trope of a damsel in distress and reinterpret it with mundane dialog to heighten the ridiculousness of the situation.

Got that?

Good.

It provides a context for what we’ll discuss next.

. . . 

Pepe le Pew is one of the third tier Warner Bros cartoon characters, easily defined (“sexually aggressive skunk”) but not particularly versatile.

While other characters -- Sylvester, for example -- can be plugged into a wide variety of stories and situations, Pepe is almost always trying to force his attentions on an unwilling female (though once he fixated on Sylvester).

He fixates on a cat (which, for some convoluted reason, now looks like a skunk) that may at first appreciate the attention but once she gets a whiff of him only wants to get away as fast as possible, which sets Pepe off in pursuit.

It’s the kind of behavior in real life that at the very least gets a restraining order sworn out against the perpetrator, and at worst lands them in prison on sexual harassment charges.

Counter Pepe with the wolf character found in many of Tex Avery’s MGM cartoons such as Swing Shift Cinderella and you see it’s possible to milk the gag for any number of possibilities without crossing over into overtly offensive territory.

Avery’s wolf is always successfully held at arm’s length, an annoyance but never a real threat to the female characters, and repeatedly battered down with comedic karma for his self-centered lust.

Pepe once or twice comes out badly at the end of his cartoons (in the very first one his wife catches him pursuing the cat) but more often than not he arches an eyebrow at the audience, makes a sly remark to indicate he never takes “No!” for an answer, then flounces off in pursuit of the fleeing female.

Avery also did his variant on an amorous skunk with Little ‘Tinker, where the skunk, longing to make himself more acceptable to females, goes through all manners of extreme effort only to be constantly rejected; in the end he disguises himself and finds a mate only for each to discover they’re both skunks in disguise, thus ending happily without having to deny their true selves.

Do you catch the difference?

Avery’s Little ‘Tinker is willing to do whatever it takes to make himself acceptable to females.

Forcing his attentions on them is never an option.

Pepe (with rare exception) is always about getting what he wants; he couldn’t care less about the female.

And that’s as basic a definition of the underlying problem of rape culture as one could hope to find.

. . . 

I like horror and sci-fi movies.

The shelf behind me as I type this has everything from the Boris Karloff version of Frankenstein to Roger Corman’s Deathrace 2000. 

I’ve seen and read literally thousands of films / TV shows / stories / comics in these genres, I know all the tropes.

Historically, women have been the object of more and worse treatment on screen and in print than males.

Let’s start at the nicest end of the equation:  Women as eye candy.

They’re more likely to be under dressed in a scene as compared to male performers.

Focus will more likely be placed on their anatomy than on males.

Typically the range of physical and facial types for females are more narrow than for males, and are more likely to be in the physically attractive range.

We will take a brief pause for the fan boiz to sputter in rage.

And mind you, the above covers a lot of what is considered wholesome depictions in media.

Disney movies.  

Family films.  

G-rated fare.  

Kid vid.

It’s often presented so innocuously we (i.e., the males in the audience) don’t see it.

But it’s there, it’s there.

. . . 

I know what the core of my moral and ethical beliefs are:  Treat others the way you want to be treated.

If it’s acceptable for one, it’s acceptable for all.

If men can vote, women can vote.

If white people can vote, non-white people can vote.

If we treat some people more preferably, we either treat all people that way or we change the way we treat people.

Stories as a rule should treat characters and performers equitably.

(There will of course always be exceptions; a war story will probably feature more male than female characters, for example.)

There’s nothing wrong with making a character of one gender either a protagonist or an antagonist, nothing wrong with making them suffer and struggle equally in the course of a story.

But the worst treatment historically has been focused on female characters.

Here the fan boiz sputter in rage again, claiming historically real life females have received worse treatment than real life males.

YES!!! That’s the precise point!!!

It’s not a chicken vs egg thing, it’s a self-reinforcing loop.

Art and literature depict the exploitation of women more because historically women have been the most exploited.

Women are the most exploited because the majority of human cultures value males over females.

The cultures value males more because the art and songs and stories of that culture depict males as more valuable than females.

And so on and so on and so on…

No pebble holds itself responsible for the avalanche.

. . . 

Years ago I got a bucket of cold water thrown on me via social media while discussing Westerns with an African-American fan of the genre.

I mentioned the Jonah Hex comics and asked what he thought of them.

He said he never read them.

“Why,” he asked, “would I want to read a series that glorifies a character who fought to keep my ancestors enslaved?”

. . .

When you start opening your eyes, when you start peeling back the layers of the onion, when you start looking at things from a different perspective, a different lens, you suddenly find yourself losing enthusiasms you once possessed.

Corman made two rip offs of Alien, a campy spoof (Forbidden World) and a remarkably good one (Galaxy Of Terror).

Galaxy Of Terror follows a starship crew as they explore a hostile alien world, getting killed off one by one in gruesome fashion as the world figures out what terrifies them.

Almost all of them die horrible screaming deaths, males and females.

That’s not the problem.

If you asked somebody knowledgeable in sci-fi films to describe Galaxy Of Terror as succinctly as possible, this would be the reply:

Giant.
Rapacious.
Maggot.

I don’t need to describe this in detail, do I?

You already know what I’m talking about, even if you never heard of the film before this.

That’s what the trope of the perpetual female victim does.

Erin Moran was supposed to be the victim, but she wisely balked and merely ended up getting squeezed to death by tentacles.

They didn’t ask Zalman King or Robert Englund or Sid Haig to take one for the team.

I’m not going to mention the name of the actress who eventually played the victim.  Interviewed for the DVD extras, she seems to have ruefully accepted the notoriety of her scene; there’s no need to dogpile on her 40 years later and besides, you sick little bastards can find out who she is in under 30 seconds thanks to Google.

But they picked a woman to die the most sexually explicit death in the movie because that’s what would sell the most tickets.

In real life, a monster that attacks and kills men would be the most terrifying because men are seen as big and burly and strong, capable of fighting monsters and at least surviving if not winning.

You’d think a scary movie monster would be one that strips men naked and rapes them on camera.

The fact men are never victimized this way just points a big red neon sign at the problem.

. . . 

There’s a movement underway to encourage film makers not to depict rape on screen.

It’s not to say rape as a crime or its after effects on a victim can’t be discussed, but the argument is there’s just no reason to show an actual onscreen rape…

…other than to titillate the audience.

I think every creator needs to ask themselves that question in all art or literature they create:  What purpose does this serve?

It’s not an argument against beauty or sensuality or even against sexuality.

It’s an argument against trivializations, especially when such trivializations can help perpetuate real world problems.

. . .

Nobody was ever raped solely because of a Pepe le Pew cartoon.

But Pepe le Pew certainly bolstered the argument:  What’s the big deal?”

We live in a culture where young men (most often white young men, but not exclusively so) argue they really didn’t rape their victim despite her protests and efforts to push them away.

“She stopped saying no and didn’t resist any more” is their defense.

“I was terrified and in fear of my life at that point” is what their victims say.

In movies and popular media, a hero is a focal character who does things.

No morality, no ethics involved.

Indeed, an ethical hero would probably be boring to most audiences.

They’ll try to find the best / least destructive solution to a problem.

Audiences want their car cases and mayhem.

I’ve posted about All in The Family before, about how it became -- despite the best intentions of its creators and cast and writers -- a celebration of white bigotry.

Every story was about Archie Bunker.

Archie might not get the final word in every episode, but Archie was back every week.

The show focused on what Archie had to say.

And, yeah, audiences with a sense of morality and ethics saw the show as a satire on the white bigot mindset, but white bigots saw it as a weekly validation of everything they believed.

The late Charles Lippincott once observed:
“No news is Bad news, and even Bad News is Good News. 
”If they stop talking about you, you have been forgotten.
”There’s nothing worse than being forgotten.”

To defeat racism and sexism and toxic masculinity we need to cut off their oxygen.

. . . 

Now some will claim this is wrong, that we should debate all ideas openly and in public.

No.

Some ideas are just plain Bad.

Any idea that denies full and equitable civil rights to all persons is just plain Bad.

We can discuss immigration policies and when an immigrant should be allowed to vote and whether there should be quotas and if so how high, but the moment you start slurring all people who immigrate as gangsters and rapists and murderers, you stopped talking about debatable policy points and you started looking for validation of your hate.

Fuck you.

Not getting it here.

We need to cut off the oxygen to Big Bad Ideas and the way to do that is not with huge fire fighting aircraft dropping tons of slurry but by individuals smothering out the embers of hate wherever they encounter them.

Pepe le Pew is rape culture.

Rape culture is primarily anti-female but it’s also directed against some males.

It’s nothing at all about sexual attraction but everything about dominant males (and dominant can mean just at that moment, in that place) doing what they want to people they think can’t hurt them.

As Tex Avery demonstrated, you can poke fun at human sexual foibles without taking the side of rapists.

But the moment you laugh and say, “Oh, that Pepe…” you have helped hold down the victim while they were abused.

You may not like that.

But it’s a fact.

. . . 

I’ve done a lot of thinking about the writing I do, the fictoids I post.

In my fiction, I try to be conscious of how I’m presenting characters.

The path of least resistance is Big Strong Man, Weak Little Woman.

Any idiot can write that story (and most have).

I want something better, something stronger, something more lasting.

I’m far from perfect.

I’ve got a spotty history and I freely admit to being amused by many of the old images I find and use for my fictoids.

I don’t take vintage ads celebrating traditional family roles too seriously, but I do see how one image here, one image there soon builds up into thousands then tens of thousands of people who sincerely believe women are biologically suited only for housework, nothing else, and that the proof of this is a highly selective reading of scripture to cherry pick only those verses supporting that idea.

I put the twist to old illustrations in hopes of puncturing the false imagery they present.  I provide counter point, I ridicule old stale ideas.

But it doesn’t mean I’m not aware of the possibility they can still be misread.

In my fiction, I strive not to write from a POV so strongly rooted in dominant white culture that it might be off putting to some. 

My characters are frequently faceless and nameless, their personalities and character vivid enough, but their physical appearance sufficiently vague for any reader to identify with them.

I try…but I’m sure I don’t succeed as often as I like.

Years ago I made up my mind not to take the easy course, not to write the easy “You killed my dog so you must die” on-the-nose story telling that are almost comically extreme situations instead of basic truths about human existence.

I’ll never claim I always followed that course, but I do try to make it my habit.

© Buzz Dixon