GI JOE and Sexual Repression

After finally getting the entire '80s GI JOE series on DVD thanks to Amazon (no thanks to lousy EBay), I started watching them a couple weeks ago.  The series starts with what you could call three miniseries starting back in 1983.  The third miniseries, "The Pyramid of Darkness" was also the start of the first real season of the show.

The absurd plot (which was pretty much the same as the first two miniseries) is that COBRA has designed this ultimate weapon called the pyramid of darkness that can surround the world (or most of it) and deprive everyone of electricity.  If people want the lights back on they have to kowtow to COBRA.  But of course GI JOE stops them (eventually) and blows up yet another sprawling COBRA headquarters.

Anyway, what I noticed is that after they complete their mission to set up the pyramid, the evil Destro and the Baroness are caught making out on camera by COBRA Commander.  In contrast to this, it takes JOE second-in-command Flint the entire 5 episodes to work up the courage to ask Lady Jay out to dinner.  It's pretty much the same for JOE commander Duke and hot redhead Scarlet in other episodes.  If you're a kid you probably wouldn't pay any attention to that, but as an adult it struck me as a perhaps subliminal message against premarital coupling.  You know, like it was trying to say that making out was only for bad guys.  Good guys are supposed to operate at a much slower pace.

Sexual repression seems pretty common among "heroes" in books.  Recently I read "The Hunger Games" where Katniss and her male friend Gale have been hunting for years but never really expressed their affection.  Peeta the baker has never expressed his affection for Katniss either, until he does so on national TV as perhaps a ploy to make her seem more likable.  I'm trudging through "Twilight" now and it seems like it's going to take Bella and Edward a while to finally get things going.

That's a common theme in superhero stories too.  Usually it's like in "Spider-Man" where the hero doesn't want to get too involved with the girl because he doesn't want her to get mixed up in the craziness of his life.  Other times like in "Captain America" the hero is just too much of a dumb-ass to actually make a move on the girl until it's almost too late.  In any case at least on the big screen, you never see the hero and the girlfriend fuck.  It's like a kiss is the pinnacle of affection and that often takes the whole fucking movie to happen!  (The exception is "Watchmen" where Nite Owl and Silk Spectre do the nasty on Nite Owl's cool little ship to "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen.  But that was an R-rated movie so you can do that easier.)

Emma in college. What a babe!

And actually my novel A Hero's Journey is the same way.  Our hero Emma is very sexually repressed, having only gone on 1 date in 19 years.  A lot of that is she was always the youngest kid in her class by a few years, so dating wasn't easy for her.  Still, just like in the movies the highlight of her and her guy Dan's relationship in the book is a kiss.  It's not even making out, pretty much just one kiss.  Gawd, heroes are so fucking lame!  Though I remedy that in the sequels, just so you know.

So anyway, kind of makes me wonder why we writers do that.  Are we all a bunch of prudes?  A bunch of Santorumites in disguise who want to take things back to "Leave it to Beaver"?  Or is it that we're just thinking of the kids and too afraid to "shock" them?  But come on, guys, they probably see worse than that on "The Bachelor" or something.  So maybe we should have our heroes let their freak flag fly a little more often.  Or not.  It's a free country, right?  (For now.)