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CrazySugarFreakBoy!
Sun Aug 28, 2005 at 10:28:14 am EDT
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Who Watches the Watchmen? Magazine Presents: The Superhero Girlfriend’s Manifesto, by April Alice Apple
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Who Watches the Watchmen? Magazine Presents: The Superhero Girlfriend’s Manifesto, by April Alice Apple

My name is April Alice Apple, and I’m a superhero’s girlfriend.

After devoting the past half-dozen or so years of my life to creating my own colorfully costumed crimefighter, the Groovy Gecko-Gal, I never expected that I’d finally gain fame as a supporting cast member in the stories of another character.

To be fair, there are some seriously fun fringe benefits to dating my Dream boy, since I doubt I would have been asked to sit in as a pop culture commentator for VH1 or E! (positions I accepted), or invited to pose nude for Rubenesque Magazine (an offer I declined, much to my own boyfriend’s chagrin), if they hadn’t been able to attach the tag “CrazySugarFreakBoy’s! Girlfriend” as a prefix or suffix to my name.

In light of these novel opportunities, as well as my utterly unexpected luck in hooking up with a smart, sweet, sexy, silly boy with whom I can share a heartfelt love affair, it only occasionally irks me that all of the hard work I’ve done over the years, to try and establish myself as an independent person and an artist and writer in my own right, has been eclipsed by my newfound identity, as someone else’s appendage.

What’s not tolerable to me is the fact that I, like every other superhero’s girlfriend out there, have become a bull’s-eye target for all of the “Women-in-Refrigerators” supervillains inspired by Mars Meltsher, simply for committing the crimes of A) being acquainted with a costumed crimefighter and B) possessing a vagina.

For those who don’t recall, about a dozen or so years ago, back when the former Yellow Flashlight with the gray hair went nuts and became Perpendiculax, the new kid who took the old guy’s place was welcomed onto the job by a second-string costumed criminal named Mars Meltsher, who catapulted himself onto the A-list of supervillains by breaking into the kid’s house, dismembering his girlfriend and stuffing her body parts into the poor guy’s refrigerator (more than a decade later, Meltsher followed up on this feat by stuffing the same Yellow Flashlight’s mother into an oven).

Even as a kid, before I ever imagined I’d be a superhero’s girlfriend myself, it scared the shit out of me that something so fucked up could happen, because the message behind it was chillingly clear; even though women were (and still are) largely regarded as second-class citizens, they had already made too many inroads into the insular realm of super-powered man-panty punch-outs, and those uppity little bitches needed to be made to pay for intruding upon this once-sacrosanct all-boys’ club.

What’s even scarier than Meltsher himself are the countless copycats who followed in his wake, to the point that nobody knows anymore which crimes were committed by Meltsher and which ones were performed by his equally misogynistic and homicidal imitators … he’s become the Keyser Soze of supervillains, and every superhero’s girlfriend had better watch her ass (quite literally), lest she find herself raped and roasted into a crispy critter (like the perky, pregnant wife of Rubber Ralph), or tormented into insanity and turned into the human host of supernatural supervillains such as Ellipso (like the liberated lawyer ex of Atomic Adam), or even retroactively impregnated with the seed of creepy costumed criminals such as the Grimm Griffin (like the already-murdered girlfriend of the Arachnid-Kid, in a dictionary definition of “overkill”).

Maybe Mars Meltsher is like Li’l Slugger in Paranoia Agent, and is just this collective subconscious-spawned psychic aggregate of all our worst fears and most shameful desires, because let’s face it, he wouldn’t even have a legacy if his deeds didn’t resonate so deeply in so many minds – after all, how many superhero fanboys secretly wish that their favorite romantically attached costumed crimefighters were still “swinging singles,” and how many comic book creators can’t come up with any ideas about what the fuck they’re supposed to do with their female characters, aside from torturing the shit out of them?

Even as a female superhero, you’re only slightly safer if the culture can classify you as being either a virgin or a whore, an age-old dichotomy that’s currently exemplified in the contrasting mainstream media depictions of Sydney St. Sylvain, the Fabulous Fashion Fairy, and Meggan Foxx, Action Figure, but if you can’t be compartmentalized into either of those polarized stereotypes, then all the super-powers in the world won’t save you from going the way of Whitney Darkness, the Sorceress of the Abandoned and Lair Legions.

As a female superhero, Whitney was a revelation. She was compassionate and complicated and conflicted and committed, and the reward she received for all of her heart and hard-earned experience was an Ike Turner beat-down from life, a series of personal tragedies that approached the practically cosmic proportions of a Chris Claremont portrayal.

In the wake of an abusive upbringing, a dozen or more plots to get her pregnant without her consent, a pregnancy that she actually did want being terminated against her will, and a subsequent breakup with one of her fellow Lair Legionnaires, I can’t blame her for wanting to get out of the game while the getting was good (which, relative to the rest of her costumed crimefighting career, translates to, “while she was still breathing”).

As much as anything else, though, I suspect that Whitney, like a lot of us girls, felt like she was being punished for not letting herself get pigeonholed into that hateful virgin/whore dichotomy, since she (and we) couldn’t be the pristine beauty pageant contestant and conservatively civic-minded career woman, nor did she (or we) care that much to be the artificially airbrushed and explicitly exposed masturbation fantasy made flesh for the benefit of the male audience’s basest and most degrading desires, either.

As the girlfriend of Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet Sydney St. Sylvain and Meggan Foxxx in person, and what’s woefully underreported is that not even these two gals represent the archetypical virgin and whore in real life, since all it took was a five-minute conversation to reveal to me that there’s more to Sydney than sanitized childlike whimsy, and more to Meg than glossy pornographic sexuality.

As women, whether we choose to be superheroes’ girlfriends or superheroes ourselves, we need to take a stand against all the societal bullshit that brainwashes us into believing that we’re not even the main characters in our own life stories, because that’s the sort of skull-fucking that makes us ever more passive and less resistant, until we’re ultimately reduced to three-holed chattel, being led to the slaughter, our otherwise meaningless deaths giving previously non-threatening supervillains a much-needed resume-booster to make themselves seem more “bad-ass,” and giving previously non-dramatic superheroes an excuse to clench their teeth and ball up their fists, before they throw their heads back and scream, “NNNOOOOOOOOO!!!” into the unfair, uncaring heavens above.

If you are a superhero, and you are sleeping with someone, then you owe it to that person to tell her (or him) your secret identity. If you had an STD, you wouldn’t keep that from your partner, would you? If you’re a costumed crimefighter, then your “dual life” is even more dangerous to your loved ones than neglecting to use protection during sex.

If your boyfriend (or girlfriend) is a superhero, then don’t let them shut you out of that other side of their lives. No, you don’t necessarily need to know all the graphic details, any more than the wife of a cop or a firefighter does, but you absolutely need to make yourself aware of who your significant other’s enemies are, and what they’re capable of doing, because odds are even that, if your lover has foiled the dastardly plans of enough evildoers out there, then sooner or later, they’ll be looking to score a relatively quick and easy revenge, which will most likely mean going after your non-super-powered ass (unless, of course, you’re a costumed crimefighter yourself).

You can take self-defense classes, learn martial arts, study up on various supervillains’ weaknesses, and start carrying mace, pepper spray, a stun-gun or even a handgun (as much as I disagree with firearms personally, I’ll admit that they can be used effectively, but only by people who take the time to train themselves on how to handle them properly). Bottom-line, what it boils down to is that we don’t have to be damsels in distress, housewife hostages or the casualties of costumed crimefighting crusades any longer.


K-Box: Box in the Box



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