Work Text:
NC sex in superhero fanfics, a study or a rationalization?
by JR
As I have discussed before, erotic superhero fanfics can often be classified into one of two opposite fields: romance stories and rape/abuse stories, with just a few falling in between. I will disect a bit the later of the two, from my biased male point of view.
Rape stories are generally simplistic in nature and follow these basic cliches:
1. Men are meant to use women for sex.
2.The heroines are foolish, arrogant and overconfident and are horrified at the prospect of something as low and dirty as sex. How they survived battling crime is a mystery. Little attempt is used to make them retain real characterization except for the use of the name and costume.
3. The villains always trap the heroines making use of their overconfidence and rape them (no choices given). Despite their horror (No! You cant! I am WW!) the heroines always orgasm during their abuse.
4. The heroines are generally "brought low" by this, humilliated and turned into broken-willed slaves by the men who "mastered" them and showed them their proper place.
5. Pleasure is forced upon the heroines through painful SM and brutal penetration by oversized penises or dildos. Size is what matters, foreplay unnecessary. Forced anal sex and fallatio are supposed to also provide her with pleasure.
6. The villains are generally "common" unpowered men, who are supremelly confident of their proper place as masters of women.
7. Plot is generally unnecessary. After a token scene of putting on airs, the heroine just walks into a warehouse or whatever, and is gassed or hit over the head.
8. The stories where the heroine is not enslaved by her rape, have her just walk on with the same foolsihness and arrogance and disdain of sex until she falls in the next trap, ad nauseum.
9. The villains rarely show true desire for the heroine except disdain for the "slut's" arrogance and lust after her Larsenite-hootered body.
Of course, there are many erotic fanfics using NC situations that do not fall into these cliches, but they are the exception.
The TRUCE is a story I wrote wanting to both criticise and make use of many of these cliches used in NonConsensual superheroine fanfics. Most of the attitudes and gimmicks of the less accomplished of such stories were then inverted or parodied in the story.
My story WW THE GAME, however, embraces NC sex without similar distancing. My particular interpretation of the heroine's reaction to forced sex situations is used as a challenge because of my dislike for other interpretations, and I have sought to find 'realistic' characterization even in such circumstances, while also going against the usual cliches.
Yet despite its recursive nature, the story did use the dark appeal of NC acts, knowing that while I may wish expose the senseless cliches, I recognize the personal erotic appeal of the scenarios.
Yeah, NC sex often turns me on.
To dislike NC sex is what I consider the "normal" reaction, and what in a perfect world I believe everyone should feel (I have yet to be accussed of being "normal" myself, however). But I cannot help but wonder about the roots of this perverse appeal in the human (or may I isolate "male"?) psyche. It is a lot more widespread that what I could have originally thought.
I have done a lot of discussion on this topic with a handful of thers willing to address the issue, and I have found very diverse rationales, from the basic fueled-by-resentment that we may simplistically identify, to more complex and not guilt-free situations and variations of what I call the "Revenge of the Nerds" syndrome. There are several factors besides the usual society conditioners which make comic book fans particularly vulnerable to such perversions.
Let us step back an instant and realize that most comics stories do seem replete of damsels-in-peril tintillation coupled with almost prevalent neutering of the characters. Superhero characters are mostly denied active sexuality yet are always placed in situations that the overactive adolescent mind can identify as rife with sexual inuendo.
Both men and women are shown as physically idealized to the extreme and are garbed in skin-tight or scarce clothing that leaves little to the imagination. Men are confident and powerful, handsome and muscular, women are voloptuous and often devoid of modesty. Both men and women spend large time in extensive physical altercations with reptitive villains, in a strange
distoprtion of foreplay. Both genders, but mostly women, are often trapped and placed in bondage
situations, where instead of being killed, they are made to participate passively in the villain's display of his plans/powers. All this screams sex, yet until recently, almost no one got any.
Superhero comics are full of teasing. IMO, this perennial "teasing" without payoff is one of
the reasons why perversion appears. Thus, I find it completely normal that we readers
step over the editorial/publishing restriction and "uncensor" the stories. Most of the stories that we write as fanfic authros address this. If the mainstream shiues away from superheroic sexuality, we fans will fill it in.
BUT, there is a significant part of the audience, who reacts to the "teasing" with guilt. We are shown these perfect wholesome characters who are devoted to the good of humanity, so we know that to think "impure" thoughts about them is surely wrong. When Wonder Woman, dressed
in just a couple of inches of cloth, with measurements that would make a Barbie doll blush, makes our libidos flare, a PC-voice inside us shouts "Come on! She is too pure to even think about sex! Forget it!"
Sadly, this denial of sexual activity is often mirrored in our daily lives. A large percentage of people who turn to comics as a hobby, are generally people who by one reason or another, are ostracised from normal social activities. We are nerds or geeks. We are not accepted by the preppies, sincewe are not pretty or fashionable enough. We cannot hang out with teh jocks being mostly overweight or coordination-challenge. We cannot be greasers or punks since we are too shy to be rebels. We thus escape into worlds of fantasy, where intellect is often valued much higher than in the "real" world, where we feel at ease.
But what happens when our medium of escapism, the comic book world, proves just as sexually frustrating as reality?
We becomes frustrated, angry, ashamed- perverted.
The nice people just fantasize that their heroes/heroines are every bit as passionate and love/sex-hungry as them. And write perhaps sexy fanfics about it.
But the not-so-nice ones sometimes love these characters too much to believe that they would behave as the sluts we would wish them to be, or perhaps we believe we are not worthy of cosnidering sex for our idols. So full of guilt, even in our fantasies we feel scorned, and go: If she won't do it, she ought to be made to do it. Thus when voluptuous WW is bound by a villain in a
bondage rack, we cannot help but think "Well, now there will be sex, if she wants it or not."
And still here are other degrees of niceness apparent:
Some people simply let their anger boil and see these fantasies as ways to vent it. They seek to punish the desired object for its indifference and denial. They must make them pay. The resentment sees the haughtyness as an affront, as a humilliation of their values, so the heroine must then be "taught her place" and "brought down". Why? Because that is the only way we can feel that we are "up". We seek to increase our self-worth by lowering those of the idealized unachievable object. Let's throw mud around so we do not feel so dirty ourselves. That is why such stories involve the outmost humilliation and the "enslaving" of the heroine by mostly common, unpowered men. Hopefully, such atitude is therapeutic for its practicioners.
Some others however, see these instances of forced behavior as an opportunity for reevaluation for vindication. Just as Superman made every nerd sigh feeling that within the grungy clothes there could hide a hero, we all believe that we could be the next Casanova, if only the girls would just give us a break. So NC sex is then an instance where we seek to prove such ignored worth.
The NC sex seeks to "show her what she has been missing." The heroine is disgusted by the villain's evil or the monster's grotesqueness (just like in real life) but she finds during rape that she enjoys sex with the disdained being. She discovers new worth in the rapist, and we become vindicated. This is the "revenge of the Nerds" syndrome. As shown in that movie, the beautiful object of desire discovers: "I never thought it would be so good
While actual physical rape is considered more expressions of violence than of real sexuality, dealing more with issues of control than those of desire, the rape in this type of stories is more about sexual affirmation. The characters are not harmed physically or emotionally by their ordeal. We just want these characters to have sex, and we are willing to bend the rules to achieve it, and feel good at the same time by identifying with the avatar who achives success in bedding such desirable idol. We all just want to be loved?
JR