America #1

I have to admit I was a little surprised to see a Marvel comic book depicting lesbian sex (see last two scans), and in a title called America. The "America" in question is America Chavez, the queer Latina LGBTQ Young Avenger from another reality, the Utopian Parallel.

I asked Simon at my neighborhood comic shop if he thought, as I do, that the scene of lady bedroom love is "boundary crossing" for a industry powerhouse like Marvel. Simon said yes.

Nietzsche said that the greater a society is the more tolerant it is, and I absolutely agree with that. Pretty much the best -- most culturally dynamic -- thing that late-stage capitalism, a.k.a., neoliberalism, has going for it is its integration of women into ever-increasing authority roles.

Marvel reflects this with a noticeable proliferation of titles devoted to super-heroines: Ms. Marvel, Patsy Walker, A.K.A. Hellcat! (apparently just cancelled), The Unstoppable Wasp, Hawkeye, etc. Sometimes it seems as if Marvel only chooses females for its new heroes.

This is all well and good, a balancing of the accounts as it were. The downside as I see it -- not only in Marvel comic books, but in my own professional life as well -- is that as women occupy more seats at the table, patriarchal norms -- social hierarchy, violence, economic inequality -- are not being destabilized, they're being exacerbated. The implicit promise of both second- and third-wave feminism is that the more women assume power in a society the more enlightened and egalitarian that society will become.

Well, that's not happening. Western civilization, despite significant gains for women and minorities, is just as addicted to warfare and hierarchy as ever, if not more so. Feminists will argue that this can't be laid at their doorstep; that the glass ceiling is ever present, and that the bald white man is still running the show from atop the pyramid. And they're right.

All I'm saying is that women are mirroring the negative aspects of patriarchy as they enjoy their "slice of the pie."

I remember one afternoon I unexpectedly returned home from work. I stood in the hallway by the front door and listened to my wife talking to her girlfriends, fellow med-schoolers. They were shooting the shit, listening to Patti Smith on the stereo, calling each other by their last names. It had all the testosterone and bravado of a men's locker room. When I stepped in to say hello I saw that my wife was wearing my favorite San Francisco 49ers cap. They all seemed shocked to see me.

That was almost 30 years ago. I always considered my generation -- the sons and daughters of second-wave feminists -- the first substantially gender-equal cohort in American history. Now women waving their "lady dick" is a cultural norm. More power to them.

But maybe we should take another look at feminism's tacit assumptions of ontological superiority. We need to ask ourselves if matriarchy is willing to abide by all the hogwash that got chalked up to patriarchy.

Secret Avengers #15

When I want to give my legs a rest from road running I go to an artificial turf soccer field in my neighborhood and jog square laps. It is a particularly nice winter location because early in the morning on the weekend no one is there. Freezing temperatures keep everyone, besides an occasional dog walker, away.

A couple Sundays back I noticed spray-painted on a concrete utility outbuilding next to the soccer pitch the slogan "GIRLS RULE!"

Since I had just finished reading the final issue of Secret Avengers #15, a title Marvel cancelled the spring of 2015, I thought it very auspicious.

The Secret Avengers are a black ops group of Avengers (sort of a superhero SEAL Team 6) put together by Steve Rogers, a.k.a., Captain America, to handle certain unsavory jobs, i.e., extraordinary renditions. Heroes enlisted, like Hawkeye, even undergo memory wipes, a la Jason Bourne. This shows how commonly accepted all murderous and illegal aspects of the Deep State have become. They appear only thinly veiled in a Marvel comic book.

Thematically what Secret Avengers provided Marvel was a way to continue Dark Avengers -- super-villains masquerading with official imprimatur as Avengers -- into the sunny Age of Obama. Dark Avengers was Brian Michael Bendis' superb commentary on the darkness of the Bush years, Norman Osborn as a stand-in for W. Darkness mainstreamed in the body politic.

Secret Avengers was Marvel's way of saying that this darkness would not be banished under Obama. And of course it wasn't. The title's cancellation in early 2015, soon after the disastrous 2014 midterms, is an acknowledgement that this darkness is not a strand of government, an aberrant strain, a subplot; it is the very essence of government, the Deep State itself.

Ales Kot, the writer on the final run of the series, put Maria Hill -- the butch, belligerent head of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Marvel's all-important equivalent of the U.S. national security apparatus) -- at the heart of the narrative, a heady story about a sentient bomb, communal mindspace, love and extinction.

Maria Hill is necessary because men -- white men at least -- can no longer front an almost universally discredited plutocratic warfare state.  We need women or minorities to act the shill; Obama did ably for most of his two terms, despite presiding over enormous losses for the Democratic Party.

These losses, which likely confirm Zach Galifianakis' quip about Obama being the last black president, could be obscured -- such was the hope -- by nominating a woman to preside over the wealthiest, most militarily powerful nation on the planet, indeed, in the history of the world.

It didn't work out that way. And more than any other single factor (and Democrat evasions about Russian hacking and interference from the FBI) it didn't work out that way because women did not vote for a sister in numbers greater than when only men were the nominees of the duopoly. Hillary reaped no record female gender gap; in fact, she only improved upon Obama's 2012 total by a single percentage point.

The ace Clinton held in the sleeve of her paintsuit right up to the exit polls on election day turned out to be a regular pip card. Trump won 53% of white women. Partisan identity "trumped" gender identity.

To put a positive spin on this result one could say that voters saw through the sham of the Democratic Party's identity politics. Hillary, like Maria Hill, is fronting the Deep State, and Clinton had about as much to offer feminism as Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel. In other words, nothing. Worse than nothing -- a thin lacquered feminine veneer on the old bloodthirsty divine right of kings, a truly devastating subversion of feminism.

True feminism has to be part of a radically egalitarian order, glimpses of which can be seen in areas where the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is in power. (See Rod Nordland's "Crackdown in Turkey Threatens a Haven of Gender Equality Built by Kurds.")

Late stage capitalism has been highly successful in integrating women into the workforce, so much so that the gender pay gap might not be as wide as commonly reported. But late stage capitalism is also peak neoliberalism, a savage celebration of elitism and competition. Women, even those that enjoy the benefit of paid maternity leave, think twice before exiting the rat race, and this translates into the problem of low birthrates, a problem that recently reached the headlines. (See "South Korea’s Plan to Rank Towns by Fertility Rate Backfires" by Choe Sang-Hun.) Francis Fukuyama has identified low birthrates as part of a "Great Disruption" that is concomitant with the rise of the Information Society, another name for late stage capitalism or peak neoliberalism.

Helene Cooper's story about the little Cameroonian boy crushed by Samantha Power's speeding motorcade (see "The Boy, the Ambassador and the Deadly Encounter on the Road" and her crucial followup "I Was in the Motorcade That Struck and Killed 6-Year-Old Toussaint Birwe") says it all about the slogan "GIRLS RULE!"

Yes, girls rule. But according to the all the old rules.

Below, from the final issue of Secret Avengers, Maria recounts the time from her childhood when she happened upon a shark in the void. The art is Michael Walsh's.

Hippies vs Punks: Childbirth's Women's Rights (2015)

If you want to know what the new West Coast tech hub feminist dispensation sounds like, it sounds like Childbirth's 2015 release, Women's Rights. Part early Black Flag, part Sonic Youth, the album clocks in at just under 26 minutes. The songs are irreverent -- tales of cocaine at baby showers, broken condoms, refulgent fertility, tech bros, etc.

I work with and for women who are all younger than I by at least a decade. The Childbirth vibe is their vibe. If, as James Brown sang in the 1960s "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," then now I would say it is something different. It is still a man's world. No doubt. The old bald white guy is still calling the shots from his sky box atop the pyramid. But women are playing an increasingly important role in late stage Western capitalism.

Women are definitely on the ascent. And let me tell you, they are not particularly gracious to a brother on his way down. Women feel a lot of pent up disdain and resentment, if not outright hatred and anger, towards men. "Loathing" might be the best term. I can bear witness as the only man at many a behind-closed-doors staff meeting.

Cry no tears for men though. We deserve every bit of bad news coming our way. There will be no Donald Trump helicopter rescue touching down in a green field to lift us off to safety as the boreal forest burns all around. No, it is all hellfire and sinks of sulfurous acid for us.

Where Monsters Dwell #4 & Where Monsters Dwell #5

Where Monsters Dwell was a five-issue limited series that was part of the recently concluded Secret Wars Marvel crossover event. The multiverse collapses in on itself --

Now all that remains is Battleworld: a massive, patchwork planet composed of the fragments of worlds that no longer exist, maintained by the iron will of its god and master, Victor von Doom!

Each region is a domain unto itself!

While abandoning a tribal princess carrying his child, flying ace (and general jerk) Karl Kaufmann agreed to fly the fetching, well-heeled Clemmie Franklin-Cox to her husband. En route, an unnatural storm stranded them in a dangerous region of Battleworld . . .

Where Monsters Dwell

To repair his plane, Kaufmann need to steal an engine and propeller from the beautiful warrior women with whom Clemmie had very happily settled down. He convinced a tribe of diminutive cannibals to wage war on the ladies. As his troops died by the dozens, Kaufmann grabbed his plane parts, and promptly deserted them.

If the original Where Monsters Dwell, an early-70s Marvel reprint series of Silver Age SciFi and horror, treated the cultural verities of the U.S.-Soviet Union Cold War and its underlying logic of Mutually Assured Destruction through a prism of aliens from outer space, the present Where Monsters Dwell, subversively penned by Garth Ennis with compelling art by Russ Braun, depicts a social milieu where men are scheming, pussy-hungry, bloodthirsty cowards and women are strong, moral and lesbian. It is a world that is the polar opposite of the Cold War 1950s and 1960s. I think it is a fair description of our world today. If there is any hope for the species to survive, men need to be shown the way out of the halls of power.

Below are nine scans from Where Monsters Dwell #4 and Where Monsters Dwell #5. The murderous poltroon flying ace gets his just desserts. He ends up trapped on an island of dung and guano with his impregnated native princess.

Uncanny Avengers #18.NOW + Uncanny Avengers #20

One thing capitalism has not been able to stifle over the last fifty years is a movement towards gender equality.

While war ravages seemingly every part of the planet (there are more displaced persons since any time going back to WWII) and wealth is concentrated more and more in the hands of a very few (the 1% -- but really, the top tenth of the 1%), and while racism still roils the body politic and corruption in both big business and government remains an endemic part of society, women have made colossal strides in my lifetime.

Of course, debilitating sexism still exists. It is still definitely a man's world. And what will become of women if Wahhabism as practiced by Islamic State and Boko Haram continues to spread?

Women only earn 78 cents on the dollar to men in the United States today. But in business, politics, and the arts, women do everything -- occupy the same commanding heights -- that men do, just not in numbers as robust.

To see this transformation in the role of women over the last fifty years all one need do is look at the Marvel character the Wasp, Janet van Dyne. Introduced in Tales to Astonish #44 (June 1963) as a romantic interest of and sidekick to Henry Pym's Ant-Man, Janet van Dyne is basically eye candy in a pill box hat.

The Wasp, the original female Avenger, I always thought of as a brunette version of Sue Storm, a.k.a., Invisible Girl; both, as depicted by Jack Kirby and Don Heck, are fine pieces of Park Avenue trim whose superhero identities -- insect smallness and invisibility -- accentuate patriarchal stereotypes of women as insignificant, passive and powerless, a conceptualization of the feminine that would make any misogynist happy. In the superhero yarns from the early 1960s, if either Janet or Sue were to save the day in the last panels of the comic book it is usually owing to the fact of being overlooked by the power-gorged super-villain. Stan Lee's moral might be summarized as something like, "See, now and then it comes in handy to be diminutive and invisible."

But that is not the Janet van Dyne of today. I have been spending the last few weekends dipping into accumulated issues of Rick Remender's Uncanny Avengers. And what struck me, besides Daniel Acuña's amazing art, is how forceful, strong, physical, alive the Wasp is. Is there a term for feminine virility? "Fertility" doesn't really do it since fertility connotes a certain passivity, a receptacle for insemination.

Whatever female virility is, Remender and Acuña bring it to life with Janet van Dyne in the pages of Uncanny Avengers #18.NOW and Uncanny Avengers #20. In Uncanny Avengers #18.NOW the Wasp takes out both the Blob and Magneto; in Uncanny Avengers #20, she delivers a bloody-mouth beat down to Kang the Conqueror.

Below you will find more scans than usual. Daniel Acuña's illustration of a free-falling fight on Planet X between Blob, Havoc, Wasp and Magneto is so compelling I couldn't resist. And Janet van Dyne's assault on Kang from Uncanny Avengers #20 cannot be omitted.