A few thoughts on Gail Simone’s Red Sonja: Consumed
by Bryn Hammond
in Issue 156, January 2025
[this essay has spoilers only for the sex scenes]
In Sword & Sorcery, I crave grungy women of the barbarian type: women as convincingly uncivilized as Conan. Red Sonja – blustery, crude, smelly – certainly has potential to be that, but the art as a rule doesn’t follow through. Even when barbaric in comics text, ‘she is often drawn with make-up, styled hair, and jewelry’ and of course ‘little or no muscle definition’.
Muscle definition. Sword & Sorcery art, infamously, when it comes to women, is into a strong definition of not thews but those body parts het men are schooled to be obsessed by. This lesbian is so sick of swollen ‘tits and ass’. Give me swole arms and thighs. It’s not about a fight for equal sight of flesh, it’s how half-naked women and half-naked men get inequal presentation. If Conan wears a loincloth, and Red Sonja an armour bra, isn’t that equivalent? No, no it is not.
At the site Women Write about Comics, there’s a quick and dirty explainer – from which I quote above – on why Red Sonja in an armour bra and Conan in a loincloth aren’t equal treatment: ‘Getting a Feminist Makeover: Red Sonja, Gail Simone, and Chainmail Bikinis’ by Jenna Ledford. It draws on a piece on superheroes by Kelly Thompson, ‘She Has No Head! – No, It’s Not Equal’. The ‘how clothed?’ section doesn’t apply to our genre where nobody’s clothed, but Thompson cogently puts my reactions to body type and pose.
Thompson contrasts an ‘athlete body type’ for men with a ‘porn star and supermodel’ body type for women. It isn’t only these used as guides for depiction, though; it’s modern urban women who, drawn from life, still have a look of modernity. Does she shave her legs? her underarms? – basic questions, before we get to, Does she work out in a way that resembles the barbarian lifestyle? To imagine the physical features a barbarian woman might have, watch your local women’s football team, find the freak player, draw her. Scour Olympics events for women of extraordinary strength and physical ability. Conan got a bodybuilder to play him in the film. His portraits concentrate on muscle and raw feasibility, not handsomeness or his sexual features. The day we see Conan in fetish wear, with, I don’t know, crotch shots and an exaggerated bulge – when his stances over the slain resemble those of a centrefold – we’ll be equal on costume. Of course, he’d be a camp barbarian. I crave a realistic barbarian woman, I want art that goes to women’s sports for inspiration, or for knowledge of how a woman’s body might respond to the demands of a fighting barbarian life. That ‘make-up, styled hair, and jewelry’ kill the mood for me. I crave to believe she’s lived as a barbarian. Give me those fearsomely physical women, lose the slender waists and plastic faces. And as a side-effect, if I believe in her, she’ll be sexy.
Because of the fraught politics of costume, I was rather glad the new Red Sonja novel, Consumed by Gail Simone, sidesteps questions of portrayal with a non-portrait cover. It made the book pickable-up for enemies of the armour bra like me. In the prose of a novel I can picture my Red Sonja preferences from a few brief descriptions. And in Gail Simone’s prose, she’s magnificently believable as a rough and tumble, grunge fighting woman – Conan’s equivalent. She has enough sheerly reckless thewsy undertakings to rival him. She has a sex life of glorious agency, while being a dope about her feelings so that she blunders in and out of emotional situations like a classic Sword & Sorcery hopeless case. I found her invigorating and loved the book. I’m here, as per my title, to talk sex, costume and the love story, but there’s much else I liked.
- The love story
The love story won me over fairly quickly, and kept me to the end: a major thread of the book to my eyes, responsible for a lot of my investment. I think the term ‘disaster queers’ fits here. Queen Ysidra wrecks her life for love – extravagant, but relatable, and with a recklessness I can’t help feel belongs in S&S. Meanwhile, Sonja has such a crude sense of her own emotions she has no idea she’s in love. At the start of the novel she follows her habits of leaving people and of thievery, and the suspected truth that she might have been less casual this time is very slow to catch up with her. That’s pretty Sword & Sorcery, in that her life has conditioned her not to believe in permanence, and analysis of feelings isn’t a skill she has learned.
But this doesn’t mean her feelings have to be shallow or her contacts entirely surface-level, in that womaniser/maniser style (for Simone’s Sonja it’d be both). I’m tired of that, if I ever was impressed. The great thing about the love story Gail Simone has given us, is that it’s pulpy as hell, but also it runs on genuine emotions. It’s not afraid of love as love. Yes, because Sonja has no idea she’s in love (never happened before), we still get to enjoy her free and breezy sexuality with whoever strikes her eye in the moment. But – this is a ‘cake and eat it too’ situation – we aren’t reduced to the seducer crap, that skates too near a user-of-others, which in this climate [looks around at the world], who has time for? We don’t need to default to that even in serial S&S. Neither do our knockabout heroes have to retire and start a family. There’s a trend in that too, I notice, in contemporary S&S, as authors reach for an emotional seriousness and the involvement of women and children in their heroes’ lives (the end of David C. Smith’s Sometime Lofty Towers, the settled wanderer in John Fultz’s ‘Blood of Old Shard’). Which, fine, it’s right for a few, but it’s not the only way to authenticate attachments. Those not cut out for domesticity, like Sonja, can still get a love story.
It’s a tricky business to have a woman frankly besotted, as Ysidra is, to her own embarrassment, shamed by her society for it, yet not be demeaned by the story. Not laughed at. Those of us who have upturned our lives for love want this, though, rather than stick to safer, shallower waters. Let’s see disastrous loves. I was afraid the love story would end in a way that belied its genuine if messy emotion – in a cyncial way that didn’t care about the characters, that cheapened their relationship. Without spoilers, it didn’t do that. It didn’t drop them when inconvenient and forget they mattered to each other. This isn’t easy to navigate, since Sonja has to roam on in her footloose fashion – not settle down or Choose One, which arguably is as un-S&S as the Chosen One, at least for a serial type like Sonja (of course adventure couples can apply) – but I was satisfied.
The criteria isn’t as simple as ‘did the love interest live?’ My most-loved Conan love story is Bêlit in ‘Queen of the Black Coast’, and she doesn’t. I don’t mind deaths, I mind cop-outs. I do want a love affair to signify, and Conan is changed by his time with Bêlit. I don’t even want to see them sail off forever – this isn’t romance; I want to see what I do see in ‘Queen of the Black Coast’, a woman he knows is his equal, where the author’s convinced of this too. So he can wander on with a new Gigantic Melancholy under his belt, and avoid the sea because Bêlit was the size of the sea to him. Robert E. Howard knew how to write a love story, and you can do worse than consult him.
- The threesomes
There are three threesomes in the book and these are different from each other, drawn from circumstance, as events in a plot should be. In other words, sex is part of the story, not a bit of lace thrown on the cake.
The first is with attendants, a woman and a man – Sonja’s given a choice and asks for both – who have been sent to her for sex work along with other service in a victorious gladiator’s suite. ‘Sonja indulged’ is the repeated phrase, for her scoffing of the food that’s laid on, and for her three bouts of sex in this threesome. Each bout distinguished by its mood, first ‘thirsty and needful’, second ‘with a warm pleasant feeling, a pact of wellness in the world’, third ‘a bit surly and athletic’. These are nicely realistic short descriptions of the moods of sex. The reader isn’t left to doubt that Sonja is in charge of her sex life, is knowledgeable, and has a range of engagement, is emotionally alive to sex’s possibilities.
Think, by contrast, how dull sex often used to be when you had a bloke getting superficially laid and not much description beyond the physical attributes of the girl – nothing going on in his head. Consumed is a sex-positive novel – let’s welcome that.
The second threesome is with friends on the road, a woman and a man who are a devoted couple themselves, who agree to ‘share’ and spend a night with Sonja. This was Sonja’s darkest night, haunted by nightmare sent from the Big Bad, haunted also by regrets over her conduct towards Ysidra, Queen of Nomads. The sex session her friends offer in the dead of this night is called by the text, by Sonja, ‘healing’. Sonja is at her most vulnerable, and the result for her is a revival. The act of her friends, the couple, is portrayed as generous and warm, moved by compassion as well as by their hero-worship of Sonja. It’s a scene of genuine emotion, and a touching one. These three go on to share at least one other night, in less fraught circumstances, with even more warmth as established friends.
Both trios are two women and a man. That may be the configuration that suits a het man, but there is a slight emphasis on Sonja’s attraction to the woman, and the scenes are resolutely in Sonja’s point of view. They are praxis of her philosophy of enjoyment – her gigantic mirth. It’s fantastic to see, because Simone knows how to keep Sonja in charge of her own affairs and free to behave as she chooses, and yet avoid the exploitative, deceptive, or the sexual adventurer as user – except in the vexed case of Ysidra, Queen of Nomads, but Sonja faces those consequences through the novel.
- The armour bra
On the first page we have this description: ‘Her preference was warmer climes and few encumbrances, her light furs and sparse ring mail…’
Sonja doesn’t like clothes. She gets hassled for wearing less of them than expected or even decent. The climate she’s in isn’t convenient for her scraps of fur and armour, she suffers from being underdressed. But the brevity of that first description of her outfit is never enlarged upon. No details.
This leaves me free to imagine for her a casual grunge of pieces of fur, of armour. To identify with her as I wear my at-home clothes which means as little and as loose as possible. Sonja doesn’t care, she goes out into the world like that: aspirational. A loose wrap, a short hang: sexy as hell.
What isn’t sexy? The armour bra. I swear by my gay gods and my feminist temples. This item that became traditional for Red Sonja screams a cishet male gaze and no experience of bra wear. Ask anyone with tits: they all tell me, the first thing they do when they get home is throw off the bra. Shoes are kicked off second. A woman who hates to be hampered by clothes, to settle for a bra, to retain that item when she’s cast off most of the rest? No, this is not reality from Sonja’s perspective. It’s a modern man who thinks of modern underwear when he pictures a semi-naked woman. Comfort-wise, an armour bra is certainly the worst of both worlds for the wearer. In practical terms, she’d jounce right out of most examples with her first swipe of a sword. She doesn’t look free in it, she doesn’t look wild. She doesn’t look self-determined.
Gail Simone’s Red Sonja is a vision of radical freedom. In her enemy’s eyes:
She did not have a secret being. She said what she meant. She smiled when she felt like it. She ate and drank what she liked and cared not a dog’s testicles what anyone thought of it.
She was free, free as no adult he’d ever met had been.
Imagine, as a woman, smiling when you feel like it, eating and drinking what you like. These are simple statements but Simone knows how radical it is to live this way. Research, if you have to, the coerced artificiality and the public policing of women’s smiles.
Simone’s Sonja is also free from beauty regimes, from the tyranny of other people’s judgemental gaze on her personal upkeep and style:
In her lonely, often solitary life, she rarely made hygiene a priority beyond scraping the crust off in a frigid stream once in a while… she tended to put on the same road-befouled clothes she’d had on before washing up.
But she’d never really bathed before.
Rid this woman of false lashes and lipstick. Draw her naked-faced as well as near-naked-bodied. And burn her bra in the fire of a thousand suns.
I’m glad to say future Sonja seems to be on this road. Marguerite Bennett is the successor to Gail Simone’s run in comics and Sonja has had an outfit change to scale armour for the torso. In a pre-release poster for M.J. Bassett’s Red Sonja film we see Matilda Lutz shoulder to the camera, focus on a piece of shoulder armour. What a difference to focus on an armoured tit. From a glimpse of her outfit in filming, Lutz is to wear a scant and skimpy disjointed armour without a wretched bra. As Kevin Beckett points out in his Sonja-heavy issue of newsletter Just the Axe, Ma’am, this future Sonja was once her past: ‘Notably, she was initially outfitted in silk breeks and an ill-fitting chainmail shirt that at least suggested it was pulled off a corpse.’ Why did we abandon the romance of that ill fit, that scavenged armour?
© January 2025, Bryn Hammond
Bryn Hammond’s Sword & Sorcery can be found in New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes, and novella Waste Flowers, out April from Brackenbury Books. Her historical Amgalant novels closely follow the Secret History of the Mongols, a 13th-century life of Chinggis Khan. This is her first appearance in Swords & Sorcery Magazine. Website amgalant.com
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