We can glimpse the other half in the buildup to the spanking in the 1944 musical And the Angels Sing, about four sisters who create difficulties for bandleader Happy Morgan (Fred MacMurray) by refusing to perform together, which makes them, as Morgan puts it, ‘four silly brats who don’t know when they’re well off’. We saw last week that it was often presented as a maternal responsibility, but that’s only half the story. Spanking is a privilege that can be taken away as a punishment – implying that, back on Earth, being spanked by her parents is a normal, if unwelcome, fact of a teenage girl’s life, especially if she gets a bad report card. As for parents and their teenage daughters… well, this panel from the December 1961 edition of Adventure Comics tells us what we need to know: In the Superman universe, the Bizarro world is a topsy-turvy planet where all human norms are inverted: postmen bark at dogs, lawyers try to get their clients into jail and nobody, but nobody, wants ever to suffer the dreadful fate of becoming rich and famous.
0 kommentar(er)
