Many people have come unstuck due to their use of new media, as it allows people to talk straight to the public with no filter. The latest to come under fire is Super and Slither director James Gunn, who’s currently working on Marvel’s big budget Guardians Of The Galaxy superhero movie. He’s now being lambasted for a blog post deemed homophobic and sexist.
Although the post first appeared on his website last year and has now been deleted (it’s still on Google Cache though), it was titled ‘The 50 Superheroes You Most Want to Have Sex With’, and asked people to use Facebook, Twitter and the like to vote for their favourite. It became a hot button topic when blog sites stumbled on it and the criticism has now gone viral.
It’s the language used in the piece that’s gotten many hot under the collar, with websites such as TheMarySue taking Gunn to task for referring to X-Men’s Gambit as a ‘Cajun fruit’, adding that the idea of having a threesome with him and a girlfriend to fulfil the woman’s fantasy, ‘makes me sick to my stomach’.
Gunn added that Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) ‘can turn’ lesbian character Batwoman, and that if she had sex with male character Nightwing (who was formerly Bruce Wayne’s ward, Dick Grayson), she could probably still be considered a lesbian. He also says that The Flash’s inclusion on the list is down to the votes of gay men. He says he doesn’t know why, ‘But I do know if I was going to get f—ed in the butt, I too would want it to be by someone who would get it over with quick.’
As for X-Men’s Kitty Pryde, he says ‘I wanted to anally do her,’ and of 15-year-old mutant X-23, ‘After you fictionally fuck her, fictional police are going to arrest you and put you in fictional jail for being a very real pedophile,’
TheMarySue feels that, ‘What’s wrong is the sheer amount of slut-shaming (on only the female characters) and anti-gay language that Gunn directs towards the majority of the male characters… These are not opinions befitting somebody who’s been given the task of bringing a major part of the Marvel Universe to the big screen.’
As for Gunn’s comments about Batwoman, the site says that the idea that gay people can be ‘cured’ is ‘a delusion at the heart of an innumerable number of rapes.’
The furore has been picked up by the likes of The Hollywood Reporter and has sparked a Change.org petition to have Gunn removed from the director’s chair of Guardians Of The Galaxy, which currently has 4,400 signatures.
While some of Gunn’s comments could simply be passed off as lowbrow, thoughtless ‘humour’, a blog post Gunn has left up on his site suggests he simply doesn’t care about being offensive or the issues his actions raise. The post refers to a song called ‘That Gay Fucking Cat’ that he wrote for his section of the upcoming anthology film, Movie 43.
When it was pointed out to him by the music department that the song couldn’t go out with such a potentially homophobic title, Gunn started a series of rather juvenile e-mails, ostensibly in response to the ‘humorless tone’ of the request for a new title. They’re rather unpleasant, delving into casually racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-disabled alternate titles for the song. Although he’s obviously not being serious, it’s all rather unnecessary, unprofessional, rude and suggests a man who thinks being asked to be more sensitive is reason to be even more unpleasant and difficult, especially as he says early on that neither he nor co-writer Tyler Bates ‘really cared what the song was called’.
He may think it’s all very funny, but when you’re in the Hollywood big leagues you need to be careful what you say, as just because you think something’s only for a laugh doesn’t mean into doesn’t have an impact or repercussions, especially when it delves into casual bigotry.
As yet, Disney/Marvel hasn’t made a comment.
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