Danger Zone

“…. this is…. big.”

“Eighty feet long, ten high, in forty panels! It was originally going to be sixty feet, but then the Thomas Malory Arthuriana got big and I had to put more stuff in.” 

“… Malory published in the fifteenth century.” 

“Do you have any idea how long it takes one person to embroider eight thousand square feet of tapestry?” 

“You’ve had a lot of free time in the last eight hundred years, haven’t you?” 

“Miscegenation” (interracial relationships) were not allowed.

Sex hygiene and venereal diseases were not appropriate subjects.

Homosexuality was not to be depicted.

Ridicule of the clergy was not allowed.

Religion could never be depicted in a mocking manner.

Words like “God,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” “Christ,” “hell,” and “damn” could not be used unless it was in connection with religious ceremonies.

But as a woman (who is sex positive) I’m fucking tired of seeing women just pushed aside and used as sexy lamps and sex objects ITS DEGRADING

if you want an example of how interesting women could be during the Hayes code I recommend Bringing up Baby and the second episode of Laramie (which is a series from the late 50s early 60s that was about the old west) where a female preacher is focused on (which if you weren’t clued in on religion was not something that happened until much later)

So yes I think some of the Hayes code is awful but why do you need sex scenes they don’t further the plot

because on the one hand: you’re absolutely right, hypersexualization in media has been and continues to be used primarily as a tool for misogyny. It’s at the point where “sexy” is basically shorthand for “dehumanization of female characters.” women are not sex objects, and i gotta tell you after a year or so of consuming basically only indie podcasts and, like, Leverage for entertainment, it is jarring as hell to rewatch Avengers 2012 with my sister. It’s not just offensive but bizarre to see how little Black Widow is treated like a person, in comparison to the male characters.

But that’s the thing: Avengers 2012 doesn’t have sex scenes. Women can be objectified just fine without any “prurient” or otherwise explicit content. And by the same token, sexually explicit content is not inherently objectifying - towards women or anyone else. (If sex isn’t inherently bad, then neither is thinking about it. If sex can be a good thing, our stories have the right to treat it like one.)

The problem, then, is not with the inclusion of sex scenes. Already we have media that is horny as hell and not degrading towards any of the parties involved. Music that equates sex to an act of worship - Hozier, anyone? - is popular for a reason, and it is not because it objectifies women. Montero isn’t about women at all, but the sexual content Lil Nas X espouses is the opposite of objectifying. (This isn’t the place for a social analysis of Montero but DANG is there a lot to unpack there, all of it absolutely fantastic.) Sex is not essentially dehumanizing; therefore, blaming sex scenes for the dehumanization of characters is not logical, and not fair.

The problem is with a culture that equates femininity with sexual possession. If the uptick in sexual content did, in fact, result in less nuanced female characters after the Hays Code was lifted, the fault for that is not with the decreased censorship. The fault lies, squarely, solely, on the storytellers who never wanted to write women as people in the first place, and the entire culture that allowed them to get away with that if they provided enough titillation to keep them engaged.

(Also, I do have my reservations about the claim that the Hays Code had anything to do with whatever female agency may have existed in 1940s-60s media. The hypersexualization may have been more limited, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, in everything from I Dream of Jeannie to Gilligan’s Island to the Flintstones. Yes, there are shows in this period that we look back on and love as “progressive for their time” - M.A.S.H., Star Trek - but that doesn’t mean they weren’t still, objectively, incontrovertibly sexist. The Hays Code may have limited the ways sexist objectification could be expressed, but it did not by any stretch of the imagination erase it from media.)

It’s worth noting the motivations explicitly stated in the Hays Code for the restrictions around sexual content:

Scenes of passion must be treated with an honest acknowledgement of human nature and its normal reactions. Many scenes cannot be presented without arousing dangerous emotions on the part of the immature, the young or the criminal classes.

“Dangerous emotions” refer to sexual arousal, which is automatically assumed to be evil if it isn’t bound by the usual 50s mores of “marriage and the home” (also a direct quote). The other tacit assumption is that “the immature, the young” and the “criminal classes” (i.e., poor people and POC) are not capable of intelligent thought, and it is thus the responsibility of the storyteller to spoonfeed them the appropriate narratives (the appropriate propaganda).

I do recommend perusing the original code, linked above, for anyone who isn’t familiar with it. Reading between the lines, though, it’s incredibly clear that the code was written for the specific purposes of:

(a) preventing the general populace from accessing certain content and ideas (there is, for instance, a repeated mandate that “drug traffic” should not be mentioned or addressed, as well as a painstakingly thorough prohibition of anything that could conceivably be construed as breaking any “law, natural or human.” Note that what a Jesuit priest in the 50s would have considered “natural law” includes things like Heterosexuals Only and racism - things he never would have thought to question, and therefore assumed no one else should);

and (b) hyping up certain content and ideas, to a disproportionate extent - namely, the power of Church and State was never to be challenged, and only to be treated with absolute respect and deference.

(The Hays Code was born out of a sexist culture of white supremacy, but it also went a fair ways towards perpetuating said culture. It is not the fault of the Hays Code - nor the other systems of censorship that existed before and after it - that North America is in the state it’s in, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a contributing factor. Maybe a major one. Maybe not; we don’t know what shows might have been made without it, without censorship. We’ll never know. But maybe. And stories have power.)

My point is that the motivations behind the Hays Code and others like it were not “to protect women, or anyone else, from being dehumanized and objectified.” The reason for censorship was, as it is always, to protect the status quo.

The problem is not with sex, that much is clear. But the problem also isn’t with the Hays Code, or its elimination. The problem is with the status quo it was protecting.

The only thing that happens when censorship is lifted is the expression of ideas that already existed, and were repressed: and so we have more violent misogynistic content. And we have, twenty-two days after the Hays Code was officially abandoned, Star Trek’s most famous interracial kiss.

Censorship doesn’t prevent misogyny, or racism, or any other awful thing that may or may not permeate our stories. If a culture is saturated with injustice, all censorship will ever do is sanitize it. 

The solution to a social disease is not to sanitize it, any more than the cure to COVID is drinking bleach.

A blanket prohibition on content we find distasteful is easy, but even if it isn’t something imposed by the people who are privileged enough to have that power, the only thing it will ever do is place a bandaid over an infection. A brief comfort, followed all too quickly by a much nastier disease.

Irene Adler’s an opera singer. We still have those! They don’t have the same subtext exactly, but nothing is going to because we aren’t the Victorians. She could continue to be an opera singer. I have never seen this happen.

Checking sea otter temperature

“Ahh, lass. You’ve been kind to me. Ya have been able to hold the weight of anyone and refused to break during that fight with me customers. Ye’re the real prize.”

Normally, I’d feel flattered, but I’m a chair right now, and he’s talking to an inanimate object. Suddenly, a crash is heard making Maxwell turn to the door to see men in masks.

“Are you Maxwell, the adventurer?” One of the masked men asks.

“Who’s asking?” He asks.

The men pull out knives, making me angry.

“Where’s the loot?” A woman asks.

“I’m a tavern owner. What loot would ye be after from me?” Maxwell asks.

The woman grabs him, putting a knife to his neck.

“Where’s the ruby, Maxwell?” She asks.

Maxwell replies, “I’ve taken many Rubies on my adventure. Which one are you talking about?”

She pushes him away before slapping him, making him fall to the ground.

“You know which Ruby, Maxwell. The Ruby of Mimicry!”

If I weren’t a chair, I would have stiffened. They were after me, and Maxwell has no clue what they’re talking about. I quickly mimic a snake, sliding along the ground towards one of the men.

“I never found the Ruby of Mimicry! When I searched its temple, I found nothing but furniture and gold.”

I bite one of the men, making him scream in pain as I mimic my true form, locking my brown eyes onto the woman.

“Who are you?” She asks, holding a knife towards me.

I smirk, pulling a large knife out of my boot.

“I guess you could say, I was loot.”

One of the men lunges at me, making me laugh as I duck, grabbing his neck and tossing him over me into another man. I flick my dark hair back, locking onto the woman again.

“But… You can call me, “Ruby”. Specifically, the Ruby of Mimicry.“ I chuckle.

Maxwell and the woman stare at me in shock. The woman glares at me, lunging for me as I block her attacks.

"You know, with people hunting me, I was living a wonderful life as a chair! And I actually enjoyed it!” I growl, punching the woman as she tries to stab me.

I hiss at her, grabbing a fry pan from behind the counter and hitting her in the head, repeatedly. I toss the pan away and walk towards Maxwell, leaning down and grabbing his hand, picking him up.

“Hi, I’m your chair that never broke.” I smile.

Max just stares at me, making me chuckle.

“Yer me chair?” He asks.

“Yes, and I must thank you for treating me with the most respect you could give a chair.” I smile.

He frowns in thought, then asks, “How did that work? Where was your face? Don’t tell me we’ve been sitting on your face this whole time!”

I realize now that it was a book about me dealing with depression before I even knew it. Looking back at how blatant the projecting was, it’s obvious now. It wasn’t then.

In the story, the middle-generation people are lost. They’re apathetic. They’re just a placeholder. The only job they have is to keep the ship running, have kids, and die. As the middle generation of people began becoming adults, suicide rates were skyrocketing. Crime and drug rates were jumping. This generation was completely apathetic because they felt that they had no use.

In the story, a small group of people in the middle-generation create the Weather Project. They turn the ship into a terrarium. They make magnificent gardens and take the DNA of animals they took with them and recreate them and they make this cold, metal spaceship that they have to live their entire lives on into a home. They take what little they have and they break it and rearrange it into something beautiful. They take this radical idea and turn the ship into a wonderful jungle of trees and birds and sunshine.

And I realize now how much it reflects my state of mind as I transitioned from a child into an adult while dealing with depression. You always hear “it gets better” and “when you’re older things will be easier” and I was so sick of waiting for it to get better. I was in the middle-generation stage. And I was sick of it. I was so sick of waiting.

When I was in highschool I didn’t know how to end the story. I didn’t know how to have a happy ending. I didn’t have the life experience then to finish the story in a meaningful way. I didn’t know how to make it better for these middle-generation characters.

But now that I’m older, I’m learning. That if you sit and wait for things to get better, it never will. You have to take your life and break it apart and rearrange it into something beautiful. You have to make the cold metal ship into the garden that you deserve. You have to make your own meaning. You have to plant your own garden.