Let Yourself Get Down

I remember awhile back, sometime in the 90's which are all a big blur to me now, a female friend let my other friend (another fellow female) borrow her Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist comics, written and illustrated by the New Haven, CT underground artist Diane DiMassa (above) for a few weeks. Both of us enjoyed what little we could find on Hothead Paisan in little punk stores in Washington DC so it was nice to have a big chunk to catch up with over the years. What neither of us really expected, strangely enough, was not only negative reaction from our male friends for reading this material, but from her own boyfriend as well.

Hothead Paisan is, as the title explains, every inch a homicidal lesbian terrorist, in that she will take an axe to a homophobic man's head, put a bullet through his beer-bloated gut, and a stick of dynamite up his urethra every chance she'll get, and without a hint of guilt or shame. Wound up on coffee and too much TV, she charges right out of the gates so overstimulated and filled with rage at her inability to adapt to society's expectations of straight feminine stereotypes she makes room for herself in the world by eliminating the "enemy" every time it crosses her path. In one issue in particular that got the boys riled up, Hothead methodically tortures a small group of rich, affluent white men who managed to easily sway the male judge's decision in their favor during a trial where they had previously gang-raped and tortured a young woman. "Violence against men is never funny." Our male friends roared to us, "I don't care what the circumstances, this is nothing but anti-male propaganda. And if this comic was about men torturing and killing women you girls would shrieking in hysteria over the sexist content".

So I wonder, are they right? I mean, comics have been eternally sexist, almost intrinsically so, for as far back as they've been around it seems. Not all of course. But although the act of "fridging" isn't limited to the medium of comic books alone, I can't recall myself getting quite so heated up when Batgirl became paralyzed, or Rachel Summers got lobotomized, or Wonder Woman lost her powers, nearly all of which were the impetus for their male superheroes counterparts to rip their shirts in anguish, scream "NOOOOOOOOOOO" and then go do something heroic and save the day. Maybe a little tired of seeing it, and wishing that there were far more creative writers in the industry who didn't feel compelled to fall back into such exhaustively played-out cliches. But it's just comic books. It's fantasy. And if I am willing to accept some man's fantasy of a woman's head stuffed in the fridge just to give her husband an opportunity for great heroism, do I not have room for acceptance of Ms. DiMassa's fantasy of a gay woman who slaughters those men who want her dead that stand in her way to realize her own superhero potential? Can I not accept this as fantasy as well?

Hothead Paisan allegedly sprung from the pages of DiMassa's journal as she was going through rehab for her own addictions earlier in life, wish-fulfillment fantasy indeed! However HP herself is more than just a man-hating dyke cypher. HP is a product of her environment. She allows herself to get fired up over the images that she sees on television -- of women cooking dinner for their lout husbands and spending all their free hours shopping at the mall, of male politicians passing laws keeping gays from marrying -- image after image telling her that there is no place for somebody like her in the world. Yet Hothead doesn't always get away with her reckless behavior. Her best friend Roz lectures her on how violence does nothing but beget more violence, her cat Chicken tries to take her coffee and TV away from her when she feels she's losing perspective, and the lamp that lives inside HP's head (named "Donna Summer"), her "inner light", helps sort through Hothead's motivations and work through her issues of self-loathing, fear, and yes -- even sometimes guilt. Yet it's all done with heaps of humor, with some of the funniest moments in comic books that I have ever witnessed. Would I still laugh quite as hard if the sex roles had been reversed? A gay man butchering straight women, maybe? Well, somebody write one and let me know. Then we'll see.

But maybe I'm strange that way. In a current pop culture atmosphere of torture-porn movies and increasingly more torture in porn itself, I'm surprised that anybody would blink an eye at Hothead Paisan these days. But as a product of the 1990's, maybe she was slightly more ahead of her time to be appreciated. Check out the Complete Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist sometime and let me know what you think. Tell me I'm nuts. Or if anything, tell me that I've turned yet another person -- straight or gay, male or female -- onto the (to me) wonderful, insightful, and outright hysterical satirical humor of Diane DiMassa. And show your boyfriends, too. I want to hear their opinions as well. ;)