Super Romance of Superheroines!
The political correctness seen on CW four superhero shows, once my favorites, have rendered them unwatchable: THE ARROW, THE FLASH, LEGENDS OF TOMORROW, and now SUPERGIRL.
For example: In the most recent episode I saw of LEGENDS, and most likely the last I will bother ever to see, the time travelers traveled back in time to 1776 to save George Washington from being assassinated. One of the crew is a superheroine from 1939. As she and a male team mate are trudging along, he mentions dating, a word with which she is not familiar: she asks if this is the same as courtship.
He explains about a phone app one can use for setting up a hook up. She asks whether men seek their brides over the phone in the future. He explains that women of his time, thanks to the social changes in the 1960s, do not court any longer, but seek sexual relations merely for pleasure.
I was honestly curious whether the writers would have the honesty to show the heroine having a realistic reaction an honest woman of that day and age would have upon hearing this. They were interrupted by a redcoat attack or something, so her reaction was not portrayed.
However, later in the episode, after he falls into icy water, and she has to snuggle up to his body naked in order to save his life, the two have sexual relations for pleasure.
Unless I misunderstood the scene changes, for the better part of a day, while their compatriots are being killed by villains and redcoats, the two copulate like mad weasels in heat.
Neither one speaks any word of affection to the other during the act. After, the girl stiffly tells him that she has no feelings for him, since fraternizing between crewmembers on the same team is untoward. He grins easily and nonchalantly and replies he is cool with that, for he shares no feelings toward her either.
The other CW shows had similarly nauseating scenes.
So I sought my superhero entertainment elsewhere. The first few episodes of IRON FIST on Netflix seemed particularly promising, for a variety of reasons. Coleen Wing, a character I liked and remembered from the original comic, was portrayed by a particularly attractive actress, and the martial arts stunts were visually impressive, especially for a television show.
In the show, she is attracted to Danny Rand, martial arts master and lonely orphan millionaire, who is secretly the Iron Fist. She is somewhat taken aback when he announces he has taken a holy kung-fu vow of abstinence, and can never allow romance to distract him from his duty and destiny as Iron Fist.
He is also clearly attracted to her, and shows this by pressuring her against her will to come on dangerous missions with him, where her face can be pounded against the pavement, and the permanent scars of battle can deform her otherwise lovely form.
I thought this is awkward and odd, and not the way any real boy since the dawn of time would ever act toward a girl half his size and weight and with far less skill than he, but, hey, I was willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of the convention of superheroine comics that, with enough training, or a magic amulet or something, a super-gal can kick the ass of any number of thugs, linebackers and trained gorillas.
Then they hop into the sack together with little or no courtship, romance, or other precursor. He smooches her smoochfully while both are naked beneath conveniently placed covers, pausing to ask if he may continue, before engaging in the suggestive thrusting motions of penetration.
I confess I laughed aloud at the idea of a girl being attracted to a boy, or even being willing to tolerate his hands touching her, if he is so dispassionate and housebroken that he remembers to ask permission during the love play for every additional quantum of intimate contact.
The next morning, they each say they enjoyed the night, but that is all. No one mentions the holy kung-fu vow of abstinence.
Neither says “I love you.” Neither expresses any affection at all, merely satisfaction with themselves, and a certain playful friendliness.
Certainly there is no talk of marriage. There is not even any talk of going steady.
Apparently the writers are seeking to put across the message that human beings as a matter of course copulate without any prudence, forethought, or meaning to the act, without emotion and without love, and neither is there a terrible price to pay when you give yourself body and soul to another and he merely says he had an enjoyable evening using you to relieve his glandular tension.
The message is not very convincing to me.
Next, I turned on THE JUDAS CONTRACT starring what is my favorite team of DC characters, the Teen Titans. In this version, after a fight with the Evil Catholic-esque minions of Brother Blood, Nightwing says he wants to bring his relationship to Starfire ‘to the next level’. And he pulls out a small square box, about the size of an engagement ring box. He blushes then the other team mates, dusting off their hands after trouncing stand-in Catholics, amble over to overhear this intimate announcement.
He then says he has an apartment, and wants to give Starfire a spare key, so she can move in with him. He does not say he is in love with her. No expression of affection is spoken. Obviously there is no talk of marriage. He merely wishes to copulate with her, and would like the convenience of having her at hand.
The only character who has a realistic reaction is Terra, secretly a traitor to the group, who mutters, “No rock? How lame.”
Damnation. She is right, of course. What Nightwing gets cheaply, he esteems little. Starfire does not slap his face or blast him to ashes with her star-powers as she should, because the writers are blind or wicked or both, depending on whether or not they believe their own horse puke.
The writers must be aware at some level that these characters and their emotional relations to their coupling partners is emotionally stunted to the point of sociopathy, and antinomian to the point of absurdity: because, after all, they know enough to make reference to the real reactions real non-sociopaths have toward their objects of romantic attraction.
Now, these characters are all allegedly heroes, persons of pristine moral character, brave as soldiers and protectors of the weak and innocent. They are saviors of the world multiple times over, and supposed to be portrayed as more admirable in their qualities than, say, the members of a robber gang or a crew of pirates.
Instead we have shows and magazines where, without exception, this behavior is portrayed as the norm, as healthy, and as expected.
Ergo, we have shows and magazines where no one, not even the men from Mars, act anything like what real humans living anywhere act like.
It would be like watching one crime show after another where the daring jewel thief steals one treasure after another, and there is no victim harmed, no money lost, no consequences, no arrests, no jail time, no hurt feelings and no one mad at him.
No human being actually lives this way.
I am not saying no one robs: I am saying, in real life, people hate being robbed and call on cops to stop robbery.
Merely glorifying robbery without showing what happens in the sequel would be just as dishonest as glorifying seduction and fornication without showing the sequel.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Mr. Fantastic married the Invisible Girl in a lawful and honest fashion, as did Lois Lane and Clark Kent, and even that loser Peter Parker got married to the hot readhead Maryjane (albeit a demon later altered the timeline to erase that from the past.)
When I was younger, and wished, as all ill-bred young men wish, for houri and nymphs with the bodies of fair maidens to serve my pleasure, I would of course have found no fault with any of this. Indeed, richly would I have scoffed at any reservations voiced as being mere irrational puritanism, a Victorian hatred of pleasure, a dog in a manger.
That naivety did not outlast my newspaper days.
When I used to work on the newspaper, I covered stories about murders of passion, and I know what men do other men cuckold them, or even compete with them. History and fiction back to the dawn of writing records the same sort of tales as modern newspapers and police blotters: the same bloody events of the type portrayed in Othello, in the abduction of Helen of Troy or in the story of Tamar and Amnon in the Bible, are repeated to this day, in all the lands on which the sun shines.
None the worldview being portrayed by the nymphs and satyrs who take the place of once-beloved super heroic icons is based in fact. None of it reflects experience. It is a dogma of the Morlocks.
Whether they are deceiving others deliberately, or have first successfully deceived themselves matters nothing to me, since their culpability in both cases is the same. They have a dogma to which they adhere because it is their dogma, and to them it would be shame and a breach of faith if they questioned conformity.
The dogma says that sex is a recreation, and that human nature is fluid, and can be shaped to human will at will, with no exertion, no training or no effort. You can couple with a girl and leave her, and if she is brokenhearted and commits suicide, that is her lookout. If she cheats on you, that is her prerogative.
For her part, any act of kindness from any man can be retroactively declared to be sexual harassment, and any intimacy can retroactively be declare rape.
Both will learn, to their sorrow, that all marriage vow can be retracted at will, and unsympathetic judges in a corrupt legal system will divide all your property and debts.
Now, should anyone reading this say that such is an accurate portrayal of the mores and customs of the real decade in which we really live, let me say I doubt that not at all. But any readers who says this will miss my point.
My point is that such a pathologically narcissistic attitude toward love and romance is not unrealistic in the sense that no one acts this way.
It is unrealistic in that no one who acts this way is acting like a real human being with real emotions, forming real and permanent love between himself and his beloved.
I am not saying modern men do not live in this environment. I am saying the environment is not fit for human habitation.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
