02. Such a Wh*re

Men as Widows and Step Mums

Hi there. Welcome to Active Faults.

Men in Chinese entertainment are being perceived, interpreted and consumed differently nowadays, and I first noticed it with Robert Pattinson’s Batman. 

Let me tell you how and why. 

“Saw the new Batman today and was brutally seduced by a widow…Robert, my wife forever.”

I can’t lie: posts like these prompted me to buy a ticket almost immediately. I ended up going to the cinema by myself one evening, after a long day of work, and sat through all three hours of it trying to make out Robert Pattinson’s “widow” charms (寡妇感) through the horribly-lit shots. 

They were right. There was something different about his version of the morally ambiguous vigilante, described in this NPR review as “a searching, wounded, haunted soul with a My Chemical Romance haircut”, the “most vulnerable” portrayal of the character to “ever grace the big screen” yet. Another Variety review called him “sullen, brooding and withdrawn”, a “damaged loner with unresolved daddy issues, saddled with all kinds of complicated emotional trauma”. Chinese fanquan agreed with all that, but in a much more concise fashion using a single descriptor that’s maybe improper but inarguably ingenious: the widow. 

First, a fan edit entitled “Gotham WidBat Bruce” (哥谭寡蝠布鲁西 and you can see the wordplay is a lot smarter in Chinese): 

I mean, there’s so much going on. The easiest thing to decipher here is how “Patman” (Pattinson’s Batman) owes his popularity to his brokenness which creates resonance. We’re seeing an actively hurting protagonist, a raw side of the guy’s psyche that everyone can empathise with. It goes way deeper than this though. 

The widowing of a male character or celebrity is essentially a variation of nisu, gender-reversing men to appreciate their androgynous appeal. But that’s nisu at its simplest. Pattinson’s peak widow moment that recurs in fan edits is his scene at the Mayor’s funeral dressed in all black, which doesn’t help get rid of the association. He writhes under the public attention on him as Bruce Wayne, mourns and thinks of his own father when he looks at the Mayor’s young son. That emotional vulnerability is automatically seen as more feminine than masculine. At the same time, his superhero persona is prepackaged with a sex appeal that’s consolidated through the display of physical strength, a respectable ethos as well as a love interest. Widowing Patman seems inevitable, seeing how he stands at the intersection of fragility and eroticism. The edit above is recognising both, with clips of his muscles as well as his sunken cheeks and puffy eyes.

The sexualisation of widows is nothing new. As this blogpost on Victorian women’s bereavement attire writes, the status of a widow symbolises “sexual experiences without marital constraints”. They are targets of men’s predatory advances and if they are to initiate casual sex, they are seen as threats to the social order and family values. Widowing Patman, then, encompasses complex feelings of being seduced and deterred by his unapproachable beauty and perilous power at the same time. An urge to protect him from grief as well as an urge to protect him from getting preyed on, to claim ownership. This is especially aided by Batman the backstory, and an actor already widely beloved as prince-charming in Twilight and Harry Potter. 

Hopefully this Weibo post makes complete sense now:

“Patman is so divisive…A group of people call him husband, another wife; Some people want to f*ck him to death and others are asking him to f*ck them; Some are calling him the Gotham Widow and others a doe-eyed schoolboy; Some say he is a drowning puppy, another group calls him a wet, dripping black cat; Some refer to him as a little sister, others call him an older brother……Zhengsu (the opposite of nisu, i.e. seeing a man as a man) and nisu are fighting while so many charaterisations are flying around, what a way to go Patman…”

The top-voted comment under this post is a fun one too: “RP (Robert Pattinson) is the perfect representative for chaotic beauty 🙏 let’s not fight guys, he has a pussy AND a dick”. For those of you who have read the issue on Liu Yuxin, this probably sounds strikingly familiar. What the term “chaotic beauty” (混乱美) really reveals is how the consumption of celebrities nowadays is less of an aesthetic choice but more of a psychological one. Physical appearances, biological gender included, retreat to the peripherals. It’s all about the vibes, the aura that someone gives off, a fragment of their persona that is appealing in an almost primal sense. If the person arouses something in you, hold onto it and nothing else needs questioning.

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I’ve written about Yoon Jeonghan, the SEVENTEEN member so nisu’ed a popular Bilibili edit of him is called “Fluid Gender”:

The puzzle pieces are all there. The black outfits, long-ish hair, sharp, aloof and icy (清冷感) facial expressions made him one of the most famous “widows” out there. It is worth mentioning here that he has rocked an androgynous look since debut. I distinctly remember him getting attention, and hate, for his “effeminate” ginger ponytail 8 years ago. His widowing seems equally unavoidable, since he is forced to “seduct” in his line of job and has been constantly construed as feminine. Unlike Patman, his vulnerability comes from being mentally chased after and owned by millions of fans other than “me”. The imaginary husband to be killed off is a placeholder for the rest of his admirers. To widow an idol like Jeonghan is to recognise his beauty while competing with those who are desiring him at the same time. There’s that tension again: he is idolised and victimised by exposure, so I must have him to protect him. He is out of reach but technically available, so I want to have him but I can’t. 

Widowing is all of that crystallised into a single word. 

That would explain why the widowing of a male celebrity doesn’t equate to the homosexualisation of him. The husband is a non-issue, a minor detail to be brushed off because sexual orientation was never in the debate. Behind widowing lies a question of power and control, of the fan’s position in relation to the celebrity. 

Jeonghan is regularly cast in “Step-Mum Literature” (小妈文学) too. Similar but certainly not identical to widow vibes, step-mum vibes imply (presumed) enticement. Their husbands are not dead yet, so their sexiness must mean they’re asking for it. And because there’s no dead to be respected and no grief to make space for, sexualisation of the celebrities is easier in step-mumification. There’s less of a sense of trespassing. 

Step-Mum-ified men tend to be unknowingly flirtatious, almost wearing a facade of purity when they are flaunting their delectable allure. When this crosses over into the shipping sphere, the writer would feed their justification for an incestuous relationship into their fan fiction. The industry standard is to set it against a backdrop where it is more excusable, perhaps in a fictional royal family. We’re told, perhaps in a gang alternate universe, that the stepmums are unhappy at the very least, sometimes even abused by their legitimate gang-leader husbands or endangered by their business. The step-child would protect, redeem and satisfy. A lot of smutty sex ensues. More often than not, the step-mum will morph into a widow by the second half of the story to allow a happy ending. 

Here’s a video of Jeonghan and Joshua of SEVENTEEN in a step-son and step-mum-to-widow narrative, cleverly edited with out-of-context clips. They even used an audio segment of Korean news as a fake announcement of the husband’s death and Jeonghan, surprise surprise, is the step-son. He returns to the country for his billionaire father’s funeral and re-meet his beautiful step-mum for a sexually charged private talk. The background music is not-so-coincidentally the same as in the WidBat video: a song called Such a Whore. I’m never not in awe of fandom.

I think you can see the problem with these. Like nisu, widowing and step mumification are consumption of men that subconsciously objectifies women. Although discursive power is reclaimed when you dictate a man’s gender and their sexual engagement, it is still reinforcing the notion that only (man-turned) women can be dictated as such. It is only if they stop being men can they be properly sexualised, conquered and owned. Of course, I’m not suggesting that this is a conscious decision. Fanquan is not purposefully objectifying women. It is just processing nonbinary sexual appeal as feminine by default after years of patriarchal conditioning. 

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In the next few issues, we’re journeying into a kinkier world of vibes. Get ready for S感 (sadist vibes), Dom感 (dominant vibes), 茶感 (tea vibes) and more. 

See you then!

*All copyrights belong to the original creators watermarked in the videos that are taken from Bilibili

*Cover photo: Patman fan art by @肠粉厨 on Weibo.