Students at the University of Richmond are mad as hell about Robert Crumb's comics, and they're not going to take it any more. Student Timothy Patterson is horrified:

“[The] book features a number of appalling depictions, such as the raping of a little girl, forced oral sex with a woman chained to a desk, and a picture of Crumb sitting on top of a pile of drugged, raped women dressed as a king,” Patterson said.

This year, Bertram Ashe, an associate professor of English and American studies, assigned “My Troubles with Women” and a documentary on Crumb titled “Crumb” to his American Misfit: Geek Literature and Culture class.

Patterson’s response questioned Ashe’s academic freedom to assign this material to his class.

Ashe responds cleverly:

“I’m offended by a middle-aged man having sex with a 13-year-old girl, but I wouldn’t let that stop me from putting Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ on my syllabus,” he said.

Which is a good point. If Crumb were a prose stylist, would any of this be happening? The funny thing is that Patterson's whining is sure to only help the sales of Crumb's splendid new adaptation of the Book of Genesis; any publicity is good publicity. Reading other letters to the editor about U of R's Crumb exhibit and lecture highlight how conservative some college students are, and I find all this talk about "the bounds of freedom" to be alarming.

She said that when a female corpse recently appeared on the jacket of a crime-writing colleague's new book, the author pointed out to her publisher that the victim in the story was actually a man. Mann said the publisher replied: "Never mind that. Dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don't. Nor do dead children or geriatrics."

But the thing that doesn't exactly make sense, Mann points out, is that the worst offenders of the hot dead girl trend are female authors. Mann suggests that this is because "girls grow up knowing that being female is 'synonymous with being prey'." Speaking anecdotally from my experience as a bookseller, more women buy mystery novels than men, too.

When I read mystery fiction, I generally find that in the uninspired, more formulaic examples of the genre, the detective (or the police officer or the baking granny or the cat lady or whoever is solving the mystery) is the least interesting part of the book. The author often makes the victim the centerpiece of the book, so that in at least one way, their series has a different, if very passive, protagonist every time. So is this a case of the reader identifying with the corpse? Is the idea of being avenged at play here, and a morbid curiosity about victimization?

(Awesome cover image of a woman being brutalized by a gorilla as a clown fights for her honor from The Fiction Mags Index.)

Tor.com describes a new literary series, in which naked women read selections from books to an audience. It's called Naked Girls Reading*:

...At the beginning of the evening, seven women, six performers from New York’s Pinchbottom Burlesque troupe and special guest Michelle L’Amour, founder of Naked Girls Reading, walked on stage, promptly dropped their robes, and sat demurely on couches and upholstered chairs. One by one, each rose and read to the vocally appreciative audience from books they chose and personally loved.

Last Friday’s theme was banned books, and there were readings from erotic classics Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Delta of Venus, as well as from books banned for non-sexual controversies like The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird.

The post says that Naked Girls Reading is coming to Seattle. I haven't heard anything, but I'll let you know as soon as I do.

*Of course, they're wearing high heels, so the "naked" thing isn't quite true, and none of the readers are underage, so "girls" isn't correct, either.

Slog tipper Gloria alerts us to this io9 post about a recent Spider-Man comic book that started a controversy in the weird world of comics blogs. It seems that one of Spider-Man's villains, while impersonating his secret identity Peter Parker, had sex with Parker's roommate.

When asked about this, Fred Van Lente, who is the writer of the story, responded in part by saying "My understanding of the definition of rape is that it requires force or the threat of force, so no. Using deception to trick someone into granting consent isn't quite the same thing." This rather stupid and wrongheaded statement did not help put out the fires caused by the rape scene. And then the next issue of the comic book came out, and once the real Peter Parker comes home, his roommate, who still believes she had sex with him, is wearing Parker's clothes and wackily believes they are now in a relationship:

You can click to enlarge, but here is the majority of what she is saying:

We're going to have to work on that—your punctuality. Guys I date have to know how to use a watch....When I come home from a long day at the office, I expect minimum two hours quality time. Otherwise, what's the point of a relationship?...Your closet looked like a shrine to 1988. Don't worry. I gave it all away to Goodwill. Tomorrow we'll get you a whole new look.

So now on top of the rape, we have the "Women just want to trap you in a relationship and take you shopping to make you over like you are a Ken doll or something" plot in play. But Van Lente has made it all better! Now he suggests that fake-Peter Parker didn't have sex with the roommate, which means, in his opinion, that there was no rape at all. Um, okay then! Case closed?

Many thanks to Slog tipper Gloria, who says "Anyway, Paul, you might like this. Because of the comics. Not because of the rape."