Yeah, that was rather intense, and not helped by the Leslie Thompkins moment.
The funny thing is, the same fans who go into a "berserker rage" when some mass media pundit will (incorrectly) claim that comic books are gender-biased will usually say something along the lines of, "I understand this character so much more" when a female character either is raped on panel or explains that she was raped. We had a dozen people going, "oh god, Black Cat is so much better now as a character" after she reveals she was raped. And then you have Sue Dibney in IDENTITY CRISIS and what spawned from that.
Hmm. Does it work for male characters? I never liked Bishop. But if he told the audience that he'd been bent over by Nimrod in the 44rd century or where-ever the hell he hails from, should that make him a "more relatable character"? I would say no.
What's funny is that while writers will claim that these stories are "edgy", they'll rarely be "edgy" enough to do it to an A-List heroine who is incredibly popular (at least at the time). Spoiler, while well known, wasn't A-list. She wasn't Wonder Woman or Lois Lane. Black Cat isn't Spider-Woman or Sue Storm right now (although Sue is set to die in a few months, so I guess the universe rights itself.
). Even during a Genosha tale when Rogue was claimed to have been "fondled" while captured and depowered, it was during the 80's when she was HARDLY as popular as she would become ten years later. Alex Ross usually talks a lot of crap in interviews, but when WIZARD interviewed him about IC, he claimed that, "if DC had balls, do that to Lois Lane and see how the readers react. Have some guts. Don't take a character that only a few dozen people know about and love and do that to her", and in a way, he has a point.
Another point, of course, is that maybe these things are a bit one-sided. Realistically, women are unfortunately more often than not the victims of crime; this is a fact (much as statistically, males commit most of the crime, especially violent crime). And because villians usually attempt to hurt a hero through attacking that hero's friends/family/lovers, and as superheroes are predominantly male, that means female characters will unproportionately suffer in stories without it being purely "sexist", just following a rational ideology. And in a way, some of these stories aren't truly "edgy", but trying to be. So, the point is, that if Heroine A gets raped, she would react....poorly? As would her lover? They would be saddened, frustrated, etc.? Well, GOSH, color me surprised. That's only the NATURAL reaction. Darkness for darkness' sake.
Gail Simone, before she hit it big, had a website devoted to covering this sort of thing ("Women In Refrigerators", named after Kyle Rayner's ex-girlfriend's fate). While there can be a place for stories such as these, incessently using them for shock value (along with death) can become a sort of downbeat doldrum that doesn't exactly prove comic critics wrong about their stereotypical judgements of the comic book genre. And that's a shame.
