No More Heroes

This Saturday was International Women’s day. Marked by events and demonstrations across the globe, it's a chance both to celebrate the ongoing political, social, and economic achievements of women and raise awareness of the myriad struggles they still face, and has been observed by millions the world over for more than a hundred years – in particular by those who advance and support feminist causes. I chose to do my bit by hosting an entirely apolitical shindig at my new London residence. You might think this sounds a little disengaged of me – a little enabling, a little supportive of the status quo – and you’d be right, of course. The problem is, I’m growing a bit suspicious of this whole ‘feminism’ thing. Being the paranoid man that I am, I’m starting to wonder whether it isn’t a movement designed solely to rob me of all my childhood heroes. For surely, the more active interest I’ve taken in gender equality issues of late has seen me shedding adolescent role models like a rescue dog sheds hair.

Take Alan Moore. Moore, the writer of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and other cast iron standards of the graphic novel canon, was one of the figures I navigated my sense of self by through the developmental hinterland that lies between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. I’m airing my dirty teen-geek wares by admitting it, but Watchmen changed me. I came away from it more politicised, more sceptical, more inquiring, and above all, with a greater empathetic concern for humanity (plus the illustrations were bloody stellar). So when I heard recently that Moore was retiring from public life, due in part to the strain of answering repeated allegations about ‘the prevalence of sexual violence towards women…[particularly] rape’ in his stories, I was all set to leap to his defence. Except then I gave the matter five minutes thought, and realised that, based on what I’d read of his works, he did seem to be somewhat fixated upon sex of a non-consensual persuasion. Indeed, if you happen to be a woman in an Alan Moore story, the chances are that someone is going to try and stick something in you without your say-so. The original Silk Spectre is raped in Watchmen. Evie nearly gets raped in V for Vendetta. The Invisible Man rapes a whole host of school girls in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And From Hell, his epic re-telling of the Jack the Ripper case, is essentially 572 pages of unmitigated violence against women. Even Batgirl isn’t spared being stripped naked and photographed by the Joker in his Batman story The Killing Joke. Renowned for his ‘gritty reinventions’ of previously frivolous pop-culture works, Moore’s formula in this case appears to be simple; take out Ace the Bat-Hound, insert gratuitous sexual brutality. I’m only glad he never lent his hand to a Beano story; I’m not sure Minnie the Minx would enjoy herself very much.

Moore has defended this predilection by arguing that the amount of sexual violence in his work reflects the amount that takes place in the real world. It’s hard to understate this amount - one in five women in England and Wales has been the victim of a sexual offence or attempted offence, according to the Office of National Statistics – and bringing attention to it is always a good thing. But portraying violence against women to this extent is problematic since it becomes the defining experience of female characters in his work – to be a woman is to be a victim. The acts of violence and rape end up subsuming the identities and experiences of the figures who suffer them to the extent that they have no character, other than in relation to the act itself. Can you remember anything about Silk Spectre 1 other than that she was a 1940’s costumed hero pin-up who got raped (and who fell in love with her rapist, even more troublingly)? I don’t doubt that Moore’s intentions are good; if nothing else, his work is coloured by a deep concern for the marginalised. I’d even go so far as to say that his writing has gone some way towards making me the feminist I am today. But it reflects an attitude towards the lives and experiences of women that I can no longer gloss over or ignore. So he’s off the hero roster. Sorry Al, but you don’t cut the feminist mustard.

Then there’s been the recent Woody Allen debacle. I should say at this juncture that I haven’t come to any conclusion about his guilt, since I have no concrete evidence on which to make the call. But I will admit that my near-worship of much of his artistic output initially pre-disposed me in favour of arguments proclaiming his innocence – and thereby damning the testimony of his alleged victim, Dylan/Malone Farrow. I swallowed much of the Robert B. Weide article without question, and found myself bristling against the voices of those who seemed to have condemned him outright. But increasingly I began to question my own reasoning. Why was I believing the account of an alleged abuser, and not an alleged victim? Why did I think the words of a hugely successful male celebrity contained more veracity than those of a young woman who had testified to being the victim of a horrific crime aged only six years old, and who was still prepared to testify twenty-two years later? Why was my first instinct to question her motives (and those of her mother) rather than to listen to her?

The whole thing left me feeling unsure, conflicted, and generally sort of shitty. Which is about the only appropriate response, as those who chose to make different ones amply demonstrated. Stephen King, who wrote pretty much every single thing I read from the age of eleven up until I went to university (give or take the occasional cereal box or Alan Moore rape fantasy) and whose footprints I would formally have gladly licked, took to Twitter to opine that Dylan/Malone’s account had an ‘element of palpable bitchery’ to it. I hadn’t previously considered that a rape accusation could be ‘bitchy’, but if I was to continue in my unbridled hero-worship of the King, I would have believe so – so King was forced to leave the Platt Idol boot camp at my reluctant request. As for Allen, I finally concluded that, though I didn’t actively consider him guilty, continuing to tout him as an artistic influence and personal hero of mine would be to make a political statement that was antithetical to everything I currently stood for. Which meant that the picture of him I had on my bedroom wall should probably go. Until I find a replacement, he’s been flipped around to face the wall – staring into the blank face of ideological limbo.

It's ended up being quite difficult, all this commitment to gender equality. I used to think that being a feminist was easy. I thought that being broadly in favour of equal rights and opportunities for women was all that it required. That I could continue to chuckle ‘ironically’ at sexist jokes and to feel put out by any argument that too radically questioned my place in the sexual hierarchy. Hey, I was a liberal-minded, forward-thinking, stand-up guy – of course I was a feminist!  Instead, my choice to embrace the movement beyond a token, superficial level has caused me an almost unrelenting degree of mental turmoil and misery. Feminism has climbed inside my belief system and kicked seven bells of shit out of it. It’s made me question everything; my reading choices, my reaction to other peoples’ views, even my own writing (I mean, I made a pretty flippant joke about animal abuse at the end of the opening paragraph that’s only been left in as a marker of my growing self-awareness). It’s reduced me to a quivering, conflicted mess, thrashing around in my own acknowledged hypocrisy – and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I may have lost my love of Moore, Allen and King, but I’ve left the way clear for others to take their place – Joan Didion, Caryl Churchill, Alison Bechdel, Toni Morrison, and hopefully many more.

Still, it would be nice to come through the feminist crucible with at least one or two of my formative allegiances intact. If it turns out Bob Dylan ever molested anything other than the Christmas favourite ‘Must Be Santa’ then I may as well write off my childhood completely.