The Four Color Media Monitor

The Mockingbird writer who made a mess of Bobbi Morse 3 years ago has just learned a certain segment of the left who may not even buy her books won't forgive her for not addressing their insane "causes" in her Image title called Man-Eaters:

Man-Eaters writer Chelsea Cain has deleted her Twitter account following a controversy regarding Cain's usage of tweets critical of her work on the Image Comics title within the pages of last week's Man-Eaters #9.

The series, which is about a world where a mutation causes menstruating women to transform into vicious cat creatures and the government harshly responds to fears over those transformations, has dealt with criticism from the start over the way Cain's writing handles gender within the world. Critics have claimed that Cain presents the world of Man-Eaters as one split between only cis men and cis women. The issue, critics state, is that such an alleged binary approach excludes trans and non-binary men and women. For instance, in a world where menstruation leads to a monstrous transformation, what about men who were assigned female at birth? Pointing to the fact that many of them still menstruate, critics took issue that Man-Eaters did not appear to take these people into account.

This is what's most fascinating about how this miniseries was regarded since the beginning: all these freaks believe Cain must address their agenda even if she didn't want to. Yet if she had, it's a forgone conclusion they would've lashed out at her with the claim that, because she doesn't belong to a specific identity, she's not qualified to address it. In other words, damned if you do and don't.

Fascinatingly enough, Cain was interviewed some time ago by Women Write About Comics (via Bounding Into Comics), and she said:

And can you tell me if/how the book will tackle what this kind of hormone therapy means for characters who aren’t cis?

I think it’s really important to tell stories from a lot of different points of view. This is a story about what it’s like to be a cis gendered female coming of age in a culture that consistently reinforces the messaging that periods are shameful, that our bodies are shameful, and that womanhood—and the biology that goes along with it—is something gross and not for polite company. It’s about rejecting that narrative and making something powerful from it. You don’t have to have a uterus to be a woman. Anyone who thinks that hasn’t been paying attention. But let’s not get lost or distracted here—this is a specific story, about a specific experience—the way that all good stories are. And if I’m doing my job well, I think that anyone can relate to it. I think that someone who is trans knows full well what it feels like to struggle with being defined by biology and by the social messaging that makes us all, at one point or another, feel like monsters.

So on the one hand, she'd stated her crummy little project was allegedly about biological women's experiences, yet on the other hand, she put forth the laughable narrative no one needs a uterus to be a woman. And the 6th issue may have gotten around to pushing that stupid ideology too. Yet it wasn't enough for the left, who turned against her, and gave her the treatment afforded everyone who dares take a position they hate, here being that she's written the book to suit her particular narrative, not theirs. Earlier this week, the same site ran an item by a SJW who even stated:

Insisting that her book is not trying to imply that all women menstruate is one thing, but the implication that all people who menstruate are women is something else entirely — and plays into a societal habit to assume all trans issues are trans women issues. Compounding that issue is Mags Visaggio, a prominent trans woman in comics who came to Cain’s defense on twitter, insisting the book wasn’t offensive and that Cain should be able to write about “her experience as a cis woman” — again, missing the point that transmasculine people were primarily the ones being harmed.

Hmm, sounds like the social justice crowd is also turning against the "dude in a wig" whose books aren't exactly big sellers either. After all the trouble he caused, this is probably what he gets, ironically or not. Oh well.

Anyway, what caused Cain much of the backlash was when she quoted a tweeter in the 9th issue proper, which was critical of her work:

However, in the recently released Man-Eaters #9, both of the reader’s tweets were featured in the pages of the comic, plastered on billboards on the wall of the forced reeducation camps in the book. As the panels blew up on social media, the original reader noted that she was feeling overwhelmed and was turning off her notifications, which is why her tweets have been quoted, rather than embedded, above, in an attempt to respect anonymity as much as possible, even if that cat is already out of the bag, thanks to all of this.

IMO, when you start putting other people's criticism into the pages of the book proper, that actually suggests a lack of faith in the project from the beginning, and makes the story dated even faster. In fact, according to this followup:

...That report ended after Cain offered to bring on transgender sensitivity readers to the book, but noted that she could not pay them, which was not well-received. Cain later said she would speak to Image about obtaining funding for the service. Cain has previously described the production of Man-Eaters as "financially ruinous." Image has found itself in hot water over transgender issues multiple times in recent years, most notable with Airboy in 2015 and Divided State of Hysteria in 2017. Image declined to comment on the weekend's events when asked.

So now, Cain's been derided as a "TERF" (trans exclusionary radical feminist), which shows how far we've come, when it's considered okay for leftists to call feminists radicals. And wolves devour wolves. Her attempts to appease all these characters were to no avail, and finally, she erased her Twitter page. It remains to be seen - will she return, as she did several weeks after supposedly facing a backlash over her poor handling of Mockingbird? This time, the hiatus she takes could be a lot longer than before, though considering how toxic the environment's become at Twitter, maybe it would be better if she just didn't make use of such a weak social media concept anymore.

Labels: indie publishers, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics