Superheroes are selfish, violent pop-cult models, critics say

Your little boy is damaged.

He's been traumatized by violence, oversexualized, and indoctrinated to believe that to be a real man he must be aggressive, narcissistic, manipulative, and misogynistic.

The perpetrators, the people behind such evil victimization, are - superheroes.

So says Boston psychologist Sharon Lamb, a University of Massachusetts scholar who claims that superheroes - once role models who inspired confidence - today are laying to waste America's boys by teaching them a perverted image of masculinity.

"There is a big difference in the movie superhero of today and the comic-book superhero of yesterday," Lamb told an audience last month at the annual American Psychological Association meeting in San Diego.

"Today's superhero is too much like an action hero who participates in nonstop violence; he's aggressive, sarcastic, and rarely speaks to the virtue of doing good for humanity."

Lamb is coauthor, with Mark Tappan and Lyn Mikel Brown, of Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons From Superheroes, Slackers, and Other Media Stereotypes, a survey of the pop-culture fare consumed by 674 boys aged 4 to 18.

"There is no doubt that children establish an understanding of what it means to be a girl or what it means to be a boy to a large extent from the media," Lamb says from her office in Boston. "Kids depend on stereotypes of gender to define themselves" and the role they play in society.

Lamb says there are two predominant images of manhood in contemporary pop culture, the "player" and the "slacker."

The player is hypermasculine, exploits women, and uses force to get what he wants. His relationships with others - friends, colleagues, lovers - are almost entirely predatory.

The slacker avoids the stigma of failure by adopting an ironic, distanced view of the world.

Lamb says that both personality types are unable to relate to others in healthy ways, and that both value autonomy and self-regard over community and cooperation.

Lamb asserts that today's heroes are motivated by selfish desires, including the desire for vengeance, and not justice and the common good.

A perfect example, says Tappan, is Iron Man hero Tony Stark, an arms manufacturer and randy playboy who fights terrorists and other evildoers but seems more concerned with self-promotion and self-aggrandizement than justice.

"He's kind of a sleaze who flaunts his fame [by] making all these appearances in front of dancing, bikini-clad women," Tappan says from his office at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where he teaches education. "That's not the kind of superhero I grew up with."

Philadelphia comic-book writer John Arcudi agrees that movie superheroes are too aggressive, cocky, and narcissistic.

Superheroes "used to be the underdog, or at least had to fight against powerful obstacles. And they could fail," says Arcudi, author of the superhero graphic novel A God Somewhere.

"Superheroes now are bullies," Arcudi says. "They have become so powerful, they have so many guns, they can never lose." X-Men character Wolverine, for example, cannot die: "Put a bullet in his brain and it'll regenerate!"

Arcudi says this is part of an overall tone of triumphalism that he believes predominates in American culture. If defeat isn't an option, he asks, then how are we to teach kids how to deal with failure?

He also worries that the traditional superhero just seems too naive to today's media-savvy kids. "Today's audiences have a lot of difficulty swallowing the idea that the hero is totally committed to an ideal" and not to personal desires, he says. Being cool and kicking derriere, he notes, always trump social justice in the movies. Just look at Matthew Vaughn's R-rated action comedy Kick-Ass, which is about expletive-spouting young kids whose action-hero antics bring big audiences on YouTube.

Novelist and Marvel comic writer Jonathan Maberry (DoomWar) rejects Lamb's entire thesis, calling it a rehash of the old complaint about the effect of TV violence on kids.

The Philly author says the "spotless heroes" Lamb mentions with nostalgia "simply don't exist," noting that traditional superheroes Batman and Spider-Man, who have been around for decades, "were motivated, in part, by personal revenge." (Batman's parents were murdered; so was the uncle with whom Peter Parker/Spider-Man lived.)

"But the point is that they learn revenge in itself doesn't do any good. There's a line from Spider-Man which informs all comics, now and then: 'With power comes responsibility.' "

Maberry insists that Iron Man "shows a character who grows as a person," adding that "in all these movies there is a moment when the heroes realize they have the power to make a positive change for themselves and for others. They are damaged people, but they learn how to go beyond that."

Philosophical questions aside, Lamb and Tappan say what disturbs them about today's media landscape is that superhero flicks such as Iron Man, Wolverine, and The Dark Knight, films with violent content appropriate only for adults and older teens, are aggressively marketed to young kids. "The problem is that people are selling these superheroes to children who are 3 or 4 years old," she says.

"It'd be in his happy meal, coloring book, or on his pajamas - images from a film he's too young to see."