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Jeet Heer Profile picture
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17 Dec, 6 tweets, 2 min read
1. As a parent of three kids who love super-heroes I'm all for tact in keeping Spider-Man all ages. Romance yes, by all ages romance! But there's a paradox here because of the very outre sexuality that went into Spider-Man's creation.
2. Between 1958 and 1968, Steve Ditko, Spider-Man's primary creator, shared a studio with Eric Stanton, an artist who specialized in fetish art for, um, discriminating collectors. The two men would assist each other on art. Spider-Man was created in 1962, in the midst of this.
3. Ur-Spider-Man was brought to Marvel in 1962 by Jack Kirby (who already created insect heroes like Ant Man & The Fly). Ditko tasked with doing character and substantially reinvented, especially costume & origins.
4. In reimagining Spider-Man, Ditko used a costume owed something to a bondage story he and Stanton did in 1960 ("Black Widow Sorority" included in Diabolique Magazine #3 (1960)
5. Ditko was a Randian libertarian. Intensely private, not much is known about his personal life, but his art certainly -- coupled with his friendship with Stanton -- shows a familiarity with the sexual underworld of 1960s New York. His characters had an East Village style.
6. More thoughts on sex and the single superhero or "Maybe Fredric Wertham Had a Point" jeetheer.substack.com/p/the-sexual-s…

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More from @HeerJeet

Jeet Heer Profile picture
18 Dec
There's a lot of talk of post-liberalism but surprisingly not much discussion (as far as I've seen) of Matthew Rose's A World After Liberalism, a really good intellectual genealogy. Reading it now and learning a lot. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030024…
Rose's book shrewdly traces to post-liberal Right to the Conservative Revolution in Germany of the 1920s (Spengler, Schmitt, Heidegger), an intellectual variant that overlapped with but was distinct from the Nazis. That's a useful frame. Image
Post-Liberal Right is confusing because it includes a bunch of wildly conflicting traditions (Catholic theocrats, neo-pagans, neo-confederates). But perhaps best understood not as a doctrine but a situation: the right that confronts decolonization & end of global white rule
Read 6 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
9 Dec
1. Last week @EoinHiggins_ & I talked about @ggreenwald, which provoked this tweet. I took it as a challenge & sat down with Greenwald to "say this to [his] face." Image
2. In the even, Greenwald and I had a spirited discussion that took up the history of "America First" (from Charles Lindbergh to the Birch Society to Pat Buchanan to Trump) as well as anti-immigrant nativism (from Henry Adams to Tucker Carlson).
3. If I had to find a theme in our conversation, I'd say Greenwald really wants to bend over backwards to give Trump & Carlson every benefit of the doubt as putative advocates of anti-interventionism & pro-worker policies. I see no reason to accept their rhetoric at face value
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
1 Dec
Oh like you never broken serious ethical codes to help out a sibling keep a high powered position when they've been under multiple accusations of sexual harassment and also through their incompetence seem to have caused thousands of unnecessary deaths.
I think we have to make a distinction between being willing to help a family member out and working to keep a family member keep a job they shouldn't have. The two are not the same and indeed are at odds. Sometimes you help your family by easing the path of resignation.
There can be ethical tensions between family and society, although I think this case isn't quite it for reasons I suggested. For a better scenario, there's Springsteen.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
27 Nov
1. As Ghislaine Maxwell's trial starts, worth remembering the man in her life who had mysterious wealth, was an asset for multiple intelligence agencies, loved to secretly record those who visited him, and died under murky circumstances (suicide? murder?): Robert Maxwell
2. Robert Maxwell: born in abject poverty in a shtetl in Czechoslovakia in 1923, family destroyed by Nazis, distinguished military service, reinvention in England & rapid rise to wealth as a publisher, business fraud, dead naked body off of yacht (jumped, fell, pushed?)
3. Robert Maxwell had 9 children of whom the favorite was Ghislaine. Maxwell's last days on earth were spent aboard the yacht called The Lady Ghislaine. Ghislaine herself doted on her dad, and learned from him the art of making herself useful to a difficult, capricious man.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
25 Nov
1. This tweet and the accompanying article got a lot of attention when it came out, but we should be clear that they are merely stating a long held orthodoxy on American right: that some forms of fascism are benign & preferable to anti-fascism.
2. I'd say going back to 1930s (or perhaps 1930s) the dominant mode of conservative thought has been that figures like Mussolini & Franco are useful bulwarks against working class militancy & anti-fascism (because it involves an alliance with left) is itself dangerous.
3. Philio-fascism or fascist fellow travelling is pervasive on right and was especially strong from circa 1935-1975. It went into slight abeyance with rise of "human rights" & pro-democracy talk as anti-communist tool, but has come back with vigor in last 10 years.
Read 7 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
23 Nov
1. Greenwald seems very touch about his appearances on Fox News, and for good reason. It's very hard to square his professed politics with his buddy-buddy act with Tucker Carlson.
2. A few useful distinctions are worth making. There's nothing wrong with going on Fox to reach their audience, as Bernie Sanders & Obama have done. But neither Sanders nor Obama praise Carlson as socialist & give credence to Carlson's claims of supporting racial equality.
3. Nor is there anything wrong with ignoring Fox because there are bigger fish to fry as Noam Chomsky does. But again, that's different from making common cause with Carlson or praising hi.
Read 4 tweets

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